Wonderful Things: A History of Egyptology, Volume 1

A History of Egyptology: 1: From Antiquity to 1881

Jason Thompson

• Publisher: The American University in Cairo Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781617976360
• Topic: Sozialwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Archäologie

The discovery of ancient Egypt and the development of Egyptology are momentous events in intellectual and cultural history. The history of Egyptology is the story of the people, famous and obscure, who constructed the picture of ancient Egypt that we have today, recovered the Egyptian past while inventing it anew, and made a lost civilization comprehensible to generations of enchanted readers and viewers thousands of years later. This, the first of a three-volume survey of the history of Egyptology, follows the fascination with ancient Egypt from antiquity until 1881, tracing the recovery of ancient Egypt and its impact on the human imagination in a saga filled with intriguing mysteries, great discoveries, and scholarly creativity. Wonderful Things affirms that the history of ancient Egypt has proved continually fascinating, but it also demonstrates that the history of Egyptology is no less so. Only by understanding how Egyptology has developed can we truly understand the Egyptian past.

1 Egyptology in Antiquity

Egyptian history, and the manners and customs of one of the most ancient nations, cannot but be interesting to every one.

—John Gardner Wilkinson

The ancient Egyptians had a definite concept of their past and connected to it in various ways. They did not practice history as we know it in an effort to learn “how things really were,” to inquire into the past and derive meaning from those inquiries. Their past was something fixed, immutable. Yet, paradoxically, it was also something that could be and should be corrected so that aberrations, improprieties, and violent disruptions were erased from memory, a process that also conveniently served the realpolitik of a particular moment, much as history would sometimes be written to order and revised as needed in later ages.

The Egyptians were aware of passing time and devised means of reckoning it. They recognized solar years, measured from the rising of the star Sirius in midsummer, and divided them into three seasons of four months each: inundation, when the Nile rose and flooded the fertile valley; emergence, when the flood receded and the land was planted; and harvest. Each year was a continuum. It was not divided into weeks, and the days were nameless, but it was punctuated by festivals, of which Opet was the greatest. The Egyptians also kept track of time through regnal years, the years of a particular king’s reign. Ancient textual references to regnal years and some of their associated events are a great source of information—and perplexity—for historians.

The ancient Egyptians also made lists of their kings. Some king lists reached into the distant past, even into mythical times when the gods ruled on earth, connecting to the cosmic order of things. These were inscribed on monuments such as the temples of Seti I and Ramesses II at Abydos, and on the Palermo Stone, a stele of uncertain origin that exists in several fragments in different museums, including Palermo, where the most substantial portion is housed. Some private tombs contained partial king lists. A king list was recognized in the Egyptian Museum at Cairo as recently as 1993 when Michel Baud and Vassil Dobrev identified it on the recycled sarcophagus lid of the late Sixth Dynasty queen Ankhenespepi III. The most extensive list of kings, the Royal Canon of Turin, is recorded on papyrus. None of these lists is complete; information in them varies, and all have suffered some degree of damage, most tragically so in the instance of the Royal Canon of Turin. It was intact when it was discovered, but careless packing and transportation reduced it to more than 160 tiny fragments, resulting in endless speculation about how it should be reassembled, and about half of it is missing.

Besides presenting monarchs in chronological order, the king lists sometimes recorded events with reference to the regnal years in which they occurred. But the impulse for compiling these lists was not historical in nature. They were designed to establish connectivity, therefore legitimacy, within a continuum that extended far into the past, but with the necessary adjustments to that past to bring it into accord with maat, the proper order of things. Hence one looks in vain for the unusual reign of the woman king Hatshepsut or the “criminal” heretic Akhenaten and other kings associated with the Amarna interlude. They were omitted from the lists and their inscriptions chiseled out of the monuments, consigning them to oblivion and striking personal blows at them because obliterating people’s names from memory was to deny them continued existence. In one of history’s many ironies, Egyptologists recovered the identities of Hatshepsut and Akhenaten, and they are now two of the most famous ancient Egyptians.

Historical material also comes from tomb autobiographies, the inscriptions in private tombs that record achievements and honors in the careers of high officials. One of the most famous is from the mastaba tomb at Abydos of Weni, a general and governor of Upper Egypt during the Sixth Dynasty. “When I was master of the footstool of the palace and sandal-bearer,” his autobiography states in part, “the king of Upper and Lower Egypt, Mernere (Mr-n-R^c) my lord, who lives forever, made me count (ḥ^ɔty-^c), and governor of the South, southward to Elephantine, and northward to Aphroditopolis; for I was excellent to the heart of his majesty, for I was pleasant to the heart of his majesty, for his majesty loved me.”¹ Weni’s autobiography provides important information about his involvement in court affairs as well as his military campaigns, reorganization of the army, and construction of a passage through the First Cataract. Private stelae also recorded personal information of historical and cultural significance. The Middle Kingdom stele of Itirsen at Abydos not only proclaims his pride in being an artist but also provides detailed information about his skill and technique. It bears repeating that these texts are not history as we know it, but they convey the voices of people speaking from the past. They speak to eternity, not us, but we can overhear what they say and be informed by it. Although the ancient Egyptians would resent our intrusions into their tombs, their coffins, and their very bodies, they would probably be glad to know that someone is still listening across the millennia and that their names are spoken and their identities preserved.

Notable projects for the restoration and conservation of monuments were undertaken even during pharaonic times. When Percy Newberry was copying inscriptions during the 1890–91 season at Beni Hasan, he recorded one by Khnumhotep, ruler of the Oryx nome in Middle Egypt during the Twelfth Dynasty. Khnumhotep boasted, “I caused the names of my fathers which I had found destroyed upon the doors to live again, recognizable in signs, accurate in reading, without substituting one for another. Truly he is a worthy son who has restored the names of his ancestors.”² Khnumhotep’s motive, of course, was more magical than historical, for by restoring the names he provided continued existence for his forebears and improved his own prospects for eternity in the process.

No restorer of monuments in ancient Egypt could match Khaemwaset, the fourth son of Ramesses II and high priest of Ptah in the Nineteenth Dynasty. Called “the first Egyptologist,” Khaemwaset said he “so greatly loved antiquity” that he could not bear to see the monuments fall into ruin. He cleared and restored several structures around Giza and Saqqara, including the Fourth Dynasty Mastabat Faraoun, providing modern archaeologists with more materials to study. In 1937, the French Egyptologist Jean-Philippe Lauer, working at the Fifth Dynasty pyramid of Unas at Saqqara, found this inscription: “His Majesty has ordered it to be proclaimed that the chief of the masters of artists, the Serem-priest Khaemwaset, has inscribed the name of the King of Upper and Lower Egypt, Unas, since it was not found on the face of the pyramid, because the Setem-priest Prince Khaemwaset much loved to restore the monuments of the kings of Upper and Lower Egypt.”³ Such is the vast extent of Egyptian antiquity that those monuments were already more than a thousand years old when Khaemwaset restored them—and probably destroyed others in the process. He came to be considered a magician of great power. Papyrus No. 3248 in the Louvre is a collection of spells attributed to Khaemwaset.

There was even some archaeology, at least of a sort. During the Middle Kingdom, with the rise of the cult of Osiris, all of the royal tombs at Abydos were excavated in a search for Osiris’s tomb. The searchers discovered it, to their satisfaction, in the form of the tomb of the First Dynasty king Djet, who had reigned a thousand or so years earlier. The tomb was thoroughly renovated, provided with a new roof and an access stairway. Further refurbishments were conducted during the New Kingdom. The ancient Egyptians’ awe of antiquity is evident in the New Kingdom visitors’ graffiti, termed Besucherinschriften by specialists, that are inscribed on the monuments. One, probably dating from the reign of Ramesses II, notes the “coming of scribe Ptahemwia and (his) father Yupa to see all of the powerful pyramids, they came and said praises and offerings . . . .” When the scribe Ahmose visited the Step Pyramid complex in the time of Amenhotep I, he “found it like Heaven.”⁴ Ancient Egypt was already ancient in antiquity.

During the Third Intermediate and Late Periods, a deliberate appeal to the past manifested itself in religion, literature, art, and architecture. Old and Middle Kingdom models were closely studied and carefully imitated, sometimes with such precision that even an expert may find it difficult to decide whether to assign a piece of sculpture to the Old Kingdom or the Late Period. Dilapidated temples were restored and new ones built with reference to examples from earlier ages. Notable figures from the dim and distant past, such as the vizier and architect Imhotep, were deified and their shrines became objects of pilgrimage. During the Twenty-sixth Dynasty, a significant increase of interest in ancient literature and in aspects of the past in general developed.

Greece was the first to express outside interest in Egyptian antiquity. The splendor of pharaonic Thebes was well known in Mycenaean Greece. In Homer’s Iliad, when Achilles refuses the gifts that Agamemnon offers to induce him to return to combat, he resorts to Egypt to say no in the most emphatic way:

Nay, not for all the wealth

Of Thebes in Egypt, where in ev’ry hall

There lieth treasure vast; a hundred are

Her gates, and warriors by each issue forth

Two hundred, each of them with car and steeds.⁵

Thence the Homeric epithet “hundred-gated Thebes” went resounding through literature. Egyptian references—“a long, dangerous voyage to the land of Egypt”—in the Odyssey are several. One of them mentions “Egypt where abundant fields grow every kind of plant for good and evil, and no one knows as much about medicine as the Egyptians.” Throughout antiquity Egyptian physicians maintained the reputation of being the best in the world.

Greek contact with Egypt increased during the Saite Period with the presence of Greek mercenaries and merchants and the establishment of the Greek trading post at Naukratis in the western Delta. The extent of that contact was strictly limited, however. Rigid cultural barriers limited interaction between Greeks and Egyptians, but that very separation may have worked conversely to enhance Egypt’s mystique in the Greek imagination. As the Greeks invented their own antiquity, they wove ancient Egyptian threads into it that credited Egypt with being the source of ancient wisdom, a notion Egyptian priests were happy to encourage. “You Greeks are nothing but children,” one of them told the Athenian law-giver Solon. The philosopher Plato (c. 429–347 BC), who may have visited Egypt himself, wrote of the god “Theuth,” or Thoth: “He it was who invented numbers and arithmetic and geometry and astronomy, also draughts and dice, and, most important of all, letters.”⁶ Nor was this altogether fanciful. Even a casual glance at the striking similarities between canonical Egyptian sculpture and archaic Greek statues, or the columns in Egyptian temple architecture and those in Greek buildings, reveals the influence of Egyptian culture on Greece.

The Greek historian Herodotus of Halicarnassus (fl. fifth century BC) visited Egypt around 450 BC during the first period of Persian rule and traveled up the Nile to the First Cataract. “I will speak at length about Egypt,” he wrote, “because there is no other country like it, nor any that possesses as many wonders.” His account is based on personal observations and interviews, and it is presented in an astonishingly open-minded manner, although he could not resist some dry humor from his Greek perspective.

The Egyptians, along with having their own peculiar climate and a river with a nature different from all other rivers, have established many habits and customs which are almost the complete opposite of the rest of mankind. For example, the women go to market and keep shop, while the men stay home and weave. Meanwhile, others push the woof upward when they weave, but the Egyptians pull it down. It is the men who carry burdens on their heads, while the women carry them on their shoulders. Women urinate standing up; men do it squatting down.

And so on, with the concluding observation that “Greeks write and work the abacus by moving their hands from left to right, the Egyptians from right to left; but they call that writing forward, while the Greeks call it writing backward.”⁷

Herodotus’s interviews in Egypt sometimes elicited preposterous responses, although they may have accurately reflected the popular lore of the time. His account of how Cheops financed the construction of the Great Pyramid is a case in point. “When he was short of money, he sent his daughter to a bawdy-house with instructions to charge a certain sum—they did not tell me how much.” Furthermore, “she asked each of her customers to give her a block of stone, and of these stones (the story goes) was built the middle pyramid of the three which stand in front of the great pyramid.”⁸ This kind of tale, of which Herodotus himself was clearly skeptical, led some modern historians to convert his sobriquet, “the Father of History” into “the Father of Lies.” Hence the French Egyptologist Auguste Mariette wrote to his friend, the historian Ernest Desjardins, in 1874 to ask rhetorically, “Considering the great number of mistakes in Herodotus . . . would it not have been better for Egyptology had he never existed?”⁹

But now Herodotus is appreciated for the scrupulous accuracy with which he reported what he heard, even when it was absurd. He also reported what he saw. The mortuary temple of Amenemhet III at Hawara, the so-called Labyrinth, was later entirely obliterated, apart from scattered fragments in the sand. It was different when Herodotus visited it. “I have seen this building,” he wrote, “and it is beyond my power to describe; it must have cost more in labour and money than all the walls and public works of the Greeks put together. . . . The pyramids, too, are astonishing structures, each one of them equal to many of the most ambitious works of Greece; but the labyrinth surpasses them.”¹⁰ That was not mere hyperbole, for several centuries later, the Roman geographer Strabo, also writing from personal experience, described the Labyrinth as “a work comparable to the pyramids.”¹¹

Egypt came firmly within the Greek orbit when Alexander the Great entered Egypt in late October 332 BC. He encountered no opposition, so happy were the Egyptians to be rid of their hated Persian overlords, and was coronated as pharaoh in Memphis. Alexander then made a memorable journey through the desert to Siwa Oasis where the oracle at the Temple of Amun confirmed that he was the son of the god. Proceeding to the northern coast, he founded a new city, Alexandria, on 7 April 331 BC, an act that was to alter the trajectory of Egyptian history. By the end of that month, he had departed to conquer the rest of the Persian Empire and beyond, but Egypt remained in his thoughts, even during his last hours. As he lay on his deathbed at Babylon in 323 BC, he expressed the wish to be buried in the temple of his father, the god Amun, at Siwa.

In the scramble for power following Alexander’s death, his general and boyhood friend Ptolemy took Egypt and established a dynasty that lasted nearly three centuries. Ptolemy I Soter, as he became known, and his successors ruled as pharaohs, albeit Hellenized ones, with their royal names written in hieroglyphs and enclosed in cartouches. Ptolemy I moved the center of government from Memphis to Alexandria, which became the leading city of the Mediterranean world. Alexandria also became the intellectual center of the Mediterranean with the establishment of its Museum, a center of scholarship, and the Great Library, by far the most magnificent library in all of antiquity. Memphis, the sprawling capital of Egypt since the unification of Egypt, went into steady decline. By the Roman Period it was little more than a mass of ruins. After millennia of being a cultural oasis, largely protected from the outside world and borrowing from outside only reluctantly, relying instead on its own cultural traditions, Egypt passed under the control of a foreign dynasty and Greek ruling elite that firmly oriented it toward the wider world.

The longstanding separation between Greeks and Egyptians was maintained during Ptolemaic times and beyond, but Greeks continued to be fascinated by Egyptian antiquity. Hecataeus of Abdera (fl. fourth century BC) traveled to Egypt during the reign of Ptolemy I and composed his Ægyptiaka, a history of Egypt, sometime around 300 BC. The text of Hecataeus’s history has been lost, and its contents must be inferred from references in later extant writings. It may have been that he took most of his material from what he read, not what he saw. Nevertheless, Hecataeus’s Ægyptiaka popularized the idea of ancient Egypt as the source of the civilized arts and crafts. Egypt also figures in the geographical and chronological works of Eratosthenes of Cyrene (c. 275–194 BC), head of the Great Library at Alexandria under Ptolemy III Euergetes and the leading all-around scholar of his time. His works survive mostly in fragments.

The most comprehensive work about ancient Egyptian history from the Greco-Roman Period was composed not by a Greek but by a native Egyptian, Manetho (fl. 280 BC). Manetho acknowledged secondary sources, especially the Ægyptiaka of Hecataeus, but he claimed also to have consulted original documents in libraries and temple archives, a claim we have no good reason to doubt. He relied as well on oral transmission, or “mouth to mouth” as the ancient Egyptians put it, which was almost certainly a major means of preserving lore. As might be ...