1. NAPOLEON:  IN THE LAND OF THE PHARAOHES   

Napoleon I and Vivant Denon dominated from the beginning archaeological exploration in Egypt. Emperors and barons, generals and artists – on a short journey they walked side by side and understood each other very well, even though essentially they had nothing in common. For one person, the pen is only used to sign military orders, give instructions, and make laws; the other used his pen to write easy, bawdy novels and create pencil drawings that are today among the most bizarre of all erotica.

On October 17, 1797, the Peace Treaty of Campo Formio was signed, ending the Italian campaign and allowing Napoleon to return to Paris. “Napoleon’s glorious days are over!” writer Stendhal said. He was wrong. In fact, the illustrious period of the great Corsican was just beginning. But before he swept Europe, he harbored a crazy, vain plan, sprung from a sick mind. Walking back and forth endlessly in a small room, withered by ambition, comparing himself with Alexander, no longer hoping for great works yet to be accomplished, Napoleon wrote: Paris weighs on me like a lead jacket! This Europe of ours is a molehill. Only in the East, where six hundred million inhabitants live, was it possible to establish vast empires and carry out great revolutions.”

            On May 19, 1798, Napoleon set sail from Toulon with a fleet of 328 warships, carrying 38,000 men on board, almost equal to the force Alexander commanded when he launched his campaign in the East. Destination is Egypt.

            The French plan was worthy of Alexander. Napoleon’s searching eyes darted across the Nile valley to the vast island of India. The goal of the initial crossing campaign was to deal a fatal blow to one of Britain’s main auxiliary forces, unfathomable in the European balance. Nelson, admiral of the British fleet, spent a month searching in vain throughout the Mediterranean, but could not trap Napoleon’s forces, although twice French warships were almost within sight.

            On July 2, Napoleon stepped onto Egyptian soil. After the march in the hot desert, the soldiers happily bathed in the Nile River. On July 21 Cairo appeared before the eyes of French soldiers, a scene straight out of One Thousand and One Nights, with its 400 watchtowers and the massive dome of Jami-el-Azhar, the city’s central mosque. . In sharp contrast to the architecture lavishly decorated with gold and silver, felt against the pearly morning sky, there rising from the arid desert floor, silhouetted against the gray-purple Jebel Mokattam hillsides, was the figure silhouettes of giant stone structures, cold, heavy, and arrogant. It is the Pyramid of Gizeh, a petrified geometry, a silent eternity, symbols of a world that died long before the birth of Islam.          

            The soldiers did not have time to gape. All around them lie the vast ruins of a dead past, but Cairo, the symbol of an enchanting future, beckons. Between them and the glittering target was the army of the Mameluke generals . This colorful force consists of 10,000 battle-hardened cavalrymen, armed with glittering curved swords, mounted on the backs of diverse steeds. The commander was the ruler of Egypt, Maurad. Accompanying him were 23 governors. He mounted a white-feathered steed like a swan and led the army, his blue cloak sparkling with precious stones. Napoleon pointed at the pyramids. He exhorted his soldiers, as a general, a master of mass psychology, and as a European face to world history. “Soldiers,” he said loudly, “forty centuries are looking down upon you!”

The encounter was terrible. The strength of the Mamelukes cannot hope to compete with European bayonets. The battle turned into a bloody escape. On July 25 Napoleon entered Cairo, and half the march to India seemed to have been completed safely.

            But on August 7, a naval battle occurred at Abukir. Nelson finally located the French fleet and massively attacked like an avenging angel. Napoleon was trapped. Abukir put an end to the Egyptian adventure, although it actually lasted another year. During this time General Desaix overran Upper Egypt, and Napoleon won a land battle at the same place of Abukir where his fleet was cut to pieces. Despite this victory, hardship, hunger, and disease tormented the French soldiers. A large number of soldiers were blinded by the Egyptian eye plague.

            On August 19, 1799 Napoleon left his army behind. On August 25, from the warship Muiron , he watched the coast of the Pharaoh’s country sink into the sea behind him.           

Napoleon’s expedition, foolish from a military point of view, had the long-term effect of awakening Egypt politically; but also launched scientific research into antiquity that continues to this day. Because Napoleon brought 175 “learned citizens” to Egypt. Soldiers and sailors call this complex of brain matter “donkeys.” The intellectuals brought with them a large library containing nearly every book on the land of the Nile that could be found in France, and dozens of crates of scientific instruments and measuring instruments.

            The first time Napoleon showed himself to be interested in Egyptian culture was at a meeting organized by scientists, in the spring of 1798, in the large auditorium of the French Academy. While explaining the scientific tasks of the Egypt project, for emphasis he occasionally tapped his finger on the leather cover of Niebuhr’s Travels in Arabia that he held in his hand. A few days later astronomers, geometers, chemists, mineralogists, Orientalists, technicians, artists, and poets joined him in Toulon. And among them was an extraordinary man whom the Queen gallantly introduced as an illustrator.

            Dominique Vivant Denon is his full name. During the reign of King Louis In St. Petersburg, he had served as embassy attache, and was also favored by Catherine, the Russian Empress. A man of the world, fond of women, amateur in all arts, good at speaking, and witty, Denon always manages to be friendly with everyone. When he was a diplomat working in the Swiss Confederation, he often visited Voltaire [ an outstanding French writer ], and painted the famous painting Breakfast at Ferney showing the writer eating breakfast in bed. . With the oil painting The Shepherd and the Baby Jesus painted in Rembrandt style, he was accepted into the Academy. News of the outbreak of the French Revolution reached him while he was living in Florence (Italy), where he was a familiar figure in the city’s art salons. He hurried back to Paris. From the independent and wealthy life of a diplomat and “ gentilhomme ordinaire ” [“ ordinary gentleman ”], he found himself suddenly on the list of immigrants. He witnessed his home and property being attacked.

            Poor, abandoned, and betrayed everywhere, he wandered around in the shabby areas of Paris, making a meager living by selling his paintings. He wandered around the markets, witnessing too many heads rolling around in the Place de Grève, including the heads of some friends, until finally he found unexpected protection from Jacques Louis David, Great painter of the Revolution. He was given the job of engraving sketches of David’s clothes, which were destined to revolutionize French dress style. This work helped him gain the trust of the “indestructible man”. His property was soon returned, and his name was removed from the list of deportees. He had the opportunity to get to know the beautiful Queen Josephine and make an impression on Napoleon, and was allowed to accompany him on the Egyptian expedition.

            He returned from the country of the Nile a respected and trusted person. He was appointed general director of all museums. As Napoleon continued to assert his power on the European battlefield, Denon followed him closely. He plundered works of art in the name of collecting, and he continued to do so until the first few bland paintings became some of the noblest decorations of France. Seeing how successful he was when drawing in color and pencil, he thought he could do the same in the field of literature. At a literary gathering, writers debated the issue of the impossibility of writing a realistic love story without using sex. Denon bets he can do it. Within 24 hours he completed  Yesterday’s Score. This recent collection of stories has found him a place in the literary scene. Connoisseurs declare it an exquisite work of its kind. Balzac later called it “an educational book for married men, and gives young people a wonderful picture of the customs of the last century.”

            Denon also wrote Oeuvre Priapique [ Sexual Paintings ], which appeared in 1793. This is a collection of acid etchings, and as the title suggests, they are brazenly sexual. It is also interesting in this regard to note that the archaeologists who have studied Denon seem to have been completely unaware of the erotic aspect of his activities. On the other hand, even a culturally knowledgeable historian like Eduard Fuchs, whose History of Moral Behavior devoted an entire section to pornography, was clearly unaware that Denon had played a role. important in the embryonic days of Egyptology.

            This multi-dimensional and in some respects astonishing man clearly deserves to be remembered by posterity for a single feat. Napoleon conquered Egypt by bayonet, and lasted only a short year. And Denon conquered the land of the Pharaohs with his pencil and maintained it forever. It is through the power of eyes and skilled hands that Egypt once again comes to life in the consciousness of modern people.

            From the moment he first felt the hot breath of the desert, Denon, the effeminate man of the sands, was suddenly aroused by a wave of fanatical enthusiasm for everything Egyptian. As he wandered from ruin to ruin, this enthusiasm did not wane.

            He followed Desaix’s army, and with this general fiercely pursued Murad, the leader of the fleeing Mameluke army, through the desolation of Upper Egypt. At this time, Denon was 51 years old, old enough to be Desaix’s father. The general, as well as the officer ranks, favored Denon. As for the soldiers, they were surprised by someone who did not care about the extremes of the climate. One day he pushed his small old horse far ahead of the vanguard of the army, the rearguard still trailing behind. He left his tent at dawn and sketched on the march and in the barracks every night. Even when he was on a meager diet, he kept his painting notebook right next to him. One time, in the midst of the alarm, he suddenly found himself rushing into the middle of an ambush. When the soldiers counterattacked, Denon encouraged them to rush in by waving his drawing paper. Then, realizing that a scene worth recording was unfolding before his eyes, he forgot all about the artillery shells and engrossed in drawing.

            Finally he encountered hieroglyphs. He was completely ignorant of them, and no one in Desaix’s army could satisfy his curiosity. Regardless, he just drew what he saw. And immediately, the keen, if not innate, eye distinguished three different types of pictograms. The hieroglyphs, he noticed, were either engraved in low relief, or in high relief. At Sakkara he sketched the Step Pyramid, and at Dendera the huge ruins of ancient Egypt. Tirelessly he hurried back and forth among the ruins that spread at Thebes with its 100 gates, and was disappointed when the order to disperse was given before he could grasp everything with his pen. Cursing furiously, he called some soldiers in his unit and told them to scrape off the dirt stains on the head of a statue that caught his attention. He continued to sketch while the army had long been on its way.

                        Desaix’s adventurous campaign took him as far as Aswan and the first waterfall of the Nile. At Elephantine, Denon painted the graceful columned chapel of Amenophis III. His masterful sketch is the only picture of the chapel that still exists, because in 1822 the structure was demolished. When the army returned home, after the victory at Sediman and the destruction of Murad, Baron Dominique Vivant Denon, with countless pencil drawings, brought back to France a lot of booty even greater than the wealth stolen by the soldiers. plundered from the Mameluke army. Denon’s sensibilities may have been ignited by the mystery of Egypt, but this excitement did not affect his precise drawing skills. His drawing style is realistic at the hands of an old sculptor who devotes all his energy to every detail, regardless of impressionism or expressionism, and calmly ignores the negative meaning. of the word painter. Denon’s pencil drawings became an invaluable source for contemporary archeology. They provided the basis for an aesthetically pleasing work in Egyptology, the first of its kind, the masterpiece Egyptian Description, in which science blossomed as a systematic intellectual endeavor.

           Meanwhile in Cairo the Egyptian Institute was established. While Denon was busy drawing, the other artists and scientists of Napoleon’s working group measured, counted, researched, and collected whatever the ground of Egypt had to offer. Just on the ground, the material displayed before the eyes is suddenly so abundant that there is no longer any motivation to excavate. In addition to plaster models, masses of memorabilia of all kinds, manuscripts, paintings, and collections of animal, plant, and mineral specimens, Napoleon’s intellectual complex also brought home a few stone sarcophagi and 27 carved stone fragments, most of which are fragments of stone statues. Included among these is a polished black basalt stone stele, containing inscriptions in three languages. This heavy tablet became known as the Rosetta Stone, the key to unlocking the mysteries of Egypt.

            But in September 1801, when Alexandria fell to the British, France had to surrender to the British all the lands in Upper Egypt they had conquered, and with them the expedition’s collection. about ancient Egypt. General Hutchinson undertook to transport them back to England. With the instructions of King George III, the items, which at that time were the most precious and rare, were stored at the British Museum. A year of French effort was successful, a year in which a number of scholars lost their eyesight because of the general situation. But then it was realized that, excluding the loss of the original to the British, all the specimens in the collection were closely copied. Thus, there is enough material to return to Paris for a generation of scholars to diligently study.

            The first member of the expedition to use these items was Denon. In 1802 he published his wonderful work A Journey to Upper and Lower Egypt. At the same time, Francois Jomard began to compile his great work, based on the materials collected by the scientists in the group, and especially Denon’s massive amount of paintings. This masterpiece, a unique event in the history of archeology, immediately made an impression and attracted the attention of the modern world to a culture that until now had only been visited by a few tourists. history, a culture as remote and mysterious, if not completely hidden, as the culture of Troy.

One of the first items of Egyptian art, called the “Narmer palette,” consists of a front and back. It is about 5,000 years old, and probably depicts Menes the Great himself, who founded the first dynasty, following his victory over enemies from Lower Egypt.

Jomard’s Description of Egypt was published over the four years from 1809 to 1813. The interest that the publication of these twenty-four volumes aroused was comparable only to the publication of Botta’s first work on Nineveh and Schliemann’s book on Troy.

            In the age of the rotary printing press it is not easy to appreciate the significance of Jomard’s selection and compilation, with its many engravings, some colored, and high-class bookbinding techniques. The book series only came into the hands of the rich, and they kept it as a treasure of knowledge. Today, when every important scientific discovery is almost instantly disseminated around the world, the effect is multiplied millions of times through media such as photographs, movies, and sounds, excitement that the great discoveries caused have been greatly diluted. One work published on the heels of another, always competing for attention, contributes to a process in which each person knows a little about something, but doesn’t really know it. What’s profound? So it is not easy for modern people to understand what Jomard’s first readers felt when they picked up Description of Egypt . They saw in it things that had never been seen before, they read about wonderful new things, they became acquainted with a way of life whose existence had never before been suspected. More capable of appreciation than ourselves, these first readers must have experienced an overwhelming feeling of being transported thousands of years back.

            Because Egypt is ancient, older than any other culture at that time. It was ancient when the political form of the future Roman Empire was being formed through meetings on the Capitoline Hill. It was ancient and decimated when Germanic and Celtic tribes in the northern European forests were still hunting bears. When the First Dynasty came to power, about 5,000 years ago, Egyptian history was shaped in the course of time, cultural forms evolved in the land of the Nile. And when the 26th Dynasty died, it took another 500 years to reach our era. During those 500 years, the Libyans ruled Egypt, then the Ethiopians, the Assyrians, the Persians, the Greeks, the Romans – all of these events happened before the star shined on the Bethlehem cave, where Jesus was born.

            Of course, the rocky wonders of the Nile were known to some, but their knowledge was more or less legendary. Only a few Egyptian monuments have been transported to museums in distant lands and shown to the public. During Napoleon’s time visitors in Rome could gape at the lion statues on the steps of the Capitol. He could also see the statues of some of the Ptolemaic kings – that is, later works, completed in the period when the splendor of ancient Egypt was being replaced by the new splendor of Egypt. Greece in Alexandria. Among the monuments truly representative of Egyptian antiquity in Rome are the 12 obelisks, plus some reliefs in the cardinals’ garden. Most commonly, Egyptian scarab jewelry was considered sacred by the people of the Nile. These scarabs were once used throughout Europe as a charm (see picture), and later as jewelry. That’s all.          

And what little of what might be called scholarly material rich in authentic information can be found in the bookstores of Paris; But an excellent translation of Strabo’s five-volume set in 1805 made widely available authoritative treatises that had previously been within the reach of scholars. Strabo traveled throughout Egypt during the time of Roman Emperor Augustus. More valuable information is contained in the second book of Hetodotus, the great traveler of antiquity. But who reads Herodotus? How many people are familiar with the handful of even esoteric and scanty references to Egypt in ancient authors?

“Who covers himself with light instead of clothes,” said the poet. Early in the morning the sun rose in the cold blue sky, and sailed on its course, dazzling gold, scorching hot, reflecting on the desert the dark brown, vermilion, pale white hues. Shadows were as black as ink poured across the sand. And towards this place of endless sunlight, where there is no weather, no rain, no snow, no fog, and no hail, where the rumble of thunder is rarely heard or the flash of lightning is seen. – towards this desert, where the air dries to the bone, where no seed grows, where the land bears no fruit, crushed, fragile, brittle when clumped, rushing river The mighty Nile, father of all rivers, rushes in. The river rises from the far depths of the country and is fed by the lakes and tropical rains of remote Sudan. During the flood season, it overflows its banks, pours water into the sand, swallows the abandoned lands, and spews mud and silt in July. The river has done so for thousands of years, rising 52 feet (about 14 meters) each year. The symbol of this event is a group of stone statues in the Vatican in which there are statues of 16 children, each representing an En (a unit of length equal to 113 cm) of the flood level. When the flood receded, the Nile saturated the dry land and the hot sand. When the brown water layers have settled, green plants begin to sprout. Young seedlings appear, bringing double and quadruple harvests and bringing “years of plenty” to feed the people during “years of famine”. Every year a new Egypt rises, “a gift from the Nile,” as Herodotus described the event 2,500 years ago, the bread basket of antiquity. As far away as Rome, there was either famine or starvation, depending on the generosity of the Nile River.

            In the towering cities rising from the sun-bleached landscapes people of different ethnicities and skin tones – Nubians, Berbers, Copts, Bedouins, Africans – crowded together through the narrow streets, shouting shout in different languages, welcoming a world of cool temples, pillared halls, and mausoleums.

            In scenes of shadowless desolation the pyramids raise their heads. Sixty-seven pyramids stand in the wasteland around Cairo, arrayed around the “Rehearsals of the Sun,” monstrous tombs of kings. Just one of them required two and a half million blocks of stone to build, brought to the site by the strength of more than a hundred thousand slaves who worked hard for more than 20 years.

            There the Sphinx of Gizeh lies crouched, the largest of its kind, half human, half lion. The lion’s mane was destroyed, its eyes and nose were only holes, because the Mameluke army used its head as a target to practice cannon shooting. But there it lay still for thousands of years, prostrate with its corpse and moon, a mass of stone so massive that Thotmes, dreaming of ascending the throne, found enough space to erect a stone between its feet. huge beer.

            There are also towering pointed towers standing out against the crystal clear sky, standing guard over the temple gate, honoring the gods and kings. Some of these beautiful rock fingers point up to 91 feet (about 30 meters) into the sky. There are also stone tombs and mastaba mausoleums, statues of “local administrators” and statues of Pharaohs, stone sarcophagi, pillars and towers, reliefs and paintings. Those who once ruled this ancient kingdom enter eternity through frescoes, in rigid postures, breathing grandeur into every gesture, always depicted with a profile and aiming at a goal. some goal. “Egyptian life,” it was said, “is a journey into death.” The principle of salvation is so strongly emphasized in the wall reliefs that one modern cultural philosopher points out that “the road” is the most fundamental Egyptian symbol, with a meaning equal to “space”. ” of Europe and the “body” of Greece.

            Practically every object in this vast cemetery of the past is covered in hieroglyphs. These hieroglyphs consist of signs, drawings, outlines, hints, all manner of mysterious and secret forms. The symbolism of this strange communication system draws inspiration from people, animals, plants, fruits, mechanical devices, clothing fabrics, utensils, weapons, geometric shapes, undulations and firelight. . Hieroglyphics are all over the walls of temples and burial chambers, on memorial stele, sarcophagi, stele, on statues of gods and mortals, on wooden boxes and ceramic vases. Even the pen holder and walking stick bear hieroglyphs. The Egyptians seem to like to write more than any other people. “If someone sat down to copy all the inscriptions in the temple of Edfu

The facade of the Temple of Edfu in Aswan

            Jomard opened this magnificent world to Europeans who quickly awakened to the wonders of science and the wonders of the past. Thanks to Caroline, Napoleon’s sister, the excavation of Pompeii was promoted with renewed enthusiasm. Through Wickelmann, scholars learned the rudiments of archeology and enthusiastically began decoding the mysteries of antiquity.

It is true that the Description contains a wealth of drawings, copies, and descriptions, which the authors cannot explain, for that is beyond their powers. When, from time to time, they tried to guess, they were wrong. Because the relics arranged in books are themselves silent, and remain stubborn. Whatever order is imposed on them is purely intuitive, because no one has any idea how to interpret them concretely and empirically. Simple hieroglyphs were unreadable, as were hieratic and demonic scripts, which were simplified forms of hieroglyphs. ¹ The written language is completely foreign to European eyes. The Description introduces a completely new world which, with respect to its internal relations, natural order and meaning, is a complete mystery.

            In Jomard’s time, people wondered if there might be something missing that could solve the mystery of hieroglyphs. But is this possible? De Sacy, a great Orientalist, said that “the problem is too complicated and cannot be solved scientifically.” On the contrary, an unknown German teacher named Grotfend in Göttingen, wrote an article that correctly showed the way to deciphering the cuneiform script of Persepolis. His methods are showing results. And while Grotefend had little material to work with, there are now countless hieroglyphic inscriptions available to examine. Furthermore, one of Napoleon’s soldiers accidentally found a precious slab of black basalt. Even the first reporters to report on this find immediately knew that the Rosetta Stone was the key to solving the puzzle of Egyptian hieroglyphs. But who knows how to use this stone stele?

            Not long after the discovery of the famous stele, an article about it appeared in the Egyptian Mail , published on the date of the Revolution: Fructidor month, 29th year of the 7th Republic . December name according to the French Revolution calendar: ND ]. By the rarest of coincidences, this Egyptian newspaper appeared in the parental home of the man who, twenty years later, in a unique work of genius, made the ability to read the inscriptions on the black stone stele and thus solve the problem of hieroglyphs

1 Demonic script is a simplified or popularized form of hieratic script, and hieratic script is in turn a shortened form of hieroglyphic script. Hieratic was used in secular or religious texts, until the word demonic appeared and became popular, and later hieratic was only for religious activities. 

Napoleon Bonaparte and Vivant Denon

Denon’s Sphinx painting

The Nile River, the longest river in the world, is the god of Egypt

Djoser Step Pyramid in Saqqara

1. CHAMPOLLION (I):  THE MYSTERY OF THE ROSETTA STONE

 When Dr. Franz Joseph Gall, a phrenologist, was traveling through France to promote the theory that the bumps on the skull could be used to determine a person’s personality. On this route, he surprised and ridiculed the people, sometimes he was honored, sometimes he was slandered. Then at a certain house in Paris he was introduced to a young student who immediately took an interest in him. According to professional habit he glanced at the young man’s head. He was stunned by its shape. “Oh,” he exclaimed, “what a linguistic genius!” Perhaps the doctor had already grasped information about the young man, because at that time this 16-year-old boy had mastered half a dozen Eastern languages ​​as well as Latin and Greek.

Equally surprising is that Champollion’s birthplace is recorded in a fictional biography that was popular in the 19th century. Because there is no evidence to refute this colorful story, we are forced to It follows that this portrait of a controversial figure, to whom archeology owes much, must be presented.

            In the small French town of Figeac, the wife of bookseller Jacques Champollion lay in bed, paralyzed, unable to move. Around the middle of 1790, after conventional doctors had given up and were unable to treat him, Jacques invited the wizard Jacqou to come. The town of Figeac happens to be located in the Dauphine region, in south-eastern France, and is known as the District of Seven Miracles. The Dauphine region is one of the most beautiful areas of the country, a place where God could be expected to come. The Dauphines are a conservative, stubborn people, not easily aroused out of their inertia, but once awakened, they can become fiercely fanatical. They are Catholic and believe in miracles and the occult.

            According to the evidence of several sources, the magician Jacqou placed the seriously ill woman on a layer of heated medicinal plants, and made her drink hot wine. He said, if she followed his instructions, she would quickly heal.

Furthermore, to the surprise of her family, he predicted that she would give birth to a son, now in her womb, who would later be famous and remembered for centuries.

            On the third day the woman became seriously ill and sat up and got out of bed. On December 23, 1790, at two o’clock in the morning, Jean Francois Champollion was born, destined to decipher hieroglyphs.

            If, according to rumor, the devil’s females have two-toed feet, it is not surprising to find scant signs of the prenatal influence predicted by the magician. Upon examining the baby, the family discovered that its corneas were yellow, a common characteristic of Eastern peoples and obviously most unusual for Western Europeans. Furthermore, it had skin that was almost tanned, and its face was definitely Oriental. Twenty years later, everyone knew him under the nickname “the Egyptian.”

            Jean-Francois Champollion was a son of the French Revolution. The Republic was proclaimed at Figeac in September 1792. From April 1793 was the reign of Terror. Champollion’s family lived in a house just thirty steps from the Place d’Armes – a square later named after the boy – where the pillar of liberty was erected. The sounds that Jean-Francois remembers hearing were the loud music of the popular Carmagnole song and the wailing of refugees seeking safety from the agitated mob in his father’s house, in There was a monk who was his first tutor.

            At the age of five, Jean-Francois, according to one admiring biographer, achieved his first decoding feat: he figured out how to read by comparing lists of words he had memorized. with written text. It was only when she was seven that she first heard the mysterious name Egypt, a name that to a sensitive child was reminiscent of mysterious hallucinations; As for his brother, 12 years older than him, Jean-Jacques, was the hope of accompanying Napoleon’s expedition to the ancient land of Egypt, but then it was shattered at the last minute.

            Young Champollion, according to rumors as well as recorded evidence, did not study well while at Figeac. To save this situation, the older brother, now a talented grammarian with great interest in archaeology, in 1801 took his younger brother to Grenoble and paid for his younger brother’s education. When at the age of 11 Francois quickly showed a rare talent in Latin and Greek, and began to devote himself to the study of Hebrew with astonishing success, his brother immediately decided to hide his own talent. so that my younger brother’s talent can shine more brightly. From this moment on he called himself Champollion-Figeac, then just Figeac. The younger brother’s humility and belief in a bright future is truly precious when remembering that he himself already has some reputation.

            That same year, Jean-Baptise Fourier, a famous mathematician and physicist, had a conversation with a child with many talents in languages. Fouriet accompanied the Egyptian expedition and later served as secretary at the Egyptian Institute in Cairo. He was also commissioned by the French military government in Egypt as chief of jurisdiction and was a leading proponent on the scientific committee. At this time he was the prefect of Isere and lived in the capital Grenoble, where he quickly gathered a number of talented intellectuals. During a school inspection visit, he had the opportunity to debate with Francois and was impressed with the young student’s outstanding intelligence. He then invited him to his house and showed off his Egyptian collection. The dark-skinned young man immediately fell in love with the papyrus scrolls and hieroglyphic inscriptions on stone tablets that he saw for the first time. “Has anyone read these words yet?” he asked. Fourier shook his head. “I will do it,” Champollion declared with strong confidence. “In a few years you can do it. When you grow up.” Years later he often mentioned this event.

            This anecdote immediately reminds us of another young man who confided to his father: “I will find Troy.” Both expressed an iron faith, a wild certainty. Yet their two youthful dreams were realized in two different ways. While Schliemann remained an autodidact throughout his life; Champollion never deviated an inch from the official educational path, even though his knowledge developed at a speed that soon left his classmates far behind. While Schliemann began his work without any technical tools, Champollion equipped himself with virtually every understanding the century could offer.

            The older brother supervises my studies. He tried to control his crazy hunger for knowledge, but failed. Champollion explores every nook and cranny of knowledge, jumping from peak to peak. At the age of 12 he wrote his first book, Tales of Famous Dogs.  Realizing that his historical research was hampered by the lack of organized journals, he created his own chronicle which he called “Chronicles from Adam to Champollion the Younger. ” When the eldest brother stepped back to let the light of glory shine only on Jean-Francois, the boy responded to the praise by calling himself “Young Champollion”, to remind everyone that there was another Champollion. you follow.

            When he was 13 he began to learn Arabic, Syrian, Chaldean, and finally Coptic. In this respect, it was surprising that everything he learned or did, and indeed everything that happened to fall into his hands without having sought it, was somehow related to the subject of Egypt. Whatever problem he set out to solve seemed to lead him to some problem about Egypt. He used Ancient Chinese to find a connection between that language and Ancient Egyptian. He studied text excerpts from the Zend, Pahlavi, and Parsi languages ​​– rare linguistic documents stored in Grenoble that were only allowed to be used thanks to Fourier’s intervention. Using every source he could get his hands on, in the summer of 1807, at the age of 17, Champollion drew the first historical map of the Pharaoh’s dynasty.

            This bold effort is worthy of appreciation when one considers that he had no other sources of reference other than the Bible, truncated texts of the Latin, Arabic, and Hebrew languages, and manuscripts. contrast with Coptic, the only language that provides a link with Ancient Egyptian. Coptic was actually spoken in Upper Egypt until the 17th century.

            Knowing that Champollion wanted to send his research to Paris, the high school faculty asked him to write about a topic of his own choosing. They wait to receive a normal high school essay; Instead Champollion presented an entire outline for an entire book titled: Egypt under the Pharaohs.

            In September 1807 he read the introduction to this proposed project. The entire school’s teaching staff gathered to listen to this slender student’s presentation. He stood before them straight and serious, his face glowing with the vibrant beauty of a prodigy. His ideas flow through a series of bold topics, driven by strong arguments. The professors were so shocked that they elected him to join the teaching council on the spot. Renauldon, the school principal, stood up and hugged Champollion. “When we agreed to choose you as a member of the teaching staff, we recognized your achievements up to this moment,” he said. “But more than that, we look forward to what you will do in the future. We are all confident that you will justify our expectations, and when you have made a name for yourself, do not forget those who first recognized your genius.”

            And overnight Champollion jumped from the position of student to the position of teacher.

            Leaving school, Champollion was ecstatic with joy. At this time he was a sentimental teenager, an intense personality prone to sad moods. In many fields he was recognized as a genius, and his early intellectual development was well known. Physically, he is also old before his time. (For example, when he decided to get married right out of high school, it wasn’t a case of puppy love at all.) He knew he was entering a new phase of his career. He dreamed of Paris, the capital of light, the center of all Europe, the epicenter of politics and intellectual adventures.

            By the time the heavy carriage carrying the two Champollion brothers had traveled more than 70 hours and was approaching Paris, Champollion was completely immersed in the jubilant scene, suspended between reality and dream. Yellow papyrus scrolls floated before his eyes, voices from dozens of different languages ​​whispered in his ears. He thought about the Rosetta Stone, a copy of which he had seen with Fourier’s permission. The hieroglyphs carved deep into the basalt rock haunted fragmented and chasing thoughts.

            According to a reliable source, it is said that on this journey of the two brothers to Paris, Champollion suddenly had secret ideas. He confided to his brother his plans, and now suddenly knew that the fulfillment of this hope was firmly within his reach. His dark eyes sparkled on his dim face as he said: “I will decode the hieroglyphs. I know I can do it.”

           A man named Dhautpoul is credited with discovering the Rosetta Stone. Other sources claim that it was Bouchard, but a closer investigation revealed that Bouchard was just an official in direct control of a group of workers working at the Rachid Fort ruins; he himself could not find the rock. This fort – which the French renamed Fort Julien – was located four or five miles northwest of Rosetta, on the banks of the Nile. This same Bouchard was responsible for carrying the stone back to Cairo.

            The Rosetta Stone was actually dug up by an unknown soldier. It can be inferred that he was also an educated person, or at least had enough sense to recognize the rarity and value of lithographs. It is also possible that he was so ignorant and superstitious that he mistook the inscriptions on the stone stele for a witch’s spell, causing him to be so frantic that it attracted Bouchard’s attention to the artifact.

            Rosetta stone is about the size of a table top, about 115 cm long, 72 cm wide and about 28 cm thick. It is made of polished basalt stone that cannot be broken when hammered. On one shiny surface are three columns of writing, partially eroded by two thousand years of sand and dust. The first column, consisting of 14 rows, are hieroglyphs; The second column, 32 rows, is written in demonic characters and the third column, 54 rows, is written in Greek.

            Greek! So it can be read and understood.

            A general of Napoleon’s, with a Greek bent, immediately undertook to translate the Greek column. He found that the encyclical recorded a directive from the Egyptian clergy, issued in 196 BC, praising Ptolemy Epiphanus for the benefits he brought.

            Along with other trophies, the stele, after the fall of Alexandra, fell into British hands and was brought to the London Museum. Fortunately, before handing it over, the French copied the text in plaster, along with all the other antiquities. These copies were brought back to Paris. The scholars gathered around and began to compare.

            The arrangement of the text shows that the three columns have the same meaning written in three languages. The Egyptian Journal of Letters suggests that this is the key to unlocking the gates to the dead kingdom, an ability to “interpret Egypt through the Egyptian language.” Once the Greek inscriptions were translated, there would no longer be much difficulty in bridging the gap between hieroglyphs and Greek writing.

            The most brilliant minds of the day took up the challenge, in England (using the original Rosetta Stone) and also in Germany, Italy, and France. But no results. One and all make wrong assumptions. Their mistake was to read the hieroglyphs partly according to Herodotus’ subjective ideas. This is one of the typical misconceptions that has persisted throughout the historical development of humanity. To delve deeper into the mystery of Egyptian writing, it is necessary to radically change Copernicus’ viewpoint [when he considered the sun to be the center of the solar system, not the earth as was the view of ancient times and of America. church], it takes an explosive inspiration to break all barriers of tradition].

The older brother, Champollion-Figeac, had a former teacher named de Sacy who lived in Paris. De Sacy, despite his scruffy appearance, was a scholar of international reputation. When Figeac brought his younger brother, now 17 years old, to meet de Sacy, he behaved as if he were an equal. In fact, he treated de Sacy as he had treated Fourier when he first met this famous man in Grenoble some six years ago.

            De Sacy seemed a bit skeptical of the prodigy from the provinces. Already at the age of 49, and the intellectual leader of his time, at first he did not know what to do with this young man, whom, in his article Egypt under the Pharaohs, he wrote. Just looking at the introduction, I envisioned a project that even the author himself admitted would not be completed in his time. Yet much later, recalling his first meeting with Champollion, de Sacy said that the young man made “a deep impression” on him. And no wonder! The above book was almost completed by the end of the year that the two met. The 17-year-old young man took advantage of the publicity that he would receive seven years later after the book was published.

            Champollion threw himself into research. Completely alienated from the pleasures of Paris, he buried himself in libraries, running from academy to academy, learning Sanskrit, Arabic, and Persian – “the Italian language of the East,” according to as de Sacy aptly calls it. In short, he immersed himself in all the Oriental languages, laying the foundation for a thorough understanding of their peculiar developments. Meanwhile, he wrote to his brother asking him to get him a Chinese grammar book, “just for fun,” as he said.

            He has such a thorough understanding of Arabic that his pronunciation is really perfect. At a meeting, an Arab greeted him in a salamm style , thinking he was a member of his race. Just through books, he acquired such a thorough knowledge of Egypt that the famous African traveler Somini de Manencort, after a conversation with the young man, exclaimed: “He knows everything about Egypt.” The country we exchange is no less than me!”

            Just a year later he was speaking and writing Coptic so fluently that – “I speak Coptic for myself,” he said – for practice he wrote a diary in Coptic. This strange incident, forty years later, caused a famous irony. A French scientist mistook these records for Egyptian originals from the time of Emperor Marcus Aurelius Antoninus and wrote a commentary on them. This is similar to Professor Duc Beringer solemnly declaring that some of the bones that the students in Wurzburd staged as a joke were ancient fossils.

            While living in Paris, Champollion encountered many hardships. Without his brother’s generosity and devoted care, he would have truly starved to death. He lived in a cramped, shabby room near the Louvre Museum, with a rent of 18 francs a month. He couldn’t even earn that small amount of money. He wrote a letter to beg his brother, lamenting that he was at his wit’s end. He couldn’t even make ends meet. His brother replied that he would probably have to mortgage his library unless Francois cut costs. Cut back? Cut more? His shoes were worn out and his shirt was tattered. The situation was so bad that he was embarrassed to show his face on the street. The winter was unusually harsh and he fell ill. As he lay buried in the cold, damp room, the germ of the disease was planted, the disease that would eventually take his life. If it weren’t for those two small achievements, he would have completely collapsed from despair.

            As if to compound his plight, the Emperor needed more soldiers and in 1808 issued an order to mobilize all young men over 16 years old. Champollian panicked. His weak personality could not handle physical exertion. Despite his ability to pursue the grimmest intellectual pursuits, he shuddered as he watched the parade of guards, pawns in a machine that leveled all individual differences. Didn’t Winckelmann suffer when the army threatened to swallow him up? “There are days,” Francois wrote to Figeac sadly, “when I almost go crazy.”

            My brother, ready to lend a helping hand as ever, overcame many obstacles to protect Champollion. He enlisted the help of friends, drafted petitions, and wrote countless letters. As a result, Champollion was finally able to continue researching dead languages ​​during the chaos of war.

            Another matter that had once occupied his mind, which now began to fascinate him, making him sometimes forget the threat of being recruited into the army, was the study of the Rosetta Stone. In this respect he resembled Schliemann, who postponed learning Greek until he had taught himself to speak and write all the other European languages. As Schliemann is with the Greek, so is Champollion with the Rosetta Stone. Although the young man’s thoughts always returned to the mysterious stone, until now, he still hesitated, knowing that he was not equipped with enough knowledge to completely solve that decisive problem. .

            However, now, after seeing a copy of the Rosetta Stone made in England, he suddenly couldn’t completely restrain himself any longer. But he restrained himself from comparing the stone block with some paper text instead of diving into the actual decoding. His first attempt at stele enabled him to “independently find the correct values ​​for an entire line of words.” “I send you the first stage for your consideration,” he wrote to his brother on August 30, 1808. At that time he was only 18 years old. For the first time one could sense the young discoverer’s pride peeking out beneath the typically humble explanation of his method.

            While he had taken the first steps, and knew that he was on the right track on the path to success and fame, regardless of hardships and criticism, he suddenly received news that shocked him. . The news threatened to destroy the elaborate preparations and the hope that was taking hold: the hieroglyphs had been deciphered.

            After a moment of shock, he regained his composure. He walked through the street toward the College de France, and bumped into the friend who had sent him the news, news that he had not expected to make him weak. Champollion’s face turned pale and he staggered, having to hold on to his friend to keep from collapsing. Everything he lived for, thought about, and suffered for was gone with smoke.

            “It’s Alexandre Lenoir,” the friend said, “His book has just been released, it’s just a thin volume. He titled it New Interpretation. In it he deciphered all the hieroglyphs. Think about what that means!”

            Yes, think about what that means!

            “Lenoir?” Champollion asked. He shook his head, his eyes shining with hope.

Just yesterday he met Lenoir. You’ve known him for about six months. Lenoir was a capable scholar, but far from a genius. “No way,” Champollion said. “No one told me anything about decoding. Not even Lenoir himself mentioned it.”

            “Does that surprise you? With such a great discovery, who wouldn’t keep their mouth shut?

            Champollion suddenly stepped back. “Where is the bookstore?” he asked. Then he hung his sausage around his neck and ran. With trembling hands, he counted the money displayed on the dusty counter. Lenoir’s pamphlet was bought by very few people. Then he quickly ran back to his room, collapsed on the couch, and began reading. . .

            In the kitchen, the landlady Mecran was placing a pan on the kitchen counter. She was suddenly startled when she heard a terrifying scream coming from the room. She listened for a moment in terror, then rushed to the door and looked in. Francois Champollion was lying on the sofa, his whole body vibrating. He was laughing and laughing, each time frantically.

            You have Lenoir’s work in your hands. Decoding hieroglyphs? The flag of victory was raised too soon! Lenoir’s book is all nonsense, haphazardly fabricated, a fanciful mixture of imagination and misguided erudition. Champollion is qualified to realize this.

            It was true that the punch of information was terrible, and Champollion never forgot that feeling. His panicked reaction shows how he fell into the problem of raising the voices of those dead symbols. That night, when he was exhausted and fell asleep, he had wild dreams. He heard Egyptian voices speaking from the illusion. In the dream, his true self appeared clearly, unencumbered by the press and daily entertainment, revealing a person haunted, crazy, bewitched by hieroglyphs. His dreams were woven with omens of triumph. Yet there were still a decade separating him from that destination.         

The Rosetta Stone is the key to decoding hieroglyphs

Champollion, the man who makes stones talk

1. CHAMPOLLION (II):  Treason and Hieroglyphs  

At age 12, while reading the Old Testament in the original, Champollion wrote an essay arguing that a republic was the only reasonable form of government. Growing up amid the innovative imaginations that paved the way for the century of enlightenment and the liberation of the powers of the French Revolution, he felt the pain of living under the shadow of a returning dictatorship, at first sneaking in with hints. examples, decrees and finally revealed their true colors after Napoleon was crowned Emperor. Unlike his brother, Champollion was not captivated by Napoleon’s charm.

            At that time it was the Egyptologist Champollion who, motivated by the call of freedom, attacked the Bourbon stronghold [the last king before the Revolution] in Grenoble, waving his flag high. He tore down the imperial flag standing on the citadel tower, and replaced it with the tricolor flag of the Revolution, the flag that had flown for a decade and a half before Bonaparte’s legions swept across Europe.

            Once again Champollion returned to Grenoble. He was appointed as a history teacher at the university from July 10, 1809. At the age of 19, he was teaching young students, many of whom had worked with him in high school just two years before. It was completely understandable that he had many enemies. Almost immediately he finds himself trapped in a web of intrigue spun by older professors whom he easily outsmarted and unintentionally insulted.

            And what strange new ideas the young history professor fights for! He fiercely defended the view that truth is the highest ideal in historical research, which means an absolute truth, not the Bonaparte or Bourbon version. To achieve this ideal he demanded freedom of imagination, at a time when inquiries of all kinds were prohibited and restricted by political control tools. Historians, he felt, should not pay attention to the powers that be. He demanded the continued exercise of freedoms that had been shouted from the rooftops in the early days of revolutionary fervor, but were now constantly betrayed. Champollion’s political campaign inevitably caused him conflicts with those of his time. He never deviated from his convictions, although he often felt discouraged. At times like that, he told his brother an idea that could have been taken from Voltaire’s Candide [a French writer with revolutionary views], but which he, an Orientalist, liked to quote from a saint. more Eastern letters. “Make your land grow crops! In Zend-Avesta * taught: Turning six acres of fallow land into cultivation is better than winning 24 battles. My opinion is the same.” More and more stuck in an academic world filled with intrigue, with low morale and a salary cut by up to a quarter through professional tricks, he wrote: “Your fate has been decided. I must be as poor as Diogenes [a cynical Greek philosopher, founder of the Cynic school, lived in the 4th century BC, despised material things and the comforts of life, worshiped nature. : ND]. I probably have to buy a box to live in and a sack to sleep in [like Diogenes]. Maybe then I can hope to survive thanks to the famous generosity of the people of Athens [where Diogenes resided].

            He wrote satirical articles on Napoleon. What’s more, when Napoleon finally lost all power, and when, on April 19, 1814, Allied troops entered Grenoble, Champollion wondered bitterly whether a rule of law could now really replace government. Bonaparte’s tyranny or not and saw that there was little hope of it.

            His concern for the freedom of government and science did not dampen his enthusiasm for Egyptology. His hard work reaped incredible results, even though he divided his time among too many unfamiliar and sometimes unimportant topics. He compiled a Coptic dictionary for his own use, and at the same time wrote plays to perform at cultural gatherings in Grenoble. In the French tradition that began with Peter Abelard in the 12th century he composed political songs, which were sung in the streets as soon as they were completed. He also continued his main work, which was to dig deeper and deeper into the mysterious world of Egypt. Ignore the screams in the streets, “ Vive l’Empereur !” [ Long Live the Emperor, referring to Napoleon] or “ Vive le Roi! [ Long Live the King, referring to the Bourbon dynasty before the Revolution ], his mind was never separated from this main concern. He wrote countless essays, he composed outlines for the work he would write, and was devoted to anyone who came to ask for help in writing.

• The code of Zoroastrianism, a popular religion in Persia, was born 1,000 years BC, and was destroyed by Islam in the 9th century, with Zoroaster as its leader, and had a profound influence on Judaism, Christianity and Islam have many precepts such as: monotheism, no idolatry, belief in the Last Day when people will be judged to go to heaven or hell. . .]

my dissertations, trying to understand the needs of mediocre students. Too much work wore out his nerves and health. In December 1816 he wrote: “Every day your Coptic dictionary grows thicker, and its author becomes thinner.” He groaned when he saw that he had written page 1069 and the project was still not finished.

            Then came the 100 Days War [marking the time from which Napoleon escaped from the prison island of Elba until the day he was captured by the Allied forces, ending his fate], when Europe once again groaned under Napoleon’s iron hand. . Overnight the executed became the executioner, the ruler became a subject, the king became a refugee. Champollion himself was too excited to do anything. “Napoleon is back!” The saying is on everyone’s lips. The reaction of the Paris press was truly brazen drama. Big headlines running across newspapers, landmarks of deceit, reflect attitudes that have turned as discolored as a chameleon’s skin. “The Beast Has Escaped” gradually evolved into: “The Werewolf Has Landed in Cannes”; “The Dictator Is in Lyon”; “The Usurper 60 Hours from the Capital”; “Bonaparte Is Coming With Speed”; “Tomorrow Napoleon will enter the capital”; and finally “His Majesty Is at Fontainebleau.”

            On March 7 Napoleon entered Grenoble, leading his army. Using a cigarette box to knock on the city gate, the torchlight illuminated his face. Very aware of his tragic role in this historical scene, in one spine-chilling moment, Napoleon alone raised his chest to welcome the cannon pointed at him from the top of the wall. From above, the gunners ran in confusion. Then the cry rang out in the sky: “Long live the Emperor!”, then the “adventurer” entered, and when he came out he was an emperor.” For Grenoble, the heart of the Dauphine, was the most important operating point that had to be won on Napoleon’s triumphant return route.

            Figeac, Champollion’s brother, had in the past openly expressed his sympathy for Napoleonic doctrine. Now his enthusiasm has exceeded the limit. When Napoleon requested a capable private secretary, the mayor brought Figeac. He was a bit hesitant, so he called his name “Champoleon.” “What a good omen!” The Emperor exclaimed. “This guy has half my name!” Champollion was also present when the Emperor interviewed his brother. Napoleon inquired about the young professor’s work and was told about the Coptic dictionary and grammar. The Emperor was very impressed by this young scholar. He talked with Champollion for a long time. He promised him help to publish Coptic works in Paris. Still not satisfied, the next day the Emperor visited Champollion at the university library, where they discussed the young professor’s language research again.

            The two Egyptian conquerors stood facing each other. One person has included the land of the Nile River in a plan to conquer the world and hopes to revive that country’s economy with a massive irrigation system. The other had never set foot on Egyptian soil, but with the eyes of wisdom he had seen the ancient ruins a thousand times, and was finally able to revive them by the power of knowledge alone. Napoleon’s imperial imagination was so buoyed by his encounter with Champollion that he announced on the spot his decision to adopt Coptic as the official Egyptian language.

            But Napoleon’s fate was numbered day by day. His downfall was as tragically sudden as his recent escape. Elba was a place of exile; and now St. Helena will be a grave.   

            Once again the Bourbon dynasty returned to Paris. They lack determination, and their revenge is relatively mild. But it is still inevitable that hundreds of death sentences will be announced. “Punishment falls like nectar upon the Jews,” people said at the time. Figeac was among those chosen for revenge, because he had exposed himself when he accompanied Napoleon to Paris. In the political measures immediately initiated against Figeac, no distinction was drawn between him and Champollion, an error which the malicious enviers of the young professor at Grenoble did not bother to correct. To make matters worse, Champollion, in the final moments of the 100 Day War, unwisely helped found the Delphinatic League, a program to promote freedom in all areas. Of course this program has now become highly suspect. Champollion made a serious tactical mistake when he attempted, unsuccessfully, to raise 1,000 francs to buy an Egyptian papyrus.

            When the royalists approached Grenoble, Champollion presented himself at the city wall, asking to volunteer to defend, completely unaware of which side gave more freedom. But what happened? Just as General Latour began shelling the city, possibly causing damage to Champollion’s priceless manuscripts, the young man hastily climbed down the city wall, forgetting about politics and war, and ran as fast as he could to the upper floors. three of the library. There he hid throughout the bombardment, carrying water and sand to put out the fire, alone in the large building, risking his life to save his papyrus scrolls.

            Only after being fired from university for treasonous activities was Champollion finally able to truly return to his work of decoding hieroglyphs. The dismissal lasted a year and a half, followed by hard labor in Paris and Grenoble. Then a new indictment charging treason sounded like it was about to be released. In July 1821 he escaped from the city in which he had risen from student to professor. A year later he published his famous work Letter to Monsieur Dacier on the Problem of the Alphabet of Phonetic Hieroglyphs . This monograph outlines the basics of successful decoding, and causes heated discussion among those interested in solving the mystery of Egyptian pyramids and temples.

A number of ancient authors mentioned hieroglyphs, and during the Middle Ages a number of odd interpretations of them appeared. Herodotus, Strabo, and Diodorus, all of whom traveled throughout Egypt, believed that hieroglyphs were incomprehensible pictorial writing. Horapollon, in the 4th century BC, left behind a description of Egyptian writing. (referring to the implausibility of the writings about Egypt by Clement of Alexandria and Porphyry [two prominent Greek philosophers in the early centuries AD].) Horapollon’s comments are often used as a starting point for later authors for lack of any better source on which to base their argument. And Horopollon believed that hieroglyphs were a way of writing in pictures. Based on this point of view, throughout the following centuries the overwhelming tendency was to search for a purely symbolic meaning for those images. This tradition allows laymen to arbitrarily imagine their meanings, driving scholars crazy.

            It was only when Champollion deciphered the hieroglyphs that we realized how wrong Horopollion was. Egyptian writing actually evolved far beyond its original symbolism, in which the three zigzags symbolized water, floor plans symbolized houses, flags symbolized gods, and so on. This interpretation of allusions, when applied to later inscriptions, leads to serious misunderstandings, some of which are sometimes absurd.

            Athanasius Kircher, a Jesuit monk, is famous for creating the magic lamp [a type of projection using a lens and lamp, to project drawings on the wall, created in the mid-17th century], between 1650 and 1654 published in Rome four books containing “translations” of hieroglyphs, none of which even remotely matched the original text. For example, the group of symbols representing the word autocrator , which was a title for the Roman emperor, in Kircher’s reading means: “Osiris is the creator of all fruit and good harvests.” ; through the power of fertility that Holy Mopta took from heaven and brought it down to his domain.” Despite this momentous error, Kircher at least foresaw Champollion and others in recognizing the value of studying Coptic, the oldest form of the Greek language – a value that dozens of scholars fake protest.

            One hundred years later de Guignes, before the members of the Paris Institute of Inscriptions, published a theory, based on a comparison of hieroglyphic systems, that the Chinese were colonists of Egypt. Yet nearly every error of this kind contains within it some germ of truth. De Guignes, for example, correctly read the name of the Egyptian King “Menes,” which a rival changed to “Manouph.” Voltaire, the most bitter critic of that time, then turned to attack the etymologists, “those who despise vowels and underestimate consonants.” British students of the same period, reversing the thesis mentioned previously, declared that the Egyptians originated from China!

            We might think that the discovery of the Rosetta Stone would end the wave of indulgent speculation, but it seems the opposite has happened. The solution to this problem now seems so obvious that even amateurs are starting to play the game. An anonymous contributor from Dresden reads the entire Greek text word for word into equivalent hieroglyphic fragments on the Rosetta Stone. An Arab named Ahmed ibn Abubekr “lifted the veil” covering the text that an earnest Orientalist named Hammer-Purgstall had been unable to translate. An anonymous Parisian said he recognized the 100th Psalm in a temple inscription found in Dendera. At Geneva appeared a translation of the inscription found on the “Pamphylitic obelisk,” said to be a report of the victory of good over evil 4,000 years ago from Christ.”

            One oddity after another. Imagination combined with remarkable arrogance and stupidity belongs to Count Palin, who declared that he recognized the meaning of the Rosetta Stone at first sight. Relying on Horapollon, on Pythagorean doctrine, and on magical powers, in just one night the Count achieved perfect results. Eight days later he presented his interpretation to the public, claiming that the speed of his breakthrough had “preserved him from the mistakes that inevitably arise from too much contemplation.”

            Champollion sat motionless in the middle of this fireworks display, patiently arranging, comparing, testing, slowly climbing the long steep hill. Meanwhile a didactic volume from the hands of Abbot Tandeau de St. Nicolas told him that hieroglyphs were not a writing system at all, but just a type of decoration. Undeterred, as early as 1815, in a letter discussing the subject of Horopollon: “This work is called Hieroglyphica, but it does not contain an interpretation of what we understand to be hieroglyphs, but rather symbols Sacred carvings – that is, Egyptian symbols – were quite different from actual hieroglyphs. My view runs contrary to popular opinion, but the evidence I cite for this view is found on Egyptian obelisks. The sacred carvings clearly show the symbolic landscapes mentioned by Horapollon, such as the snake biting the swan, the eagle in a characteristic pose, the ethereal rain, the headless man, the dove with laurel branches, etc., but there is nothing symbolic in the actual hieroglyphic writing.”

Detail of the Narmer Tablet, late fourth millennium BC Horus the Eagle symbolizes the king, holding in his hands a conquered land (represented by an oval with the head of a bearded man) pulled by a string rope – refers to submission. The conqueror stood on six blooming lotuses. The blooming lotus is the symbol for 1,000, so this picture shows 6,000 prisoners. The harpoon below certainly indicates the name of the country. The square is filled with zigzags that could indicate that the country is located on the coast. Both symbols certainly point to Syria.

During these years, hieroglyphics became an overarching concept of a mystical Epicureanism*. All sorts of mystical, astrological, and fruitarian doctrines are attributed to them, even agricultural, commercial, and administrative implications for practical life. Biblical quotations are also found in it, even antediluvian legends, not to mention Chaldean, Hebrew, and Chinese excerpts. “It was as if the Egyptians,” Champollion observed, “had nothing to express in their own language.”

            All attacks against this target of interpretation are more or less based on Horopollion. There is only one way to decode, which is the way away from Horapollon. That is the direction Champollion has chosen.

Great intellectual discoveries rarely have an exact date of birth. They are the result of constant exploration in a long process of focusing the mind on a single problem. They represent the intersection of the conscious and the unconscious, of purposeful observation and wandering daydreaming. Rarely is a solution achieved overnight.

            Great inventions lose their charm when dissected in the light of the hunt. In retrospect, to those who have understood the principle involved, the mistakes must have seemed somewhat comical, the wrong views committed were the result of blatant blindness, and the problems were simple. single. Today it is difficult to imagine Champollion daring to recklessly oppose the Horapollon tradition. It must be remembered that both the experts and the informed public adhered to Horapollon for two weighty reasons: First, Horapollon was revered as an authority in ancient times, in the same spirit that the central thinkers The ancients revered Aristotle, and as later theologians revered the early church fathers. Second, even though they were skeptical themselves, they simply could not see hieroglyphs as anything more than symbols, conventionalized images. Even the evidence of the eyes supports this argument. Moreover, Horapollon lived a millennium and a half closer to the end of hieroglyphics, and this advantage seems to tip the balance in favor of his view, which affirms what everyone can be seen and touched – pictures, pictures, and more pictures.

• Epicureanism, founded by Greek philosophers in the early 4th century BC, advocated that the goal of life is to enjoy noble pleasures. To achieve that, people must live simply, acquire human knowledge, and limit desires. This will lead to peace, no more fear, no more physical suffering, this is the noblest human happiness.

            We cannot say exactly when this happened, but the moment it occurred to Champollion that the pictures in hieroglyphs were “letters” (or, more precisely, “phonetic symbols” – stated

His original code was: “not purely alphabetic, but also phonetic”) he passed a decisive turn away from Horapollon, and followed the correct route to finally succeed in decoding. Can we talk about inspiration after so many years of hard work? Is this a joyful moment of complete breakthrough? The truth is that when Champollion first toyed with the idea of ​​phonetic hieroglyphics, he was firmly against it. He even identified the sign of the horned serpent with the letter f and then erroneously resisted the idea of ​​a complete phonetic system. Other investigators, among them the Scandinavians Zoega and Akerblad, the Frenchman de Sacy, and, above all, the Englishman Thomas Young, all recognized that the demotic inscriptions on the Rosetta Stone were “alphabetic writing.” “, and, like that, partially completed the solution of the problem. But they cannot go beyond this point. They either give up or come back. De Sacy declared his complete surrender. The hieroglyphs, he said, continued to be “the inviolable * Ark. ^”

            Even Thomas Young, who achieved outstanding results in deciphering the demonic inscriptions on the Rosetta Stone, for the reason that he read it phonetically, adapted his own theory in 1818. In deciphering Ptolemy ‘s hieroglyphs, he arbitrarily divided the characters into letters, one syllable or two syllables.

            From here the difference between the two methods and the two results becomes obvious. On one side is Young, the naturalist. Although he was an undeniable genius, he was not educated in literature at school. His approach is schematic. He compared and interpolated wisely. Although he actually deciphered only a few hieroglyphs, the power of his intuition is demonstrated by Champollion’s assertion that Young had correctly described 76 of a list of 221 groups of letters, even though he was ignorant of them. their phonetic value. However, Champollion has mastered more than a dozen ancient languages. Through Coptic he came much closer to the spirit of the ancient Egyptian language than Young. While Young guessed the exact meaning of a handful of single words or letters, Champollion recognized the underlying linguistic system. He goes beyond trivial interpretation; he made Egyptian writing readable and teachable. Once he grasped the basic principles, he saw that decoding must begin with the names of kings. This idea had been lying dormant in his subconscious for a long time.

• The Ark of Achievement is a treasure of the Jewish people, made of gilded wood, containing two stone tablets inscribed with the Ten Commandments”, according to legend, God ordered Moses to make them in the correct size.

            But why by the names of kings? The Rosetta Stone inscription, as previously mentioned, is a notice written in three different scripts in which the clergy paid special homage to King Ptolemy Epiphanes. The Greek text can be read in one go, giving us the above content clearly. In hieroglyphic text, there is a group of symbols enclosed in an oval frame, this frame will be understood as cartouche .

            Since these cartouches are the only symbols in the text that reveal a particular emphasis, it is reasonable to assume that these cartouches may contain the Egyptian word for the king’s name. Because the king’s name is the only element in the text that has a qualitative difference. And one might think that anyone of average intelligence could pick out the letters of the name Ptolemy (written in the old style) and associate the eight hieroglyphs with the eight letters.

            Every great idea is simple in retrospect. Champollion’s achievement was to break away from Horapollon’s tradition, which for fourteen centuries had covered the whole subject of Egyptian writing, and was no ordinary triumph. Moreover, just by luck, Champollion’s theory was brilliantly confirmed when studying the inscriptions on the Philae Pillar, brought back to England by archaeologist Banks in 1821. This column contained a message also written in the same way. pictographic and Greek, similar to the second Rosetta Stone. And here again the name Ptolemy is framed in a cartouche, and there is also another unfamiliar group of hieroglyphs that we know by comparison with the Greek word is the Egyptian word for Cleopatra.

            Champollion wrote on paper a group of symbols one above the other in the following form:

From the two “cartouches” on the Philae obelisk, Champollion paved the way for the ultimate decoding of hieroglyphs.

It is obvious that the second, fourth, and fifth symbols in the hieroglyphic group of the word Cleopatra coincide with the fourth, third, and first symbols of the equivalent group of the word Ptolemy. Thanks to that, the key to solving hieroglyphs was found – also the key to opening all the closed doors of ancient Egypt.

The left panel shows how highly developed hieroglyphs (left column) evolved into hieratic (middle column) and then into demonic (right column).

Today we understand how complex the hieroglyphic writing system actually was. Today it is natural for students to learn every detail that Champollion could only master after extraordinary efforts. In his time the language, despite his contribution to thorough understanding, still caused great difficulties, of course, because it contained many variations that had arisen during its three thousand year journey . Today we know much about these variations, dividing “classical” Egyptian from “new” Egyptian, and dividing “new” from “later.” Before Champollion no one noticed this development. A discovery helps a scholar decipher one inscription but fails to decipher the next. The difficulty for the pioneers of hieroglyphics was to grasp a writing style that was evolving in a culture that was completely foreign three thousand years ago.

            Nowadays it is quite easy to distinguish phonetic characters from ideographic characters and determiners, a division in the initial valuation of hieroglyphs. Today we no longer get upset when one inscription reads from right to left, another from left to right, and the next from top to bottom. Rosellini in Italy, Leemans in the Netherlands, de Rouge in France, Lepsius and Brugsch in Germany, they all contributed discovery after discovery. Ten thousand papyrus scrolls were brought to Europe, and decoders were eventually able to read a mountain of new inscriptions from tombs, monuments, and temples with ease. Champollion’s Egyptian Grammar ( Paris, 1836-1841) appeared after his death. Then came the first dictionaries of the Ancient Egyptian language, followed by the Records and Monuments . Based on these achievements and later research, Egyptologists over time were able to not only decipher but also write Ancient Egyptian script. The names of Queen Victoria and Duke Albert are inscribed in hieroglyphs in the Egyptian Room of the Crystal Palace in Sydenham. The dedication plaque located in the garden of the Egyptian Museum in Berlin is written in Ancient Egyptian characters. Lepsius attached to the Great Pyramid of Gizeh a tablet on which the name of the tour’s sponsor, King Friederich Wilheim IV, was commemorated in ancient Egyptian script.

The nerdy type of scholar doesn’t always get the luxury of proving his theories directly. Often he did not even have the opportunity to go to places where for decades he had wandered only in his mind.

            As it happened with Champollion, he was not lucky enough to add excavation achievements to his purely theoretical conquests. But at least he could visit Egypt and have the satisfaction of testing in the field the theories he had discovered in his private research. From his youth Champollion studied the chronicles and topography of ancient Egypt. Over the years, as he succeeded in determining the space and time of a statue or tablet as accurately as possible with such meager data, one hypothesis followed another. flowing from the waterfall of his imagination. Once he actually set foot in the Egyptian landscape, Champollion was in a situation not unlike that of a zoologist who, having recreated a dinosaur from bones and fossils, suddenly found himself back in the Cretaceous period face to face. with a roaring dinosaur.

            Champollion’s tour, which lasted from July 1828 to December 1829, was a triumph. At this time, everyone in Egypt except the French officials had forgotten that Champollion had once been convicted of treason. Local people flocked to see the face of the man who could “read the writing on ancient rocks.” The warm welcome of the Egyptian people inspired the tour group to sing “Marseillaise” [French national anthem] and “Song of Freedom” when solemnly welcoming the Governor of Girgeh province, Mohammed Bey. The group of French people also managed to do some things. Champollion went from discovery to discovery, and found his ideas confirmed with every step. With just a glance, he was able to classify the different eras of structures found in the Memphis ruins. At Mit Rahina he discovered two temples and a cemetery. At Sakkara – which a few years later would see Mariette unearth a number of artefacts – he discovered the name of the Omnos dynasty and thus dated it precisely to the earliest Egyptian times.

The hieroglyphic alphabet (left column) compares with the Latin alphabet (middle column) and the names of the accompanying images

Then he had the sweet satisfaction of proving the assertion that six years before the entire Egyptian committee had laughed at him. The expedition team’s boats anchored at Dendera. On the shore, right in the foreground, are majestic Egyptian temples built by successive generations of kings and conquerors. The kings of the 12th Dynasty during the Middle Kingdom contributed to the construction of the Temple of Dendera, as did Thotmes III and Ramses the Great, the most powerful rulers of the New Kingdom, as well as Ramses’s successor. The Ptolemaic kings also contributed to the construction, and later the Roman emperors, Augustus and Nerva, and finally Domitian and Trajan, the last two figures are remembered for their work in building gates and walls. .

            Napoleon’s armies, after a terrible journey, reached Dendera on May 25, 1799, and were stunned by the sight of ruins. Here, a few months ago, General Desaix and his division had stopped their pursuit of the Mamelukes to gaze, fascinated, at the majesty and splendor of a dead kingdom. Here, at last, stood Champollion, having previously detailed every detail of the landscape through descriptive notes, drawings, and copied inscriptions. Now is the sparkling, brilliant Egyptian night, under the full moon. Fifteen members of the Champollion expedition begged the leader to let them go ashore. Seeing that he could not refuse, he took the lead, and together they rushed into the temple. “Egyptians would have thought we were Bedouins,” he wrote, “and Europeans would have thought we were a band of Carthusian monks armed to the teeth.” .”

            The guest, participating in this trip, stammered excitedly when telling the story: We scattered through a patch of bog trees – a magical sight under the moonlight! Then we passed through a patch of tall grass, thorny bushes, and thick grasses. Come back? No, we don’t want that. Moving forward? But we didn’t follow any direction. We shouted loudly, but in response we only heard dogs barking in the distance. Then we saw a shabby guy, sleeping behind a tree. Armed with a stick and covered in nothing but black rags, he looked like a ghost.” (Champollion called him “a walking mummy.”) He jumped up, scared to death, thinking he was about to die. . . Still have to go another two hours. And finally the temple appeared, bathed in golden moonlight, a sight that made us swoon. . . On the way we walked and sang to calm our nerves, but now, in front of the temple door, there was a mystical light – how impressive! Perfect peace and mysterious magic reigned beneath the portico with its massive columns – and outside the dazzling moonlight! A strange and magical contrast!

            “We then lit a fire with dry grass inside the temple premises. Fresh joy, a new enthusiasm burst out, like a storm coming over. Like a fever, a madness. Everyone was in a trance. . . This enchanting painting, filled with magic, is reality – beneath the temple gates of Dendera.”

            And how did Champollion report on this experience? The others called him “master” and his mildly descriptive tone was in harmony with this transcendent state. Yet behind the sober words we can feel a throbbing emotion. “I will not attempt to describe,” he wrote, “the impression which the temple, and especially the portico, made on us. The individual sizes of architecture can be measured, but they cannot give us an overall idea. To the highest degree imaginable the temple combines splendor and grandeur. We stopped there for two hours, filled with pleasure. Guided by the poor rag, we wandered through the corridors and tried to read the plates outside in the sparkling moonlight.”

            This is the large, well-preserved Egyptian temple where Champollion was first seen. What he recorded that night, and those that followed, showed how excited this man was to enter ancient Egypt. In his imagination, dreams, and contemplations, he had prepared himself for the actual scene so carefully that nothing in it surprised him. Everything he witnessed now confirmed what he already felt. His unexpected insights surprised his educated but insensitive companions. Most members of the Champollion tour group saw temples, gates, columns, and inscriptions as dead stone figures, lifeless memorials of the past. But for the group leader, they are components and pieces of a living landscape.

            All members of the Champollion crew had their hair cut and wore huge turbans, jackets embroidered with gold thread, and yellow boots. This strange style of clothing is not shared by Champollion. For many years in Grenoble and Paris he had been known as “the Egyptian”. During the tour he dressed in native clothes, as if he were born on the land of the Nile. All friends can attest to this.

            Champollion diligently interpreted and deciphered the code during his trip to Egypt. His inspiration was vibrant, his mind full of ideas. He expressed joy before the committee: This was not the Temple of Isis, as they insisted, but the Temple of Hathor, the goddess of love. And is the temple “absolutely ancient,” as the commission says? In fact, the architecture took its final form during the time of the Ptolemaic kings, and even after this period of completion touches were added by the Romans. The overwhelming impression the moonlit temple made did not prevent Champollion from realizing that although the building was ‘an architectural marvel,’ it was covered ‘with sculpture of the worst style.’ “Let us hope the committee will not be offended,” he wrote, “but the reliefs at Dendera are disgusting, and cannot be anything else, considering that they spring from a period of decadence. . During this period sculpture fell into decline, while architecture, an art that was numerical and little changed, remained worthy of the Egyptian gods and the admiration of the ages.”

            Champollion died three years later, in a great loss to the new science of Egyptology. Immediately after his death his ideas were attacked by British and German scholars. They blindly dismissed his decoding technique as a product of imagination, yet the results were widely recognized. Champollion was strongly encouraged by Richard Lepsius, a German who in 1866 found the Edict of Canopus written in two languages. An extensive study of this text in demonic and Egyptian hieroglyphs and in Greek has fully substantiated Champollion’s theory. Sir Peter le Page Renouf, in a speech to the Royal Society of London in 1896, finally honored Champollion properly – 64 years after his death.

            Champollion solved the puzzle of Egyptian writing. The long process of excavation can now begin.       

A tablet inscribed with Egyptian hieroglyphs

Bas-relief on the ceiling of Dendera temple

Supporting column in the hall at Dendera temple

1. BELZONI, LEPSIUS, AND MARIETTE:  LIFE IN ANCIENT EGYPT

 This book is only a summary, going from one peak to another in archaeological achievement. It is unfair, for example, to every scholar who, as industrious as ants, has classified, enumerated, and occasionally come up with some bold interpretation, some creative hypothesis, or enthusiasm. love blooms and bears fruit.     

            During the decades that followed Champollion’s deciphering of hieroglyphs, the great discoveries of Egypt linked the following four names: the Italian, Belzoni, the collector; German, Lepsius, enumerator; Frenchman, Mariette, conservator; and the Englishman, Petrie, who measured and interpreted.

            “One of the most outstanding figures in the entire history of Egyptology,” archaeologist Howard Carter called Giovanni Battista Belzoni (1778-1823), once an athlete in a London circus. Carter is talking about his character’s personality rather than his professional achievements. As we know, amateurs have played important roles in the history of archeology; but of all the laymen in this field, Belzoni is perhaps the most curious figure.

            Belzoni was born in Padua, of a Roman family, and as a young man planned to become a monk. Before being accepted into the clergy, however, he became entangled in political intrigues and, to avoid imprisonment, he fled to London. There, according to one newspaper article, he found work in a cheap theater as an “Italian giant” and “athletic man,” performing every evening carrying an incredibly large number of people on his shoulders. walk around the stage. During this time, obviously nothing was farther from his mind than archaeology. After that, he apparently turned to learning about machine manufacturing, especially water wheels used in Egypt. In 1815 he announced that his water wheel would be four times more productive than the prevailing native tool. He must have been a persistent and clever man, because he was eventually granted permission to assemble a model of his machine in Mohammed Ali’s castle.

            This Mohammed Ali was a rather sinister character, and at that time had just climbed the first step of his career. Originally from Albania, Mohammed Ali was a coffee merchant, then a general, and when Belzoni arrived there he served for a time as viceroy of the Egyptian government. He later became dictatorial ruler of Egypt, and also of parts of Syria and Arabia. Twice he defeated British armies. He also suffered many reputations for his brutal political assassinations. Once he resolved a disagreement with the Mamelukes by inviting 480 governors to a banquet in Cairo and slaughtering them all. Although in many respects he was an advocate of reform, Mohammed Ali was not impressed with Belzoni’s water wheel. Belzoni is not discouraged. During this time, through the German explorer Burckhardt, he managed to get an introduction to the British consul general in Egypt, a man named Salt. To Salt he made a daring proposal to obtain permission to transport, from Luxor to Alexandria, two sitting statues of King Amenophis III, or Ramses II, which are today on display in the British Museum.

            Five years later he started collecting, first for Salt, then for himself. He collected everything he could find, from scarab jewelry to obelisks. (One of Belzoni’s obelisks fell off a barge into the Nile, but he was later recovered.) He was active during the Egyptian period, becoming notorious as the world’s largest source of antiquities. , are being plundered without charge. Many mining methods, similar to those that would be used during the California and Australian gold rushes a few decades later, were used to dig for gold artifacts. I don’t know if it’s because there are no regulations or there are too few. More than once, disagreements were resolved with guns and bullets.

            Inevitably, the craze for collecting antiquities without regard to their archaeological significance causes more destruction than discovery. Any knowledge that is accidentally discovered will eventually be destroyed by the damage caused. Although on the way to search for Belzoni, he also collected some archaeological information, but like many others of his class, he collected with a hammer and pliers. He did not mind, for example, breaking sealed tombs with a hammer.

            Despite Belzoni’s aggressive methods – methods that certainly make the hairs on the back of modern archaeologists stand up – Howard Carter still thought highly of him. Howard Carter once remarked that Belzoni deserved recognition for his excavation work and “the method and technique of conducting it.” This opinion is somewhat difficult to understand unless we judge Belzoni in the chaotic circumstances of his time and remember that he was the author of a number of discoveries that gave rise to a series of considerations that have not yet ended.

            In October 1817, in the valley of Biban el-Muluk, near Thebes, Belzoni discovered, among other mausoleums, the mausoleum of Sethos (Seti) I, predecessor of the great Ramses, and conqueror of Libya , Syria, and Chatti, the land of the Hittites. The empty sarcophagus is now on display at the Soane Museum in London. The mausoleum was actually empty for more than three thousand years. Where the mummy went, Belzoni did not discover. The excavation of the tomb of Sethos began a long series of important discoveries in the Valley of the Kings. Over the years the entire area has been thoroughly excavated, the greatest discoveries having been made in our century [20th century].

            Six months later, on March 2, 1818, the Italian opened the second Gizeh Pyramid, Chephren’s tomb, and entered the royal burial chamber. Belzoni’s preliminary investigations launched the study of the pyramids, the greatest structures of the ancient world. From the darkness of Egyptian prehistory, the first human traces began to appear, framed in a large geometric space.

            Belzoni was not the first person to dig in the Valley of the Kings, nor was he the first to find an entrance to a pyramid. Yet even though he was more a hunter of gold than a hunter of knowledge, at least he was the first to raise, in the burial chamber and the pyramid at two different locations, important archaeological questions only was recently resolved.

            In 1820 Belzoni returned to London, and in the Egyptian Hall erected in Piccadilly about eight years before he organized an exhibition, the chief attractions of which were the alabaster sarcophagus of Sethos and a model of his burial chamber ta. A few years later Belzoni died on a reconnaissance trip to Timbuktu. Today we can forgive him for imprudently engraving his name on the throne of Ramses II at the Ramesseum temple at Thebes, an act that created a precedent that ruined the work that many years later would attract antiquities collectors. imitators like Mr. Brown, Herr Schmidts, and the Leblans, have since been a thorn in the side of archaeologists.

            Belzoni was a major collector; Now it’s time for the catalogers and arrangers to take the stage, most brilliant of all being Richard Lepsius.

Alexander von Humboldt, a traveler and naturalist, persuaded King Friedrich Wilhelm IV of Prussia to generously fund a tour of Egypt. Richard Lepsius, then 31 years old, was chosen as the leader. Lepsius (born 1810, in Naumburg, Germany) studied grammar and comparative linguistics. At the age of 32 he became a lecturer at the University of Berlin. A year later he led a trip to Egypt.

            The three-year term, 1843-5, created an advantage that no tour group had: time. Earning loot quickly isn’t the goal; The purpose is to list and learn; and the generous amount of time allowed them to dig shovels and hoes into any promising place. In Memphis alone they spent six months, and in Thebes seven months.

Sethos fought the Hittites in Syria. This drawing is from the temple at Thebes. At some point this relief was painted. Belzoni, the discoverer of Sethos’ tomb, reported that only a few streaks of the original color were still visible.

Lepsius’s first success was the discovery of several obelisks from the Old Kingdom – the early period of Egyptian history, the pyramid-building period, between 3200 and 2270 BC. He found traces and ruins The remains of 30 pyramids were unknown, thus extending the total list to 67. He also examined 130 mastabas, a type of burial that archaeologists before him had overlooked. The Mastaba is a box-shaped structure with sloping sides containing a burial chamber and connected by a tunnel to the burial chamber in the rock below. These mastabas were built during the Old Kingdom as mausoleums for famous figures. In Tell-el-Amarna Lepsius found material that provides the first thorough understanding of the personality of the great religious reformer Amenophis IV. He was also the first to survey the Valley of the Kings. Under his command, cast prints of reliefs on temple walls and countless inscriptions were carried out. Lepsius rattled all the way down to 4,000 years BC. He was the first to put his finds in order, the first to look at Egyptian history as a whole, to understand the ruins as products. the final product of an evolutionary process.

            The treasures of the Egyptian Museum in Berlin are the result of this research trip of Lepsius. A vast series of publications, beginning with the 12-volume publication of the Monuments of Egypt and Ethiopia and extending to a vast body of monographs on many unfamiliar subjects, is the result of Extensive research of Egyptological sources by the tour group.

            Lepsius died in 1884 at the age of 74. His biographer, Georg Ebers, was an outstanding Egyptologist, whose flowery Pharaonic romances were avidly read by romantic young women. at the turn of the two centuries, describing him without fail as the true founder of modern archaeology. Two works by the great taxonomist immortalized him in posterity: The Egyptian Chronicle , published in 1849; and The Book of the Kings of Egypt, which appeared a year later .

 The Egyptians, like all ancient peoples, unlike our customs today, did not leave us historical records in the modern sense; They do not have historians, nor do they calculate the timeline from a fixed point of reference. Instead, they calculated dates according to “the year of the reign of the current king,” assigning the date of any notable event to the number of years in the reign during which the event occurred. They compiled king lists divided into dynasties, starting with the first king of the First Dynasty. The oldest almanac that has survived us, called the Palermo Stone, dates from the Old Kingdom, its fragments tantalizing; The Kings Papyrus, also in a poor state of preservation, dates from the New Kingdom. Reconstructing the Egyptian past is akin to compiling a passably accurate European chronicle from the plaques on public buildings, the texts of church fathers, and the fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm. That is exactly what the pioneers of Egyptology tried to do. We should devote at least a few brief lines to the construction of an Egyptian chronicle, if only to clarify how archaeologists astutely used every available fulcrum to plant their a milestone in 4,000 years of human experience. This effort was so successful that today our knowledge of Egyptian dates is more accurate than, for example, that of Herodotus, who actually traveled to Egypt nearly 25 centuries ago.

Although all ancient Egyptian sources must be given due weight, one fragment of an Egyptian priestly text, if there is one, provides the first historical landmark. The monk, a certain Manetho of Sebennytus, 300 years before Christ, or just after the death of Alexander the Great, and at some time during the reigns of the first two Ptolemaic kings, composed a history of Egypt in Greek, called the Egyptian Almanac, or History of Egypt. Manetho’s work has not reached us intact. We know about him from the summaries found in the works of Julius Africanus, Eusebius, and Josephus. Maneto divided the long list of Pharaohs he knew into 30 dynasties, a division similar to the one we use today.

1. H. Breasted, the American archaeologist, calls Maneto’s annals a “collection of naïve folk tales.” This harsh judgment perhaps needs to be clarified. We must remember that Maneto had no historical records to guide him, and that three thousand years of history had passed. He was somewhat in the position of a modern Greek historian, wanting to reconstruct the events of the Trojan War using only national traditions and folklore. For several decades Maneto’s list was the only basic reference source available to archaeologists. (Then, as now, archeology was a term for the general study of antiquity. However, the monuments and inscriptions of Egypt were so numerous that they required concentrated attention. Since the time of Lepsius the term Egyptology has been used for this specialized field of archaeology, just as in more recent times the term Assyriology has been used to refer to the study of Mesopotamia. ancient.) How well established Western scholars went further than Maneto is shown in the following chronologies, in years, for King Menes’s unification of Egypt.

            Champollion, 5867 BC; Lesueur, 5770; Bökh, 5702; Unger, 5613; Mariette, 5004; Brugsch, 4455; Lauth, 4157; Chabas, 4000; Lepsius, 3892; Bunsen, 3623; Eduard Meyer, 3180; Wilkinson, 2320; Palmer, 2224. Recently the date has been pushed back again. Breasted dates Menes to 3400, Georg Steindorff to 3200, and the latest study dates it to 2900.

           The further back in time we go, the more difficult it becomes to determine dates. For more recent periods of Egyptian history – such as the New Kingdom, and the End Times, the period just ending when Caesar was pining for Cleopatra – we can use chronological contrast. from Persian, Hebrew, Greek, and Assyrian-Babylonian history.

            Suddenly, in 1843, new possibilities for examining the distant past through a comparative approach opened up with the discovery of the Imperial Palace at Karnak, archived at the National Library in Paris. On the inscription is a list of the kings who ruled Egypt from the earliest times down to the 18th Dynasty. Another major source is the Royal Court Table of Sakkara, found in a tomb, now resting in the Egyptian museum. Egypt in Cairo. On one side of the Sakkara is a hymn to Osiris, god of the underworld, on the other side is written the prayer of the scribe, Tunri, to 58 kings, from Miebis to Ramses the Great, the names arranged in Two rows.

            More famous, however, and even more important to Egyptology, is the Royal List of Abydos. This tablet, found in a hall of the Temple of Sethos, depicts Ramses II and Sethos I, the former a crown prince. They are carved in the pose of worshiping their ancestors – Sethos himself holds aloft the incense burner – the ancestors are listed in two rows, containing 76 names in all. Bread, beer, lamb, goose meat, incense, and offerings were all recorded on the tablets. The Abydos List provides excellent opportunities for cross-checking the imperial line of succession, but does not enable precise dating in the manner of our present calendar system.

            Scattered everywhere in the ruins of ancient Egypt, however, are inscriptions of the reign of this or that king, the duration of the campaign, the time of the construction of the temple. . . Using a method called “minimum chronology” – that is, adding up successive periods of reign – the skeleton of Egyptian history was gradually pieced together.

            The first absolute dates, however, can be calculated based on an event older than Egypt, older than human history – the movement of the stars. The Egyptians had a calendar that corresponded to the changing of the seasons, and had used it for countless years to predict the periods of flooding of the Nile River, so that arable land existed. It was not the first calendar, as we will later learn, although, according to Eduard Meyer, it was in use at least around 4241 BC, a rather remote date. This Egyptian calendar was the basis for the Julian calendar used in Rome in 46 BC, the time calculation system recognized and used by the Western world until it was replaced by the Gregorian calendar, 1582 AD. CN that we use now.

            Archaeologists turned to mathematicians and astronomers for help, and they provided ancient texts, copies of inscriptions, and translations of hieroglyphic references to celestial events. literature. By analyzing announcements related to the ascent of the star Sirius on Thu 1 – July 19 – the first day of the Egyptian New Year, astronomers can determine the first year of the Dynasty. 18th with some precision in 1580 BC, similar to the start of Dynasty 12 in 2000 BC, with an allowable error of three or four years.

            From there we have fixed reference points from which we can build a chronicle. The known reigns of a series of kings can now be fitted into a diagram. It has recently been discovered that the time periods attributed by Manetho to certain dynasties have been greatly exaggerated. Within this three thousand year framework, Egyptian history gradually evolved.

Egyptian culture is a river culture. When political alliances were first formed, the Northern Kingdom emerged in the Delta, and the Southern Kingdom emerged between Memphis (Cairo) and the First Falls of the Nile. The real history of Egypt begins with the merger of these two ancient kingdoms, an event that occurred around 2900 BC, during the reign of King Menes, of the First Dynasty.

            Subsequent dynasties were, to put it simply, grouped into larger groups, known as kingdoms. Dates, especially the oldest ones, are completely inaccurate and can vary by several hundred years. The dates and divisions up to the New Kingdom used here are according to the German Egyptologist Georg Steindorff. An appropriate general division will then be used, at a time following Steindorff’s dates.

           The Old Kingdom (2900-2270 BC) included the First to Sixth Dynasties. It was a time of miraculous cultural germination, a period in which the basic cultural genres, religion, writing, and Egyptian artistic expression, began to take on identity. It was also the period of the builders of the Gizeh pyramid, of great kings such as Cheops, Chephren, and Mycerinus, all of them belonging to the Fourth Dynasty.

            The First Intermediate Period (2270-2100 BC) began after the catastrophic collapse of the Old Kingdom. It can be seen as a transitional period leading to feudalism, in which an unorthodox royal dynasty resided in Memphis. This period lasted from the 7th to 10th Dynasties, including more than 30 kings in all.

            The Middle Kingdom (2100-1700 BC) represents a period of development dominated by the princes of Thebes, who swept away the Heracleopolitan rulers and once again unified the country. The period lasted from Dynasties 11 to 13. We can consider this period as a period of cultural brilliance expressed in countless outstanding architectural works completed under the four kings named Amenemhet and three named Sesostris.

            The Second Intermediate Period (1700-1555 BC) was ruled by kings of Hyksos descent. The Hyksod were a Semitic people (“shepherd kings”) who annexed the Nile Delta, conquered it, and dominated Egypt for a century. They were eventually driven out of the country by the princes of Thebes (Dynasty 17). Previously, it was believed that the expulsion of the Hyksos was related to the biblical legend about the exodus of the children of Israel. But now this hypothesis has been overthrown.

           The New Kingdom (1555-1090 BC) was a time of political prestige, of Caesar-like conquering Pharaohs of the 18th to 20th Dynasties. Thotmes III’s conquests forged relationships with the Near East. Foreign peoples were forced to pay tribute to Egypt; Vast wealth poured into the land of the Nile River. Splendid buildings were erected. Amenophis III made alliances with the kings of Babylonia and Assyria. His successor, Amenophis IV (Nefertiti’s husband), was a great religious reformer who attempted to replace the old religion with a form of sun worship and therefore called himself Ikhnaton – “the with which Aton (sun god) was pleased.” Grandfather

built a new capital in the desert, which he named Tell-el-Amarna, competing with Thebes. But the new religion collapsed in civil wars and died with the king. Under the rule of Amenophis’ adopted son, Tutankhamen, the palace returned to Thebes.

            However, Egypt reached its peak of political power under the Pharaohs of Dynasty 19. Ramses II, later known as Ramses the Great, reigned for 66 years. During that time, he projected his omnipotent power onto the monumental – indeed giant – structures at Abu, Simbel, Karnak, Luxor, Abydos, and Memphis, and at Thebes in the temple of peace. The burial place is called Ramesseum.

            After Ramses’ death, chaos ensued, but Ramses III was able to maintain peace and order during his 21-year reign. After that, the power of Egypt was in the hands of the priests of Amen temple (Amun, Amon) whose power gradually increased.

            The Third Intermediate Period (1090-712 BC) was a time of turmoil and shifting power. Among the kings of Dynasties 21 to 24, Sheshonk I interests us as the conqueror of Jerusalem and the sack of Solomon’s Temple. During the 24th Dynasty, Egypt was briefly ruled by the Ethiopians.

            The Late Period (712-525 BC) marked the period when the Assyrians under Esarhaddon conquered Egypt during Dynasty 25. Dynasty 26 was able to reunite the country once again, despite the loss of Ethiopia. The alliance with Greece stimulated trade and cultural exchange. The last king of Dynasty 26, Psamtik (Psammtech) III, was defeated by the Persian King Cambyses at the Battle of Pelusium. Egypt then became a province of Persia. The historical and cultural momentum of Egypt really died out in 525 BC

            The Persian kings Cambyses, also known as Darius I, and Xerxes I, imposed rule on Egypt (525-332 BC), and by the time of Darius II it ended. During this period Egyptian culture lived on the past, and the land of the Nile became “the spoils of mighty peoples.”

            The Greek-Roman rule (332 BC – 638 AD) began with Alexander the Great’s conquest of Egypt and the founding of the city of Alexandria, which became the center of the Greek capital’s characteristics. The Alexandrian Empire began to decline, but under Ptolemy III Egypt once again rose to power and autonomy. Two centuries before Christ was born, the country was in a state of struggle between the Ptolemaic royal families. Egypt drifted more and more into the orbit of Rome. Under the reigns of the Roman emperors, nominal autonomy was maintained, but in reality the country was nothing more than a Roman province, the granary of the Roman Empire, an impoverished colony. harmonize in the same way

carpet with looting.

            Christianity took root very early in Egypt. From 640 AD onwards, however, the land completely fell into the hands of the caliphs (Muslim kings), who then submitted to the Osmanli Turks. Egypt finally entered the European historical complex under the conquest of Napoleon. 

           In 1850 Auguste Mariette, a 30-year-old French archaeologist, climbed to the top of the Cairo citadel. Having just arrived in Egypt, he was anxious to see the land he had heard so much about. As he slowly turned around, looking ecstatically in all directions, an ancient empire appeared before his mind’s eye. He glanced past the slender Islamic watchtowers to the enormous shapes of the pyramids, reaching out from the western edge of the desert. The past beckoned him. And although he only stopped for a short business trip, what he saw became his destiny.

            Born in Boulogne in 1821, Mariette began pursuing Egyptology at an early age. In 1848 he was appointed to an assistant position in the Louvre Museum, and it was here that he was commissioned to go to Egypt to acquire papyrus documents. In Egypt he witnessed antiquities being looted, and soon found himself more interested in improving the situation than in negotiating with antiquities dealers. How can you help? Archaeologists, excavators, and everyone else wandered around in a thirst for “antique collecting” – in fact, stealing monuments and carting away the country’s treasures. The native Egyptians themselves also assisted in these scandalous activities. The laborers hired by archaeologists are willing to pocket the tiny artifacts they find to resell them to foreigners to help increase their income. This arbitrary plundering also caused irreversible damage to the ruins. People value material gain more than scientific achievements. Despite Lepsius’s example of thoroughness in excavation, people preferred Belzoni’s style of looting. Mariette, who was really only interested in excavation, knew that, without a conservation plan, the future of archeology in Egypt was in jeopardy. And it is true that a few years later he organized extremely successful control regulations and built the largest museum of ancient Egypt in the world. Yes, he, the third of the four outstanding Egyptologists of the 19th century, the first who turned to excavation and discovery.

            He was not in Egypt very long before he noticed a most striking event. Stone sphinxes with identical sculptural inspiration are found displayed in the magnificent gardens of Egyptian officials and in front of newer temples in Alexandra, Cairo, and Gizeh. Mariette was the first to wonder where these sphinxes came from.

            Luck plays an important part in every discovery. Walking through the ruins of Sakkara, a town near Cairo, Mariette came across a sphinx, buried in the sand with only its head visible, near the massive stepped pyramid identified as Zoser. Mariette could not have been the first person to see this artifact, but he was certainly the first to recognize its similarity to the sphinxes of Cairo and Alexandria. And when he found on it a tablet recording a proclamation addressed to Apis, the sacred cow of Memphis, everything he had read, heard, and seen on this subject fell into place in his mind. grandfather; he envisioned a mysterious Avenue of the Sphinxes that had been lost, but had yet to be found. Why couldn’t the Avenue of the Sphinxes be located right here in Sakkara? Mariette hired a group of Arabs, armed with shovels and picks, and told them to dig. Their labor brought to light 141 sphinxes! Today we call the land that Mariette excavated near Sakkara Serapeum, or Serapeion, after the god Serapis.

            The Avenue of the Sphinxes once connected the two temples. These temples were also excavated by Mariette, and found artefacts traditionally identified with the site – the tombs of Apis, sacred cows. This discovery gives us a more thorough understanding of certain Egyptian cultural genres than previously possible; that is, of a strange and dark form of worship, a form of worship that even the ancient Greeks, in their travel accounts, considered strange.

Apis the cow god. The white triangle on the cow’s forehead is a symbol that marks it as a sacred cow among normal cows.

Only later in Egyptian history did the gods take human form. In the ancient religious perception of this land, gods incarnate in the form of symbols, plants, and animals. The goddess Hathor was a cow, believed to reside in the trunk of a sycamore tree; God Nefertem is the lotus; The goddess Neith carries the symbol of a shield on which are attached two crossed arrows. However, most Egyptian gods were represented in animal form. The god Khnum is a ram; Horus the falcon; Thoth ibis; Sebek crocodile; goddess Nut, in Bubastis, the cat; and the snake goddess Buto.

            Not only these divine animals, but any real animals, as long as they meet certain qualities, are revered. The most famous of these sacred beasts, the object of a solemn cult, was the sacred bull of Memphis, Apis, whom the Egyptians considered the attendant of the god Ptah.

            The sacred cow is worshiped as a real beast. It was raised in a temple and cared for by monks. When it dies, it is embalmed with spices and given a solemn burial, after which a new cow with the same markings takes its place. Cemeteries worthy of gods and kings were built to bury these sacred beasts. At Bubastis and Beni Hasan there are cemeteries for cats, at Ombos for crocodiles, at Ashmunein for ibises, at Elephantine for rams. A number of animal cults spread throughout the land and developed in countless variations. Other sects dwindled locally, and after a period of outbreaks would fade into obscurity after centuries.

God Ptah, “creator of the world”

Mariette stands in front of the resting place of the Apis sacred cows. At the entrance to the underground chambers is a burial chamber similar to the burial chambers built at the entrances to mastabas used to bury Egyptian nobles. A steep tunnel leads down to the long burial chamber where Apis, in countless incarnations, was buried during the time of Ramses the Great and for hundreds of years afterward. Mariette found the remains stored in different rooms arranged along a 320-foot-long passage. Later excavations showed that the mausoleum was active during the reign of King Ptolemy, increasing the total length of the burial corridor to 1,120 meters (about 341 meters). What a record of worship!

            Under the flickering torchlight, the Egyptian workers remained silent, only daring to whisper as they crept down behind him fearfully, Mariette going from one burial room to the next. The sacred cow burial chamber is made of heavy, monolithic black and red granite cut from a single block of polished stone approximately 9.6 feet (2.9 meters) high, 6.3 feet (1.9 meters) wide, and 12.8 feet (3.86 meters) long. The weight of these stone blocks is estimated at about 72 tons.

            Sarcophagus lids have been pushed off many sarcophagi. Mariette and his successors only found two coffins with intact burial items inside. The rest was stolen by tomb robbers. When? No one knows the answer. The grave robbers are anonymous. Time and again the Egyptologists, frustrated and helplessly angry, discovered that the tomb robbers had preceded them. The ever-shifting layers of sand, gliding across temples and tombs and cities, have erased every trace of crime.

            Mariette has entered the darkness of lost cult rituals. He was granted the privilege – following his excavation achievements at Edfu, Karnak, and Deir el-Bahri – of unlimited viewing of the rich and colorful life of ancient Egypt.   

            Today tourists, emerging from the tombs of the sacred cows, sit and rest on the terrace of the Mariette House, located to the right of the stepped pyramid and to the left of the Serapeum. There they sipped Arabic coffee while listening to garrulous tour guides preparing them for a tour of the visual world.

            Near the Serapeum where Mariette found the tomb of a powerful mandarin and landowner named Ti. The great antiquity of this rich man’s tomb contrasts with the tombs of the sacred cows, where traces of human activity were found dating to the relatively recent reign of the Ptolemaic kings. In fact, work on the Apis tombs ended so abruptly that a large black granite sarcophagus remained inside the entrance instead of being dragged down the tunnel and placed in a reserved spot. Ti’s tomb was completed shortly after Cheops, Chephren, and Mycerinus finished building their pyramids. This mausoleum is special thanks to its richness of realistic decorations. Mariette was quite familiar with the burial customs of the ancient Egyptians and expected to encounter only the usual burial goods, rich sculptures and friezes illustrating normal life activities. All of these are present in Ti’s tomb, but in incredibly large quantities. The frescoes on the walls of the burial chamber and hallway were of a quality that far surpassed anything previously discovered in terms of the detail used to illustrate the daily lives of the deceased. This wealthy man, Ti, obviously values ​​absolutely everything related to his social and family life. All the personal and belongings of his entourage were taken with him, symbolically, into the darkness of death. Ti himself is shown in a dominant pose in every relief, three to four times the size of an ordinary person or slave. Even the physical proportions of his portrait express power and significance and a great gap between his fate and those of lower status.

            The murals with sharp, even and stylish details and embossed carvings depict the practical and recreational activities of the people.

rich people. We see flax being processed, harvesters harvesting rice, donkeys pulling carts, threshing and sifting rice. The boat-building process 4,500 years ago is illustrated: a scene of felling trees; sawing boards; scene of using peep axes, hand awls, and chisels. Then saws, axes, and drills were very popular. We also witness gold smelters at work, and observe how air is blown into the furnace to create high temperatures. We spot sculptors, bricklayers, and tanners in their daily work.

            Again and again we are struck by the authority that an official of Ti’s status exerts over those under his command. The village officials are shown being led to Quan Ti’s house like sheep to settle accounts, with military commanders dragging those who are slow to come forward. We see countless rows of peasant women offering gifts to Ti, and groups of servants, some leading before the sacrificial cows, others slaughtering them. We see Ti sitting at the table, with his wife and family, Ti going out, Ti traveling with family in the Delta, and Ti traveling through a dense field of sedge grass.

            During Marriette’s time, engravings were judged more by their expressive content than by their aesthetic qualities. Through it we can understand the intimate nuances of the daily life of the ancient Egyptians. These paintings not only show their occupations, but also how they make a living. Other monuments that have come to light have exploited more extensively the type of event information used as a decorative motif on Ti’s tomb. Some of these relics were found in the tomb of the general Ptahhotep, of Mereruka, discovered about 40 years later. All these artefacts were found in Sakkara. And understanding the primitive yet sophisticated techniques developed by the Egyptians to solve the construction problems of their time makes the feat of building the pyramids even more admirable. As for Mariette and his contemporaries, knowing what the Egyptians used in their creations adds to the mystery of the pyramid. The reality is that Egyptian technology is based on an abundance of human resources. For decades after Mariette all kinds of speculation about the secrets the Egyptians used to build their monumental structures continued to appear in the press, in travel guides, and even in printed publications. technique, when there really is no mystery at all. The principles of Egyptian construction were revealed by a man born in London at a time when Mariette was excavating at the Serapeum.

Monsignor Ti was transported by bottomed boat across a field of sedge grass

Embossed painting of farming scene in Ti’s tomb

            Eight years after Mariete first viewed ancient Egypt from the walls of Cairo, he finally turned his attention to what he had felt from the beginning was his most important task. In Bulak he founded the Egyptian Museum, and some time later was appointed by the governor as director of the Egyptian antiquities office and chief supervisor of all excavations.

            In 1891 the Egyptian Museum moved to Gizeh, and finally, in 1902, was permanently located in Cairo, not far from the Nile Bridge built by Dourgnon in a pseudo-antique style, the most beautiful bridge that could be created when enter the new century. The museum became a checkpoint as well as an Egyptology collection. From then on anything discovered in Egypt, either accidentally found or methodically dug, had to first be brought to a museum. In this way, Mariette, French and foreign, prevented the looting and internal trafficking of antiquities that rightfully belonged to the Egyptian people. To show gratitude, Egypt erected a statue of Mariette in the museum grounds, and after his death his body was brought to Egypt, where he was laid to rest in a stone sarcophagus.                 

Giovanni Battista Belzoni

Richard Lepsius

Auguste Mariette

 It’s surprising how many archaeologists are geniuses. While still an apprentice to the trade, Schliemann spoke half a dozen languages. At age 12 Champollion could intelligently argue political issues, and at age 9 CJ Rich made an impression. William Matthew Flinders Petrie, the last of the four great men who laid the foundation for Egyptology in the 19th century, who measured and interpreted, was also a boy wise beyond his years. He is said to have shown a special interest in Egyptian excavations from the age of ten. Even in his youth he forged the principle that guided him throughout his life: worship and the pursuit of knowledge must each be given their due share, the sands of Egypt must be sifted, grain by grain. , not only to find what is hidden underground, but also to realize how things are arranged while still visible in the light of day. This account of Petrie was printed in a London paper in 1892, at which time Flinders Petrie was appointed full professor – he was then 39 years old – at University College.

            There is no doubt that when he was only 10 years old, he combined his passion for ancient history with a few other subjects that later contributed to his advantages. He experimented with natural sciences and studied chemistry not only out of amateur interest. He also founded a research group on the mathematics of surveying, on which the exact sciences had relied since the time of Galileo. And as he wandered through London’s antique shops, he tested his theories on real objects. Even when he was a student, he often complained about the lack of basic works in archeology, especially Egyptology.

            What students lack, adults will provide. Petrie’s scientific publications numbered 90 volumes. The HISTORY OF EGYPT , in three volumes (1894-1905), filled with research results, is the main foreshadowing work of all later work. His long report Ten Years of Egyptian Excavations, 1881-1891 (published in 1892) is still fascinating to read today. Petrie was born on June 3, 1853, in London. He conducted his archaeological research in England, and published a book on Stonehenge, the Bronze Age stone circle. But in 1880 he went to Egypt, and remained there, except for some interruptions, for 46 years excavating.

            Petrie discovered the Greek colonial town and trading center of Naukratis, and excavated the Temple of Ramses from the ruins at Nebesheh. At Kantara – the once important military route between Egypt and Syria ended, and where, today, planes land in the open square – he discovered a stronghold where the mercenaries of the Psamtik I once stopped at the garrison, and identified this place with the Greek towns of Daphnae and Tahapanes in the Bible. He eventually rediscovered two giant sandstone statues of King Amenophis III, statues mentioned by Herodotus, and first seen by the European scholar Pater of Erfurt in 1672. The Greeks called the statues This giant is the Column of Memnon. As the mother, Eos, rose above the horizon, the son, Memnon, wailed and groaned in a human voice that stirred the hearts of all who listened. Strabo and Pausanias recount this legend. Much later (130 AD) Hadrian [2nd century AD Roman emperor] and his wife, Sabina, waited for Memnon’s cry, and the couple was rewarded by hearing unusual sounds. about this world, squeezing their hearts like never before. Septimius Severus [late 2nd century AD Roman emperor] restored the upper part of the statue with sandstone blocks, and the cry was no longer there. Even today there is no scientific explanation for the cause of the scream, but its existence is beyond doubt.

Memnon Column was completed in 1350 BC, 18 meters high, worshiping King Amenhotep III

The wind gnawed at the giant stone statue for centuries. Vanslen saw the lower parts of at least one of the giant stone statues. In Petrie’s time nothing but ruins remained, enough for him to estimate the height of the throne at 38.4 feet (about 11.68 meters). The length of the middle finger of the southern statue is 4.4 feet (about 1.32 meters).

            Petrie excavated throughout his life, always dispersing his efforts, unlike Evans, who spent a quarter of a century exploring at a single site at Knossos. Petrie literally “scraped the sand” across Egypt, and thereby traveled through three thousand years of history. Petrie’s expertise lies in familiar small artefacts, especially anything that Egypt offered in the form of ceramics and figurines. . . In this field he was a pioneer, the first to introduce Egyptian miniature sculptures into the timeline. At the same time, he also became an authority on the most sacred and grandest Egyptian works, the towering pyramids, symbols of death.

In 1880 Petrie arrived at the Pyramid of Gizeh. After scouting the entire area, he found an abandoned mastaba that someone had opened the door to, probably intending to use the structure as a warehouse. This strange European told the porter that he would take up residence in the tomb, and the next day was the starting day. A smoking oil lamp stood on a wooden barrel, in the corner of a roaring oil stove. William Flinders Petrie feels right at home. That evening, when the shadows were long and deep blue, a naked Englishman crawled through the ruins to the base of the great pyramid, found the entrance, and went inside, appearing like a ghost in the rooms of the temple. people died, the air there was hot and stuffy like in a bustling chicken coop with chickens incubating eggs. After midnight he emerged from the depths of the earth. His eyes were stinging, his head felt like a hammer, and he was sweating profusely like someone who had just escaped from a blazing furnace. Calmly he squatted in front of the wooden box and copied down the notes he had written inside the pyramid, the measurements, cross-sections, slopes of corridors and turning angles. He also happily recorded his first hypotheses.

            Hypothesis? About what? Is there any mystery in the pyramid? They have opened their doors for people to see for thousands of years. Herodotus looked at them in amazement, and the ancients listed them as one of the seven wonders of the world. Wonder – by definition they avoid explaining. Surely we cannot help but think that the very existence of the pyramid raised dizzying questions for 19th century minds, for people of technology and of a rational approach, for a time Are you skeptical but rarely feel the divinity of transcendent goals?

            Pyramids are known as mausoleums and massive sarcophagi. But what was it under the sky that inspired the Pharaohs to build in a way that had never been done before and never existed again? In Petrie’s time the Egyptian pyramids were thought to be unique. Now, of course, Central America has been explored archaeologically, and structures similar to Egyptian pyramids have been discovered in the Toltec jungle, although these were temples rather than mausoleums. tomb. What was in the minds of the Egyptians when they created citadel-like monuments, when they designed entrances that were secretly hidden with false doors, and dead ends blocked off with impenetrable granite blocks? violate? What made Cheops put a veritable mountain of stone on his sarcophagus, and a geometric shape containing 29,500,000 cubic feet of limestone? Petrie, toiling night after night in corridors filled with rubble, filled with smoke and dust and gasping for air, determined to solve the pyramid’s puzzles using world-class scientific methods. self-discipline. Many of Petrie’s results have since been confirmed; and there are also many things that have been refuted by later studies. Any figures shown in this text come from modern sources. But now that we first follow in the footsteps of the tomb robbers who negated all the merits of the Pharaohs, we will choose Petrie as our guide and advisor.

            More than 4,500 years ago a vast herd of naked slaves, with smooth black skin, flat noses, protruding lips, and bald heads, flocked up from the banks of the Nile River. They smelled of rancid oil and sweat, onions, garlic, and radishes. About $2 million worth of food was spent to feed these workers at the Cheops Pyramid construction site alone. They groaned and screamed under the whips of the supervisors as they toiled on the large, flat paved road leading from the Nile River to the construction site. They groaned as the rope cut into their neck bones as they bent their backs to pull large blocks of stone, each block larger than a cubic meter in size, placed on skis, moving slowly on rollers. Amidst the wailing, crying, and death the pyramid gradually grew higher, layer after layer. It continued to grow for twenty years. Each time the mud of the Nile overflowed its banks, every farmer had to stop working, and the rebuilding force could be replaced by 100,000 auxiliary workers, so that Cheops could receive his tomb on time. , the tomb is called Echet Chufu, or the Horizon of Cheops [also named Giza].

            Using only human hands and bare backs, 2,300,000 stone blocks were dragged to the site and stacked on top of each other. Each base of the pyramid is more than 736 feet long (more than 224 meters). When the rock was finally in place, its peak rose to a height of 467 feet. This Pharaoh’s tomb is almost as high as the tower of St. Stephen’s Cathedral in Vienna, much taller than the dome of St. Peter in Rome, the largest church of Christianity. All St. Paul in London could fit inside a pyramid. The total amount of masonry, quarried from the rocky slopes and limestone layers on both banks of the Nile, contained 3,277,300 cubic ya (about 3 million cubic meters) of material, piled onto a surface area of ​​64,942 square feet ( about 6,000 square meters).

Today Tram number 14 in Cairo brings tourists almost close to the pyramid. Here, at the end of the road, the interpreter shouted, the donkey driver, the camel cart – everyone was looking for a tip. The groans of the slaves were silent, the wind of the Nile swallowed the sound of whips and blew away the foul smell of human sweat. Only giant constructions remain here. Today we can climb all the way to the top of the Great Pyramid of Cheops, the largest and highest of all, and to the south we can see a group of Pharaoh’s obelisks rising in the distance, the Abusir, Sakkara, and Dahshur pyramids. And nearby we look down on the pyramids of Chephren and Mycerinus, second and third largest respectively to the Pyramid of Cheops, and to the left the Sphinx. Many sphinxes are just piles of rubble. The upper block of the AburAeash Pyramid, north of Gizeh, has been largely removed, so that we can look down into the burial chamber, once hidden under thousands of tons of heavy stone. The Hawara and Illahun Pyramids, made of a stone core covered with adobe bricks made from Nile clay, have been destroyed by time. And the “false pyramid” at Medum – known to the Arabs as “el Haram el-Kaddab” because to them it looked nothing like the other pyramids – was most vulnerable to attacks by Arabs. wind and weather and sandstorms, because this structure was never completed at all. Even so, it is 128 feet (about 39 meters) tall. The pyramids belong to the Oldest Kingdoms period, and were also built during the time of the Ethiopian rulers of Meroe. Only the northern group in the Meroe area has 41 pyramids, containing the bodies of 34 kings, 5 queens, and 2 crown princes. The mausoleums for a select few had their names written in stone by anonymous people in the sky, competing with eternity! Is fame the hook that hooked the Pharaohs? Is it an urge to express themselves excessively? Or is it just the arrogance of a powerful person who has lost all mortal restraint?

            The meaning of the pyramids can only be grasped by the category of Egyptian beliefs. The urge to build pyramids was rooted in the fundamental Egyptian belief that after physical death the soul continued to exist in eternity. There exists an afterlife, a realm beyond, a region separate from the earthly world. This land is inhabited by the dead, who are allowed to live in the spiritual realm as long as – and this is the key – they pass the Last Judgment before the Inquisitor, understand the esoteric rules, and can carry with them items suitable for life on earth. The after-death offerings must absolutely include everything that the deceased person has

used in everyday life – for example, a physical residence, food and drink, as well as servants, slaves, and employees. But above all, the body must be guaranteed not to be destroyed, so that the wandering soul – or ba in Egyptian – can find its way back to the place where it once resided. Furthermore, the body must be safely preserved to provide refuge for the protective consciousness, or ka , the individual’s endogenous vitality. This ka , like the cognate ba , is immortal, and is extremely useful for providing energy to the deceased in the afterlife, where wheat grows up to eight en [a unit of measurement for dimension] . Egyptian length, about 110 cm] and must be sown and reaped as on earth.

            The concept of life after death had two related consequences: the ritual of mummification and the construction of the pyramid. On other continents the Incas, Maori, Jivaro, and other cultures all developed the art of embalming, but none reached the advanced level of the Egyptians. As for the pyramids, they represent an extraordinary instrument intended to provide the individual with two, five, tenfold security against all enemies who might violate it or disturb its rest.

            Thousands of lives were sacrificed in forced labor to give dead kings eternal security and eternal life. A Pharaoh who spent 10, 15, 20 years building the pyramids, drained the strength of the Egyptian people and placed an increased burden on their children and their children’s children. They have huge debts. Even after his death

Further weakening the kingdom’s finances, as his ka still required regular sacrifices and priestly service. It was necessary to confiscate the crops of 12 villages to provide enough for the priests tasked with worshiping the soul of a Pharaoh.

            The power of belief trumps political or moral judgment. The pyramids were for the Pharaohs – and for them only, those of lesser rank had to be content with mastabas, and the common people were content with tombs in the sand. This indistinctness is the result of an inflated, self-centered ego, a perspective in which the interests of the community are simply ignored. The urge to build pyramids was diametrically opposed to the Christian aspirations of building great architectural monuments. The purpose of Catholic churches is to serve the devout community. The stepped towers, or ziggurats, of Babylonia were temples to the gods, used publicly as places of worship; but the pyramids serve only the Pharaohs and no one else; his body , his soul , and his ka .

            One thing is palpable: the size of the monument built by the 4th Dynasty kings 47 centuries ago far exceeds the standards set by beliefs, religions and safety. We will see that soon after this period pyramids of such enormous scale began to fade away, and eventually stopped altogether. This happened during the reign of kings Cheops, Chephren, and Mycerinus in Egypt. These kings were no less tyrannical than the kings of Dynasty 4. Indeed, they were more divine than the older tyrants, and, like Sethos I and Ramses II, they were far removed from the slaves. The range is even farther.

            The physical reason for stopping the construction of large-scale pyramids is that tomb robbers are becoming more and more daring. In fact, in some villages people make a living by robbing graves that have been passed down from father to son for centuries; The hungry and thirsty regularly rebel against the minority who are constantly well fed and clothed. When the safety of the dead was no longer guaranteed by the pyramid, new protective measures became necessary, and the result was the construction of other types of tombs.

            But there is another, more pressing, non-material, reason for the decline in pyramid building suggested by the historical morphological approach. From a morphological perspective, cultures go through similar periods of ups and downs. For example, once the cultural soul is awakened, a tendency toward monumental memorial worship always appears. Despite the differences, there is an underlying connection linking the ziggurats of Babylonia, the Gothic-Roman church, and the pyramids of Egypt. Because all of these works are consistent with a newly emerging cultural period, in which massive structures were erected using wasteful barbaric energy. With a power that knows no bounds, a power that from the dark regions of consciousness arises the statics essential to structural computational engineering, and a power that, through hard-won understanding , inventing essential mechanisms – from which the cultural eruption erupted.

            The 19th century, the age of technological progress, refused to acknowledge that this was possible. It is difficult for Western engineers to accept that such massive structures can be built without the use of “machines,” including systems of pulleys, shafts and cranes. But the urge to attain spiritual grandeur overcomes all obstacles; The amount of effort an ancient culture has accomplished in its final results is as great as the quality of effort in a later civilization.

            The pyramid is built purely by muscle power. Holes were drilled into the rock in quarries in the Mokattam mountains, wooden sticks were inserted into the holes, and they expanded when water soaked, causing the rock to crack. On sliding tables and rollers the finished stone block is dragged to the site. The pyramid ascends layer by layer. PhD students in archeology write theses on whether only one or a few building plans were used. Lepsius and Petrie took opposite positions in this debate, but modern archeology favors Lepsius’s view. Obviously, in some construction designs, sudden changes require urgent and rapid additions. The Egyptians, 4,700 years ago, worked with such precision that their errors in length and angle could, as Petrie puts it, “be hidden with a thumb.” They fit the stone blocks so closely that “no needle or hair” can, to this day, pass through the seam. The Arab author, Abd al-Latif, commented on this in amazement 800 years ago. Critics point out that the ancient Egyptian master builders miscalculated pressure and tension, for example when they created five voids above the burial chamber to relieve downward pressure, in when just one space is enough. But these nitpickers forget, in our days of electronically analyzed T-beams, that not so long ago we were accustomed to building with safety ratings of 5, 8, or even twelfth.

            The pyramids will stand for a long time to come. The Pyramid of Cheops, for example, remains relatively intact, although most of the decorative surface layer of beautiful Makattam limestone has peeled away, leaving bare the yellowed limestone used in its rough structure. The top also collapsed, forming a flat square surface about three meters wide on top. But those are just damages caused by the ravages of time. Cheops’ obelisk and others will withstand many more millennia.

            But where are the kings who found safety in the pyramids, the peaceful homes of their ka and papa ?

            The Pharaohs had to receive poetic justice. Their arrogance is just in vain. Those who chose to rest in less ostentatious mastabas, or in crude sand tombs, were treated less harshly over the years than the powerful kings of Egypt. Many of the more modest burial chambers survived the ravages of grave robbers, but the granite sarcophagi of the great Cheops were smashed and empty – we cannot tell when. In 1818 Belzoni found that the lid of Chephren’s sarcophagus had been smashed and the sarcophagus was filled with broken stones. When Colonel Vyse discovered Mycerinus’s burial chamber in the 1930s, the lid was removed from the basalt sarcophagus. Pieces of the wooden coffin inside were thrown here and there in the room above, and with them pieces of the royal mummy were scattered on the floor of the room. Quach eventually sank when the boat carrying it back to London sank off the coast of Spain.

            Millions of stone blocks were used to shelter the bodies of deceased kings. The paths between the stone walls, all the design tricks used to distract marauding intruders, were devised. Because the burial chamber hides unimaginable treasures. The king, though dead, is still the king – and if his ka were to return to his body to be resurrected in the afterlife, he would obviously need jewels, personal items, and splendid rituals, familiar weapons of gold and precious metals, decorations of blue stones, precious stones, and rock crystals. Do the pyramids provide real protection? It seemed that their massive size attracted intruders instead of scaring them away. It’s as bad as if they announced: “Attention, we have hidden things in here.”

            While thieves – from the earliest times to today – search for hidden treasures, some respected scholars around the world propose theories about another form of secrecy that ancient architecture can hold. Over the past hundred years the so-called “mystery of the great pyramid” has periodically aroused the interest of Egyptologists, historians of world civilization as well as ordinary people.

            And no wonder – for wherever doubt exists, there is room for conjecture, which may take the forms of reasoned hypothesis or indulgent contemplation. Hypothesis belongs to the working method of any science; it is a form of legitimate contemplation that draws from established results. Although it explores the possibilities, it cannot be said to eliminate the question marks that linger behind them. Pure contemplation, on the contrary, knows no limits. Its assumptions are arbitrary, unexamined. And often its conclusions are only imaginary, as in sleepwalking, walking on the darkest paths of metaphysics, in the darkest woods of mysticism, and lost in the realm of mystery most of the misconceptions of Pythagorean doctrine. Most dangerous of all, unruly contemplation can lurk in the plain logic that the 20th century found convincing. The finds in Egypt have, over time, provided opportunities for wild contemplation of all kinds. Living the longest in these contemplations is the message of the great pyramid.

            The core of the argument is this: The Great Pyramid of Cheops was built to pass down a mysterious number system that had been known since ancient times. The mystery of numbers, of course, is not worth considering. Yet serious scientists who have done outstanding works in their fields often become addicted to Egyptian number magic.

            The Great Pyramid of Cheops was once called the Bible in stone. We know how forced Bible interpretation can be; the interpretation by the Pyramid of Cheops is no less. The entire history of humanity has been deduced from the plan design of the structure, from the dimensional relationships of the entrances, corridors, halls, and burial chambers. On the basis of a historical theory of the pyramid an expert determined the start of World War I to be 1913, and gullible people gleefully pointed out that he was wrong by “just a year.”

            What’s more, the mystical numerologists have enough material at their disposal to produce bewildering results if they are twisted in any way possible. For example, the pyramids are oriented with the four cardinal points of the site. The northeast-southwest diagonal of the Pyramid of Cheops, if extended, would coincide exactly with the similar diagonal of the Pyramid of Chephren.

            Most claims of this kind, however, arise from erroneous measurements, either from exaggeration, or from arbitrary interpolation, of the possibilities with which a monumental structure has been measured. How can ax bring. Meanwhile, since Petrie’s initial measurements, almost exact dimensions have been assigned to the Great Pyramid of Cheops. But even modern measurements are approximate, because the original shape of the pyramid has been lost due to the destruction of the top. For any reason any Egyptian mysticism about numbers invoked in terms of centimeters or inches is necessarily unreliable.

            It is not difficult to obtain spectacular mystical results if very small units of measurement are applied to so large a project. If Chartes or Cologne cathedral were measured in inches, an unexpectedly similar pattern of results to numbers with cosmic content would almost certainly be derived by appropriate addition, subtraction, and multiplication. Surely claims to the extent that the pyramid builders were the first to discover the value of pi are an exaggeration of this kind.

            Even if it can be proven that the Egyptians actually launched it

projected onto the pyramid’s dimensions important mathematical and astronomical information in a form unknown to science until the 19th and 20th centuries, where there was still no reason to read between the lines. mystical in such numerical values ​​or deducing from them great prophecies. In 1922 the German Egyptologist Ludwig Borchardt published the findings of his studies of the Great Pyramid of Cheops, under the title: Against the Mystical Interpretation of the Numbers of the Pyramid of Cheops, in which he finally demolished the mystical nonsense.

            Petrie is one of those archaeologists who refuses to give up. Stubborn, stubborn, and persistent in his pursuit, in 1889 he dug a tunnel into an unidentified brick pyramid along the Nile River, not knowing that he had encountered the tomb of Amenemhet III, a among the rare peace-loving figures who ruled Egypt. Unable to find the entrance to the tomb, Petrie dug at an angle straight through the masonry of the structure.

            When he first decided to attack the pyramid – it was located about 23 hours on donkey from the village of Jauwaret el-Makta – he sought the entrance in the usual way – that is, on the north face – and, as it were, too many Other archaeologists before him, he could not see the entrance on that side. On the eastern face he was no better. Then he decided to dig an angled tunnel into the masonry rather than waste even more time.

            His decision was correct, but his technical means were limited. Although he knew he faced a formidable task, he did not expect to have to dig for weeks at a time. Petrie was devastated when he finally removed the last block of wall separating him from the burial chamber and discovered that someone else had entered before him. But these others were not the least bit interested in studying the wonders of bygone ages; Their purpose is just looting. Petrie’s exhausting hardships in the scorching heat of the Egyptian sun, with scarce tools and a team of reluctant workers, were in vain.

            Once again we encounter a common disappointment at the height of archaeological effort, an extreme discouragement that can paralyze all but the tenacious. (Exactly 12 years later a similar failure occurred, but this time, in return, for someone else, which must have given Petrie some comfort. Modern tomb robbers break into Amenophis’s burial chamber II, died around 1420 BC, and in search of the royal treasure, cut open the mummy’s wrappings. But they were also completely dissatisfied – bitter, no doubt, more than Petrie. Fellow thieves did the job three thousand years ago so well that nothing remains to reward the pirate’s efforts.

            The hole that Petrie had drilled into one side of the pyramid was so narrow that he could not squeeze all the way through, but he could not wait for the hole to be widened for him to enter. He let an Egyptian boy hold a candle down to the dome. The flickering candlelight illuminated two sarcophagi – both looted and empty!

            There’s nothing left for Petrie to do except try to find out whose tomb it is. Other difficulties appeared. Groundwater has seeped into the pyramid. When the first hole was wide enough for Petrie to enter, he found the burial chamber submerged in water. Using a shovel, he cleaned the floor inch by inch. Finally he came across an alabaster vase with the name Amenemhet carved on it, and in the second room were numerous burial objects, all bearing the name of Princess Ptahnofru, daughter of Amenemhet III.

            Amenemhet III, a king of the 12th Dynasty, reigned, according to Breasted, from 1849 to 1801 BC. His family ruled for 213 years. The period in which Amenemhet III wore the two crowns of Egypt [for Upper and Lower] was one of the happiest the country saw. For centuries the country was alternately ravaged by wars against harassing barbarian border peoples, and by internal strife between the central government and periodically rebellious provincial princes. . Amenemhet is a peace-loving person. His countless construction projects – including the construction of a dam for an entire lake – served human as well as religious purposes. His social measures were, by modern standards, not worth mentioning, but in the context of a harshly class-divided society and slave economy like Egypt’s they were truly significant. Revolution.

            He has made the Two Lands greener than the great Nile.

            The one who brought republican strength to the Two Lands.

            You are life, strongly cooling your nostrils.

            The treasure he gives is food for those who follow him;

            He nurtures those who follow his path.

            The King is food, and his mouth is growth.

 The mere discovery of this great king’s tomb was a feather in Petrie’s cap, and archaeologically, at least, his results gave him some satisfaction. Yet, in terms of excavation, his work was far from a complete achievement. How did the tomb robbers find their way into the tomb? Where is the actual entrance to the pyramid? Did the tomb robbers discover the entrance, which you and other researchers could not find? The thieves had obviously solved the entire structure that the Egyptian architects had designed for the pyramid; Petrie began to retrace the path of the grave robbers.

This required an arduous tunneling project. Groundwater has risen inside the pyramid. Sand, rubble, and broken rocks had mixed into a tough, dirty impurity. Petrie, a tireless man, had to crawl through some paths, his stomach pressed against the ground, breathing with difficulty, his mouth and nose covered in mud. His goal was to find the real entrance, and he finally found it. Contrary to all previous experience and contrary to all Egyptian traditions, the entrance was on the south side! Somehow the tomb robbers knew this. Petrie was surprised. Do thieves succeed through pure ingenuity, or simply through perseverance? Petrie was determined to check meticulously.

            Systematically he retraced the route used by the thieves. They encountered all kinds of obstacles. Every time this happened to Petrie he tried to put himself in the thieves’ shoes and imagine what he would do if he were them. A couple of times he was forced to realize that he could not solve the situation like the thieves could. What mysterious instinct, if it was an instinct, led the thieves through the countless traps, tricks, and tricks that the Egyptian architects attached to the pyramid? When the stairs suddenly ended in a room with no exit, the thieves quickly discovered that the path leading there was carved into the ceiling. The entire ceiling of the room is a huge trap door. With difficulty, the thieves broke through the door, not unlike today’s safe pickers, bit by bit, drilling through the thick steel door of a safe. And then where do they go? Arrive at a corridor filled with giant stone blocks! Petrie, the technician, could appreciate the extreme effort the thieves put into clearing the books a path through the hallway. He could also understand their feelings when, after such exertion, they once again found themselves in a room with an exit, and, having overcome this new obstacle, entered another third exitless room. At this point, Petrie had begun to admire the thieves, finding it difficult to know whether to honor their steadfast achievements for their masterful knowledge or for their unrivaled strength. Without question we know they must have been digging for weeks, months, or even a year longer – and in extreme conditions! They had to work in constant fear of being discovered by guards, priests, and worshipers who came to offer offerings to the great Amenehet.              

            Or is that so? Petrie saw firsthand how much acumen and experience it takes to overcome the obstacles that ancient architects deliberately erected to confuse intruders and protect for his king. He did not believe that ancient Egyptian tomb robbers could be so clever as to achieve glorious achievements without support. Is it not true that – Egyptian documents support such an argument – ​​that the thieves had the assistance of experts? Were they secretly plotted, abetted by priests, guards, and corrupt members of a degenerate official class? This brings us to the colorful subject of tomb robbers in Egyptian history. Its beginnings were lost in antiquity; it continued miserably in the Valley of the Kings; and it came to a climax not long ago, in the rather modern form of a criminal case.

1. GRAVE ROBBERS IN THE  VALLEY OF THE KINGS

 In early 1881 a wealthy American art collector set sail on the Nile toward Luxor, a village located opposite the ancient citadel of Thebes, where he planned to go to buy antiquities. He did not take the official route in museums, because there was close supervision due to Mariette’s influence, and preferred to trust completely to his intuition. At night he frequented the dark alleys and back rooms of Luxor grocery stores. There he came into contact with an Egyptian who specialized in selling items that were clearly genuine and valuable.

            This American method needs a little more discussion on the sidelines. Today, every tour guide warns tourists against participating in black market antiquities deals. That’s right – most so-called antiquities are faked by modern Egyptian craftsmen, or even imported from Europe. Black market operators have all kinds of tricks to imitate the real thing. Even connoisseurs like German art historian Julius Meier-Graefe were caught in the crossfire. Once while walking around with a professional guide who was clueless about this, in the 1920s, he found a small human statue in the sand. Finding the item himself convinced him that it was a real antique. He “told” the tour guide to keep this a secret and stuffed the artifact under his shirt when entering the hotel. Then, to add a base to it, he took it to a specialist, and asked him for his opinion on the item. Y smiled. And in the words of Julius Meier-Graefe: “He invited me into the back of his little shop, opened a cupboard there, and showed me four or five identical dishes, each heavily soiled with thousands of years of sand. They came from Bunzlau (Germany), but he bought them from a dealer in Cairo, a Greek.”

            In addition to counterfeiting antiquities as a profession, scientists and scholars must be on the lookout for unpleasant surprises devised by pranksters. This is illustrated by the following anecdote told by the modern French writer, Andre malraux. He served as cultural commissioner in China and later as General De Gaulle’s propaganda chief. There is no reason to doubt this anecdote, which is told below as a strange and certain story

should not be imitated. In 1925, in a Singapore pub, Malraux happened to talk to a Russian collector who was entrusted by the Boston Museum to come here to buy antiquities. After a social exchange, the Russian placed on the table five small ivory elephant statues that he had just bought at an Indian store: “You see, these are the elephants I just bought. When we’re done excavating, I’ll stuff it into the graves before we cover it up again. In 50 years from now, when other archaeologists come to excavate and open the chest again, they will find these things inside, and they will be puzzled. . . I love making people who come after me scratch their heads. On the tower at Angkor-Vat, you know, I engraved a very rude inscription in sanskrit; Then I stained it to make it look very old. One day some guy who knows everything will decode it. Someone has to do something to stop these arrogant people from hating them. . .”

            Back to our American: while he may be an amateur in Egyptology, he is not lacking in professionalism. Therefore, when he saw the Egyptian items, he was quite excited. He brazenly disregarded the oriental haggling rituals, buying a scroll of papyrus because of its beauty and good preservation, which he rarely found. when we meet. He hid it in a chest and left Egypt quickly, bypassing customs and police barriers. In Europe, experts confirmed that he had stumbled upon a rare treasure. By chance, he also caused a most remarkable series of events in which he himself played no further part.

            But before continuing the story, it is necessary to present a few interesting facts about the Valley of the Kings.

            The Valley of the Kings, or the Tombs of the Kings at Biban el-Muluk, lies on the west bank of the Nile, across which lies Luxor and Karnak, site of the colonnades and colossal temples of the New Empire. The valley’s location is near an expanse of what is now desert, which was once the necropolis of the prosperous city of Thebes. On the west bank of the Nile, during the New Empire, mausoleums were cut out of the rock face to accommodate the bodies of notables. Here, too, temples were dedicated to the god Amen (Amun) and to various kings (see picture below).

            The supervision and construction of the huge cemetery required the contributions of many people, under the command of an official with the title of Western Prince and Commander of the Cemetery Protection Team. The garrison, tasked with guarding the cemetery, lived in barracks. Regular laborers and construction workers crowded into temporary tents, which over time developed into small villages. Among this workforce were masons and painters, craftsmen of all kinds, and even embalmers, whose job it was to preserve the body and build an eternal home for the ka .

            This development occurred, as I have shown, during the period of the New Kingdom, when the most powerful rulers of Egyptian history were in power, the Sons of the Sun, Ramses I and II. This period is identified by the 18th and 19th Dynasties, and ran from about 1350 to 1200 BC. In Spengler’s view, it was a period similar to our modern period, a period of civilization. “civilization” is almost pure, characterized by “Caesarism”. According to Spengler’s notion of historical simultaneity, this Egyptian period in which tectonic momentum ceased to seek expression in pyramid building and instead produced ostentatious structures such as Karnak , Luxor, and Abydos, correspond to the Caesarian period in Roman history, during which the “memorial” Greek culture was absorbed into the Roman “monumental culture.” Other examples of “massive” historical periods are the period when Sennacherib built Niveveh into an Assyrian Rome, when the Qin Emperor ruled in China, and when the great monuments of India was established, after 1250. Furthermore, the same forces at work during the Egyptian transition to that culture of grandeur are at work today among us Westerners living in our cities. skyscraper in New York, in the ruins of Berlin, in cramped London, or in an exhausted Paris. [This book was written in the period after World War II, first published in 1949: ND]

            A drastic reform undertaken by King Thotmes I (1545-1515 BC) marked the beginning of a period of bustling construction in the Valley of the Kings. Thotmes I was a decisive figure in Egypt’s dynamic history. He also played a significant role – although this has not been conclusively proven, and proving it would require more than a purely archaeological effort – in pushing Egyptian culture to evolve into a civilized culture. civilization, a process typically involving the dissolution of old traditions.

            In any case, Thotmes was the first Egyptian king to build his tomb nearly a mile away from his temple. And instead of burying his body in an exposed and ostentatious pyramid, he gave instructions to bury it in a stone chamber carved into the cliff. This may not seem very important to people today. But in fact the decision represents a blunt rejection of a tradition that has lasted about 1,700 years.

            By this drastic move Thotmes created immeasurable difficulties for his ka and risked his survival after death. Since the ka he ‘s ability to live depends on the offerings made on sacred days performed at the temple quite far from the tomb, it is of course no longer intimately connected to the body to which the ka is given. is hanging around there. However, to compensate for this defect, Thotmes hopes to have the endless security that his ancestors did not have because of grave robbers. The instructions he gave to the chief architect, Ineni, were due to the terrible fear that his tomb would be violated. Despite the decline of rationality and the secularization of religion – the 21st Dynasty was dominated by priest-kings, and before that time their power in the kingdom had increased rapidly – ​​concerns about The possible destruction of his mummy remained a dominant factor in Thotmes’ consciousness. Around the beginning of the 18th Dynasty there was hardly a royal tomb on the outskirts of Thebes that was not visited by thieves. There is hardly a mummy that has not had at least part of its “mystical armor” torn off, and thus permanently defiled. As a rule, grave robbers are not caught, although occasionally they may be harassed and forced to leave behind their loot. Five hundred years before the reign of Thotmes, an intruder entering the tomb of King Zer’s wife was stopped by breaking the Queen’s mummy and hastily hid a withered arm in a niche in the burial chamber. . In 1900, it was found by a British archaeologist, still intact under a layer of cloth, and also wearing a precious turquoise and amethyst bracelet.

            The chief architect of Thotmes is named Ineni. We can imagine the discussion between the tyrant and his master builder. After deciding to break with tradition, Thotmes must have known that unless the location and construction of the tomb were kept absolutely secret, there was no guarantee that he would escape the same fate as his predecessors.

            The vanity of the chief architect has preserved for us the story of how this plan was carried out, because on the walls of his cult temple Ineni left, as part of a detailed biography , a record of the construction of a tomb in this first rocky slope. One sentence reads: “I alone supervised the construction of the King’s rock-faced mausoleum. No one saw it, no one heard it.” But a modern archaeologist, Howard Carter, one of the pioneering authorities on the Valley of the Kings and on the physical requirements of tomb construction there, estimates the number of people who worked for Ineni. Carter writes: “There is enough evidence to show that about 100 employees who knew the King’s mysteries were not authorized at the dig, and we can be completely confident that Ineni has found some effective measures. something to silence them.” It is conceivable that the work was carried out by prisoners of war, and then massacred after the work was completed.

            Does Thotmes’s breaking with tradition accomplish its goal? His rocky tomb was the first of many hewn tombs in the Valley of the Kings. In the limestone wall of a forbidding and lonely valley beyond the western slopes of Thebes he dug a steep tunnel according to plans used for five successive centuries by the architects of Pharaoh. The Greeks, impressed by the flute-like passages leading to ancient tombs, called stone tombs syringes , because they evoked the image of a syrinx, or shepherd’s flute. Strabo, the Greek traveler who lived in the last century before Christ, described these 40 tombs as worth seeing.

            We do not know how long Thotmes rested. However, we know that it is not too long compared to the length of Egyptian history. The day came when his mummy, along with those of his daughter and relatives, was taken off the cliff, this time not by tomb robbers, but by monks as a precaution. against invaders. The kings chose to build their tombs close together on rocky slopes so that the work of guarding the tombs could be more concentrated than when building them scattered as before, but tomb robberies continued.

            Thieves broke into Tutankkhamen’s tomb within 10 to 15 years of his death. A few years after the death of Thotmes IV, thieves left calling cards in his tomb by engraving mysterious signs and slang words for wall-cutting on the wall. This mausoleum was so damaged that one hundred years later the pious Horemheb in the eighth year of his reign decreed that officials “renew the burial of King Thotmes IV in the High Residence.” Precious in Western Thebes.”

            Tomb robbers reached their peak during Dynasty 20. The rule of Ramses I and II and of Sethos I and II (Seti) came to an end. The next nine kings, all of them took the name Ramses, but only in name and in reality. Their control over the kingdom was weak and constantly threatened. Bribery and corruption are rife. The cemetery guards ganged up with the priests, the surveillance force of the burial area, and the governors of the area. Even the mayor of Western Thebes, the highest-ranking official in the cemetery protection system, secretly joined hands with the grave robbers. It seems strange to us today to find, among the papyrus collections from the period of Ramses IX (1142-1123 BC), a document relating to a case of tomb robbery. appeared three thousand years ago. Before this case happened, the grave robbers were anonymous; now they suddenly had names and were real people.

            Peser, the mayor of East Thebes, heard rumors of tomb robbers raging on the west bank of the Nile. The mayor of West Thebes is a person suspected of involvement by many people. At that time, Peser felt excited because he had the opportunity to discredit his competitor for the position of mayor with the governor of the entire Thebes region, a certain Mr. Khamwese. (What follows is Howard Carter’s report on progress, based on Breasted’s collection of  Ancient Roman Records.)

            But things suddenly became unfavorable for Peser. In his denunciation of Pewero and his accomplices, Peser made a tactical mistake in stating the exact number of mausoleums that had been violated. According to his accusations, 10 royal tombs, 4 mausoleums containing the remains of monks, and many other private tombs were desecrated. Several members of the official investigation committee that Khamwese now sent across the river, including the man currently charged, may have been involved in the theft. Even Khamwese himself can pocket a little in this case. And in today’s terms, the investigative committee was “hooked,” and so their false report was planted as they sailed across the Nile. Based on legal formalities, they acquitted the accused, by talking in circles and focusing only on irrelevant details.

            The Commission rejected the accuracy of Peser’s detailed complaint. They hesitated to consider his claim, arguing that while Peser claimed that 10 royal tombs had been looted, there was really only one, and instead of 4 monks’ tombs, there were only 2. And indeed That nearly all the private graves mentioned by Peser had been disturbed was an undeniable fact, but the committee saw no reason to drag out an important official like Pewero over this small matter. court. The day after the conviction was shelved, a triumphant Pewero gathered “inspectors, cemetery operators, workers, police, and all the cemetery attendants,” and incited them to go in a group across the east bank of the Nile, in today’s language, making a “spontaneous demonstration”. They gathered to march around Peser’s home area.

            This event was too much for the mayor of East Thebes to bear. Peser could not bear the humiliation. He became angry, and while not restraining himself, he made his second, almost fateful, mistake. Arguing fiercely with the leader of the protest from the west bank, in anger Peser vowed, under the hearing of many witnesses, that he would climb over the head of the Governor of Thebes and appeal to the king.

            This was exactly what Pewero expected to hear. As quickly as he could, he rushed to Governor Khamwese. He informed the governor that Peser intended to cross the line, a blatant violation of administrative principles. The governor, furious, convened a trial and forced the clumsy Peser to sit with the other judges to judge himself. He found himself in an amusing situation when he had to accuse himself of perjury and declare himself guilty.

            This strangely modern crime story, with all the details that are not added or subtracted here – in fact, it could be told at length – even has a “happy ending” that is rarely found except in stories. Fairy tale.

            Two or three years after this decadent act won the case, a gang of eight grave robbers were arrested. These men, “after being flogged with double punishment on the hands and feet,” confessed. The names of five of these eight thieves have come down to us: the stone cutter Hapi, the craftsman Iramen, the farmer Amenemheb, the water bearer Kemwese, and the black slave Thenefer. In their testimony they said:

            “We opened the trunk and everything covering the body. We found the majestic mummy of this king. . . There were many talismanic necklaces and gold ornaments around the neck; The mummy’s head wears a gold mask; The king’s majestic mummy is covered with gold everywhere. The upholstery is wrapped with gold and silver thread, outside and inside; There are precious stones everywhere. We stripped the gold and silver from this god’s majestic mummy, along with charms, jewelry around his neck, and on his shrouds. We also found the king’s wife; We also stripped her of all precious things. Then we burned the shroud. We took away the belongings they were carrying, pots of gold, silver, and bronze. We divided the wealth we took from these two gods into eight parts.”

            The court found the defendants guilty, and found Peser’s previous charges to be valid.

            It happened that this case – and a number of other cases in which criminals were also punished severely later on – could not stop the systematic looting in the Valley of the Kings. We know that thieves broke into the tombs of Amenophis III, Seti I and Ramses II. “The valley must have witnessed many strange sights, and daring ventures committed in it,” Carter wrote. “One can imagine the plots planned days in advance, the secret rendezvous on the cliffs at night, the bribing or drugging of the cemetery guards, and then the digging in the dark, crawling down narrow holes into the burial chamber, frantically searching in the half-light for portable treasures, and returning home at dawn laden with stolen goods. We can imagine these things, and at the same time we can realize this is inevitable. By dressing the mummy with precious and exquisite jewelry and burial items that he thought were worthy of his supernatural qualities, the king himself invited bad guys to destroy him. The charm is so great.   

            Wealth beyond greed lies there for anyone to use, and sooner or later, the tomb robbers will win.”

            But the 20th Dynasty was not all about tomb robbers, treacherous priests, and corrupt officials, corrupt judges, and highly organized thieves from all walks of life. But there are also good believers and righteous people who always respect the deceased kings. Because even as the thieves are making their escape through secret alleys, small groups of faithful people are lying in ambush for them. The need drove these devotees to use raid tactics, returning fire with fire. In the counter-war waged by loyal priests and honest officials against sophisticated theft organizations, it is necessary to operate more secretly than the criminals.

            It is interesting to imagine the guardians of this tradition, in heated exchanges of whispers, entering the mausoleum, holding up their torches so that its light illuminates the open sarcophagus, the bodies of the crucified out of fear of being discovered. They are not afraid of the guards stationed at the tomb. Yet just one glance from a bribed guard could be enough to let thieves know which king was under guard tonight and therefore out of their reach to plunder. And loyal patrols carried away the embalmed bodies of their deceased kings. They moved the mummies from one tomb to another to protect them from sacrilegious hands. They heard that new raids were being planned by the thieves, and responded with more night raids. And the dead kings, whose mummies should have rested in eternal peace, wandered about.

            Suddenly the situation changed. The priests took protective measures in broad daylight. Police cordoned off the valley. Long lines of porters and draft animals transported large coffins from unsafe burial chambers to new locations, new hiding places. military forces joined the mission – and once again many witnesses paid with their lives so that the new secret could be kept.

            Three times Ramses III was taken from his tomb and reburied. Ahmes, Amenophis I, Thotmes II, and even Ramses the Great were moved to safer locations. In the end, due to lack of other hiding places, they were all gathered into a single burial place.

            “In the 14th year of the third month of the second season, on the 6th, King Osiris Usermare-Setepnere (Ramses II) was buried again in the tomb of King Osiris Memmare Seti I, presided over by the High Priest of Amen, Paynezem.”

            But even there they make no guarantees. Sethos (Seti) I and Ramses II were placed in the tomb of Queen Inhapi. In the end, no less than 30 royal mummies were crowded into the tomb of Amenophis II. Other kings were picked up at different times and under very different circumstances and carried over remote highland roads out of the Valley of the Kings. They were then placed in a mausoleum carved into the basalt rock walls of Deir el-Bahri. This site is not far from the monumental temple built by Queen Hatshepsut, sister of Thotmes III, who was her co-regent.

            Here for three thousand years the mummies rested in peace. Obviously the exact location of the tomb was lost, the same unforeseen circumstances that sheltered Tutankhamen’s tomb after it had been crudely plundered. It’s possible that a heavy rainstorm wiped out all traces of the entrance. Then a trip by an American collector to Luxor in 1881 led to the revelation that the kings’ mass tomb had been discovered by luck six years earlier, in 1875.                 

The Valley of the Kings is hidden in the darkness, a dark realm without history. “We must imagine a desolate valley,” Carter writes, “haunted to the Egyptians, its cavernous corridors plundered and empty, its many open entrances, becoming home for weasels, desert owls, colonies of bats. Although looted, abandoned and desolate, the romance of the mausoleums has not completely disappeared. It is still the Sacred Valley of the Kings, and sentries and curious onlookers still come to visit. In fact, some mausoleums were reused during the time of Osorkon I (about 900 BC) to bury priests.”

            A thousand years later we find the Valley populated by Christian hermits crouching in the tomb passages.

            “Royal splendor and pride have been replaced by humble poverty. The king’s ‘noble residence’ has been reduced to a small hermit’s room.”

            And this also changes. Tradition has assigned the fate of the Valley as a home to kings and thieves. In 1743 the English traveler Richard Pococke gave us the first modern report on the condition of the Valley. Guided by a village chief, he was able to visit 14 open mausoleums. (Strabo knew, as we said, up to 40; today there are 61 known mausoleums.) But it is not a safe place to visit. In the Kurna hills a band of thieves was camping. When James Bruce visited the Valley 26 years later, he learned of the futile efforts to drive out these thieves. “They are all outlaws. If caught in another area, they could be sentenced to death. The former governor of the Girge region, unable to endure any more of the lawlessness caused by these bandits, immediately ordered his soldiers to carry bundles of firewood and occupy the mountain face, where the majority of these bandits resided. : he immediately ordered dry wood to be piled into their cave, then set it on fire, causing almost all of them to suffocate to death, but then they recruited enough and the situation returned to the same.

            When Bruce planned to stay overnight in the tomb room of Ramses III, to copy the frescoes on the wall, his guides were scared to death, quickly threw down their torches and ran out, cursing. As the light flickered and then went out, “they uttered terrifying omens about the disasters that would befall them after they had left the cave!” Then as Bruce descended into the Valley in the falling darkness with only one servant remaining, trying to board his boat on the Nile, screams rent the night, and rocks hurled from the slopes. down. Bruce had to use a gun and his servant used a ball gun to chase them away, but when he reached the boat he anchored immediately, and never returned to visit again. When Napoleon’s “Egyptian Commission” arrived there 30 years later, to explore the Valley and its tombs, they too were attacked and even shot by tomb robbers.

            Today the Valley attracts visitors from all over the world. One of the precious treasures ever taken from the ancient earth was only discovered 40 odd years ago. Today we have another attraction where tour guides pat the donkey’s back; Tourists flocked from Cook’s boarding house in Deir el-Bahri, and Arabs cajoled and beckoned loudly in broken English. And to hear a tour guide say that “The most important tombs and Tutankhamen’s tomb can be visited under electric light three times a week,” feels both sad and ridiculous, considering its monumental history. of the Nile Valley, its kings, and its people.

            The greatest excavation made in the Valley – arousing a wave of excitement in the Western world comparable only to the previous archaeological discovery, the excavation of Schliemann’s Troy – occurred in 1922.

            But a few decades ago an equally amazing discovery was made in Deir el-bahri, under much more strange circumstances.

            When the American, who had purchased a well-preserved papyrus in Luxor, submitted it to experts in Europe to assess its authenticity, one of them questioned him in detail. The collector was happy, feeling safe with his loot in Europe, speaking freely, without needing to hold his tongue. The expert then sent a detailed letter to Cairo, and so began the exposure of a most extraordinary tomb robbery.

            After receiving the letter from the expert at the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, Professor Gaston Maspero returned with two accusations: first, that his museum may have once again lost a precious artifact. treasure. In the past six years, rare treasures of great scientific value have in some cases secretly appeared on the black market of antiquities. A few lucky buyers, once safely out of Egypt, were willing to describe the circumstances of the sale, but no transaction was traced. Sometimes the broker is described as big. Other times he was an Arab, other times he was black, then he was a miserable Egyptian farmer or a rich village chief. Maspero was also puzzled to learn that the last item smuggled out of Egypt was a burial item from the tomb of a 21st Dynasty Pharaoh, whose location is unknown. Who discovered these tombs?

            Reviewing the items smuggled out of the country that had been reported to him, Professor Maspero was convinced that they must have come from the tombs of several different kings. Is it possible that a modern tomb robber can discover several ancient tombs at once? Maspero favors the situation where thieves accidentally stumbled upon a large communal mausoleum.

            Maspero was impressed with the prospects that opened up if what he thought was correct. Something must be done. The Egyptian police have failed. You have to investigate yourself. After several secret consultations he sent one of his young assistants to Luxor.

            From the moment he stepped ashore from the Nile boat, this assistant behaved like anyone but an archaeologist. He rented a room at the hotel where the American who bought the papyrus stopped. Day and night he wandered around grocery stores, pretending to be a rich European, with pockets full of gold coins and buying miscellaneous souvenirs at sky-high prices. After conversing with the brokers in a trustworthy manner, he gave them a decent tip, but not so much as to cause suspicion. Time and time again he was introduced to antiques made in the country, but the young man was not easily fooled, and the illegal brokers noticed immediately. Gradually they came to respect this stranger more and more, and to trust him more and more.

            One day a broker, squatting in the doorway of the medical shop, signaled the young man to come closer. The assistant from the Egyptian Museum is now holding a small statue in his hand. He tried to restrain his emotions; Trying to hide the expression on his face. He squatted next to the broker and began to bet while turning the statue back and forth in his palm. Looking at the inscription on the statue, he knew it was a real three-thousand-year-old artifact, a burial item from a 21st Dynasty tomb.

            The bidding lasted long. Finally, the assistant agreed to buy the small statue, while pretending to be dissatisfied. He expressed his desire to find a larger and more precious artifact. That same day he was introduced to a tall Arab man in his prime who called himself Abd-el-Rasul. This Abd-el-Rasul was the patriarch of a large family. After the young man had bet for a few days, during which time he was shown other burial objects dating from the 19th to 20th Dynasties, he had the Arab arrested. He was confident that he had caught the grave robber. Is not it?

            Abd-el-Rasul and a few of his relatives were brought before the Governor of Keneh, named Da’ud Pasha, who personally questioned them. An endless line of witnesses appeared to accuse the accused. All the people in the village where Abd-el-Rasul lived swore he was innocent – ​​in fact, his entire family was innocent, a family recognized as the oldest and most respected resident in the community. copper. The adjutant, firmly convinced of the correctness of his accusations against Abd-el-Rasul, sent an optimistic telegram to Cairo. Now he had to watch helplessly as Abd-el-Rasul and his accomplices were acquitted due to lack of evidence. He cried out to the authorities; but they all shrugged. He went straight to the Governor, who stared at him in amazement, and advised him to be patient.

            The assistant waited a day, then another day and another day. He cabled Cairo again, repeating the first telegram. The constant ambiguity wore him down, as did the governor’s Eastern patience. But the governor understands his people well.

            Howard recounted a story one of his oldest workers told him about his experience. When he was young, he was arrested for stealing and brought before the same governor. Faced with the notoriously strict Da’ud Pasha, the young man was scared to death. The fear doubled when, instead of being taken into the usual courtroom, he was led to the governor’s private room. The weather was very hot that day, and the official was soaking in a large porcelain bathtub.

            Da’ud Pasha, according to the story, looked at the suspect for a long time. The young prisoner was frightened by this silent scrutiny. “His eyes pierced me,” he told Carter. “I felt like my knees were turning into water. Finally, he quietly told me: “This is the first time you have appeared in front of me. Give him freedom. But be careful not to come here a second time.” I was so scared that I immediately quit being a thief, and never got into trouble again.”

            Da’ud’s authority – reinforced by brutal punishment if mere presence was not enough of a deterrent – ​​bore fruit, to the astonishment of the young aide from Cairo, now bedridden with a fever. A month after the initial interrogation, a relative of Abd-el-Rasul and also an accomplice went to the governor and told everything. The governor informed the young scientist about the progress of the case and ordered a retrial. This trial showed that the entire village of Kurna, where the entire Abd-el-Rasul family lived, was a den of grave robbers. This profession has been passed down from father to son continuously without interruption since the 13th century until now. A dynasty of thieves from such a formidable lineage had never been heard of before or since.          

            The largest discovery that Abd-el-Rasul’s team ever made was the mass tomb at Deir el-Bahri. Serendipity and systematicity played a part in finding and plundering this tomb. Six years earlier, in 1875, Abd-el-Rasul, by sheer luck, had discovered the entrance hidden in the cliffs between the Valley of the Kings and Deir el-Bahri. Climbing up and getting in with difficulty, Abd-el-Rasul found himself in a spacious burial chamber containing several mummies. Preliminary research reveals a treasure that could provide a prosperous life for his family for the rest of their lives – if the secret is kept.

            No one except the leading members of the Abd-el-Rasul family was told the secret. They solemnly swore to leave the treasure where it was found, as if it were an “embalmed” bank account that could be withdrawn as needed. It’s hard to believe, but the secret was kept for 6 years, during which time the family became rich. But finally, on July 5, 1881, representatives of the Cairo Museum led by Abd-el-Rasul came to the entrance on the cliff.

            The chosen representative was not Professor Maspero, who was busy working away, and ironically not the young assistant with the greatest merit, but Emil Brugsch-Bey, the younger brother of the famous Egyptologist. Heinrich Brugsch, then a conservator at the Egyptian Museum in Cairo. He went to Luxor to find his young assistant lying in bed with a fever. He also visited the governor in a diplomatic capacity. Everyone agreed that to prevent the treasure from being damaged, the tomb should be confiscated by the authorities. On the morning of July 5, Emil Brugsch-Bey, accompanied by an Arab aide and Abd-el-Rasul, set out for the mausoleum. What he soon saw he would never forget.

            After a period of arduous climbing, Abd-el-Rasul stopped and pointed to an opening that was poorly covered by rocks. It’s in a discreet location out of direct sight. No wonder it went unnoticed for three thousand years.

            Abd-el-Rasul took the rope off his shoulder, and hung the rope down the entrance hole, and told Brugsch that he should climb down into the tunnel himself. Brugsch did not hesitate. He had the heart to leave the criminal in question with his trusted Arab assistant at the mouth of the bunker. He dropped down, dropping one hand after the other, cautiously, not without realizing that he might be the victim of a trick by a clever thief. Maybe in his heart he also hoped for an amazing discovery, but he certainly had no inkling of what was really waiting for him down there.

            The tunnel is about 35 feet (about 10 meters) deep. When he set foot at the bottom of the tunnel, he lit the torch, moved forward a few steps and turned a rather sharp turn – and before his eyes was the first giant sarcophagus.

            One of the largest sarcophagi is just past the outer entrance to the tunnel. An inscription indicates that it contains the mummy of Sethos I, the same mummy that Belzoni complacently found in October 1817 at the Pharaoh’s original resting place in the Valley of the Kings . The flickering light of the torch revealed more coffins, and countless treasures according to Egyptian burial customs were scattered on the floor of the room and the coffins. Brugsch walked further inside, pushing things aside as he went. Finally the main burial chamber appeared, seemingly endless in the dim light. Coffins lie everywhere; Some lids were pried open, others were still closed. Surrounding the mummies were countless tools and decorations. The sight took Brugsch’s breath away; for he was standing among the bodies of the most powerful rulers of the ancient Egyptian world.

            Sometimes crawling on his hands and knees, sometimes standing upright, Brugsch found the mummy, among many others, of Amosis I (1580-1555 BC), the Pharaoh who made his name for driving out the last of the barbarian Hyksos, the “shepherd kings.” Brugsch also discovered the mummy of the first king Amenophis (1555-1545 BC), who later became the guardian of the cemeteries of Thebes. Among the countless coffins containing the bodies of lesser-known Egyptian kings he finally found the mummies of the two greatest Pharaohs, whose names resonated throughout the ages. century without the help of archaeologists or historians. At this point he had to sit down, still holding the torch, stunned by his discovery. He found the bodies of Thotmes III (1501-1447 BC) and of Ramses II (1298-1232 BC) at whose court Moses, the lawgiver for the Jewish people and the Western world , is said to be an adult. These two Pharaohs ruled for 54 and 66 years, respectively, over empires that they not only created but also knew how to keep intact for a long time.

            When Brugsch, still stunned and not knowing where to begin, glanced at the inscriptions on the coffin, his eyes happened to fall on the story of these “wandering mummies”. He began to imagine the countless nights the priests worked hard to protect these dead Pharaohs from theft and harm. He thought of them laboriously removing the coffins from the original tombs, and transporting them, often at several stops, to Deir el-Bahri, where they placed them in new stone sarcophagi, this one close to that one. At a glance he could seem to see how fear and desperate haste had wielded the whip, for some of the coffins remained in the same position lying sideways against the wall of the room in the same position as they were. flag falls. Later, in Cairo, with deep emotion he read the messages left by the priests on the coffin walls – the journeys of the deceased Egyptian kings.

            People counted no less than 40 bodies of kings gathered here. Forty mummies! Forty sarcophagi contained the remains of those who once ruled the Egyptian world as gods, and who for three thousand years had rested until first a thief, and then later, Emil Brugsch -Bey, once again look at them.

            Despite all the painstaking care that went into preparing their bodies for immortality, Egyptian kings were often pessimistic: “ Those who build with granite, place a hall in the heart of the pyramid. their towers, and create beauty from their masterpieces. . . Their stone altars are as empty as the stone altars of the weary, those who died on the dike without leaving anyone to mourn .

            These fears did not prevent them from taking extra precautions in carefully preserving their bodies. Herodotus describes the funeral rites prepared for the dead during his travels in Egypt (the following quote is from Howard Carter):

            “When a man of rank dies, the women of the family immediately smear lime on his head, and sometimes even mud on his face; and then, leaving the body lying in the house, walked out of the house and wandered through the city, with his shirt tied with a ribbon, his belly bare, pounding his chest as he walked. All the relatives attended with them and acted similarly. You guys also tie up your clothes and beat your chest. After this ritual is completed, the body is brought to the place of embalming.”

            Inseparable from the topic of royal burial and theft is the embalming process. The word mummy has several meanings. According to the survey of the 12th century Arab traveler Abd al-Latif, “mummy” is a cheap medicinal herb. Mumiya, or mumiyai , is an Arabic word, and in the sense used by Abd al-Latif means bitumen (tar). In places where tar oozes from rocks, such as at Mummy Mountain, in Derabgerd, Persia. When Abd al-Latif said mummy he meant a mixture of pitch and myrrh. As late as the 16th and 17th centuries – in fact, even 100 years ago – there was still a bustling sale of a preparation called “mummy,” a medicinal substance used to treat broken bones and injuries. Mummy also means fur and hair cut from living people. These ingredients, in terms of magic, are used as charms and exorcisms. Today the word mummy almost always means mummy, especially bodies preserved in the ancient Egyptian style. It is necessary to distinguish between natural and artificial mummies. Natural mummies are mummies that are preserved from decomposition thanks to favorable natural conditions rather than special chemical treatments.

Bodies in the Capuchin monastery in Palermo, in the monastery in the church of St. Bernard, in the lead vault at Bremen Cathedral, and in Quedlinburg Castle are all naturally mummified. The distinction between the natural and the artificial still holds today, but Elliot Smith’s extensive research, and Douglas E. Derry’s analysis of Tutankhamen’s mummy, have demonstrated that it was the country’s consistently dry weather. The area of ​​the Nile, and the absence of bacteria in the sand and air, are more likely to be responsible for the excellent state of preservation of Egyptian mummies than the materials used in their preparation. embalming process. The mummies were dug up intact from sand tombs, although not placed in coffins and without removing internal organs. Bodies from the ground, it was discovered, had withstood the ravages of time as well, perhaps better, than those that had been handled with care. Some embalmed bodies were putrid, or congealed into shapeless masses, despite being embalmed with an abundance of resin, tar, and myrrh, among others – as described in the Rhind Papyrus – “water from Elephantine, salt from Eileithyiaspolis, and milk from the city of Kim.”

            During the 19th century it was widely believed that the Egyptians possessed a secret chemical knowledge. Even today no complete and absolutely authentic record of the mummification process has been discovered. But at least we now know that chemical treatments have as little preservative effect as mystical or religious invocations. Likewise, we must consider the fact that over the course of the millennium the art of embalming underwent many changes.

            Mariette observed that the mummies at Memphis, which belonged to an earlier period, were almost black, calcified, and fragile. Later Thebes samples are yellowish in color, have an iridescent coating, and are often flexible, showing inconsistencies that cannot be explained by differences in time alone.

            Herodotus reported that there were three methods of embalming, the first method was three times more expensive than the second method, the third method – the method used for low-ranking officials – was the cheapest. (The average farmer did not embalm his body at all. He simply left his body to be processed by the dry Egyptian weather.)

            In the earliest times embalmers could only preserve the outside of the body. Later, people found a way to keep the skin from wrinkling, thanks to which people today can find mummies with identifiable personal characteristics.

            Bodies are usually handled in the following way: First, the brain is completely pulled out through the nostrils with an iron hook. Then the chest was opened with a stone knife, and the internal organs were removed. Another method is to completely remove the internal organs through the anus. The organs were then kept in jars called “canopic jars,” or large earthen jars. The heart is removed and replaced with a stone scarab statue. The body was then washed and soaked for more than a month in salt water. Finally, the body was dried – a process that, according to some accounts, took up to 70 days.

            The impregnated body was then buried in several interlocking wooden coffins shaped like human bodies, and the coffins were then placed in a stone sarcophagus. The body is placed in the innermost coffin in a side lying position. The hands are folded across the chest or abdomen or even down to the sides. Hair is usually cut short, although ladies often allow it to be left long, after being curled to look beautiful. The hair on the lower body is shaved clean.

            To preserve the body from the penetration of destructive substances, the holes in the body are sealed with lime, sand, resin, sawdust, and linen pellets. . . with aromatic substances, sometimes using onions, mixed into the plugs. The women’s breasts are further padded. Then came the tedious step of wrapping the body in linen sheets or cloth bandages. The wrapping fabric, over time, will completely absorb the glue that is filled so much that archaeologists have great difficulty removing it all. Thieves, whose sole purpose is to steal all the valuable jewelry hidden in the fabric, simply cut through the fabric and then rip it off.

            In 1898 Loret, director general of antiquities, opened the tomb of Amenophis II. He also found “wandering mummies,” specifically, 13 royal mummies that were painstakingly collected for monks to preserve during the 21st Dynasty, working long hours in the dark. But Loret could not find a treasure comparable to the one Brugsch had found just a few years before. While the mummies themselves were not desecrated – Amenophis remained in the sarcophagus – everything else was stolen. But just a year or two after Sir William Garstin had people build a wall to enclose the tomb again, so that the dead kings could rest in peace, modern tomb robbers broke in, pulled Amenophis out of his coffin and destroyed it. serious damage to the mummy. They must have shared with the guards, as have most thieves for thousands of years. That further proves that Brugsch did a good job cleaning up the mass mausoleum he found; If you don’t act for fear of disrespect, it will cause, as always, serious consequences.

            Returning to Emil Brugsch-Bey, as he climbed back up that narrow tunnel, leaving 40 dead kings behind, he thought a lot about ways and means to ensure their safety. If left as it is, it will invite looters. But to clean it up and transport it to Cairo, it took a lot of workers – and they had to be hired all the way to Kurna, the lair of the Abd-el-Rasul thieves! When Brugsch went to see the governor again, he decided to do so, despite the risks. The next morning he was back in the tunnel, with three hundred peasants. He ordered the conferment 

clear the area. With his loyal Egyptian assistant he recruited a small group who seemed more trustworthy than the others. While this group took care of the heavy lifting – it turned out that lifting some of the heaviest items required 16 people – moved the valuable items to the ground one by one, recorded it, and arranged it neatly with The rest are at the foot of the hill. This job takes 48 hours. Howard Carter succinctly commented: “We don’t do things so fast these days!” This haste turned out to be redundant, because the steamer for Cairo arrived several days late. Brugsch-Bey ordered the mummies packed, the coffins covered, and transported to Luxor. It took until July 14 for them to board the ship.

But then Brugsch witnessed an event that impressed seasoned scientists even more than the discovery of the treasures. Because the scene he witnessed as the steamship slowly sailed on the Nile River influenced not only the scientific community but also those who remained respectful. 

            News of the cargo the steamship was transporting spread like wildfire through every village along the banks of the Nile and farther inland. And that clearly shows that the ancient Egyptians’ belief in their kings as gods is not dead yet. Standing on the deck of the ship, Brugsch saw hundreds of farmers with their wives and children escorting the ship along the riverbank from Luxor down, new people following old people left behind as they moved along as far as Qift and Qena, at the wide bend of the Nile. You shot guns to send the Pharaohs to their deaths, in

when the women threw clay and dust on their faces and bodies and rubbed sand on their breasts. The sounds of wailing that followed the ship could be heard from afar. It was a magical procession, spontaneous, unvarnished, filled with emotion and grief.

            Brugsch could hardly bear to see this scene and quickly turned away. Was what he did right? Is it true that in the eyes of the people who are mourning and beating their chests in grief, he himself is no better than a grave robber, just one of those who violate the sacred resting place of the past? a thousand years? Is it enough to acknowledge that he is serving the ideals of science?

            Years later, Howard Carter provided a clear answer to this confusing question. Regarding the events surrounding Amenophis’s tomb, he commented:

            One moral issue we can draw from this event, and we celebrate it even though critics accuse us of being vandals by removing antiquities from mausoleums. By transferring antiquities to museums we actually ensure their safety: left as they are, sooner or later, it is inevitable that they will become easy prey for thieves, and that’s how it goes. will end.”

            When Brugsch arrived in Cairo, he enriched not only a museum but the whole world with evidence of the irrecoverable grandeur and splendor that had once been a part of it.

1. CARTER:  TUTANKHAMEN’S TOMB

In 1902 Theodore Davis, an American, received permission from the Egyptian government to conduct excavations in the Valley of the Kings. There he dug for 12 long winters. Davis discovered valuable tombs such as those of Thotmes IV, of Siptah, and of Horemheb. He also found the mummy and coffin of the great “heretic king,” Amenophis IV, whose other name, Ikhnaton, was a religious reformer who for a time introduced sun worship. to replace the traditional Egyptian form of religion. Amenophis is remembered for saying, “The sun disk is satisfied,” and for the beautifully colored bust of his wife, Nefertiti, a famous work of Egyptian sculpture (pictured below).

In the first year of World War I, Davis ceded the franchise to Lord Carnarvon and Howard Carter, and with this began the most important excavation in Egypt. The story of this project, as Carnarvon’s sister later told in her sketch of her brother’s life, “begins like Aladdin’s magic lamp and ends like the Greek saga Nemesis.

            The discovery of Tutankhamen’s tomb represents the pinnacle of achievement in archaeological efforts. It is nothing less than a milestone in archaeological drama, a drama in which the subject matter was systematized, methodized, and specialized by Winckelmann and a long succession of others. The first thorny knots in a growing web of action were tied by Champollion, Grotefend, and Rawlinson. The archaeologists who followed to speed up the action and receive applause for their mid-stage performance were Mariette, Lepsius, and Petrie in Egypt, Botta and Layard in Mesopotamia, and Stephens and Thompson in Yucatan. The action builds to a breathtaking climax with the discoveries of Schliemann and Evans, one at Troy, the other at Knossos, and the discoveries of Koldewey and Woolley in Babylon and Ur, the home of Abraham. Schliemann was the last of the great amateurs. By the time Lord Carnarvon and Carter appeared on the scene, entire teams of experts were hard at work at Knossos and Babylon and other ancient sites.

            States, princes, wealthy Mæcenases, famous universities, archaeological institutes, and private individuals of means from all over the world sent surveying missions with modern equipment to every country. corners of the antique world. But the discovery of Tutankamen’s tomb summed up on a grand scale everything that had previously been only scattered achievements. This victory is a victory of the scientific method. Layard’s work was hindered by superstitious follies, and Evans’s by jealousy of office, but all such difficulties were overcome in Carnarvon-Carter’s survey by the full support of the Egyptian government. The professional jealousy that had damaged Rawlinson’s reputation and made Schliemann’s life a living hell was now replaced by international cooperation and willing support from many diverse scientific fields. The pioneering phase of archeology has ended. Howard Carter was a student of Petrie and thus had access to the older tradition. Under his auspices, however, Egyptology ceased to be a haphazard swing of a shovel in an obscure field and became a kind of process of cultural investigation, marked by a rigorous adherence to to the method.

            Yet because he never lost inspiration and a sense for the whole, Carter was able to exploit scientific precision and rigor to the fullest. It was this combination of small and extensive thoughtfulness that made Carter one of the greatest figures in the history of archaeology. He claims to belong to a select group whose primary concern is solving cultural mysteries.

            Lord Carnarvon was a personality that could not have come from anywhere else but in England, a mixture of sporting spirit and collecting, a gentleman and a world traveler, a realist in action and romance in emotions. As a student at Trinity College in Cambridge, he paid out of his own pocket to restore the original beauty of the baseboards in his room, which over time had become distorted, peeling and faded. From a young age, he frequented antique shops, and later became an enthusiastic collector of engravings and pencil drawings. At the same time, he also frequented horse races, was a skilled marksman thanks to diligent training, and was also a famous sailboat racer. At the age of 23, he had a decent fortune and sailed around the world. The third car licensed in England was his, and driving fast became his passion. It was this crazy passion that created a decisive turning point in his life. Around 1900, the car he was driving at full throttle overturned on the way to Bad Langenschwalbach and he was seriously injured. For the rest of his life he suffered from shortness of breath, a condition that prevented him from living in England during the winter. For this reason, in 1903 he first went to Egypt in search of a warm climate and during that time he visited the excavation sites of several archaeological teams.

            He immediately found in archeology an opportunity to combine the excitement of collecting objets d’art [French, meaning objects of fine art ] and the joy of sporting chance. In 1906 he began excavating himself. That winter, knowing that he did not have enough professional knowledge, he went to Professor Maspero for advice. Maspero introduced him to young Howard Carter as an archaeological assistant.

            This partnership will demonstrate an extraordinarily happy outcome. Howard Carter can provide all the qualities that Lord Carnarvon lacks. He was a thoroughly knowledgeable scholar who, before becoming long-term supervisor of all Lord Carnarvon’s digs, had had considerable experience with Petrie and Davis. At the same time, he did not appear to be a genuine collector of knowledge, although some critics complained that he was pseudo-scholarly. In practical terms, he is a resourceful person, and when it comes to tasks that require energy and challenges, no one can surpass him. This is demonstrated in the risky incident that occurred in 1916.

            At that time Carter was on short leave in Luxor. One day the village elders came to him in a state of confusion and begged him for help. The war began to be felt even in Luxor, and the bureaucracy, including the police force, was significantly cut back. As a result, Abd-el-Rasul’s daring descendants returned to grave robbing.

            A group of Egyptian tomb robbers did business on the west bank of the mountain beyond the Valley of the Kings. Another competing gang, hearing this news, armed themselves to try to force the other gang to share the stolen goods. What happened next was like in the movie.

            The two gangs rushed into a fierce battle. The first group of grave robbers were beaten to a pulp and chased out of the field, but there was still a risk of further bloodshed. Carter decided to intervene.

            “It was already evening,” he wrote later, “so I hastily gathered together a few of my men who had escaped military service, and with the necessary provisions set out for the scene, a The trek involves climbing the 1,800-foot Kurna hills under moonlight. We arrived at midnight, and the guide showed me the end of a rope hanging above the surface of the cliff. Listening, we could clearly hear the thieves busy at work, so first I cut the rope, thus cutting off their means of escape, and then, using a strong rope of alone, I swung myself down the rocky slope. Climbing down a rope in the middle of the night, right into the lair of industrious grave robbers, is

a pastime that in the least does not lack excitement. There were 8 guys on the move, and when I reached the bottom of the tunnel they were really panicking. I gave them the choice of either escaping with my rope, or staying with no means of escape, and eventually they understood the reason and left. I stayed at the mausoleum all that night. . . “

            Lord Carnarvon and Howard Carter threw themselves into work. It was not until the fall of 1917 that they were able to proceed on a scale that promised success. And then something often experienced in archeology happened by chance. By pure luck on the first try the small area in the Valley of the Kings where excavation was allowed was monitored to avoid attack. However, almost immediately, external troubles stopped the project. Critical considerations, reservations, doubts, and, above all, expert trickery delay – indeed, almost prevent – ​​success.

            In this respect we recall Cavaliere Alcubierre, a Neapolitan who, on April 6, 1748, thanks to a similar stroke of luck, hit the very center of Pompeii, but in his excitement wanted to dig a new and good location. Than has filled in the original excavations to explore elsewhere first. Only a few years later did he know that the first location was the correct place to proceed.

            Carnarvon and Carter look down on the Valley of the Kings. Dozens of others had dug there before them, but none of those who had gone before had left behind precise drawings or even rough sketches to guide future surveyors. Piles of rubble were everywhere, making the valley look like a scene on the moon. Among the piles of rubble, like mine gates, are the entrances to quarried mausoleums. A possible excavation plan is to systematically dig down into the rock formation. Carter proposed excavating in a triangular area bounded by the tombs of Ramses II, Merneptah, and Ramses VI. “We have clear hopes of finding the tomb of a particular king, and that king is Tu.ankh.Amen,” he declared.

            Exactly one hundred years ago, Belzoni, after opening the tombs of Ramses I, Sethos I, and of Eje and Mentuherkhepesh, wrote: “Judging by my recent discoveries, I am of the firm opinion that in the Valley Biban el-Muluk has no remaining tombs other than the ones we know today. Because, before leaving this place, I tried my best within my limited ability to find another mausoleum, but without success. And, the evidence is even greater, independent of my own research, after I left this place Mr. Salt, the British consul, excavated there for four months to find another tomb, but in vain. .” Twenty-seven years after Belzoni – that is, in 1844 – the mighty Prussian survey entered the Valley of the Kings and measured the entire area in detail. When they left, their leader, Richard Lepsius, was also of the opinion that everything worth finding had been found. This did not prevent Loret, shortly before the new century, from finding more tombs, and Davis found others soon after Loret. But now every grain of sand in the Valley, it seemed, had been sifted three times and thrown away. When Maspero, the director of the Egyptian Antiquities Department, signed the concession to Lord Carnarvon, he said quite frankly that he considered the area exhausted and that further exploration would be a waste of time. The valley, in his expert opinion, simply had nothing left to offer.

So what, despite all the discouraging advice, gave Carter hope of finding not just any ancient tomb, but a specific tomb? He himself knew well what Davis discovered, and in Davis’s collection there was a ceramic cup named Tutankhamen. This cup Davis found hidden under a rock. In the same location, Davis also discovered a small stone tomb, and in the tomb a broken wooden box containing a gold leaf also bearing the name Tutankhamen. Davis also made the mistake of hastily concluding that the stone tomb was Tutankhamen’s tomb. Carter, however, thought differently, and his skepticism was reinforced when a third discovery by Davis was not properly identified. This third find included several pieces of apparently worthless pottery and a bundle of linen, hidden in large ceramic vessels with sealed mouths and hieratic inscriptions on the shoulders. A second survey, conducted at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, showed that it was certain that the urns and their contents were burial materials used in Tutankhamen’s burial. Furthermore, Davis later found clay seals with the name Tutankhamen in the tomb of Ikhnaton, the heretic King.

            All this evidence points to one conclusion: the existence of Tutankhamen’s tomb. It seems that Carter was justified from the start in assuming, despite most doubts, that the tomb must be located somewhere in the middle of the Valley, very certainly near the site of Davis’s discoveries. But when three thousand years of erosion and destruction are considered, the outlook is not entirely rosy. During these three thousand years the objects in countless tombs were removed by tomb robbers and priests. On the other hand, in the early days archaeological research was often poorly managed, and it is impossible to know what damage this caused. Carter’s four relics were some pieces of gold leaf, a ceramic cup, some ceramic vases, and some clay seals. Placing hope on such flimsy evidence with a positive belief based on instinct will find Tutankhamen’s tomb actually shooting at the farthest target.

            Once Carnarvon and Carter got their hands dirty, in one winter they cleared the interior of the triangle of a large portion of the upper layers of rubble and dug to the base of Ramses VI’s tomb. “Here we found a series of workers’ huts, built on blocks of flint, which in the Valley often indicates that there must be a tomb nearby.

            What happened next was extremely exciting, seen in the context of a Tutankhamen play. Because if we try to expand the excavation area further in the expected direction, it will block the entrance to Ramses’ tomb, a place very familiar to tourists, the work must stop until it can proceed without interruption. hamper. Excavations continued in the winter of 1919-20, and at the entrance to the tomb of Ramses VI a small but archaeologically important deposit of funerary materials was unearthed. “This is the closest we’ve come to an actual discovery to date in the Valley,” Carter commented.

            They have now excavated the entire triangle except for the workers’ tents. Once again they left this last place untouched, for fear of inconvenience to visitors, and moved to another location. In a small valley next to where the tomb of Thotmes III was located, they dug for two more winters, finding nothing of value.

            Now they stop to evaluate and consider the important plan of moving to a completely new location, because after several years of effort, only a relatively small result has been achieved. Only the site of the workers’ tents and the flint block have not been surveyed, which, as I have said, is at the base of the tomb of Ramses VI. After much hesitation and several reversals of plans, they decided that the group would spend one last winter in the Valley of the Kings.

            This time Carter came to work at the location where he should have focused six years ago. The workers’ tents had just been demolished and the ground underneath cleared when he came face to face with the entrance to the tomb of Tutankhamen, the richest man in Egypt. “The dramatic surprise of the initial discovery,” Carter wrote, “stunned me, and the following months were so full of circumstances that I scarcely had time to think.”

            On November 3, 1922 – at this time Lord Carnarvon was in London – Carter began demolishing the workers’ tents. The next morning a step cut in the rock was discovered below the first tent. By the afternoon of November 5, the rubble had cleared enough so that there was no longer any doubt that the entrance to the tomb had appeared.

            But it is also possible that this is an unfinished mausoleum, one that may have never been used. And if the tomb contained a mummy, it may, like so many other tombs, have been plundered. And maybe, to complete the list of pessimistic possibilities, the mummy is still there, but is nothing more than the tomb of a high-ranking official or priest of some kind.

            Work was rushed, and Carter’s excitement grew as the day passed. One step at a time emerged from the pile of rubble, and as the Egyptian night suddenly descended, a twelfth step appeared, revealing “the upper part of a doorframe, blockaded, plastered with lime, and sealed . A sealed door frame – that’s true, so what now!. . . It was a thrilling moment for an excavator.”

            Carter examined the seal and found that it was indeed the seal of the royal cemetery. The royal seal is clear evidence that someone with a very high position resides within it. Since the workers’ tents were located directly above the entrance, it was obvious that the tomb had not been plundered since at least the Twentieth Dynasty. And when Carter, who was shaking with shock, drilled a hole in the stone door “large enough to fit an electric torch,” he discovered that the passage behind the door was filled with large rocks and rubble – an additional guarantee. Furthermore, elaborate protection measures have been taken for the mausoleum.

            Leaving his most trusted men to guard the tomb, Carter took off his donkey and descended into the Valley under the moonlight, trying to resist the overflowing temptation: “Anything, exactly anything, could be in the passage behind the door frame, and I need to be calm so as not to break the door frame, but to survey here and there,” he wrote, describing his feelings after looking through the drilled hole. Now once more, as the donkey trotted him home, he was tormented by desire, by impatience, by an inner voice telling him that he was on the verge of boundless discoveries. Yet this man, at last making his great discovery after six years of hopeless toil, still had enough self-control to cover the tomb and wait for his sponsor and friend, Lord Carnarvon, arrive before proceeding to explore.

            On the morning of November 6 Carter sent the following telegram to Lord Carnarvon: “Fantastic discovery at last in the valley; a magnificent mausoleum with its seal intact; closed it up waiting for him to return; congratulations.” On November 8 he received two replies from Carnarvon: “May come soon”; and “Planning to arrive in Alexandria on the 20th.”

            On the 23rd Lord Carnarvon, accompanied by his daughter, arrived at Luxor. For more than two weeks, Carter waited tirelessly, always carefully guarding the hidden entrance to the mausoleum. Two days after discovering the stairs, he received congratulatory letters pouring in. But what exactly is congratulations for? What’s in the tomb? Carter couldn’t say anything at this time. If he had dug just a few inches deeper, he would have come across the unmistakable seal of Tutankhamen himself. “If only I knew. . . I would have cleaned up,” Carter said, “and would have slept well many nights without tossing and turning.”

            On the afternoon of November 24, workers cleaned up the pile of rubble on the last steps. Carter walked down the 16 steps and stood before the sealed door. Now he could see clearly the mark on Tutankhamen’s seal. And he knew immediately – as is typical of the Egyptologist’s experience – that someone else had been here before him. Here, thieves practiced their trade. “Now that the whole door has come into light,” said Carter, “it is possible to distinguish an event that had previously escaped notice – that there had been two successive openings and partial closings of the door. door surface: furthermore, the previously discovered seal, the jackal with nine prisoners [cemetery seal], was made in the closed parts, while the seals of Tut.ankh .Amen covers the untouched part of the door frame, which are the wedge marks that were placed to protect the tomb from the beginning. So the tomb is not absolutely intact, as we had hoped. Tomb robbers had broken in, and broken in more than once – from the evidence of the tents above, the robbers dated no older than the reign of Ramses IV – but the evidence that they had not looted lies in The tomb has been sealed.”

            But there are more revelations in store for Carter. His confusion and doubt gradually increased. When he had cleared away all the broken stones blocking the stairs, he found ceramic vases and wooden boxes, the wooden boxes had the names Ikhnaton, Sakeres, and Tutankhamen engraved on them, as well as a scarab belonging to Thotmes. III, and another engraved with the name Amenophis III. Do all these names mean that, contrary to all expectations, this is a communal grave and not a separate grave?

            We can only know for sure after opening the tomb. The following days this was carried out. The first time I looked through the drilled hole, the passage inside was clogged with debris. This rubble consists of two types of stone that can be clearly distinguished. The shoulder-wide entrance cut out by the tomb robbers was blocked with black flint.

            After a few days of hard work, the excavation team, having advanced 32 feet (nearly 10 meters) into the passage, found themselves blocked by a second door. The imprints of Tutankhamen’s royal wedge and the cemetery wedge are also on this door, but there are also traces of an intruder who broke in through this second blockade.

            Based on the similarity in the layout of the Ikhnaton cache found nearby, it was easy for Carnarvon and Carter to believe at this point that they were facing a mass mausoleum, and not a mausoleum. Origin of an Egyptian king. And is there much to expect from a hiding place, especially one that has been visited by thieves?

            For a moment, their hope died. However, tension increased even more when the rubble was cleared from the second door. “The decisive moment had come,” Carter said. “With trembling hands I broke a small hole in the upper left corner of the door frame.”

            Taking an iron probe, Carter poked through the door and found it empty on the other side. He lit candles to protect against toxic fumes. Then the hole is widened.

            People interested in the project now crowded around. Lord Carnarvon, his daughter, Lady Evelyn, and Callender, the Egyptologist, who had rushed to his aid when news of the discovery first arrived, all looked on. Nervously, Carter lit a match, lit the candle, and held the candle toward the opening. As his head leaned into the opening – he actually trembled with anticipation and curiosity – the warm air escaping from the room on the other side of the door caused the candle to flicker. For a moment, Carter, his eyes fixed on the opening and the candlelight burning inside, could make out nothing. Then, as his eyes gradually became accustomed to the flickering light, he clearly distinguished the shapes, then their shadows, then the first colors. Not a sound escaped his mouth; he seemed mute. The others waited for what seemed like an eternity. Finally, Carnarvon could no longer be patient and asked urgently: “Did you see something?”

            Carter, slowly turned his head, his voice trembling: “Yes, wonderful things.”

            “Certainly never before in the entire history of excavation had such an extraordinary sight appeared before our eyes in the light of the torch.” Carter wrote so, announcing the scene that appeared before the excavation team’s eyes, as each person in turn peered into the hole. When the door was actually opened, on the 17th, his description proved to be no exaggeration at all. The light of a strong electric lamp moved over golden couches, a gold-encrusted throne; whose soft reflections highlighted the two large black statues, the alabaster vases, and the strange altar. The dark silhouettes of grotesque animal heads were printed on the wall. A golden snake poked its head out of the open doorway of one of the altars. Two statues of kings face each other like sentinels, “dressed in golden dresses, golden shoes, armed with axes and clubs, and on their foreheads is a protective cobra.”

            Amidst all this splendor, an abundance that the eye could not possibly take in in a single glance, they once again discerned traces of intrusion. At the door there was a jar half full of mortar, and nearby a lamp that had turned black. There were fingerprints on the once freshly painted surface, and on the doorstep a wreath was left behind when someone left.

            Too many emotions made them dumbfounded, it took a moment before Carter and Carnarvon were startled to realize there was no sarcophagus or mummy in this treasure museum. The question of whether they were facing a royal mausoleum or a hiding place once again appeared in their minds.

Looking more closely across the wall, they discovered there was a third sealed door between the two guard statues. On the 27th of the month, with the help of powerful electric lights set up by Callender, they investigated the sealed door. They found a small hole had been cut near the bottom, which was then filled and sealed. Obviously the tomb robbers had penetrated through the antechamber, which was the name they gave to the first room of the mausoleum. What’s in that room or passage over there? If there is a mummy on the other side of the door, is it still untouched? The situation is still shrouded in secrecy. It is essentially unlike any previous experience; It also raises the question of why the thieves went through all the trouble of breaking in through the third door without escaping with precious possessions at hand. What happened to them that made them indifferent to the pile of solid gold lying in the front room?

As Carter studied this incredible treasure trove, he realized that the artifacts in the antechamber had both aesthetic and historical value, exceeding the value of the precious metal used in quantity. great in creation. What information do these silent objects bring to archaeology? There are countless things of Egyptian origin that have practical and cultural usefulness as well as luxury, every single one of which can be considered a rich reward for a season’s arduous digging. winter. They reveal Egyptian art of a certain period of such vitality and force that a mere glance was enough to convince Carter that a detailed study of the collection would “bring about a corrective , if not a complete revolution, of all our old ideas.”

            It wasn’t long before another discovery was made. Someone, looking under one of the three large sofas, found a hole. He called the others to come and crawl with him, carrying an electric lamp. Now they were looking inside a small side room, or side room, smaller than the front room, filled with all kinds of materials, utensils and decorations. The thief, after visiting, did not bother to tidy up this room, as well as the front room. The thief who ransacked the place “went about his business completely like an earthquake.” The intruders have disturbed everything. Apparently they threw items from the father’s room all over the front room, damaging a few things. But it was clear that they only took very little, not even the items that fit their palms once they passed the second door. Were they discovered during their actions?

            The discovery of the extra room creates a sobering effect. Up to this point the situation had been felt in an outpouring of excitement, causing confusion on the whole. Now that the investigators can calm down, they know that even greater treasures may be waiting for them behind the third sealed door. They also recognized an extraordinary scientific task confronting them, one that required massive organization and manpower. The discoveries already made, not to mention those yet to come, may never be resolved in a single winter.

1. CARTER:  THE Curse of the Pharaohs

Carnarvon and Carter decided to cover the newly excavated tomb. Carter saw very clearly that under no circumstances could he rush into the task of removing the objects contained in the antechamber and ancillary rooms. Putting aside the need to accurately record the exact locations of all objects – to determine temporary and other reference points – Carter realized that many items were in a state of disrepair and needed treated for preservation before, or immediately after, being relocated. For this purpose it is necessary to arrange in a large stockpile of preservation and packaging materials. Expert advice is needed to find the best course of action, and a field laboratory to conduct on-site analysis. The classification of monumental finds itself requires rigorously organized preparation. The measures that need to be taken are beyond the reach of available means. Carnarvon would have to go to England, and Carter at least to Cairo. On December 3, the entrance to the tomb was sealed off, a move that showed that Carter still thought that tomb robbery was still a factor to consider. Only when he sealed the tomb and assigned Callender to guard Carter did he feel secure. And immediately after arriving in Cairo, he ordered a heavy steel door to be made to cover the inner front door.

            Since the tomb was discovered, countless offers of support have poured in from all over the world. Outside experts then contributed many ideas to improve the comprehensiveness and accuracy of the most exemplary Egyptian excavation. AM Lythgoe, manager of the Egyptian department at the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art, sent Carter the American photographer Harry Burton for his use. He also sent draftsmen Hall and Hauser, as well as AC Macedonia, director of the museum excavations at the pyramids of Lisht. In Cairo, A. Lucas, director of the Egyptian government’s chemical department, who was about to take a three-month leave before retiring, also stopped to go and help Carter. Dr. Alan Gardner handled the inscriptions, and Professor James H. Breasted of the University of Chicago rushed to the scene to lend a hand in determining the historical significance of the door seals.

            Then – on November 11, 1925 – Dr. Saleh Bey Hamdi and Douglas E. Derry, professor of anatomy at the University of Egypt, began examining the mummy. A. Lucas wrote a fairly comprehensive study of “The Chemistry of Tombs, the special things that happen to metals, minerals, fats, dyes, textiles and the like.” PE Newberry analyzed the wreaths found in Tutankhamen’s coffin and identified flower varieties that were present nearly 3,300 years ago. He could have stated that Tutankhamen was buried between late April and mid-May, because he understood that flowers such as picris and amaryllis only bloomed during this time.  

            On December 16 the mausoleum was reopened, on December 18 photographer Burton took the first pictures in the antechamber, and on December 27 the first object was removed from the tomb.

            Being a perfectionist takes a lot of time. Work on Tutankhamen’s tomb lasted several seasons. Here I only discuss the highlights of Howard Carter’s colorful report. Just a few of these beautiful objects will be mentioned here; For example, the painted wooden chest from the antechamber (pictured below), is a testament to one of the greatest treasures of Egyptian art. It is completely covered with a thin layer of gesso, or plaster, and painted on all four sides with lovely decorations, in which the expressive use of color is combined with exquisite virtuosity in the strokes. draw. The details of the hunting and battle scenes depicted on the chest are composed with a delicacy that, as Carter says, “exceeds anything of its kind that Egypt has ever produced.” This decorative wooden chest is filled with diverse artifacts. Typical of Carter’s comprehensive approach is the fact that he spent three weeks of diligent effort to complete this wooden chest.

Equally impressive are three animal-shaped sofas, which have never been found before. The first chair is shaped like a lion (pictured below left), the second is shaped like a cow, and the third is shaped like a mixed animal, part rhinoceros, part crocodile. All three chairs were literally lying around mixed in with other precious items, crowded around them and on top of them were all kinds of weapons, jewelry, and pieces of fabric. Below the sofa is a throne (pictured below right) that at first glance makes Carter exclaim “without hesitation” that it is “the most beautiful thing ever found in Egypt.”

Finally, we must mention the four chariots, so large that the axles had to be cut in half to be placed in the tomb (pictured below). The thieves, moreover, disassembled the parts and left them everywhere. All four cars are completely covered in gold. Every inch is decorated with reliefs and scenes carved into gilded gold or decorated with stone or stained glass.   

            On May 13 thirty-four heavy crates were loaded onto carts and dragged on the movable railway, five and a half miles to the steam barges waiting on the banks of the Nile. The treasures were carried away from the tomb by the same route they had come, in a solemn ceremony three thousand years ago. Seven days later they were in Cairo.

            In mid-February the room was cleaned. The space was prepared for a phase of the project that everyone was eagerly looking forward to: The opening of the sealed door between the two guard statues. The question of whether that back room contains a mummy or not will soon be answered. On Friday, February 17, when about 20 people who had the privilege of witnessing the opening of the seal gathered in the vestibule, excitement ran high. Yet no one there could have predicted what they would encounter two hours later. After the discoveries of treasures, it is difficult to imagine that there are other more important and valuable treasures that will come to light.     

            The guests – archaeologists and Egyptian officials – sat down on rows of folding chairs. A frozen silence enveloped the audience as Carter stepped onto the newly built platform to facilitate breaking the sealed door.

            Carter carefully pried off the top layer of plaster. This takes a lot of time, because it has to be meticulous, there is always the risk of loose stones falling inside, possibly causing damage to the treasure on the other side of the door. He also tried his best to preserve the seal image because it has high scientific value. Once he had made a small opening, he recounted, “how irresistible the temptation was to stop and look in every moment.”

            Mace and Callender now stepped forward to give Carter a hand. A suppressed whisper arose when Carter, about 10 minutes later, picked up a flashlight and poked it through the opening.

He couldn’t see anything except a wall of bright light. Panning the lamp in all directions, he still couldn’t see anything but the wall. Obviously, the wall blocked the entire entrance to the room on the other side of the door. Carter is looking at a wall of solid gold.

            As quickly as he could, he removed more blocks of stone. Now the audience can see the sparkle of gold. As block after block of stone was removed, “we could, as if electrocuted,” he wrote, “feel the excitement running through the people watching behind the barricade.” Carter, Mace, and Callender simultaneously learn what the wall really is. Now they were face to face at the entrance to the burial chamber. What they saw as a wall was the surface of an unusually large worship room, and of course incredibly expensive. Then a minute of pause made everyone’s nerves tense because there were beads scattered on the floor of the room by thieves. While everyone squirmed impatiently on the hard chairs, Carter bent down to pick up each grain with the boundless care of a true archaeologist, always meticulously appreciating the smallest things, even though he knew that I’m on the brink of a terrible discovery.

            Now people immediately realize that the burial room is about 1 meter lower than the front room. Carter took the flashlight and lowered himself through the opening. Yes, he is standing next to a large altar room. The size was so large that it seemed to take up most of the burial room. Carter informed that the passage between the burial room and the altar room is only 15.35 inches (about 40 centimeters) wide. You must go through this narrow passage very carefully, because burial items are scattered everywhere.

            Lord Carnarvon and M. Pierre Lacau, general manager of antiquities services in Cairo, were the first to follow inside the burial chamber. They stood frozen before the splendor of the scene before them. They measured the altar room twice, for cross-check, showing the dimensions to be 17 x 11 x 9 feet high [518 x 335 x 274 cm]. It was completely covered with gold, and on the sides were inlaid panels of brilliant blue porcelain, representing magical symbols intended to protect the dead.

            The question that now makes everyone wonder is: did the thieves have time to break into the altar room? Did they find the mummy and violate it? Carter discovered that the folding doors on the east side of the altar room were bolted, but not sealed. With trembling hands he pulled the latch and came across another pair of folding doors, also latched but sealed. This door leads to a second worship room built inside the first worship room.

            All three people breathed a sigh of relief. Every room opened so far had revealed traces of intrusion, but here, at the most decisive landmark of the mausoleum, they were definitely the first. They will have an intact mummy, exactly as it was buried more than three thousand years ago.

            They closed the altar room door “as gently as possible.” They noticed the linen robe, speckled with gold and yellow with age, hanging down from above the altar room. “The cloth tells us that we are standing in the presence of a dead king of the past.” For a moment, they felt like they were intruders. They went to the other end of the burial chamber. There they found a low door, leading to another somewhat small room. From the center of this room, facing the door frame, a cabinet in the shape of a golden shrine shone, and surrounding it, standing alone, were four guardian goddesses, with a graceful, honest demeanor, and filled with compassion and sincerity on their faces, so much so that “it makes us feel like we are committing blasphemy when we look at them. . . I’m not ashamed to admit,” Carter said, “that my throat suddenly closed up.”

            Slowly Carter, Carnarvon, and Lacau stepped back through the golden altar room and into the antechamber to let the others in to see. “Standing in the lobby, it felt strange as we looked at their faces, one by one, just coming out the door. Each person’s eyes flashed with confusion and shock, and they in turn raised their hands in front of themselves, an unconscious gesture expressing the helplessness of words before the wonders they had just witnessed.

            Around five o’clock that afternoon, three hours after entering the tomb, they crawled to the surface. When they returned early in the morning, “the Valley itself seemed changed to us and assumed something more familiar.”

            Surveying these superb archaeological treasures took several more seasons. Unfortunately, the first winter passed with very few achievements, because Lord Carnarvon had passed away, and it was unknown how the Egyptian government’s method of renewing mining concessions would change, and how the resources would be divided. excavated product. The case was eventually handed over to an international commission, which ultimately succeeded in reaching a satisfactory adjustment. Work continues. In the winter of 1926-27 the most important steps were then taken – namely, the actual opening of the gilded altar room, the painstaking separation of the various precious coffins, and the preliminary but Tutankhamen’s mummy was cautious after it was found.

            This phase of the project, although it provided few surprises to an emotion-starved public, was the main concern of Egyptology, and also had a dramatic climax of its own. This peak of excitement occurred when investigators, for the first time since the king was taken out of sight 33 centuries ago, were able to look at the late king’s identity.

            Work began by removing the brick wall separating the front room from the burial room, and then the first golden altar room was disassembled. Inside this altar room, they found a second, then a third altar room.

            Carter has every reason to believe that the stone sarcophagus itself is located inside the third altar room. “It was an exciting moment in our arduous task that will not easily be forgotten,” he wrote, as he proceeded to open the third altar room. “With suppressed excitement I carefully cut the rope, removed that precious seal, pulled the latch, and opened the doors to discover a fourth altar room, similar in design and even craftsmanship. Even brighter than the last altar room. . . An indescribable moment for an archaeologist! What lies inside the fourth altar room? With heightened tension I pulled back the latches of the last unsealed doors; They slowly opened, and there they were, filling the space inside. . . was a huge yellow quartzite sarcophagus, intact, as if pious hands had just lifted it from it.” What an unforgettable sight of splendor, magnificence enhanced by the glittering gold of the altar rooms! A goddess extended her arms and wings over the base of the sarcophagus, “as if to ward off an intruder.” He stood there in awe before this powerful symbol.

            Just disassembling the altar room from the burial room took 84 days of hard manual work. The four altar rooms altogether consist of about eighty-odd parts – each part is heavy, difficult to handle, and very fragile.

            As usual, nothing is one hundred percent perfect. Carter, the perfectionist, kept nagging that – after a period of three thousand years – the workers assembled the altar rooms. While he admired the masterful skill of the craftsmen who created the parts of the altar room and admired them for carefully inscribing the parts with numbers and positions for easy disassembly, Then he was very upset with the workers who assembled these worship rooms.

            “But on the other hand,” he writes, “there is evidence that the funeral was hastily arranged, and that the workers who handled these last rites were by no means meticulous people. It is true that they also placed the parts around the sarcophagus but reversed the order of the sides, contrary to the instructions written on the different parts, with the result that, when they were erected, the altar doors

facing east instead of west, the base of the walls facing west instead of east, and the panels are also out of position. But that’s not all, there are other traces of negligence. A few places on the walls of the room were hit hard, not afraid to damage the embossed decorations on the gilded layer. There were deep dents from a hammer-like tool clearly visible in the gold plating, some parts of the surface were actually knocked off, and the workers did not bother to clean up the fallen pieces of wood.

            On February 3, the excavators were finally able to view the sarcophagus at full comfort. It is a masterpiece, made of a single block of the most beautiful yellow quartzite. It measures 89.8 feet long, 4.8 feet wide, and 4.8 feet high [268 cm x 146 cm x 146 cm.] The sarcophagus lid is made of pink granite.

            As the tool lifting the heavy sarcophagus lid – it weighed more than 600 kilograms – began to hiss under the rising load, once again the audience of famous faces stared. The first look inside the sarcophagus was disappointing: there was nothing to see but a pile of tinder wrapped in linen. But when all these things were removed from the coffin, the coffin immediately appeared, a very impressive revelation.

            But the king’s body has not been found. The first thing to appear was a golden figure of the young king on the lid of the human coffin. The gold sparkled brightly as if it had just come out of the furnace. The head and hands are molded in relief, but the rest is embossed with many decorative details. Two crossed hands hold the Crochet Stick and Crossbow badge, inlaid with green ceramic. The face is made of pure gold, the eyes are made of mineral lime and obsidian, and the eyebrows and eyelids are made of blue precious stones (pictured below).

There was something different on the coffin that touched Carter and his friends even more than the doll. Carter describes this as follows: “. . . but perhaps most touching in its humanistic simplicity is the little wreath” around the symbols on the forehead, “a farewell gift from the young widowed queen to her husband. . . Amidst all that regal splendor, royal splendor – golden sparkles everywhere – there is nothing more beautiful than a few of these withered flowers, still retaining a bit of their faded color. They tell us that three thousand three hundred years is just a short time, like Yesterday and Tomorrow. Rather, that small touch of nature makes ancient times and our modern civilization become flesh and blood.”

            On the lid of the second sarcophagus – there are three sarcophagi in all, one nested within the other – is a figure of the young Pharaoh in ceremonial robes, richly decorated in the Osirian style. The third coffin is about 0.5 cm thick and is made entirely of pure gold, contributing to the weight of the coffin. Even its value itself is enormous.

This interesting information immediately faded when it was discovered that a glue-like substance, which had been recorded before, adhered to the decoration of the second coffin. Now it was seen that the entire space between the second and third coffins was filled with liquid that had now become a solid mass. Now surveyors are beginning to worry whether the liberal use of embalming oil may damage the mummy.

            Lucas immediately took charge of analyzing the oil. A liquid, or nearly liquid, must have been used, the base materials containing fat and resin, along with wood-based tar. Tensions continue to rise; The decisive moment has finally come.

            Some of the golden tenons were removed, then the lid of the coffin was finally lifted by the golden handles, and the mummy appeared. In front of us is Tutankhamen’s body, after six years of hard work searching.

            “At times like that,” Carter said, “the emotions cannot be expressed in words, because they are so complicated and disturbing.”

            But who is this Pharaoh, this Tutankhamen? Strangely enough, for all the pomp of his funeral, Tutankhamen was a little-known king. He died at the age of 18. He was certainly the son-in-law of Ikhnaton, the “heretic king,” and also certainly Ikhnaton’s half-brother. Tutankhamen’s youth was spent during the period of religious reform initiated by his Aton-worshiping father-in-law. His return to the original religion of the god Amen is evidenced by his change of name, from the original name Tutankh-Aton to Tutankh-Amen. We know that his reign was a time of political turmoil. There are paintings showing Tutankhamen kicking prisoners, as well as shooting rows of enemies. But there is no certainty that he actually went to the battlefield himself. We don’t even know the exact length of his reign, only that it dates somewhere around 1350 BC. The throne came to him through his wife, Anches-en-Amen, whom he married while still young. very young, and her portrait shows her to be a woman of ravishing beauty.

            Through the paintings and reliefs found in his tomb, and many everyday personal items, we get an interesting sense of Tutankhamen’s personality. But we know nothing about his administrative achievements, how he ran the country as a ruler. It seems safe to assume that there are not many meaningful achievements that a king who died at the age of 18 could have accomplished. Carter is certainly right that the only outstanding act in Tutankhamen’s life was his death and burial.

            However, if this 18-year-old Pharaoh was buried with a solemnity and splendor beyond our Western imagination, then the treasures in the tombs of Ramses the Great and Sethos I What will it be like? So many unimaginable treasures must have passed through the hands of the thieves of the royal tombs in the Valley of the Kings, over the course of many centuries.

            The appearance of the Pharaoh’s mummy is both magnificent and terrifying. Much of the embalming resin had filled the tightly wrapped body, and this glue had hardened, blackened, and attached the shroud to the body.

            Contrasting with the shapeless, glossy black mass of the mummy is the golden mask covering the king’s head and shoulders, regal gold glittering radiantly. The burial mask did not touch the embalming resin, nor did the mummy’s feet.

            After several unsuccessful attempts, the second wooden coffin was separated from the third golden coffin nested within it, by a process of heating to 932 ^degrees F (500 ^degrees C). The gold was covered with a layer of zinc after the mummy was removed.

            The next step is to examine the mummy, the only one in the Valley that, as far as we know, has remained intact for 33 centuries. The survey brought to light a fact that Carter commented as follows: “Here we have an ironic situation that sometimes awaits research. Tomb robbers pulled the bodies of the Pharaohs out of their tight shrouds to find the jewels hidden inside, or devout priests hid them to avoid further abuse, at least to preserve them. preserves the royal remains from the harmful effects of chemical reactions caused by the embalming resin before having time to corrode.” Mummies were often damaged when robbed – unless the thieves were priests – but nonetheless, they remained in much better condition than Tutankhamen’s mummy. Rather, the decay of the body was the only point of dissatisfaction in the tomb.

            On November 11, at 9:45 a.m., Dr. Derry, the surgeon, made the first cut in the outer layer of linen and bundled the mummy. Except for the face and legs, which were not exposed to embalming resin, the mummy was in a terrifying condition. Oxidation of the resins of the mixture created a spontaneous combustion reaction, so intense that not only the wrapping fabric was charred. The tar-like shell is so hard that in some places, such as under the legs and buttocks, it is necessary to chisel it out.

            One astonishing discovery was a magical headrest placed beneath the bandage around the head as deftly as a surgeon’s hand. The talisman doesn’t seem the usual way. And hidden inside the linen wrappings of the mummy’s bundle were all kinds of “magical armor” – talismans, symbols, and magical symbols. But the headrest is made from pure iron, instead of the usual hematite mineral. This is the first pure iron artifact found in Egyptology.

            Extreme care must be taken when untying the linen wrappings from the young Pharaoh’s charred body. Just the slightest touch of the mink brush tip causes the remnants of rotting tissue to crumble. Then the young king’s face was revealed to the eyes; According to Carter: “. . . a serene, calm expression, the expression of a young man.” “The face,” we are told, “appears delicate and elegant, the facial features are symmetrical, especially the prominent lips.”

143 pieces of jewelry of all kinds were discovered inside the mummy’s wrapping. Of the 33 pages that Carter used to describe the mummy’s examination, more than half were just to list the precious items found in the bundle. The 18-year-old Pharaoh was literally wrapped in many layers of gold and precious stones.

            In a special monograph Dr. Derry then describes the examination of the mummy from an anatomical perspective. He states with high certainty that there was a father-son relationship between Ikhnaton and Tutankhamen, a fact of extraordinary significance in terms of illustrating the political and dynastic conditions at the time of the decline of the 18th Dynasty. .

            Derry then goes on to document a very interesting cultural survey: specifically, that expressionist art from the beginning of the New Empire leaned strongly toward realism. “Tutankhamen’s face on the gold burial mask depicts him as a noble and refined young man,” Derry said. “Those who had the privilege of seeing the real face when the mask was removed can testify to the talent of the 18th Dynasty artist who so faithfully rendered the features of the face, and recorded it for for posterity, in indestructible metal, a beautiful portrait of the young king.”

            Derry was also able to closely estimate the king’s age, which history does not reveal. From an anatomical perspective, he determined Tutankhamen’s age to be somewhere between 17 and 18, certainly 18 being the closest approximation.

            Here the story of the actual excavation of Tutankhamen’s tomb ends because the side rooms and small treasure rooms provide no further interest.

            However, there is another area that needs clarification: “the curse of the Pharaohs.” More than 20 people more or less involved in unsealing this famous tomb died under mysterious circumstances.

            In two hundred years, more or less, of archeology, no discovery of the ancient world is as well known to the public as Tutankhamen’s tomb. Not without the help of rotary printing, cameras, and radio technology to help promote the event. The world first showed their concern with emails of praise and congratulations. After that, reporters began to bustle into the field. Recently, I started sending letters of criticism and criticism. Some complained bitterly about what they considered an insult to the deceased. Other letters describe licensed methods of digging graves. The first winter there were 10 or 15 odd letters sent every day.

            Then tourists started arriving in droves. During three months of 1926, when public opinion was high, 12,300 tourists visited the mausoleum. There were also 270 applications to survey found treasures and work in the lab.

            Exactly how the myth of the “curse of the Pharaohs” was created cannot be investigated. During the 1930s, at any rate, the subject was bandied about again and again in the press. However, it must be admitted that there is more basis for that story than for astrology based on the Great Pyramid of Cheops, or for “mummy wheat” taken from Egyptian tombs, which according to rumored to still retain the ability to germinate after a period of two or three thousand years. This wheat myth was so widely believed that even today tour guides earn extra tips by seeing to it that their clients find “mummy wheat” among the tourists. exposed masonry of royal tombs.

            “The Curse of the Pharaohs” is nothing more than gossip of a rather horrifying kind, about on par with “the curse of the Hope Diamond” and “the curse of the Lacromanic priests.” less famous. If there was a single incident that gave rise to the legend of the “curse of the Pharaohs,” it was surely the sudden death of Lord Carnarvon. When he died, on April 6, 1923, after three weeks of fighting a serious illness caused by a mosquito bite, people began to talk about punishment from the underworld on those who blasphemed the gods.

            Big headlines like ‘Pharaoh’s Revenge’ began to appear, with smaller headlines announcing a ‘New Victim of Tutankhamen’s Curse’. . . “Second Victim,” and so on. The death of the 19th victim was announced as follows: “Today 78 year old Lord Westbury jumped from the window of his 7th floor apartment in London and died instantly. The son of Lord Westbury, who was formerly secretary to Howard Carter, the archaeologist who excavated Tutankhamen’s tomb, was found dead in his apartment last November, although when he went to sleep he was still alive. in good health. The exact cause of death has never been determined.” “A shiver ran through England. . .” Another journalist wrote that Archibald Douglas Reid died while he was about to X-ray a mummy. Egyptologist Arthur Weigall later ranked him as the 21st victim of the Pharaoh’s curse when he died of “a fever of unknown origin.”

            Then Carter’s bandmate, AC Mace, died, a man who had worked actively in the tomb. However, sources have hidden the fact that Mace has been ill for a long time and still helps Carter despite his poor health due to a chronic illness. In fact, he had to abandon work before the project was completed.

            Later, when Lord Carnarvon’s half-brother, Aubrey Hernert, died of natural causes, some in the press still tried to fit his death into the framework of the Legend of the Curse. When Lady Elizabeth Carnarvon died in February 1929, Howard Carter was the only one of the staff to survive.

            “Death will find on the tips of the soaring wings whoever dares to disturb the Pharaoh’s rest” – that is one of many variations of the Pharaoh’s curse that is often said to be inscribed on tomb.

            When the press reported that a man named Carter, living in the United States, had become the Pharaoh’s final victim in some mysterious way, it seemed to confirm the argument that Tutankhamen had done it. The act of revenge was clearly from the family of the leader of the insult and then gradually to himself. At this point, serious archaeologists saw that the joke had gone too far and protested.

            Carter himself tried to quell the wave of rumors. “The Egyptologist’s impression,” he said. . . not fear, but reverence and awe. It is the exact opposite of the crazy superstitions that are so popular among sensible people seeking “spiritual excitement.” He denounced Tutankhamen’s “ridiculous tales” of revenge as “just a kind of literary entertainment.” Then he went specifically to articles claiming that stepping across the threshold of the tomb can be dangerous – even science has proven it wrong. He enthusiastically pointed out that science had confirmed the absence of bacterial agents in the tomb. The inside has been checked for contamination and concluded that it is safe for health. His tone turned sour at the end of his protest: “. . . In some respects,” he said, “our moral progress is less obvious than many decent people often believe.”

            To add to the publicity, in 1933 the German Egyptologist Professor Georg Steindorff published a petition on the subject of the Pharaoh’s curse, in which he took pains to research newspaper sources and other sources. Other reports. He determined the truth that the person named Carter who died in America had nothing in common with archaeologist Carter except the name. He also found that no one of the Westbury family had the slightest connection, direct or indirect, with the mausoleum, its removal, or the mummy. After piling up evidence of irrelevance, he came to the most relevant conclusion of all: the “curse of the Pharaohs” simply did not exist. No such words were ever uttered or recorded.

            Following Steindorff’s line, Carter writes: “In relation to life, curses of this kind have no place in Egyptian rites. On the contrary, we always express good wishes for the deceased.”                      

            Apparently people have misunderstood the meaning of certain protective formulas of invocations found inscribed on magical mannequins left in the burial chamber and considered them to be curses. These formulas are intended only to “drive away the enemy of Osiris (the deceased) in whatever form he comes.” Many excavation trips were made in Egypt after the discovery of Tutankhamen’s tomb. In 1939, 1940, and 1946 Professor Pierre Montet discovered a complete complex of royal tombs of the 21st and 22nd Dynasties. In underground corridors more than 3,000 feet long (more than 900 meters), chiseled In the rocks, Professor Sami Gabra discovered sacred places of the Ibis sect and countless sacred animal tombs. Egyptian King Farouk sponsored a voyage to trace his country’s antiquity, and burial sites dating to the second and third millennium BC were discovered. In 1941 Dr. Ahmad Badawi and Dr. Mustapha El-Amir came across a stele honoring Amenophis II, and an undisturbed tomb of Prince Sheshonk, with many splendid jewels.