Chapter One
New Year’s Day 1901 Deir el-Bahri, Southern Egypt
Everyone who was anyone was in the desert that day. An excited crowd had
gathered beneath the stark cliffs that rose dramatically behind the two ancient
temples. One was dedicated to the soul of Queen Hatshepsut, 1550 bc, and the
even older one next to it, Mentuhotep I’s, had stood there in the relentless sun
for four thousand years.
It was a place of great desolation and silence. Behind the temples towered the
lifeless cliffs; and before them, the blinding white sand stretched endlessly to
meet the empty sky. Djeser djeseru, the ancients called it, the holy of holies,
the dwelling place of Meretsinger, the cobra goddess: She Who Loves Silence.
And it was here that the noisy crowd descended, chattering, speculating, filled
with the nervous restlessness of modernity. In search of sensation, treasure,
beauty-how could the goddess bear them as she watched from her barren heights?
First and foremost was the British viceroy, Lord Cromer, a man whose word was
law in Egypt. He’d dropped everything, leaving Cairo in the midst of one of
Egypt’s endless crises. After ordering his private train, he’d traveled five
hundred miles south, then taken a boat across the Nile, and then a horse-drawn
calèche out toward the desert valley. The price of Egyptian cotton had plummeted
on the world market, pests were ravaging the crops, and starvation stalked the
countryside. But what did that matter next to the fact that a royal tomb had
been discovered? After months of laborious excavation, the diggers had finally
reached the door of a burial chamber with its clay seals still intact-and His
Lordship wanted to be present at the opening.
As did an assortment of idle princes, pashas, and high-living riffraff from the
international moneyed scene … along with the usual hangers-on of the very
rich: practitioners of the world’s oldest profession. Which in Egypt didn’t
refer to-to what it usually does, but meant grave robbers (or archaeologists, as
they are more politely known).
To dig with any success (“to excavate,” in the polite lingo), one needed
knowledge. And one needed money-a great deal of it.
Thus, they often came in pairs, the archaeologists and their sugar daddies.
There were famous “couples”-inseparables for all their differences of
temperament and background. For example, looking back on turn-of-the-century
Egyptology, can one think of the American millionaire Theodore Davis apart from
the young Cambridge scholar Edward Ayrton?
Together they discovered a long list of tombs and burial shafts, Pharaoh
Horemheb’s, Pharaoh Siptah’s, and “the golden tomb” (KV #56) among them. As
well as the mysterious Tomb Kings Valley #55-and the animal tombs (#50, #51, and
#52): the mummified and bejeweled pets of Amenhotep II. The beloved creatures
had been stripped of their jewelry by ancient robbers who had even decided
to create a “joke”-perhaps the oldest in existence-leaving pharaoh’s monkey and
dog face-to-face. Which was how Davis and Ayrton found them some three thousand
years later: locked in an eternal stand-off.
The two men, the millionaire and the scholar, made a striking picture: Davis,
headstrong, determined, unwilling to be denied anything he wanted. The
entrepreneur stood erect, staring down the camera in his flared riding pants and
polished boots and gray side whiskers; Ayrton stood next to him, athletic,
boyish, shy, a straw boater tilted at a rakish angle as he smiled
absentmindedly, staring out over the desert. If it wasn’t exactly a marriage
made in heaven-the two had their ups and downs-still their partnership produced
significant results.
Or take Howard Carter and Lord Carnarvon, another such couple. Carter, irascible
to the point of being rabid when the fit was on him, intense, brooding,
obsessed. With almost no formal education and a humble background, he was the
quintessential outsider whose artistic ability was his one saving grace. Where
would he have been without his Earl of Carnarvon, the lovable “Porchy”-bon
vivant heir to a thirty-six-thousand-acre estate who came to the excavations
supplied with fine china, table linen, and the best wines?
Though they tried to pass themselves off as patrons of the arts and archaeology,
the truth was that these high rollers were not selfless. They paid for an
excavation because they stood to gain a great deal from it, more than they would
have at the racetracks and roulette tables of their usual watering holes. The
laws-or, better, the rules of the game-in Egypt allowed for an equal division of
whatever was found: statues, jewelry, papyri. The fledgling Egyptian Museum at
Cairo got half the take, the other half went to the wealthy diggers. It was this
prospect that drew the British earls and American millionaires to the remote
desert wadis with their magnificent treasures … and their ancient curses and
gods.
There was, however, one exception in this high-stakes game, the wild card in the
deck: an intact royal burial. A pharaoh’s tomb or a queen’s sepulcher
undisturbed since the time of its sealing. In the case of such a discovery, all
bets were off and the rules changed. In theory, everything went to the Egyptian
Museum-though what would happen in practice no one knew, since up to that time
such a discovery had never been made. What was more, it was such a remote
possibility that those in the know discounted it. The tombs found so far had all
been at least partially plundered in antiquity.
But this discouraged no one, since a plundered tomb could be astonishing enough.
What had been worthless to the ancient thieves was often worth a fortune to
their modern counterparts. The early grave robbers concentrated on gold and
silver, or on jars filled with costly perfumes and unguents. They would pour the
oils into animal skins to be easily carried away, leaving behind exquisite works
of art. They couldn’t have fenced the finely carved statues. Or the limestone
and alabaster sarcophagi, the painted coffins and splendidly illustrated rolls
of papyri. Such priceless leavings made the game well worthwhile (a game that in
modern terms came to hundreds of thousands of British pounds, or American
dollars, or French francs).
Then, too, there were the accidental finds stumbled upon in such “plundered”
tombs: amulets overlooked in the folds of mummy wrappings or jewelry dropped in
the haste of an ancient getaway. A “worthless” crocodile mummy, brittle to the
touch, would crack open to reveal a hundred-foot papyrus roll, a masterpiece of
the calligrapher’s art. A mummified arm would be discovered-the arm of Queen
Mernneith, broken from her body and thrust into a niche during the First Dynasty
(3000 bc). Laden with wondrously worked golden bracelets, the arm had been
plastered over by some hapless thief who’d never managed to return for his
booty. His loss was his modern “brother’s” gain (the severe and Spartan W.
Flinders Petrie, working over the supposedly exhausted Abydos site with a
fine-tooth comb).
With so much at stake, is it any wonder that Egypt was a place of feverish
rumors and speculation? Competition was fierce: among private collectors, among
dealers in antiquities (both real ones and forgeries), and among the great
museums of the world. The Louvre, the British Museum, and the Metropolitan
Museum of Art all had their unscrupulous representatives at work. Greedy,
squabbling children, they were anxious to obtain the finest examples of ancient
art: provenance known or unknown-no questions asked.
Of course, they were all there in the desert on that hot, bright November day.
The opening of an intact royal tomb was not an event they were likely to miss.
Nor would the “father” of this naughty family overlook such an occasion: Gaston
Maspero, the mudir, or director, of the Service des Antiquités, a devoted
scholar whose job it was to keep his acquisitive children in check.
Portly, middle-aged, unworldly-a French academic-Maspero had come to Egypt in
1881 to become the second director of the newly established service. His
position as mudir had forced him quickly to learn the ins and outs of the shady
antiquities markets.
His first task had been a very “unacademic one”: to trace the source of a steady
stream of treasure, recognizably from royal burials, that had been showing up on
the market. With the help of a wealthy American collector (Charles Wilbour) and
an agent working for both Russia and Belgium (Mustafa Aga Ayat), Maspero
followed a torturous trail. It began with two leather strips, outer mummy
wrappings, and led to a notorious grave-robbing family, the Abd er Rassuls.
Maspero had its members “interrogated” roughly. For though he was soft-spoken
and humane, when it came to saving antiquities he could be as hard as nails. He
ordered a bastinado for the culprits, a beating on the soles of their feet.
Ironically, it was a harsher method than the one used on the ancient grave
robbers, who were merely lashed on the back to make them talk (the blows given
by the hundred, one wound counting as five blows). The bastinado, though,
besides causing the whole body to swell, created extreme mental anguish. It left
Ahmad er Rassul, the brother who finally confessed, crippled for life
(afterward, Maspero was clever enough to recruit him as a service inspector).
The disclosures led to the discovery of a remote desert tomb known as the Deir
el-Bahri cache-the hiding place of thirty royal mummies, among them Amenhotep I;
Thutmosis I, II, and III; Seti I; Ramesses II and III; and the royal family of
the priest-pharaoh Pinedjem. During the breakdown of order in Egypt (in the
Twentieth and Twenty-first dynasties), the royal mummies had been taken from
their tombs by priests striving to protect their sacred god-kings. Moved from
place to place, they were finally reburied here, DB tomb #320.
Here they had remained for three thousand years-and might have remained forever
if not for some roaming Arabs. One idly threw a stone into a cleft in the face
of the cliffs, and the hollow ringing echo alerted an er Rassul brother who was
with them. Keeping his suspicions to himself, he frightened his companions with
talk of demons and ghosts in the area. Then he and his brothers returned to
investigate. As a result, the er Rassuls had been selling the tomb’s treasures
bit by bit for over a decade.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from In the Valley of the Kings
by Daniel Meyerson
Copyright © 2009 by Daniel Meyerson.
Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Ballantine Books
Copyright © 2009
Daniel Meyerson
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-345-47693-7
