Amanda Adams (5 page)

Then, almost as if fate had played a hand in brushing aside the dunes and drifts, Edwards found a wonder. It was evening, and her first sighting of Abu Simbel arrived as a twilight dream:

As the moon climbed higher, a light more mysterious and unreal than the light of day filled and overflowed the wide expanse of river and desert. We could see the mountains of Abou Simbel standing as it seemed across our path, in the far distance—a lower one first; then a larger; then a series of receding heights, all close together, yet all distinctly separate. That large one—the mountain of the Great Temple—held us like a spell. For a long time it looked like a mere mountain like the rest. By and by, however, we fancied we detected a something—a shadow—such a shadow as might be cast by a gigantic buttress. Next appeared a black speck no bigger than a porthole. We knew that this black speck must be the doorway. We knew that the great statues were there, though not yet visible; and that we must see them soon. At length the last corner was rounded, and the Great Temple stood straight before us. The facade, sunk in the mountain side like a huge picture in a mighty frame, was now quite plain to see. The black speck was no longer a porthole, but a lofty doorway. Last of all, though it was night and they were still not much less than a mile away, the four colossi came out, ghostlike, vague, and shadowy, in the enchanted moonlight. Even as we watched them, they seemed to grow—to dilate— to be moving towards us out of the silvery distance.
²³

Edwards spent over a week investigating the site from morning to night and only agreed to depart as the complaints and impatience of her travel companions mounted. She made them promise that they could stop once again on the return home, and they did. Edwards’s enchantment with Abu Simbel was profound; it was also the site of her own archaeological discovery. This was the place where she dropped to her knees in excavation.

The unexpected find was a small, square chamber where sand had gathered in a steep slope angled from the ceiling to the floor, lit by a lone sun shaft, and on every wall were painted friezes in bright unfaded color and bas-relief sculptures. She and the other travelers who excavated by her side correctly surmised that the place had never been discovered. Edwards quickly had the ship crew working like “tigers” and sent someone to the nearest village to hire another fifty hands to help. The excavation was underway and “. . . the sand poured off in a steady stream like water.” When all had been cleared away, Edwards, the Painter, and even the Idle Man gathered in the chamber and got busy copying inscriptions, measuring and surveying the find, sketching the walls, and sniffing around for any further surprises. It was at that moment that the Idle Man lifted a human skull from the sand.

Could a tomb be underfoot? Were mummies and papyri and jewels only a shovel scoop away? A smaller skull appeared next, one as “pure and fragile in texture as the cup of a water-lily.”
²⁴
Everyone must have been holding their breath, hearts racing with the thought of a spectacular, gold-covered, ruby-lit, hieroglyphics-laden find.

Unfortunately, the new room proved to be only an empty basement. All archaeological hopes were dashed. What they had found in the decorated room, however, was apparently a lost library. Even if the discovery wasn’t as grand as the group had hoped, Edwards took special pride in it. It was a turning point for her, the moment when archaeology became not just a subject of study but a personal experience.

Lifting fragile old bones from the earth and brushing sand away from ancient objects were no longer activities that belonged to someone else, no longer the remote and exciting discoveries one read about in a book or newspaper article, actions that seemed exciting yet inaccessible. Edwards could now experience the thrill of unearthing a small piece of history with her own two hands. Archaeology was no longer a dream or a distant desire: it had become real.

With that feeling came a heightened awareness of archaeology’s value and its vulnerability. Shoveling sand, she was dismayed to see that workmen “wet with perspiration” were leaning against the paintings, marring their brilliance and smearing the color. She felt conflicted when the Painter scratched their names and the date of the chamber’s discovery into the ancient walls. That was a normal practice back then, but it nonetheless soiled the purity of the place. As Edwards thought about all the artifacts for sale at roadside stalls, the museum collections where prized objects had been stolen from their place, the common looting, and the slow deterioration and loss of some of the world’s greatest historic sites, she was struck by the unshakable desire to do something about it. A bolt of passion. A call to arms. She would appeal to her readers with a question:

I am told that the wall paintings which we had the happiness of admiring in all their beauty and freshness are already much injured. Such is the fate of every Egyptian monument, great or small. The tourist carves it over with names and dates, and in some instances with caricatures. The student of Egyptology, by taking wet paper “squeezes” sponges away every vestige of the original colour. The “Collector” buys and carries everything off of value that he can, and the Arab steals it for him. The work of destruction meanwhile goes on apace . . . The Museums of Berlin, of Turin, of Florence are rich in spoils which tell their lamentable tale. When science leads the way, is it wonderful that ignorance should follow?
²⁵

JUMPING AHEAD
eight years, Edwards is a woman out of the field and at her desk. Returned to her life in England, she sits in her personal library, which contains over three thousand books. Littered on the shelves and lined up in tall cases are specimens of Greek and Etruscan pottery, Egyptian antiquities, antique glass, engravings, and watercolor sketches. She’s a matronly woman, robust and smart looking, silver hair swept up and braided on top of her head, eyes dark and intelligent, her features rather beautiful. Outside the wild birds are in a tizzy, and “thrushes drop fearlessly into the library to be fed,” while the robins perch on the tops of high books and at Edwards’s feet as she lies “reading or writing in a long Indian chair under a shady tree” on a summer day.
²⁶
She has since her travels along the Nile become a reputable Egyptologist in her own right. Edwards has taught herself to read hieroglyphics—a mighty task. She has also redirected her passion for Egypt’s archaeology into something of a savior’s work.

Passions still simmering, Amelia Edwards was the woman responsible for thinking of, advocating for, and ultimately assembling the Egypt Exploration Fund, which was later renamed the Egypt Exploration Society.
²⁷
A powerful organizer, she led the way in promoting research and excavation in the Nile Delta. As the society notes in its own organizational history, “Amelia Edwards, together with Reginald Stuart Poole of the Department of Coins and Medals at the British Museum, founded the Egypt Exploration Fund in
1882
in order, as announced at the time in several daily newspapers, ‘to raise a fund for the purpose of conducting excavations in the Delta, which up to this time has been very rarely visited by travellers.’” In asking the public for financial contribution, she enabled a host of new investigations and played a critical role in the whole enterprise of Egyptology. Most notably, she was instrumental in recruiting a young archaeologist named Sir Flinders Petrie to her cause.

Petrie would come to be known as the father of modern archaeology. Why? Because he kept the small stuff. Whereas most archaeologists of the day pursued trophy finds, destroying valuable evidence in their hunt to obtain friezes and sculptures for European museums, Petrie recognized the inherent worth of the potsherds, fragmentary inscriptions, and broken utilitarian wares from the past. This was the stuff of everyday life, which could provide a sequential understanding of historic events. Petrie developed a dating method still used by archaeologists today called seriation, which relies on relative comparison. A style of pottery is associated with a particular time period. Once that is established, chronologies can be determined for sites and for all the different artifacts types found within. Petrie’s method constituted the best of scientific field archaeology available until the advent of radiocarbon dating in the mid-twentieth century.

At her desk, Edwards rewrote Petrie’s field journals into popular articles so that the public could understand and appreciate the significance of his findings. It was this unique collaboration that helped give the London-based Egypt Exploration Fund an international reputation. As honorary secretary and the tireless recruiter of new subscribers, Edwards was the force behind one of archaeology’s great men and most productive societies.

She saw her work with the fund as absolutely worthwhile, worthy of her talents, and most of all, necessary. It not only guaranteed new excavations and research but also helped safeguard antiquities and raise public awareness of the threats faced by fragile cultural relics. Edwards handwrote thousands of letters every year, imploring (she would say “begging”) people to support the effort. She oversaw the publication of all archaeological reports and news. Over time her duties grew bigger and more administrative, and she was stretched thinner. Exhausted by the work involved, and by some of the brackish personalities she had to reckon with to get anything accomplished, she began to tire. She was no longer writing novels, and her finances took a nosedive. When Petrie complained about the incompetence of the fund and threatened to leave, she let him have it:

I have given the best part of 7 years to it. My time, I admit, is not scientifically so valuable as yours . . . But
in the market
my time is worth a great deal more than yours. [Her novels paid handsomely, and she had turned down two offers to write new ones.] It is madness perhaps on my part to desire to preserve my chains unbroken—& yet I wd fain see the work go on; that work wh. is glory to you & Mr. Naville—& poverty & obscurity for me.
²⁸

She felt as though she had disappeared behind a mountain of letters, publications, and messages, her own success as a best-selling author eclipsed by the everyday needs of supporting archaeology. She couldn’t even take comfort in the fact that her own skills in reading hieroglyphics were so highly regarded that experts sent samples of potsherds and papyrus to her for translation. Edwards’s fingers were cramped from composing too many letters, and her bank account was circling the drain.

In spite of this hardship, Edwards was
the
voice for Egyptology. Her knowledge of the field was vast and expert, and she was about to emerge from whatever obscurity she felt to face the world in an unprecedented manner. She had a plan, a big one.

But first there was Kate. Kate Bradbury was the energetic thirty-four-year-old woman who doted on Edwards and looked after her. It was because of this trusted bond (and the need for some money) that Edwards embarked on an ambitious lecture series in America in
1889
. With Kate there to help her, she put her strong understanding of current archaeology in Egypt into motion and claimed a piece of the fame that was deservedly hers.

With jittery nerves and a streak of genuine panic, Edwards still proved to be a public-speaking phenomenon. Her lectures weren’t attended by just a handful of spectacle-wearing, gray-haired men; thousands came, both because of Edwards’s reputation as a scholar and because of the public’s fascination with the subject. Over two thousand people attended her first lecture, titled “The buried cities of ancient Egypt.”
²⁹
Reporters rushed to greet her; newspapers announced her arrival in each city; ladies’ societies and other organizations welcomed her to their luncheons as a celebrity. A collection of her lectures makes up the book
Pharaohs, Fellahs and
Explorers
(
1891
), published posthumously.

Just as her writing combined scholarship with wit and an easy narrative, Edwards’s lectures simultaneously entertained and educated. This was always the beauty of her work. Probably her greatest contribution to archaeology was that of “bridge.” She was the mechanism that connected field experience and the solid understanding of a science and its achievements with the enviable twist of popular appeal. What made her books sell is the same thing that made people subscribe in droves to the Egypt Exploration Fund. Edwards had the rare gift of making archaeology not only accessible to the general public, but also absolutely fascinating.

THE AMERICAN LECTURE
tour schedule was demanding. Even by today’s travel standards, she was on a circuit that would exhaust anyone:
120
lectures in less than a year. Kate was beat, and Edwards seemed to be running on the fumes of glory alone. Things began to slow down for her when she fell and broke her arm and soon afterwards began a battle with breast cancer. She underwent a successful operation to remove the malignant tumor, but her health declined anyway. Edwards continued to lecture even as her health dwindled. Each new lecture offered a chance to spark renewed vigor, but Edwards couldn’t keep it up. She died in April
1892
.