In the Valley of the Kings (15 page)

After the French occupation was over, foreigners had a better time of it in the Valley. The Albanian adventurer Mohammed Ali, who ruled Egypt in the name of the sultan, counted on Europeans to help him modernize the country, and he saw to it that they were well protected.

Perhaps too well protected, for Mohammed Ali cared so little about the ruins and monuments that he would have quarried the pyramids to build factories if it had been practical (a scheme he actually considered). Foreign consuls shipped colossal statues and boxes of tomb friezes back to Europe, where they found their way into collections such as that of the Louvre or the British Museum. It was only with the creation of the Egyptian Antiquities Service in 1858 that the Valley’s tombs began to be protected and preserved and that foreign excavators digging in the Valley found themselves regulated by Egyptian law.

Carter had come to the Valley directly from his work with Petrie at Amarna in 1893—or rather, almost directly, after a few months in the north. But this interlude at Timai al Amdid proved to be irrelevant to him, something of a farce. Almost everything went wrong. It rained incessantly. The excavation permits never got issued. And Carter’s co-worker was a young athlete just arrived from England with barbells, a horizontal bar—and a nervous system totally unsuited to life on a lonely, windswept desert mound.

They were supposed to retrieve a Ptolemaic library, but, as Carter remembered, “the rain made it impracticable to extricate anything of the nature of burnt papyri from under masses of mud bricks and earth now sodden with water. This inclement weather terminated in a tempestuous night, the force of which caused our tents to collapse and expose us to the elements, like wet and bedraggled crows. Upon this, my esteemed assistant began to weep profusely. So I hastily packed up….”

To unpack again … where? The directors of the Egyptian Exploration Fund hesitated. Petrie had reported that Carter’s work
had been satisfactory—high praise from such an exacting man. But other candidates had been proposed for the important assignment they considered giving him—candidates who, after all, were gentlemen. For a few months he was employed on minor tasks, sent back and forth between sites in Middle Egypt.

Then the good news came: He had been chosen to assist Édouard Naville at Deir el-Bahri, the site of Hatshepsut’s mortuary temple (
1490 BC
). It was perhaps the most beautiful building in Egypt, certainly the most dramatic in its setting. Three perfectly proportioned terraces, one on top of another, rose against the towering, reddish cliffs surrounding the temple in a semicircle. And just on the other side of these cliffs—an hour’s hike over steep footpaths—was the Valley of the Kings.

He arrived in Luxor by the newly introduced “screeching train,” as Carter called it in a letter home, admiring the speed with which the trip could be made from Cairo: a single long day’s journey rather than the three weeks it would take
by faluka
, or sailboat, sometimes lengthened by contrary winds.

Naville had sent his reis to meet him. In a calèche jingling with little metal hands against the evil eye, they drove through the town with its dusty streets; its shabby buildings and crowded bazaars; its smoke-filled water-pipe cafés, where Carter, unlike his European colleagues, would spend many hours. Here, he listened to the storytellers (even translating some of their tales) and paid close attention to the gossip—often empty rumors, sometimes valuable information, but focused always on one subject: the tombs, the digs, what had been found, and by whom.

The ferry across the Nile here was just beneath the ancient temple that dominated the city; but Carter had no time to visit it since he had to get onto a boat so crowded, it seemed likely to sink. Word had gotten out that Naville’s excavation would be a large one, and desperate fellahin had shown up from far and near. The crops had been poor; overirrigation had led to a rise in the water
table; there had been locust plagues and pest infestations—one disaster after another had brought them here, looking for work.

Making his way among them, Carter crossed the Nile and then rode out past the Memnon colossi to the desert. The whole area where he had come to live was like a huge Casino of Tombs. Over the years, many treasures had been unearthed here—and for sure, more remained to be discovered. Where? Almost anywhere—“in the innermost recesses,” Carter noted, “in clefts and crevices, some [tombs] being cut high up in the rock faces of perpendicular cliffs.” It was a place where one could dig for years and find nothing. Or else one could suddenly turn up, at the first lucky swing of a pickax, the burials of hundreds of ancient priests (the Bab el Gasus), together with their grave goods.

Carter’s private explorations began here; he wandered in the desert every chance he got, every moment his duties left him a free hour. Over the years, his map became covered with hatched areas that he’d ruled out and circled, possibilities that became fewer and fewer. Nothing was overlooked. A coin minted by Ptolemy III, dropped in antiquity and still lying near a lonely desert path. A drawing at the base of a cliff: a man with his arms raised—an ancient “marker” for a tomb somewhere above? the rough beginnings of a tomb begun and then abandoned—perhaps the unstable shale caused the diggers to move nearby?

He wrote in his journal: “I have marked HC and the date so that any future investigator will know that some attempt has been made to note or copy these tombs, or the places that might contain tombs.” Which was exactly what happened some eighty years later: “I saw a shiny vertical line at the precise spot on the wall I was seeking,” recalled archaeologist John Romer. “Next to that pencil mark were the initials ‘H.C.’ and the date. Few tombs escaped his attention. It was not surprising that Carter had been there before me.”

But there was no time for such exploration when Carter first
showed up at the beginning of 1894. He had been sent here not to look for tombs, but to copy the friezes that covered Hatshepsut’s temple—together with the long inscriptions found everywhere, behind doors and across walls and high up along the architraves. This part of the job was perhaps the most difficult. His copies of the rows upon rows of hieroglyphs must be exact if scholars were to rely on them. James Breasted, whose life was spent in such work, forever after suffered blind spells on account of it.

Sitting high up on wooden rigging built by the temple sides, Carter squinted through glaring sun reflecting on white stone, day after day. There were thousands of hieroglyphic images to be recorded, sometimes in their ancient colors, which still remained. After which his copies had to be verified by colleagues or sometimes by Naville himself, who was greatly interested in this aspect of the work.

Because if Naville was a “slovenly” excavator (as Petrie called him), he was meticulous when it came to his scholarship. An expert linguist, he impressed upon Carter that nothing must be left out—a few small strokes could alter a phrase’s meaning; a tiny horned serpent or loaf of bread could shift a grammatical mood or indicate gender.

Before this phase of the work began, though, two years went by. The temple Carter saw when he arrived was half-sunk beneath sixty tons of debris. Its blocks were scattered, its chapels were filled with sand, and its rows of Osiride pillars had cracked and fallen. The heavy work of clearing and reconstruction must be carried out before Carter could take up brush and pen.

It was an enormous job—which was why the fellahin had been flocking here, thinking many laborers would be needed. They had not counted on a new invention, though, which reduced the number of men who would be employed—the Decauville (or movable) railroad tracks with open wagons to cart away spoil, railroad ties
that could be easily laid down and then quickly taken up again to be replaced in a different direction.

As Carter appeared, riding along the sphinx-lined temple approach, his way was blocked by the crowd of men who had encamped on the dromos. More than a thousand had shown up so far, though there was work for only a hundred. Their shouts echoed in the silent desert as excavation guards tried to send them away, but there was nowhere for them to go. They had shown up here, and here they would remain, their numbers increasing by the day.

For Carter, they were part of the scene, like the cliffs and the ruined temple rising above them. The shouting and shoving, the building violence, didn’t intimidate him, now or later, when the inevitable riots broke out. He took the situation as he found it. “He is absolutely fearless …,” Emma Andrews wrote in her diary, “carries no arms and rides about quite unattended all hours of the night.”

Naville, however, did not have such fortitude. He had asked for soldiers to supplement the usual excavation guards, and he walked through two rows of them as he appeared from his large, luxurious tent to greet his new assistant. A dignified, white-haired man whose perpetually half-closed eyes gave him a supercilious expression, Naville was as different from Petrie as it was possible to be: in his philosophy, in his archaeological interests, in his lifestyle, and in his appearance.

Whereas Petrie was ragged, Naville was dressed impeccably in a dark suit and clerical collar (he was a pastor as well as a scholar). While Petrie’s ideas tumbled forth in an almost incomprehensible torrent, Naville spoke in a slow, soft drawl. And if Petrie scampered over excavation mounds like a sure-footed goat, Naville laboriously climbed the terraced temple on Carter’s arm, pausing to take snuff.

He pointed out to Carter what must be done. A late Coptic
monastery (fourth century
AD
) had been built at the end of one of the terraces. The monks had quarried many of its stones from the ancient temple, and the monastery had to be demolished and the stones put back. Retaining walls must be strengthened, chapels must be cleared, and large slabs of frieze must be fitted together.

Some of these, sections from the “Expedition to Punt [Somalia]” series, were already in place. In one, the queen of Punt was depicted, a squat, “steatopygous” figure, to describe her “archaeologically” (that is, Her Majesty had an enormous behind). In the frieze, she stood next to the sweet-smelling myrrh trees she had sent as a gift to Egypt. Just below, in front of the first terrace, the stone-lined pits could still be seen where they were planted thirty-five hundred years before (during his work here, Carter would find some more pieces of the Punt frieze—scenes from the African marshes).

Taking his new assistant through a recently cleared corridor, Naville showed him the secret places where Hatshepsut allowed her architect—and lover—Senenmut to inscribe his name (on the backs of doors opening inward, where it would never be seen). For the queen had showered Senenmut with honors, even granting him a tomb in the Valley. (In the end, though, she denied him the last gift: “eternity.” His name was scratched out everywhere in the tomb, while her name remained; he was not someone with whom she chose to spend eternity. After all, she was a queen, while what was he? A commoner—a one-lifetime stand.)

High up on the surrounding cliffs, however, some naughty ancient artist had drawn them naked and making love—a find Naville most emphatically did not take Carter to see.

It was one of the ironies of this first meeting that as the two men walked through the ruins, Petrie was telegraphing the Egyptian Exploration Fund, trying to prevent Naville from being given the site. Much would be lost, Petrie warned, it was nothing less than a crime to put the temple in the hands of such a man.

But Naville had an established international reputation. He had had long experience in Egypt and influence both in Cairo and in Europe. Taking the temple away from him would cause a major rift, the fund’s directors knew. Not to mention the loss of financial support—for Naville had written extensively on biblical aspects of Egyptian finds, and such a tie-in was a major draw (an economic fact of life, pure and simple, of turn-of-the-century archaeology).

Caught between the two, Carter was able to divide his loyalty without loss of principle. Though Petrie-trained, he realized there was much he could learn from Naville as well—if not about excavation, then about architectural reconstruction and the linguistic aspects of the inscriptions he was copying. Moreover, once Naville came to trust his assistant, he left Carter in charge for long periods of time and decamped to Cairo, where he spent his time in the khedival library.

For Naville was addicted to his studies, though his writing would lead one to believe the opposite. “I believe that henceforth it is in the soil, in the excavations, that we shall find the solution of important questions which criticism has hitherto sought too exclusively in philological study,” he wrote (in
The Discovery of the Book of the Law Under King Josiah: An Egyptian Interpretation of the Biblical Account
, one of many such studies he produced). But even when he was out of his library and near the soil, he did not, like Petrie, get his hands dirty.

As Amelia Edwards ironically wrote to Petrie: “I regret to tell you that though you have been excavating for years, you do not yet know the correct manner. It takes five to do digging in the true (high and mighty) style. At Bubastis, there was Mr. Naville to preside (in his tent, bien entendu) where he probably spent his days in writing to Madame and the children; there was Mr. Macgregor to take photographs; Mr. Goddard to spend American dollars and curl his hair and mustachios; Mr. Griffith to rescue a few small objects and Count D’Hulst to talk Arabic and pay the men.”

But if Naville proceeded at a more leisurely pace than Petrie, and in greater comfort, the Decauville railroad wagons kept running, and the mountains of spoil were removed from Hatshepsut’s temple day by day—riots or no riots. Over the months and then the years, as Naville came to respect Carter’s artwork and reconstruction skills, more and more responsibility was shifted to his shoulders.

“It is certainly quite remarkable how well that difficult work of rebuilding is done by Mr Carter,” Naville reported to the Egyptian Exploration Fund. “The whole of the execution … has been done admirably. He has a very quick eye for finding the places where the stones belong; besides, as he has a thorough command of Arabic, he can direct and superintend the men, or rather teach them what they are to do.”