In the Valley of the Kings (7 page)

These “vendettas” consumed Carter. While Petrie could quickly shake off a venomous exchange, forgetting everything in the joy of an intellectual problem, Carter was capable of spending an entire night awake, full of hate. If, as it has been said, archaeologists are “dead men on leave,” they certainly lack the calm of the dead (the perspective of eternity) but are goaded on by green-eyed jealousy, vindictiveness, and vanity—with the most eminent often being the least open-minded.

The superstar Heinrich Schliemann, surrounded by a blaze of glory from his discovery of Troy, showed up at a Petrie dig together with a sidekick named Georg Schweinfurth. Petrie enthusiastically described the visit (reported with different emotions by his guests). Schliemann was “short, round headed, round faced, round hatted, great round goggle eyed, dogmatic, but always ready for facts,” Petrie recorded. He added that Schweinfurth was “a bronzed bony fellow” and “an infatuated botanist” whom he, Petrie, had thrilled with wreaths of ancient red roses from the tombs.

They lunched. In his distinguished visitor’s honor, Petrie hospitably opened one of his precious bottles of citric acid and mixed it with water. Now there would be lemonade to wash down the tinned sardines. (High on the list of Naville’s unforgivable sins was having once broken a bottle of the same stored away with Petrie’s things in a Cairo warehouse. When the letters between the insincerely contrite Naville and the furious Petrie are unearthed in
AD 3000 or 4000
, they will undoubtedly lead some future archaeologist to write an essay—“Bitter Ambrosia”—on the high value attached to citric acid in the early twentieth century.)

In any case, as Petrie caroused with his guests, they saw “a procession of gilt mummies coming across the mounds glittering in
the sun”—workmen bringing in a new find. The best coffin was Ptolemaic, with a vivid portrait of a gloomy young man surrounded by an olive leaf wreath. Inscribed across his chest in Greek were the words
O Artemidorus, farewell!

The young man’s mummy was inspected, and then the conversation turned to other matters. Poor Artemidorus, after twenty-two hundred years of dwelling in the “world of truth,” must now witness, as his first example of modern life, archaeological duplicity.

It was very hot—even for Egypt. “A day,” Petrie recorded, “when one thought not of glasses, or jugs, or pails of water, but of nothing short of canals and rivers….”

Nevertheless, as the sun beat down on the living and the dead, the enthusiastic Petrie explained that he had discovered that a pot’s style had a life cycle. There was its first appearance, then its “flourishing” or popular phase, and then its “degraded” or simplified stage.

He picked up a handleless pot with two wavy lines painted on its sides. Degraded! he pronounced, for the lines were only a “shorthand” or simplified version of an earlier version in which it had wavy handles. The wavy lines linked it to the earlier version while showing just where in time the pot existed.

Schliemann was profoundly silent. Petrie took the silence for assent and continued. After reaching its final, simplified phase, he explained, the style died or disappeared. “Degradation is followed by death,” he intoned as Schweinfurth suggested a descent into the cooler tombs—a suggestion nixed by Petrie, who was in the midst of recording and did not want anything disturbed.

The sun lit up Artemidorus’s gilt-and-red plaster coffin as if it burned with the ancient sacred fire—which certainly enveloped the oblivious, discoursing Petrie.

He demonstrated his theory with a variety of other pottery styles. Of special interest were some perfume jars he had recently unearthed. In earlier phases, they were filled with costly unguents, but in the “degraded” (or simplified) phase in which he had found
them, they were empty. The scented clay from which they were made, however, gave them away: They were definitely connected to the earlier perfume jar tradition.

Despite the heat, Schweinfurth managed to murmur, “It is certainly very important to know the age of pottery,” an innocuous comment that Petrie recorded with pleasure. He was delighted finally to have an understanding audience.

After a style’s disappearance, there was still another phase, a kind of resurrection: A new style followed that had similarities to the one that had gone before.

It was too much for Schweinfurth. The suffering botanist burst out that he was “incredulously pleased” by Petrie’s explanations.

But the explanations were not yet over! After all, his visitors would surely want to hear about Diospolis Parva (Upper Egypt), where he had uncovered over four thousand graves and determined the burial sequence by using pots found among the grave goods….

He was reminded that the trip to the nearest hotel was a long one (the site was some distance from the Faiyum oasis). But how could that matter to Petrie? He never spared himself and couldn’t imagine that anyone would be more interested in comfort than in knowledge. Though his guests were on camels, he himself frequently walked that distance and more on the off chance of discovering something interesting along the way. In any case, he was just coming to the best part: his mathematical calculations!

As the citric acid was passed around, he continued: To order such a vast amount of evidence as is found in four thousand graves (the numbers become even more staggering in the sacred ibis and crocodile cemeteries where burials run into the hundreds of thousands), he used a statistical method known as “seriation.” In fact, his brilliant use of mathematics throughout his career has led a modern authority on the subject, David Kendall, to call him “one of the greatest applied mathematicians of the 19th century.”

Professor Kendall, though, was judging Petrie “in retrospect” and from the comfort of his study. At the time, the sweating Schweinfurth, his stomach filled with sardines and his heart with a bitterness that not even Petrie’s ancient roses could assuage, doubted everything—as did Schliemann. (What Max Planck observes in relation to physics applies equally to archaeology: “A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.”)

Word of Schliemann’s skepticism quickly made the rounds in archaeological circles: a blow to Petrie! Schliemann has stated “in the strongest terms … the utter impossibility of establishing anything like a chronology of Egyptian pottery,” Naville gloated in a letter to a colleague. “I should have liked Francis Llewellyn Griffith [of the British Museum] to hear him,” and so on. And so the conflict raged on, a dividing line—one of many in the archaeological world—being formed on either side of Petrie’s cracked pots (pun most certainly intended).

While even Petrie’s critics could appreciate his more spectacular finds—the magnificent Ptolemaic coffin, for example, with its sensitive portrait of Artemidorus—Petrie’s singularly modern approach was beyond them. His emphasis on knowledge, his “ravings” about potsherds and dung heaps … everything, in fact, that made him unique.

Such was the nature of the archaeological gossip making the rounds when Carter showed up in Egypt. He listened and observed and silently drew his own conclusions. Foes and friends and false friends chose sides in the battle for truth? For reputation and the best sites? Or for survival—as Carter put it when writing about his own first archaeological dispute, calling it nothing less than “the struggle for existence.” The Darwinian phrase was very
much in the air at the time and resonated with the driven, do-or-die young man fallen into the midst of this intense and crazy new world.

He was literally just off the boat. A whirlwind had just taken him from the calm of the English countryside to London, then to Alexandria, then to the teeming never-never land of Cairo. He had had no time to pause, to catch his breath and get his bearings. Less than a week earlier, his father had seen him off at what was to be their last meeting. His father called after him with emotion. He paused to hear that now he had permission to smoke. Then he was on his own.

Exhilarated and heartsick, Carter crossed the English Channel and made his way to Marseilles, where he boarded one of the dilapidated old boats belonging to the Messageries Maritime Company. It was still seaworthy, or just barely. His cabin was next to the “smelly dining salon,” he noted, where the food was served up “oozy with oil.” The weather was rough, and his groans were heard by a fellow passenger. The man, a sympathetic Franciscan, knocked on his cabin door with Christian charity in the practical form of a bottle of wine. His head spinning, his stomach churning, Carter fell asleep to awaken the next day in the port of Alexandria.

Anyone who has found himself alone in the midst of a bustling foreign city knows what it’s like to be overwhelmed by a place where everything is strange and new—sounds, smells, sights. But there was no time for Carter to linger in Alexandria. He had to go on to Cairo right away, since it was uncertain when his expedition would be leaving for Beni Hasan. But as he passed through, he got a dreamlike impression of the cosmopolitan city, half Oriental, half European.

Its narrow winding streets were alive with the color of rich fabrics; with mountains of dates and pomegranates and the hard brown dohm fruit; with the cries of street hawkers, splashing fountains, the wail of prayer from mosques, and the chanting of students
in the madrassas. The small squares opened onto the broad modern streets, where Arabic mixed with a medley of Italian, Greek, French, and English and where the architecture was French rather than Arabic.

But like a shadow falling over the vibrant oceanside city, there were still signs everywhere of the British bombardment of a decade earlier. Photos of Alexandria in the 1890s show the Street of European Consulates, the Hotel d’Europe, Ramleh Boulevard, the Bazaar, and the Okelle Neuve pockmarked with ruined buildings and shattered monuments. It was a dark chord of warning: Political passions simmered just under the surface.

The Europeans who had seized control of the unstable country naïvely thought of themselves as benevolent. After all, they were reorganizing Egypt’s desperate finances and extending its irrigation system; they were building bridges and roads and digging up its antiquities. But they were arrogant, racist, self-seeking infidels, and they were hated. The struggle had just begun that would end in the Egyptian revolution of 1952. Then the magnificent Cairo opera house where
Aida
was first heard, the elegant Shepherd’s Hotel, the Fencing Club, and the rococo theaters would go up in flames; the British would be driven out and the British-backed King Farouk would hurry through these same Alexandria streets on his way to exile in Italy.

The young Carter, though, was traveling in the opposite direction: toward the heart of Egypt. Taking the Alexandria-Cairo train south, he passed through countryside that had changed little since the time of the pharaohs. The naked boys on skinny water buffaloes might have ridden out of a frieze in a Sixth Dynasty tomb. As might the irrigation shaduf they turned, the pole-and-bucket arrangement in use a thousand years before King Tut was born. The mud brick pigeon houses still rose in fantastic shapes amid the palms, and brilliant blue lotus blossoms floated timelessly on shimmering, flooded fields.

All his worldly possessions crammed into a trunk and a cloth portmanteau, Arabic grammar in hand, Carter arrived in Cairo. It was a harsher city than Alexandria (then as now): its contrasts more pronounced, its beauties more hidden, its amenities fewer, its climate worse, its past longer and perhaps darker as well, with the ruins of the ancient Egyptian capitals On and Memphis, the sphinx and the pyramids, looming at the “modern” (
AD 969
) city’s edge.

While Alexandria faces outward toward the Mediterranean, Cairo is situated at the culmination of the Nile valley with its enclosed, “claustrophiliac” Egyptian life. For more than six hundred miles to the south, the landscape does not vary. On each side, the Nile is bordered by the fertile land that the river creates. Beyond that there is nothing but cliffs, desert, and tombs.

Carter’s stay in Cairo was a short one. He took leave of Petrie never guessing that the two of them would work together before long. Petrie’s exhortations echoing in his ears, he set out to join his expedition in Beni Hasan, having barely had time to take in Cairo’s sights.

He was formally dressed. If Petrie, even when spruced up for the city, was too impatient to bother about socks, he was secure in his status: He was a gentleman and knew he could afford what amused colleagues called his “gypsy appearance.” Carter, though, understood that in his case they would be less forgiving. Throughout his career, he was always meticulous in his appearance, on the sites or off. Photos often show him putting on the Ritz in his homburg and three-piece suit, a silver-topped walking stick under his arm, even while mounted on a donkey. Which was how he was dressed now, minus the silver-topped stick. He looked more like a young English lord than a raw youth setting out to rough it in tombs and burial shafts.