[Published in: A. Maravelia (ed.), Modern Trends in European Egyptology. Papers from a session held at the European Association of Archaeologists Ninth Annual Meeting in St. Petersburg 2003, BAR International Series 1448, 2005, 43-48]

 

 

From the history of archaeology:

The destruction of the late antique necropoleis in Egypt reconsidered

 

Maya Müller

Museum der Kulturen Basel

 

 

 

Abstract

 

Between ca. 1880 and 1914, the late antique cemeteries in the Nile Valley were radically destroyed and the plundered artifacts scattered to the four winds. Targeted were tens of thousands of burials dating from the Roman to the Early Islamic periods, containing chiefly tapestry ornamented clothes, cartonnage or plaster masks, and painted mummy portraits. We want to reconstruct the exact circumstances of the discovery and exploitation of these cemeteries in order to understand their destruction in the context of the history of Egyptian archaeology.

 

Surprisingly, the late antique necropoleis were not found by chance, but at the initiative of an outstanding scholar, an orientalist and specialist of ancient textiles. His fields and periods of research were quite innovative, because at that time all vestiges of the Roman, Byzantine and early Islamic periods in Egypt were disdained. All learned interest was focused on pharaonic times. That is why the exploitation of the burials were abandoned to dealers and commercially working archaeologists who just tore out finds without bothering about methods of excavation, documentation or conservation, which, in fact did not yet exist. Tragically, the discovery of the late antique necropoleis came too early, and those who wanted to open new fields of research caused the destruction of near to all the information contained in them.

 

Introduction

 

I became interested in the fate of the late antique cemeteries of Egypt when I found, among the collection of archaeological textiles in the Museum of Cultures Basel, a number of tapestry fragments with a peculiar provenance: They were at the 'exposition universelle de 1900' in the palais du costume, in Paris. Indeed Paris is always a good address when speaking of fine clothes, although in the present case, it sounds rather strange. The fragmentary clothes exhibited in Paris were excavated in 1898-99 in four necropoleis of Middle and Lower Egypt by Albert Gayet, a French Egyptologist who brought them back to France for the show.[1]

 

Let us begin with a brief survey of the historical facts:

The necropoleis of the 1st millennium CE were exploited and destroyed between 1882 and 1914.[2] They are located near the Ptolemaic-Roman towns of Middle Egypt and the Fayum oasis, taking in the desert strip between the cultivation area and the mountain at the edge of the Nile valley. These large burial fields often held tens of thousands of mummies. They were virtually unknown until 1882 because they are not visible on the surface, consisting of simple underground burials without suprastructures. The actors of the drama were foreign antiquaries and archaeologists, in collaboration with local Copts and Arabs. The most important kinds of finds were textiles, chiefly clothes found on the mummies, painted mummy cloths, cartonnage masks some of wich were guilded, Roman plaster masks and the famous mummy portraits painted on panels, all of them unknown, up to then on the European art market. All the excavations were hasty raids; there is not the slightest documentation on the tens or hundreds of thousands of burials uncovered, some summary notes only were published. And since the quasi totality of the tomb fields were destroyed, all the rich historical information they once contained is definitely lost. Ironically, the excavations were often legal, the legal and the illegal excavators acting exactly the same way.

 

There is one very brief but realistic description only of what had happened there, written by the Swiss antiquary Robert Forrer who excavated at Akhmim in 1894:[3]

 

"Before us lies a little mountain range, without any vegetation... Everywhere as far as the eye reaches, you percieve black holes in the mountain where tombs had been opened, and other black points turn out when coming nearer to be human bodies or mummies, torn open and robbed of their bandages and robes... They are lying there, here a complete body with skin and hair, there a corps without a head, with cracked chest... The picture becomes more horrible even when reaching the plateau of the mountain. Everywhere open tombs, the whole field burrowed through for miles and miles; here a faded skull, there a torn off leg, everywhere corpses beside uncovered tombs. And where they had been thrown back into the tombs, we see a dead body vertically peeping out, or another one extending his dry legs to the sky."  A horror trip indeed!

 

We suffer under the consequences to this day. The museum people are frustrated because there is, when dating the textiles, an uncertainty margin of 200-300 years, and the textiles are mostly so fragmentary that it is not possible to reconstruct the original garment, to mention two major points only. Egyptologists and coptologists must always shamefully refer to the lack of documentation, in their publications. Some of them condemn the culprits and think that the few existing "excavation reports" are entirely untrustworthy, even if the impact of their collections for the study of late antique Egypt is acknowledged.[4] We want to go beyond this stage, we want to know how it all began, and what really happened. We want to see how this phenomenon can be understood in the context of the history of Egyptian archaeology. Today, it is possible to reconstruct the discovery of the late antique necropoleis with sufficent certainty, thanks to the publication of relevant documents in 1962 and these last 10 years.[5]

 

Chronology of the discoveries

 

Seemingly, it was a philologist who first gave the impetus to seek a Romano-Byzantine cemetery: We speak of  an orientalist from Vienna, Joseph von Karbacek. The whole drama began with the find of a very important lot of papyri, discovered in winter 1877-78 in the ruins of Crocodilopolis in the Fayum, by sebbah diggers. They came on the international market and were partly sold to Berlin, the documents covering the 5th through 10th centuries, written in Arabic, Greek, Pehlevi and other languages. Karabacek instantly realized the impact of these papyri on the Byzantino-Islamic history of Egypt and he knew that there were many more on the market. He concieved the idea to beg his friend Theodor Graf in Cairo to buy such papyri. Graf was a carpet dealer in Vienna who had branches in Alexandria and Cairo. He spoke fluently arabic and was interested in ancient textiles and in Egyptian and arabic antiquities and periodically made a tour through Egypt to buy things. This plan worked well, Graf bought an important amount of papyri within a few years and sold about 10'000 pieces to Vienna (the Erzherzog Rainer collection).[6]

 

The next step: Karabacek, who is also a specialist for oriental decoration and textiles, ancient and recent, poses a clever question: When such important finds come from the ruins of cities and towns, what could be found in the cemeteries? There would certainly also be textiles to be found. Up to that time not one single cemetery of the Roman, Byzantine, Coptic and Early Islamic periods was known. He contacts Graf and instructs him to try to find out where such cemeteries might be, although he knows that it is forbidden for foreigners to dig in such places. Graf is very enthusiastic. During the next three years, from 1879 to the beginning of 1882,  he collects information on papyri, textiles and burials in Egypt and Syria. He visits a number of  Coptic monasteries, knowing that these often date back to early Christian times and he also tries to get information from his Egyptian trading partners. According to the German antiquarian Franz Bock, Graf has intensive inquiries been made particularly in the Fayum because of the above mentioned finds of papyri at Crocodilopolis.[7] Suddenly at the start of 1882 there is great jubilation: A large cemetery is found (in the Fayum) and Graf sends a fine lot of decorated fragments of clothing to Vienna, which he dates from the 3rd to the 9th centuries. Digging is only done most clandestinely in order to keep the site secret. From the correspondence (especially in April-May 1882) between Graf and Karabacek we see that Graf himself is never at the site of the excavations, but rather has the finds brought to Cairo by the Arabs.[8] The finds are largely textiles which had been ripped off mummies.

 

So far the chronology of events as told by Karabacek in 1883, and I think that his report is correct and not a 'vaticinium ex eventu' since there were, in that time, no other scholars interested in these late periods, neither egyptologists nor classical archaeologists (see below). The burial field exploited by Graf's agents was not given a name in his letters nor even its location in the Fayum mentioned. The site was, however visited by an important German natural scientist and explorer, three years later: Georg Schweinfurth who lived in Cairo since the late seventies undertook, in January 1886 geological explorations and cartographical measurements in the Fayum, including ancient Crocodilopolis (Arsinoe). In spring 1887, he came back to Crocodilopolis in order to make an intensive survey and to draw a plan of the entire city area. Knowing that there was, at the north-western border of the ancient city, a burial field of the Byzantine period called Kom el-Adjame (Azame) and exploited by Graf's people, he could not resist to open a number of tombs and putting together a textile collection very similar to Graf's, as he tells us in his report of 1887.[9]

 

As far as we know today, Graf was the first person to search specifically for Roman, Byzantine, and early Islamic papyri, textiles and cemeteries, from the autumn of 1879. In doing this he certainly started something and the word spread like wildfire and was probably a subject of attention for the local dealers in antiquities, especially in the regions of the late-antique cities of  Middle Egypt and the Fayum.

 

A mysterious document concerning what is probably a Roman cemetery is a letter written to Gaston Maspero by Eugène Allemant in March 1881.[10] Allemant was a French antiquities dealer who had already sold lots of Egyptian artifacts in Europe.[11] Now he discovered "the necropolis of the Ptolemies" as he told Maspero although he did not mention the location nor the kinds of finds which made him think of the Ptolemies. The young Maspero had just succeeded Mariette as chief of the Antiquities Service and Allemant tries to pressure him for an excavation permission with division of the finds.

 

"Mark my word, Mr. Maspero, we treat this business with delicacy. Otherwise it would be very easy for us to buy the land covering this underground which is on sale for a trifle; then we could break into and destroy the tombs as we wanted to. That would be vandalism, you would say, and I would agree with you; but so many people in this country commit such barbarious acts, and without praising myself, if it were not for me, this would already have happened!"

 

Perhaps Allemant (or more probably his arabic business partners) had spotted a burial field, possibly in the Fayum, and found a guilded cartonnage mask or mummy sheeth from a Roman tomb. At least this is the only thing I can think of which may suggest the Ptolemies. If indeed Allemant had found a Greco-Roman necropolis, it would be the first one ever mentioned.[12] Charles Edwin Wilbour relates how Allemant whom he met in Alexandria at the very end of 1880, urged him to support an excavation in Lower Egypt which he had in mind.[13]

 

The exploitation of the Roman necropoleis of Akhmim begins at about the same time as that of the Fayum. Well dated references can only be found in the letters of Charles Edwin Wilbour, an American traveller who is often on inspection tours on the official boat of the Antiquities Service with its chief, Gaston Maspero, in the 1880s. Wilbour writes that in January 1883 they are no longer looking for the large rock-cut tombs of pharaonic times, but rather wanted to find "some graves where there are said to be fine mummy cloths". Obviously the native population had been busy and it could be that Graf's questioning regarding Roman and Byzantine textiles had been heard at Akhmim. Wilbour's mummy cloths must have been painted Roman ones.[14] This indicates that the locals had penetrated one of the burial fields lying in the strip between the area of cultivation and the cliffs, near the ancient Coptic monastery ruins. It was in fact the so-called cemetery A near Hawawish wich was exploited by the Antiquities Service under supervision of a Reis, from 1884 onwards. After a fortnight already, 20 tombs containing about 800 mummies were uncovered. A little later, we hear of 8-10'000 mummies, but (as Maspero puts it), "most of them worthless. Not even one out of twenty have a coffin or a cartonnage cover". In 1884, Roman tombs are found, in 1885-86 Byzantine and Coptic ones containing textiles.[15]

 

No sooner had the excavation prooved to bee successful than there was a rush at the site and "all Akhmim was agog to dig", Wilbour says.[16] In the following years, a number of archaeologists, amateurs and dealers, foreigners and Egyptians, asked the Antiquities Service for a digging licence and shared the finds with the Museum in Cairo; others, chiefly inhabitants of Akhmim, dug illicitly.

 

From 1885 onwards, there came from Akhmim an important lot of painted coffins dating from the Third Intermediate Period to the Late Period, entering Cairo and the international art market. There is no way, today to know where the coffins came from. There are hundreds of rock-cut tombs in the cliffs near Akhmim, mostly of dynastic times, described by Klaus Kuhlmann as cemeteries B and C. Cemetery C, however was rediscovered by Ernesto Schiaparelli in 1885 and subsequently exploited.[17] This was perhaps the source of the coffins which must have been found in reused ancient tomb chambers. Many of the exported coffins were negotiated by Emil Brugsch who was an assistant curator at the Bulaq Museum and in charge of export licences and also of selling duplicats, the museum being allowed to sell all kinds of less important entries in order to cope with the want of financial support. Foreign dealers, collectors, tourists and museum curators bought at the museum.[18]

 

Akhmim after a short while looked like a lunar landscape, as we heard from Robert Forrer's above quoted description, who went there digging himself in 1894. He describes the procedure of opening a tomb as follows:

 

"After taking away the earth and stone cover, we come, at a depth of about 1.5 m across the mummy lying freely in the soil.. The earth was dug out all around the mummy showing itself in its linen cover, the mummy itself slightly undercut, and now, with vigorous jerks, slowly set up vertically and pulled and pushed upwards until it appears at the edge of the pit and is deposited on the field.. Immediately after the mummy had been pulled to daylight, all the workmen and my coptic guides dashed to it in order to tear off the corps's covers and to seek its riches."[19]

 

News spread quickly. In 1886, Franz Bock a German dealer went on a tour through Egypt to buy antique textiles wich were his special interest. (Being a clergyman, he was used to buy from the treasuries of impoverished churches in Europe). He put the early christian textiles on the European market, particularely those from Akhmim wich he published in 1887.[20] It was through him that Robert Forrer, himself an important dealer in Strassburg, became acquainted with textiles from Akhmim and had them sent to Strassburg by agents from Cairo.[21] Textile finds from the Akhmim tombs were sold by local dealers and by the Museum at Bulaq.[22]

 

Let us come back now to Theodor Graf and the Fayum. Since his first success in 1882, Graf indefatigably exhorted his agents to search and excavate. In spring 1888, they brought him for the first time the (afterwards) famous mummy portraits painted on wooden panels, and masks of plaster or guilded cartonnage also, all from a cemetery called after Rubayat, a little village at the northeastern edge of the Fayum. Graf's necropolis is located in the range of hills laying between the edge of the Fayum and the Nile valley somewhat to the South-East of Philadelphia. The site is, again not named or described by Graf (or Karabacek) himself, but by the German engineer P. Stadler who surveyed and mapped the Fayum in the eighteen eighties. Stadler explored the site soon after Graf's agents had exploited it. He bought some remaining mummy portraits from the local bedouins and had them tell him the story of the discovery:[23]

 

"... While searching for salt, the bedouins came upon one of these tombs and several guilded sarcophagi which showed a picture of the deceased at the top end of the lid... All of the portraits which were found, (including those of mummies which were later discovered), were relinquished as worthless to the lower workers who subsequently sold them to a Greek dealer of antiquities. It remains a secret as to where the coffins, clothes and jewels of the plundered mummies remain. The coffins and clothes were probably burnt to prevent their discovery on the part of the authorities who would have confiscated them."

 

Surprisingly it was already a good year before Stadler's survey as Doctor Fouquet sent a letter from Cairo to the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres in Paris, telling a similar story. Fouquet's letter, dated from the 21st of april 1887 runs as follows:[24]

 

"... The Arabs and the Greeks have discovered a cavern containing a large number of burials. The floor was covered with cadavers some of which are mummified and others envelopped in several shrouds... The walls of the cave were ornamented with a great number of portraits on wood which were mostly in a good state of conservation... The vandals who made this important discovery were surprised by darkness and coldness in the cavern. In their stupidity, during three nights they were not impeded in burning the portraits; very few pieces survived this carnage."

 

I am convinced that Stadler's and Fouquet's reports refer to the same discovery, both being based on local rumours abounding with mistakes. The fact that the local bedouins and dealers regarded the mummy portraits as worthless may account for the long time it took them to turn up in the international art market - in spite of Fouquet's estimation.

 

At this point we come across another curious chronological coincidence: At about the same time, in 1888 (there are no exact dates available), Flinders Petrie excavated at nearby Hawara, the pyramid complex of Amenemhet III. "As soon as I went there", so he tells us in 1893, "I observed a cemetery on the north of the pyramid; on digging in it I soon saw that it was all Roman, the remains of brick tomb-chambers; and I was going to give it up as not worth working, when one day a mummy was found, with a painted portrait on a wooden panel placed over its face." After that he had thousands of mummies uncovered, but he only described this exploitation very summarily.[25]

 

It is very probable that Petrie had heard the same rumours as Fouquet and Stadler, or perhaps even seen some mummy portraits which had arrived at Theodor Graf. At least this would account for his interest in the Roman cemetery of Hawara and for the total lack of surprise at the sight of the new category of works of art, as described in his publication.

 

In spite of the growing market for antiquities from Roman and Byzantine tombs, the raiders seemingly confined themselves for a long time to the Fayum and Akhmim, where the largest cemeteries were located. Otherwise, I only found a remark by Maspero on a very small coptic cemetery at Tod which he briefly exploited in 1884.[26] As to Antinoe and its Roman and Byzantine burial fields, it appearently was Albert Gayet who first exploited them, working there from 1896 onwards.[27] Gayet made a systematic survey of the relatively narrow desert strip between the ancient city and the cliff until he found the tombs. On his first campaign in 1896-97, he made several soundings in the city, in the cliff with its many rock tombs, and in the desert strip in between to obtain a general view. In 1897-98 he first wanted to excavate the rock tombs of the Middle Kingdom, the Antiquities Service gave him, however a licence for the desert strip only.[28] Although the finds from there were relatively modest, he was able to push them on the European market, using his vivid imagination to promote them. Gayet's style of excavating was virtually the same as the one of his predecessors, although he took some notes which he published, sometimes.

 

Gayet must have been the first, also who found and exploited the Byzantine and early Islamic cemetery of Assiut, located near Drunka in the desert strip at the foot of the cliff, in 1898; in the same winter, he excavated a burial field at Sheikh Shata near Damietta in order to get enough decorated garment fragments for the Universal Exhibition in Paris.[29]

 

All the three main actors of our exploitation drama, Graf, Forrer and Gayet, were dealers and scholars with an important talent in sales promotion. They organized sales exhibitions (Graf from 1883 onwards), lectures, popular articles in newspapers and periodicals, and popular historical books. Gayet made himself intensly hated by modern egyptologists because he gave his 'parade mummies' famous antique names like Thais and Serapion, inventing romantic legends for them.[30]

 

The state of archaeology up to 1882

 

We must know the state of Egyptian archaeology in the 19th century in order to assess the destruction of the late antique necropoleis as a stage of its development. First of all we must realize that the monuments and ruins of antiquity were percieved, in the 19th c. in a very different way than we do today. The monuments were there, they were visible, on the ground. They were not hidden in the ground (or in the manner of the rock tombs only), there was no need to seek them laboriously and to remove them layer by layer from the soil. Moreover there was, at a very early date already, a quite complete and exact inventory of all important antique sites, thanks to the "Description de l'Egypte" published by the members of the Napoleonic expedition, between 1803 and 1813. Most of the monuments, tempels, and tombs, largely buried under rubble and sand, were defaced by later additions such as houses and stalls. They had to be cleared, freed of intrusive elements and cleaned.

 

Since Champollion's day there had been observations and laments on the terrible destruction of the temples and tombs. Building elements of limestone were used to burn lime. Whole walls and buildings were used as quarries for building new structures. Walls were defaced by graffiti and whole sections of reliefs and frescoes torn out of the walls. The sebbahin destroyed mud brick building complexes. Ancient sites were simply ploughed through in the search for statues, stelae and anything that would bring money on the international antiquities market.

 

It was the duty of archaeology to clean and conserve the monuments while combatting pillaging and vandalism. This task led to the founding of the Antiquities Service and the National Museum, and to the promulgation of laws and regulations regarding excavation and the export of antiquities as well.

 

It was not until the end of the 19th century that archaeological methods were developed for dealing with mud bricks, sherds of ceramics and buried organic materials (such as animal bones and plants), as well as with inhumations in the soil without a real burial chamber. As to documenting an excavation, it was Georg Schweinfurth who postulated, in 1895 that every find, however small and inconspicuous it may seem, must painstakingly be inventorized.[31]

 

As we have seen, the scientific world was not prepared for the discovery and archaeological treatment of inhumations without burial chambers, and certainly not for the treatment of textiles from such sites. Both of these tasks were practically unknown quantities at the end of the 19th century. Moreover, nobody was willing to deal with post-roman monuments at a time when only pharaonic ruins were considered interesting.

 

Conclusions

 

Egyptian Archaeology as practiced since 1798 can only be understood as a process locked in the force-field between discovery and destruction. Discovery, as is well known, always brings, sooner or later, destruction with it. This is, however, not the place to go into that general theme. Above, we have seen the most significant factors in destruction through human stupidity, greed, and vanity. The discovery of the necropoleis of the 1st millenium after Christ ended extremely badly. It was the story of the wrong objects found by the wrong people at the wrong time.

The bad course was determined chiefly by the following factors:

-The discoverers were commercially oriented persons: either dealers or archaeologists under pressure to market the finds. They were gifted salesmen who pushed their new products without  the slightest respect for their original context.

-Scientific excavation methods had not yet been developed. Nobody had yet thought of layers and horizons, much less of the essential statistical (or parametric) evaluation of sites and finds.

-Methods for the conservation of textiles had not yet been developed.

-The egyptology of the day considered Egyptian monuments of the Post-Pharaonic periods as trash and treated them as such.

 

Having cleared up a dark facet of Egyptian archaeological history, we may state the following: Ironically the start of the late antique necropoleis drama was made by a scholar, Joseph Karabacek, who was on the one hand, a far-sighted pioneer, but at the same time unable to foresee the consequences of his actions . Karabacek wished to open a new field of research, the history of he Roman, Byzantine and early Islamic art and culture in Egypt. His initiative came too early and, therefore, had to end in the destruction of the very objects which he wished to study.

 

Postscript

 

The vast necropoleis of the late antique cities in Middle Egypt had a unique structure which would have been of invaluable interest for truely professional research: The burials of the Roman, Byzantine, early Islamic or Coptic periods partly lay one beside another in the horizontal sense, partly they overlapped in the vertical sense, the periods thus changing imperceptibly one into another. All the information pertaining to cultural changes which they must have contained is lost.

However, there are investigations of some interesting sites found in more recent times in progress now. Roman cemeteries and settlements are excavated in the Libyan Oases, e.g. in Dakhleh, to cite one example only.[32] The Deir el-Banat (Fayum) project of the Center for Egyptological Studies Moscow and the Russian Institute for Egyptological Studies in Cairo is an other example.[33]

 

 

maya.u.mueller@bluewin.ch