In the Valley of the Kings (2 page)

The laws—or, better, the rules of the game—in Egypt allowed for an equal division of whatever was found: statues, jewelry, papyri. The fledgling Egyptian Museum at Cairo got half the take, the other half went to the wealthy diggers. It was this prospect that
drew the British earls and American millionaires to the remote desert wadis with their magnificent treasures … and their ancient curses and gods.

There was, however, one exception in this high-stakes game, the wild card in the deck: an intact royal burial. A pharaoh’s tomb or a queen’s sepulcher undisturbed since the time of its sealing. In the case of such a discovery, all bets were off and the rules changed. In theory, everything went to the Egyptian Museum—though what would happen in practice no one knew, since up to that time such a discovery had never been made. What was more, it was such a remote possibility that those in the know discounted it. The tombs found so far had all been at least partially plundered in antiquity.

But this discouraged no one, since a plundered tomb could be astonishing enough. What had been worthless to the ancient thieves was often worth a fortune to their modern counterparts. The early grave robbers concentrated on gold and silver, or on jars filled with costly perfumes and unguents. They would pour the oils into animal skins to be easily carried away, leaving behind exquisite works of art. They couldn’t have fenced the finely carved statues. Or the limestone and alabaster sarcophagi, the painted coffins and splendidly illustrated rolls of papyri. Such priceless leavings made the game well worthwhile (a game that in modern terms came to hundreds of thousands of British pounds, or American dollars, or French francs).

Then, too, there were the accidental finds stumbled upon in such “plundered” tombs: amulets overlooked in the folds of mummy wrappings or jewelry dropped in the haste of an ancient getaway. A “worthless” crocodile mummy, brittle to the touch, would crack open to reveal a hundred-foot papyrus roll, a masterpiece of the calligrapher’s art. A mummified arm would be discovered—the arm of Queen Mernneith, broken from her body and thrust into a niche during the First Dynasty (
3000 BC
). Laden
with wondrously worked golden bracelets, the arm had been plastered over by some hapless thief who’d never managed to return for his booty. His loss was his modern “brother’s” gain (the severe and Spartan W. Flinders Petrie, working over the supposedly exhausted Abydos site with a fine-tooth comb).

With so much at stake, is it any wonder that Egypt was a place of feverish rumors and speculation? Competition was fierce: among private collectors, among dealers in antiquities (both real ones and forgeries), and among the great museums of the world. The Louvre, the British Museum, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art all had their unscrupulous representatives at work. Greedy, squabbling children, they were anxious to obtain the finest examples of ancient art: provenance known or unknown—no questions asked.

Of course, they were all there in the desert on that hot, bright November day. The opening of an intact royal tomb was not an event they were likely to miss. Nor would the “father” of this naughty family overlook such an occasion: Gaston Maspero, the mudir, or director, of the Service des Antiquités, a devoted scholar whose job it was to keep his acquisitive children in check.

Portly, middle-aged, unworldly—a French academic—Maspero had come to Egypt in 1881 to become the second director of the newly established service. His position as mudir had forced him quickly to learn the ins and outs of the shady antiquities markets.

His first task had been a very “unacademic one”: to trace the source of a steady stream of treasure, recognizably from royal burials, that had been showing up on the market. With the help of a wealthy American collector (Charles Wilbour) and an agent working for both Russia and Belgium (Mustafa Aga Ayat), Maspero followed a torturous trail. It began with two leather strips, outer mummy wrappings, and led to a notorious grave-robbing family, the Abd er Rassuls.

Maspero had its members “interrogated” roughly. For though
he was soft-spoken and humane, when it came to saving antiquities he could be as hard as nails. He ordered a bastinado for the culprits, a beating on the soles of their feet. Ironically, it was a harsher method than the one used on the ancient grave robbers, who were merely lashed on the back to make them talk (the blows given by the hundred, one wound counting as five blows). The bastinado, though, besides causing the whole body to swell, created extreme mental anguish. It left Ahmad er Rassul, the brother who finally confessed, crippled for life (afterward, Maspero was clever enough to recruit him as a service inspector).

The disclosures led to the discovery of a remote desert tomb known as the Deir el-Bahri cache—the hiding place of thirty royal mummies, among them Amenhotep I; Thutmosis I, II, and III; Seti I; Ramesses II and III; and the royal family of the priest-pharaoh Pinedjem. During the breakdown of order in Egypt (in the Twentieth and Twenty-first dynasties), the royal mummies had been taken from their tombs by priests striving to protect their sacred god-kings. Moved from place to place, they were finally reburied here, DB tomb #320.

Here they had remained for three thousand years—and might have remained forever if not for some roaming Arabs. One idly threw a stone into a cleft in the face of the cliffs, and the hollow ringing echo alerted an er Rassul brother who was with them. Keeping his suspicions to himself, he frightened his companions with talk of demons and ghosts in the area. Then he and his brothers returned to investigate. As a result, the er Rassuls had been selling the tomb’s treasures bit by bit for over a decade.

Maspero had the royal mummies taken upriver to Cairo. They made the long trip to wailing all along the way, “the women screaming and tearing their hair,” as Emile Brugsch, Maspero’s assistant, wrote. The peasants crowded to the riverbank, filling the air with a ritual lamentation. Their stylized wailing went back to the earliest epochs of history, when the pharaoh’s death was an act
of cosmic significance: It represented the death of a god, the eclipse of the sun, a time of danger and instability. Perhaps moved by some obscure instinct, the mourning villagers now reenacted the same scene that had taken place thousands of years before.

Once in Cairo, the mummies were eventually studied with the most up-to-date scientific methods of the time.
^2*
The notes scrawled on their coffins were translated and the history of their wanderings recorded. Finally put on display, their expressive features—faces from another world—were gazed upon by an admiring multitude. And thus Maspero began his directorship of the service with a resounding success.

Maspero’s position plunged him into the thick of Egyptian politics. Among his many responsibilities was the granting of concessions to excavate. It was up to him to decide which ancient sites went to whom. National passions were at their height in the years before World War I, and the claims of British diggers had to be considered against French ones, not to mention American, Italian, and German rivalries. Complicating matters was the fact that the British exercised political control over Egypt, while the French had been culturally preeminent in the country since Napoleon’s invasion a century before.

By nationality Maspero was French; by extraction he was Italian; and in his sympathies he was Anglophile. But the cause closest to his heart was knowledge. He sought to strengthen the service, hoping in this way to preserve the ancient sites and to stop the unrestrained looting of Egypt’s treasures.

A beautifully wrought work of art had a monetary value on the antiquities market. But when exact information as to where it had been found could be obtained—when it could be put into a historical context—its scientific value increased tenfold.

Both realist and idealist, Maspero knew that money was the key. Money not only to excavate, but also to preserve what had already been uncovered. To guard the temples and tombs, to restore them, to record the inscriptions covering their walls. Since scant public funds were available, private contributions were a necessity—and such contributions often had to come from the very people he had to be most wary of.

In pursuit of his goals, the new director cultivated a wide range of friendships, anyone and everyone who could be of help. There were the poor itinerant scholars: men and women wandering among the ruins, notebooks in hand, their families moving from pension to pension (figures such as James Breasted, whose translations of ancient inscriptions in Egypt and Nubia ran into many volumes and remain a standard work; his son Charles recalls meager meals in backstreet Egyptian restaurants, his parents dividing the food among the three of them with a careful hand).

And there were the wealthy itinerant aristocrats—an international crowd wintering in Egypt. They sailed the Nile on luxurious dahabiyyas or were pampered in fantastically opulent hotels such as Shepherd’s in Cairo or Luxor’s Winter Palace. Maspero was always a welcome presence among them: earnest but never gauche; witty and sociable.

He enlisted the help of pious churchmen, reverends eager to prove the historical truth of the Bible; and he employed impious thieves of every stripe and rank, high and low. An embassy clerk might pass on a tip as to what was being smuggled out in the diplomatic pouch: a rare scarab, a pharaonic diadem, or a bust such as the famous one of Nefertiti that was brought to Berlin in this way.

It is a wonder that Maspero, understaffed and overworked, had the energy not only to fulfill his duties as mudir so brilliantly, but at the same time to pursue his scholarship. But somehow he did—keeping one eye on the fashionable guest list of Shepherd’s Hotel and the other on a papyrus scroll. His knowledge of the monuments was encyclopedic, his writings were prolific, and his work on the pyramid texts was groundbreaking. He was first among the Egyptologists of his generation, at the same time taking under his wing many young hopefuls of the next.

Among those Maspero encouraged was Howard Carter, though the young man fit into none of the usual categories. He had no education, no money, no family background, and no training in Egyptology. He could speak neither Arabic nor French, and his manners were awkward and abrupt. He was taciturn, brooding, and bad-tempered. He didn’t even have the robust constitution required for turn-of-the-century archaeology, when diggers lived for months on tinned food, sleeping in tents or ancient tombs cut into the cliffs. He had nothing but his stubbornness, an iron determination to make good.

His roots were rural and lower class. His grandfather had been gamekeeper on a Norfolk country estate, where his family had lived for generations. Carter’s father, Samuel, had been the one to break away, developing his natural gifts to become a painter specializing in animal portraits.

Carter would write of him in later years (in an autobiographical sketch or journal he never published): “He was one of the most powerful draughtsmen I ever knew. His knowledge of comparative anatomy and memory for form was
[sic]
matchless. He could depict from memory, accurately, any animal in any action, foreshortened or otherwise, with the greatest ease.”

To this he added a word of professional criticism: “However, if a son may criticize his father, this faculty was in many ways his misfortune.
For by it he was not so obliged to seek nature as much as an artist should, hence his art became somewhat styled as well as period marked.”

Whatever his merits or faults as a painter, the elder Carter had enough admirers to make a career for himself. He worked in the great country houses, painting the beloved horses of the aristocrats; and he worked as an artist for the
Illustrated Times
as well, supplying sketches and drawings for the London newspaper. This eventually necessitated his moving to London with his large family and his animal models (penned up behind the house).

Howard Carter, however, was raised by a maiden aunt in Norfolk. He was a sickly child, and it was thought that the country air would strengthen him. What’s more, such an arrangement eased the financial strain, Carter being the youngest of eleven brothers and sisters.

His formal education was cut short after a few years in a simple rural school in Norfolk where he learned the basics. He wrote later that this was due to ill health, but the real reason was probably financial. It was necessary for Carter to begin to make a living as soon as possible. “I have next to nothing to say about my education … nature thrusts some of us into the world miserably incomplete,” he remarked with some bitterness in his journal. Throughout his life, he felt his lack of education. It was one of the sources of his resentment—and of his determination to succeed.

Fortunately, Carter showed early signs of having inherited a gift for sketching and painting. When his father worked in the great country houses, the young Carter began to go with him, serving a kind of informal apprenticeship. Soon, he was able to obtain small commissions of his own: “For a living, I began by drawing in water colours and coloured chalks portraits of pet parrots, cats and snappy, smelly lap dogs.”

But as he sat drawing his lapdogs and parrots, fate hovered over
the boy. William Tyssen-Amherst, one of his father’s patrons, was an aficionado, an Egyptomaniac, an addict—call it what you will—a passionate collector. He was mad for Egypt, as was his whole family, his wife and five daughters (Mary Tyssen-Amherst, later Lady Cecil, would excavate in Aswan, uncovering a significant cache of late Ptolemaic papyri, among other finds).

Didlington Hall, the Tyssen-Amherst estate, housed some of the most important Egyptian antiquities in private hands. As you approached the manor on its south side, you passed through a formal garden. Here, seven massive black statues loomed amid the flower beds and gravel paths. Fashioned in the fourteenth century
BC
for Amenhotep III—Tutankhamun’s grandfather—they were signifiers of a different reality: images of Sekhmet, a goddess who tore men to pieces at the request of the sun, her lithe, bare-breasted body joined to a lion’s head.