CHAPTER II

MARIETTE AND HIS WORK

The story of the life-work of the man who, more than any other, was responsible for the creation of a genuine interest in the great works of ancient Egypt, as distinguished from the aimless or sordid antiquity-grubbing which has been described in the preceding chapter, is one of the romances of science. Mariette was one of those men who, in the words of Cromwell, never go so far as when they do not know whither they are going, and in his early connection with Egypt he was like Saul the son of Kish, who went out to look for his father’s asses and found a kingdom. Born in 1821, at Boulogne, and employed as a teacher in the college of his native town, he was drawn to the study of ancient Egypt by the fact that the town museum had acquired a fine Egyptian sarcophagus from the collection of Denon, one of the savants who had accompanied Napoleon’s Army of Egypt.

[Illustration: 3. DETAIL OF DECORATION, TOMB OF SETY I.]

In 1849 he was appointed assistant in the Egyptian Department of the Louvre, and in the following year he was sent out to Egypt for the purpose of buying Coptic manuscripts. The mission, a comparatively trifling one in itself, was one of those trifles which often prove turning-points in a man’s life; and from the moment when he set foot on Egyptian soil, Mariette’s future career was marked out for him.

The thing which determined his fate was a passage from the old geographer and historian Strabo. The god of Memphis, the most ancient capital of Egypt, was Ptah, the artificer-god, who was supposed to become incarnate in the sacred bull Apis. As each successive Apis died, it was buried with all the reverence and splendour due to an incarnation of Divinity, in a special necropolis at Saqqara. Later in the complicated story of Egyptian religion Apis was identified with the god of the Underworld, Osiris, and was called Osiris-Apis, and the Greeks speedily corrupted this into Serapis, and called the burial-place of the Apis bulls the Serapeum.

Now Strabo, in writing his account of Egypt, inserted the following passage about this ancient bull-cemetery. “One finds also [at Memphis] a temple of Serapis in a spot so sandy that the wind causes the sand to accumulate in heaps, under which we could see many sphinxes, some of them almost entirely buried, others only partially covered; from which we may conjecture that the route leading to this temple might be attended with danger if one were surprised by a sudden gust of wind.” While Mariette was pursuing his inquiries after Coptic manuscripts, he noticed in a garden at Alexandria several sphinxes, and shortly after, when at Cairo, he came across several more of the same type, while more still were found at Gizeh. It was plain that there was somewhere not far off some storehouse of sphinxes which was being plundered to furnish ornaments for the gardens of local officials. The matter lay in Mariette’s mind until one day when he was at Saqqara he noticed the head of a similar sphinx sticking up out of the sand. Searching round about it, he found a libation-tablet, inscribed with a dedication to Osiris-Apis. At once Strabo’s statement occurred to his mind, and he realised that he was standing over the avenue of sphinxes which the ancient writer refers to.

Coptic manuscripts went to the winds. Without apparently asking permission of anybody, “almost furtively,” as he says himself, Mariette gathered a handful of workmen, and began the excavation. “The first attempts were hard indeed,” he says; “but before very long lions and peacocks, and the Grecian statues of the dromos, together with the monumental tablets or _stelæ_ of the temple of Nectanebo, were drawn out of the sand, and I was able to announce my success to the French Government, informing them, at the same time, that the funds placed at my disposal for the researches after the manuscripts were entirely exhausted, and that a further grant was indispensable. Thus was begun the discovery of the Serapeum.”

The passage is entirely characteristic of Mariette, and the calmness with which he assumes that the Government which had sent him out to buy manuscripts will be quite pleased to hear that he has spent all their money on something quite different, and has committed them to a huge excavation which was to last four years, instead of to the purchase of a few parchments, is particularly delightful. One wonders what were the first thoughts of officialdom at Paris when his letter reached the Louvre, and his chiefs realised the kind of man and the irrepressible energy which they had let loose in Egypt to spend money on things which they had never dreamed of.

His action at the Serapeum was typical of his whole career in Egypt. When Mariette had once reached the conclusion that a certain object was desirable, nothing was allowed to stand in the way. He went for his object, one cannot always say straight, for he had caution as well as daring, and knew how to use the wisdom of the serpent, but with a resolute determination which seldom failed in the end to accomplish its purpose; and if regulations stood in the way, so much the worse for the regulations. It was this self-reliance and impatience of restraint which were responsible for a good deal of the wastefulness which undoubtedly was a marked feature of his Egyptian work; but, on the other hand, without these same qualities it is difficult to see how his work could have been accomplished at all, in the face of all the obstacles which were thrown in his way by Oriental lethargy and corruption, and by European jealousy and selfishness.

The great Apis-cemetery which was thus discovered by Mariette’s happy disregard of the limits of his commission is all that remains of the original Serapeum. When the place was complete, it comprised an avenue of sphinxes at least 600 feet in length, leading up to the great temple of Osiris-Apis. No fewer than 141 of the sphinxes were discovered, together with the pedestals of others. The temple had entirely disappeared, having, no doubt, been used as a quarry for other building operations; but an inclined passage led from one of its chambers downwards into the vast vaults where for centuries the bodies of the dead Apis-bulls were given burial with splendours which rival those of the Pharaohs.

The vaults belong to three periods. In the first, which belongs to the XVIIIth Dynasty, the tombs are separate vaults hewn here and there in the rock; in the second, which is that of Dynasties XXII to XXV, a long gallery was excavated, on either side of which mortuary chambers were excavated as needed; in the third (XXVIth Dynasty) the gallery plan is followed, but on a much larger scale. The total length of the galleries of the XXVIth Dynasty is 1150 feet, and the great gallery alone measures 640 feet in length. In the side chambers are the immense granite coffins, of superb workmanship, which were provided for the last resting-place of the Apis. Twenty-four of these were found in the third gallery. They average 13 feet in length, 11 feet in height, and 7 feet 8 inches in breadth, and weigh not less than 65 tons apiece, magnificent specimens of the engineering skill of the ancient workers who transported these vast blocks from Aswan to Memphis, a distance of almost 600 miles.

The discovery of the Serapeum set the seal on Mariette’s destiny. Henceforward his life-work was to lie in the excavation and preservation of the relics of that ancient land to which fate had brought him; but as yet he occupied no official position in the country, and was, indeed, looked upon rather as an unauthorised interloper by the native antiquity-hunters and the foreign officials who encouraged the constant and shameless pillage which had been going on for half a century. It was in his struggles with these vampires that the great explorer acquired the habits of secret and solitary planning and working which characterised his reign as chief of the Egyptian Service of Antiquities, and the distrust of all other excavators which led him to forbid all such work even to the most famous scholars or to his dearest friends, and to retain the right to excavate exclusively in his own hands to the day of his death.

“Forced to struggle for more than three years,” says Maspero in his vivid sketch of his predecessor, “against the jealousy of the dealers of the time and the sharp practices of the Egyptian officials, he was not long in learning and putting into practice all the dodges which the natives employed to track out their rivals or to cheat the treasury. No one knew better than he how to conceal a quest, to pack up the product of it in secret, and to dispatch it without arousing the suspicion of anyone.” Curious qualifications for the head of a great Government department; yet they served him well in what was really a lifelong battle against the rivalry of men of science, who, instead of encouraging him in his efforts to set Egyptology on a firm foundation in its native land, did their worst to rob him of the fruits of his labours; and against the apathy and indifference of his master, who regarded the antiquities which his untiring servant unearthed as valuable only because he could gratify a globe-trotting potentate by the gift of some of them, or in the last resort might raise a loan on the precious treasures of his Museum.

Mariette’s appointment as head of the Service of Antiquities was due, indeed, to a piece of skilful wire-pulling in which de Lesseps and Prince Napoleon, afterwards Napoleon III, were concerned; and Said Pasha gave him the post, not because he cared for his royal predecessors, but because, as Maspero caustically puts it, “he came to the conclusion that he would be more acceptable to the Emperor if he made some show of taking pity on the Pharaohs.”

An appointment due to no higher inspiration than self-interest on the part of the giver obviously depended largely on how long self-interest coincided with the interests of the new post; and perhaps the most arduous part of Mariette’s task consisted in trying to make his thoroughly Oriental master see that it was his interest to maintain what he had begun, and in overcoming the whims and caprices, and the secret intrigues which continually threatened to undermine his position and destroy the structure which he was so painfully rearing. He never could get a permanent grant for the work of his department from the Egyptian Government. When money was needed he had always to ask it direct from the Khedive, who granted a subsidy or refused it according to the mood in which he happened to be at the moment. Again and again Mariette had to close down his excavations because he had unfortunately approached Said when the Khedive was in a bad temper; but though the continuance of work under such conditions might have driven the most phlegmatic of men, let alone a mercurial Frenchman, to despair, he never for a moment lost sight of his end. Repulsed once, he only waited a more favourable opportunity to return to the charge, and in the end he was almost invariably successful.

When his work is criticised, as it has often, and not unjustly, been, as hasty and wanting in thoroughness, let it be remembered that, with all its faults, it was done under conditions which would have driven most men mad, and that thoroughness and minute care are not precisely the qualities which are encouraged by the knowledge that the exchequer is empty, and that there is no prospect of being able to pay the workmen unless one can catch a wayward prince in a favourable mood. All things considered, the wonder is, not that so much was overlooked and left undone, but that so much was actually accomplished under such maddening conditions.

His main object was to form such a Museum in Egypt that it would no longer be possible for the representatives of the European powers to excuse their spoliation by the suggestion that Egypt was unable to safeguard her own treasures of antiquity. With this end in view he was indefatigable in the work of excavation, doing his utmost to gather from Memphis, Thebes, Abydos, Tanis, and other famous sites, such a collection of historical monuments as should render the creation of a permanent home for them a crying necessity.

Erelong he had so far succeeded that his collection included fine statues of Ramses II, the well-known Amenartas, the so-called Hyksos Sphinxes, the Triumphal Stele of Thothmes III, and a great mass of amulets from the cemeteries of Memphis, Abydos, and Thebes. To house these treasures he was provided with a set of miserable buildings which were of no use for any other purpose--a deserted mosque which was falling into ruin, some filthy sheds, and a dwelling-house alive with vermin, in which he lived himself. Making the most of this heap of ruins, he improvised pedestals for the statues and cases for the amulets, and turned his early training as a drawing-master to account in the painting of the decorations of his crazy walls.

The incident which finally determined Said to yield to the importunity of his energetic Director of Antiquities was highly characteristic, both of the daring and persistence of Mariette, and the waywardness of the ruler with whom he had to deal. One of the chief hindrances to the erection of the Museum was the fact that the excavations, though highly productive of objects of historic interest, had as yet yielded nothing in the way of gold or jewellery, and Said, a thorough Oriental, cared but little for researches which only produced inscribed or sculptured stones. Early in 1859, Mariette’s workmen at Drah-Abou’l-Neggah, near Thebes, discovered the splendid gilded sarcophagus of the Queen Aah-hotep. Mariette sent orders for it to be sent to Cairo at once; but meanwhile the Mudir of Keneh had laid hands on it, opened it in his harem, and, throwing aside the mummy, took possession of the fine set of jewellery which the coffin contained, and hurried off by boat to present it to the Khedive as an offering from himself.

Mariette immediately set out on his steamboat, the _Samanoud_, to meet the robber. Boarding the Mudir’s boat, he tried to persuade him to give up his ill-gotten goods, and when persuasion failed he passed to threats, and from threats to blows. Finally he triumphed, and took possession of the treasure. Knowing the danger which he ran of having his action represented to the Khedive as sheer robbery of a treasure addressed to the Royal Palace, Mariette took care to be the first to tell the story to his royal master, and did so with such effect that the Khedive thoroughly enjoyed the joke, and laughed heartily at the spoiling of the spoiler. He kept a gold chain for one of his wives, and himself wore for awhile a fine scarab which he afterwards returned; but the rest of the treasure was reserved, as Mariette wished, for his darling Museum, and the Khedive, now convinced that the collection was worth housing, gave orders for the erection of a suitable building at Boulak.

Thus, by a happy combination of good fortune and daring, the great explorer succeeded in the attainment of at least a part of his heart’s desire. The buildings at Boulak, however, were far from satisfactory, and his heart was always set on a dream-museum, which he did not live to realise, which indeed has not yet been realised, though the great Egyptian Museum has known two changes of abode since his time, and is now preparing for a fresh extension to house the treasures of Tutankhamen’s tomb. In addition, he had to be continually on his guard to see that the priceless things which he had gathered with such pains, and housed at such risk, were not dissipated to gratify his patron’s passing whims of generosity towards some favourite guests, or sold _en masse_ to act as security for a loan. Mariette had no intention of allowing his treasures to be treated as pawnbroker’s pledges; but it took all his energy and authority to prevent this happening, for whenever Said was short of money, which happened with unfailing regularity, his first thought was to raise a loan on the Museum, and it was only the Director’s personal acceptability with his master which enabled him to stave off disaster once and again.

The narrowest escape came just on the heels of what had seemed the greatest triumph of his life. At the Paris Exhibition of 1867, he had secured the first adequate representation of Egyptian antiquities. A small Egyptian temple was built, preceded by a short avenue of sphinxes; and within the temple were housed the finest specimens of art and craftsmanship which Egypt could produce. For six months all the world admired and wondered; then came the blow. Mariette had wrought too well, and made his treasures look too inviting. The Empress Eugenie had cast covetous eyes upon them, and the Khedive Ismail was informed that she desired to have the whole collection offered to her as a gift. Ismail, taken by surprise, and, as usual, short of cash, did not dare to refuse; but he had the sense to make his consent subject to one condition. “There is,” he said to the emissary of the Empress, “someone at Boulak more powerful than I, and you must address yourself to him.” It must have been the cruellest of blows to Mariette thus to be wounded in the house of his friends; but his resolution was proof against both imperial wiles and threats, and the collection returned in safety to its native home. The explorer had saved the treasures of the land of his adoption from the greed of his native land; but it was at a heavy cost that the victory was gained. The favour of France, which had always been one of his main supports, was immediately withdrawn, and for the next two or three years Mariette found himself in disgrace at the palace, and unable to obtain any support for his schemes. Curiously enough, it was the downfall of France in 1870 which brought him into favour once more with the Khedive, and for the last ten years of his life he saw the work to which he had given himself steadily growing, though on at least one occasion the proposal to raise a loan on the Museum was revived, and though Ismail’s grandiose plans for the extension of the buildings remained only dreams, which came through the ivory gate.

In respect to the excavations which he kept so jealously in his own hands, Mariette’s energy was amazing, though its results were never so carefully chronicled as they might have been, and were sometimes scarcely chronicled at all. The two greatest charges to be brought against him as an excavator are, first, this lack of adequate publication of his results, a huge mass of precious material being gathered without anything to tell the student its actual provenance, or its historical connection, and, second, the craving for big and imposing results, which led him often to neglect the smaller but often more important material which would have been of priceless value to modern workers, but did not appeal to him, and consequently got overlooked and lost.

With regard to the latter point, however, we must remember that the knowledge of the infinite importance of the small game of the archæologist is a thing of modern growth, and that it is scarcely fair to blame Mariette for not being a quarter of a century in advance of his time; and also that the difficulties of his position obliged him to lay stress on the big and imposing monument, even at the cost of neglecting what was really of more value to the serious student. Broken potsherds may mean far more for the reconstruction of history than intact colossi; but to the men in authority on whom depended the continuance of the excavator’s work, they were just-broken potsherds.

[Illustration: 4. TEMPLE OF RAMSES III, MEDINET HABU.]

Spite of all the defects of his methods, we owe him an infinite debt, both for what he accomplished and for what he hindered others from destroying. The chief fruit of his toil, apart from the work at the Serapeum and in the necropolis at Saqqara, was the unveiling at Abydos of the noble temple of Sety I, with its exquisite reliefs, which will always rank among the very finest work of the artists of the New Empire. Besides the excavation of the temple, he did an immense amount of work, very imperfectly recorded, alas, in the great necropolis of Abydos, where he unearthed over 15,000 monuments of one kind or another. It ought not to be forgotten either, though it often has been, and though it has been stated that in his work at Abydos he had no idea of the existence there of any remains of the early dynasties, that it was Mariette who prophesied both the discovery of Ist Dynasty tombs and that of the great subterranean “Pool of Osiris,” which is the latest fruit of M. Naville’s work there.

Scarcely less important was his work at Thebes, where he for the first time made some approach to establishing the architectural history of the great temple of Karnak from its foundation under the Middle Kingdom down to the close of building under the Ptolemies. To him, also, we owe the excavation of the great temple of Ramses III at Medinet Habu, and the first beginnings of that huge piece of work which M. Naville and his assistants at Der el-Bahri only completed, after thirteen years’ hard labour, in 1908.

How many of the visitors to Hatshepsut’s beautiful memorial temple, who wonder at the patience which unearthed this most exquisite of Egyptian buildings, remember that it was Mariette who first gave to the world the most interesting part of the whole building with its reliefs of the royal expedition to the Land of Punt?

To tell of all his work at the thirty-seven places in which he excavated would take a volume, and not a chapter. One of his greatest successes, though it dealt only with a Ptolemaic building, was the excavation of the very perfect temple of Edfu. He found it so completely covered with rubbish that an Arab village had established itself upon the roof of the ancient sanctuary of Horus. Mariette succeeded in getting these interlopers cleared away, and was at last able to reveal the whole of a building, which, while comparatively modern as Egyptian temples go, is yet one of the most complete and perfect specimens of Egyptian architecture, showing the almost pure type of temple architecture as it can be seen only in one or two other instances in the whole land.

The great explorer’s work in Egypt lasted for almost exactly thirty years. Before his death on January 18, 1881, he had the satisfaction of knowing that the work of which he had so well laid the foundations would not be interrupted when he had to lay it down. He never, indeed, saw the accomplishment of his great life-dream, the completion of a Museum really worthy of the treasures which he had gathered. Sir Gaston Maspero, his able successor, has told us how that vision hovered round his death-bed, and cheered his last hours; but even to-day the great Museum at Cairo is scarcely worthy of the matchless stores which it holds, and it is becoming more and more doubtful whether Cairo is the right place for a collection of such priceless value. But at least Mariette accomplished one thing which will never be undone; he put a stop to the worst of the pillage of Egyptian antiquities which had gone on unchecked for half a century, and he established the fact that the proper place where the historical monuments of a great nation’s past should be gathered is on national soil, where they are at home, and where they have a value which could never be theirs if they were scattered through a score of alien collections.

A noble statue keeps his memory alive in the Cairo Museum. Maspero tells us that a great personage who visited the Museum asked whether this monument was that of a Pharaoh or of a modern individual; and when he was told that it was the monument of Mariette, the founder of the Museum, “Mariette,” said he, “I did not know that the founder of the Museum was a woman!” Such is fame, even in the land where memories seem to endure longer than in any other spot on earth. But Mariette’s worth to the world does not depend on monuments, though he had so much to do with them, nor on great personages, though he suffered so much at their hands all his life. It lies in this, that he saved the relics of ancient Egyptian history from the bottomless bog of international jealousies and greed and insisted that a nation with a great past had the right and the responsibility to hold the treasures of that past within its own bounds--in trust for the world.

“Assuredly,” says Maspero, “Mariette is not a model to be blindly imitated; and the man who should imitate him to-day would run the risk of committing irreparable blunders; but let anyone who is tempted to depreciate him replace himself in spirit in the Egypt of sixty years ago, and let him ask himself how he would have acted in the midst of the difficulties which would then have assailed him on all sides; I believe that, if he is an honest man, he will be forced to admit that though perhaps he would have handled matters differently, he would not have come better out of the business. Mariette was the man who fitted the time.”