In the Valley of the Kings (8 page)

Upon arriving at Minya by train, the seventeen-year-old Carter and a colleague took donkeys the last lap of the journey to Beni Hasan’s rock-cut tombs.

“With our luggage and various impedimenta strapped upon donkeys,” he recorded in his unpublished memoirs, “we rode through the cultivated fields to the river, crossed over to the east bank in an antiquated ferry-boat, and in the dusk we climbed up the slope of the desert escarpment to the terrace where the rock tombs are situated. And there, as the twilight fell swiftly and silently upon those dun coloured cliffs, my first experience was an aspect of dreary desolation which, I must admit, filled me with distrustful phantoms that sometimes haunt the mind on the eve of an adventure.”

It was too dark and he was too weary to examine the tombs he would be working in. But the light of the rising sun provided a revelation as he climbed the high, windswept cliffs to the tombs of the princes and nobles of the first intermediate period (
2181-2040 BC
).

The light was caught by mirrors placed at the tombs’ doorways and reflected into other mirrors set farther back in the dark, cavernous chambers. Here the world of the living was also mirrored in scenes painted on the tombs’ walls: Soldiers march out to war, brewers make the strong Egyptian beer, crocodiles laze in the sun, launderers wash clothes, and squatting women give birth.

Birds, animals, and flowers abound. If harvesters gather olives, apes sit in the trees above them, watching. Here a bald-headed old priest sports with naked girls. There a swineherd, milk on his tongue, weans a piglet. Fishermen cast their nets, pottery makers turn their wheels, weavers ply their trade, while nearby idle gamesters play at draughts, mora, thimble ring, and sennet. Bakers and harpists are lit up by the rising sun, as are cooks and singers, wine makers and acrobats, hunters, dancers, butchers, and lovers.

There may have been no treasure in the tombs here, and there may have been no depictions of gods among the scenes. But there were wrestlers—rows of loincloth-clad men covered the east wall of tomb #15. More than a hundred pairs were laid out on a grid like the frames of a film strip. While the men themselves were identical, the
twisting, turning arms, legs, and torsos were all drawn in unique positions (like the modern wrestlers photographed in sequence by the French artist Eadweard Muybridge in 1887). The observer’s eye swept across the tomb wall from “frame” to “frame,” taking in the motion and struggle captured on the thin layer of plaster nearly four millennia ago.

In places, wasps’ nests (hard as rock) had damaged the friezes or cracks had appeared from the shifting limestone. In some tombs, early Christians had scrawled crosses over scenes, while in others walls had been blackened by squatters’ fires. All kinds of accidents reminded one of the murals’ vulnerability. From early morning until late at night (when weak candlelight replaced the mirrored sun), Carter remained “entombed,” slaving away like some ancient harried painter with only seventy days to finish his work.
^1*

If he was happy with the assignment, he was dissatisfied—“horrified,” to use his expression—by the expedition’s copying methods. They were deadening and mechanical, he protested, though he was low man on the totem pole (only a seventeen-year-old assistant archaeological artist, his official title).

“The modus operandi in force [at Beni Hasan],” he wrote, “was to hang large sheets of tracing paper upon the walls, and with a soft pencil trace the scenes upon them…. These paintings [tracings] were then to be transported to England, where they could be inked in with a brush … often by persons without any knowledge of drawing.”

Carter wanted to work freehand, to draw rather than trace. He wanted to show what he could do. “I was young, however, it was my first experience, and in the struggle for existence I had to obey
and carry out this method of reproducing those beautiful Egyptian records….”

A few months into the 1892 season, the expedition moved south to El Bersheh. For the first part of the trip, the mode of travel was by foot in order to search for tombs and quarries along the way.

There were four men: Newberry Carter, Blackden, and Fraser. Newberry, the scholar who had suggested hiring Carter for the expedition, was in charge. Blackden was an archaeological artist, like Carter, but his experience gave him seniority—and as a gentleman, he had a higher social standing.

Finally, there was Fraser, engaged as both surveyor and copyist. An engineer by training, Fraser originally came to Egypt as a member of the elite Department of Irrigation (the official class most privileged because of the country’s dependence on their work). Soon after arriving, though, Fraser was bitten by the archaeology bug. He gave up his high-paying job with Irrigation and went to train under Petrie at Hawara and El-Lahun, swimming around among bobbing skulls in the dark, flooded pyramid chambers and subsisting on sardines.

If Newberry and Carter were natural allies, then it was to be expected (on the aforementioned “principle” of archaeological jealousy and ambition) that Fraser and Blackden drew together in shared antipathy for their colleagues. The hot, exhausting journey during which the men discovered only empty, uninscribed, undecorated, and roughly hewn burial chambers did nothing to improve their mood. By the time they reached the town of Sheikh Ibada (where they had to wait for a boat), they were taking tea separately—an ominous sign.

The ruins of Sheikh Ibada, the ancient Antinopolis, were meager. Some marble pillars remained standing amid its mud brick houses, dusty palms brushed up against a broken Roman wall or two—nothing more. When some years before the French novelist Gustave Flaubert passed through, he marveled that the squalid
place had once been a thriving city with grand, romantic associations.

For in the second century
AD
, the story goes, when Emperor Hadrian sailed down the Nile, an Egyptian fortune-teller appeared to him here. He predicted death for Hadrian—unless someone freely agreed to take his place.

Hearing his words, Hadrian’s young lover, the beautiful eunuch Antïnous, drowned himself in the Nile, moving Hadrian to decree that a magnificent city with Antïnous’s name should rise on the spot—which is how Antinopolis (the City of Antïnous) rose here, where the four down-in-the-dumps archaeologists now sat wearily (and separately) taking their improvised tea. “Bread, water and onions!” as Newberry noted with an exclamation point, silently passing over Hadrian and the tragic Antïnous. After all, there was no percentage in dwelling on either of them: Hadrian’s tomb was in Rome, while Antïnous went to a watery grave. The talk of the town centered on the still undiscovered tomb of the heretic pharaoh Akhenaten, said to be somewhere in the vicinity.

Rumor had it that Akhenaten (father of Tut’s wife, Princess Ankhesenamun, and of Tut as well) was buried somewhere in the desert surrounding El Bersheh or nearby Amarna, where just now Petrie was raking over the site with a fine-tooth comb.

All kinds of stories were in the air. That Bedouins had stumbled upon the tomb and were secretly selling objects from it—somehow in cahoots with the French director of the Antiquities Service. Or that the Amarna villagers had found the pharaoh’s coffin and, not wanting foreigners to seize it, had reburied or burned it in the dead of night (a British officer even claimed to have caught sight of the torchlight reburial procession).

Such rumors were fire, and the young archaeologists, eager to make their mark, were tinder. Carter’s task, though, was not to search for Akhenaten’s burial place, but to copy the tomb walls before him. And copy them he did, as the weeks stretched into
months and the seasons followed one another, bringing changes in the desert that the boy, very alive to natural beauty, recorded on his sketch pad … while he dreamed of a discoverer’s glory.

Carter’s work at El Bersheh (freehand at last!) was excellent, and the Egyptian Exploration Fund was delighted with him. All very gratifying. The discoverer of Akhenaten’s tomb, though, would win not only the fund’s praise, but that of the world at large.

Is it any wonder that thoughts of the fascinating figure of Akhenaten sometimes came between Carter and the tomb walls he was copying? Evidence of Akhenaten’s period was just beginning to come to light in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The pharaohs who came after him damned the “great criminal” (as they called him), striking his name from the royal chronicles and destroying his monuments in an effort to erase all memory of him. Even today, his chaotic seventeen-year reign (the seals on his wine bottles stop at year 17)
^2*
is interpreted in a more widely varying and contradictory manner than any other reign in Egyptian history. He is a riddle.

What is undisputed is that Akhenaten, a son of Amenhotep III, came to the throne at a time when the empire was at its height (New Kingdom,
1350 BC
). Egypt’s boundaries stretched from Syria in the north to Nubia (now the Sudan) in the south. Lesser kingdoms trembled at the name of Egypt. Tribute poured in from Asia; the army was powerful, the granaries bursting, the temples rich and resplendent. But all of this did not interest Amenhotep IV (“Amun is pleased”)—or Akhenaten, as he called himself in honor
of the Aten, the dazzling Sun Disk at the height of day and the object of his constant meditation.

He was deformed—possibly. At least it may be said that he broke with the conventional portrayal of the king. In murals and most especially in a series of enormous nude statues (now in the Egyptian Museum), he had himself depicted as having huge hips, almost female breasts, no genitals, long, “spidery” fingers, an elongated skull, and a strange, gaunt, brooding face.

His haunting features are unlike any seen in the three thousand years of Egyptian royal portraiture. Possibly such statues were “realistic” and the pharaoh was a Marfan’s case or a sufferer from Froelich’s syndrome.
^3*
Just as possibly the portraits were the expression of a new aesthetic linked to the “heretic’s” religious philosophy. It is like asking whether El Greco’s elongated figures should be traced to severe astigmatism of the artist’s eye—or to the Byzantine icon tradition he absorbed in his youth. Or analyzing Gauguin’s use of light and shadow in terms of his cataracts. After all the scholarly opinions are studied, one still has to flip a coin—and the answer may very well be both heads and tails.

A visionary, Akhenaten turned away from Egypt’s many gods and wrote hymns to the one source of all life, the sun, who warmed all beings from the chick in his egg to the pharaoh on his throne. If Egypt’s principal god, the ram-headed Amun (whose name means “Hidden”), was worshipped in temples with dark, enclosed holy of holies, the Aten was the visible sign of divinity that daily crossed the sky. His worship was conducted in open courtyards, standing out under the sky; art of the period represented him with many life-giving hands reaching out to his creatures below.

In an attempt to fit Akhenaten into an earlier tradition, scholars have pointed out that solar worship was present from the very first dynasties. However, Egypt had never seen anything like Akhenaten’s fanaticism, his chiseling out of the name of “Amun” in inscriptions and earlier royal cartouches, his closure of the temples of other gods, his turning away from political life and absorption in religious contemplation, which led to the ruination of the empire.

Deserting his ancient capital, Wast (Thebes, Luxor), Akhenaten traveled upriver to where the present-day village of Amarna is located in Middle Egypt. Here, in a completely barren stretch of land, he dedicated the new city of Akhetaten to his god. The other pharaohs of his dynasty (the Eighteenth) were buried far to the south, in the Valley of the Kings. But Akhenaten’s vow, inscribed on a series of boundary stelae placed in the surrounding mountains, was to remain here—“in this place”—forever.

These inscriptions, taken together with the fact that his great officials all had tombs in the region, meant that the pharaoh’s tomb was certainly hidden in some wadi, some dry riverbed, or perhaps some cliff.

On Christmas Day, Fraser and Blackden headed for the nearby city of Minya to celebrate, while Carter and Newberry set off to search for Akhenaten’s tomb, keeping their plan secret from their colleagues. Of course, they were not honor-bound to inform them. However, the detail is important in getting a sense of the mood—an almost feverish rivalry was in the air, Carter’s protestations notwithstanding. (“There was not the slightest idea of winning discovery by selfish competition with our colleagues, nor getting the advantage over others….” He was acting “for the advancement of general knowledge.”)

But if we can’t trust Carter’s account of his motives, his description of their exploration provides a good picture of the terrain and distances involved. “There were rumours abroad that the Bedu [Bedouin] had discovered the long lost tomb of Amenophis IV
[the Greek form of Amenhotep IV], or Akhenaten, which was believed to be hidden somewhere in the desert hills behind the great plain of El-Amarna, south of Deir [Arabic for the Monastery of] el-Bersheh.

“Encamped on the desert near us between the cultivated fields of Deir el-Nakhleh and the ravine in which we were working, there was a large Bedu family, of the Ababda tribe who dwell in groups and haunt the solitudes of the eastern desert….

“From these nomads we sought information. Whether they had any knowledge of a large tomb in the desert east of El-Amarna. The chief man among them, called Sheikh Eid, professed to know of a place situated on the desert plateau east of a village at El-Amarna, called Haggi Qandil, where there was a deep cutting in the rock, which he described as being much like the chapels [tombs] of El-Bersheh.

“But as the Ababda, who possessed an original language of their own, had exchanged it for bad Arabic, it was very difficult to understand the Sheikh’s description of the cutting excepting that it was ‘written’ (i.e. inscribed). The Sheikh, however, volunteered for a remuneration and the hire of his camels to show us the spot.