THE LATE EARL OF CARNARVON.
From a Photograph by F. J. Mortimer, F.R.P.S.
THE LATE EARL OF CARNARVON.
From a Photograph by F. J. Mortimer, F.R.P.S.
For out first real description of The Valley in modern times we must turn to tlie pages of Richard Pococke, an English traveller who in 1743 published “A Description of the East” in several volumes. His account is extremely interesting, and considering the hurried nature of his visit, extraordinarily accurate. Here is his description of the approach to The Valley:—
“The Sheik furnished me with horses, and we set out to go to Biban-el-Meluke, and went about a mile to the north, in a sort of street, on each side of which the rocky ground about ten feet high has rooms cut into it, some of them being supported with pillars; and, as there is riot the least sign in the plain of private buildings, I thought that these in the very earliest times might serve as houses, and be the first invention after tents, and contrived us better shelter from wind, and cold of the nights. It is a sort of gravelly stone, and the doors are cut regularly to the street. We then turned to the north west, enter’d in between the high rocky hills, and went in a vary narrow valley. We after turn’d towards the south, and then to the north west, going in all between the mountains about a mile or a mile and a half. . . . We came to a part that is wider, being a round opening like an amphitheatre and ascended by a narrow step passage about ten feet high, which seems to have been broken down thro’ the rock, the antient passage being probably from the Memnonium under the hills, and it may be from the grottos I enter’d on the other side. By this passage we came to Biban-el-Meluke, or Bab-el-Meluke, that is, the gate or court of the kings, being the sepulchres of the Kings of Thcbes.”
The tradition of a secret passage through the hills to the Deir el Bahari side of the cliff is still to be found among the natives, and to the present day there are archaeologists who subscribe to it. There is, however, little or no basis for the theory, and certainly not a vestige of proof.
Pococke then goes on to an account of such of the tombs as were accessible at the time of his visit. He mentions fourteen in all, and most of them are recognizable from his description. Of five of them, those of Rameses IV. Rameses VI, Rameses XII, Seti II, and the tomb commenced by Ta•usert and finished by Set•nekht, he gives the entire plan. In the case of four—Mer•en•Ptah, Rameses III, Amen•meses and Rameses XI—he only planned the outer galleries and chambers, the inner chambers evidently being inaccessible; and the remaining five he speaks of as “stopped up.” It is evident from Pococke’s narrative that he was not able to devote as much time to his visit as he would have liked. The Valley was not a safe spot to linger in, for the pious anchorite we left in possession had given place to a horde of bandits, who dwelt among the Kurna hills, and terrorized the whole country-side. “The Sheik also was in haste to go,” he remarks, “being afraid, as I imagine, lest the people should have opportunity to gather together if we staid out long.”
Plate V
ENTRANCE TO THE TOMB OF RAMESES VI.
These Theban bandits were notorious, and we find frequent mention of them in the talcs of eighteenth century travellers. Norden, who visited Thebes in 1737. but who never got nearer The Valley than the Ramasseum—he seems to have thought himself lucky to have got so far—describes them thus :
“These people occupy, at present, the grottos, which are seen in great numbers in the neighbouring mountains. They obey no one; they are lodged so high, that they discover at a distance if anyone comes to attack them. Then, if they think themselves strong enough, they descend into the plain, to dispute the ground ; if not, they keep themselves under shelter in their grottos, or they retire deeper into the mountains, whither you would have no great desire to follow them.”
Bruce, who visited The Valley in 1769, also suffered at the hands of these bandits, and puts on record a somewhat drastic, but fruitless, attempt, made by one of the native governors, to curb their activities :—
“A number of robbers, who much resemble our gypsies, live in the holes of the mountains above Thebes. They ore all outlaws, punished with death if elsewhere found. Osman Bey, an ancient governor of Girge, unable to suffer any longer the disorders committed by these people, ordered a quantity of dried faggots to be brought together, and, with his soldiers, took possession of the face of the mountain, where the greatest number of these wretches were: he then ordered all their caves to be filled with this dry brushwood, to which he set lire, so that most of them were destroyed; but they have since recruited their numbers without changing their manners.”
In the course of this visit Bruce made copies of Hie figures of harpers in the tomb of Rameses III, a tomb which still goes by his name, but his labours were brought to an abrupt conclusion. Finding that it was his intention to spend the night in the tomb, and continue his researches in the morning, his guides were seized with terror, “With great clamour and marks of discontent, they dashed their torches against the largest harp, and made the best of their way out of the cave, leaving me and my people in the dark ; and all the way as they went, they made dreadful denunciations of tragical events that were immediately to follow, upon their departure from the cave.” That their terror was genuine and not ill-founded, Bruce was soon to discover, for as he rode down The Valley in the gathering darkness, he was attacked by a party of the bandits, who lay in wait for him, and hurled stones at him from the side of the cliff. With the aid of ills gun and his servant’s blunderbuss he managed to beat them off, but, on arriving at his boat, he thought it prudent to cast off at once, and made no attempt to repeat his visit.
Nor did even the magic of Napoleon’s name suffice to curb the arrogance of these Theban bandits, for the members of his scientific commission who visited Thebes in the last days of the century were molested, and even fired upon. They succeeded, however, in making a complete survey of all the tombs then open, and also carried out a small amount of excavation.
Let us pass on now to 1815, and make the acquaintance of one of the most remarkable men in the whole history of Egyptology. In the early years of the century, a young Italian giant, Belzoni by name, was earning a precarious income in England by performing feats of strength at fairs and circuses. Born in Padua, of a respectable family of Homan extraction, he had been intended for the priesthood, but a roving disposition, combined with the internal troubles in Italy at that period, had driven him to seek his fortune abroad. We happened recently upon a reference to him in his pre-Egyptian days, in one of “Rainy Day” Smith’s books of reminiscences, where the author describes how he was carried round the stage, with a group of other people, by the “strong man” Belzoni. In the intervals of circus work Belzoni seems to have studied engineering, and in 1815 he thought he saw a chance of making his fortune by introducing into Egypt a hydraulic wheel, which would, he claimed, do four times the work of the ordinary native appliance. With this in view, he made his way to Egypt, contrive ! an introduction to Mohammed Ali the “Bashaw,” and in the garden of the palace actually set up his wheel. According to Belzoni it was a great success, but the Egyptians refused to have anything to do with it, and he found himself stranded in Egypt.
Then, through the traveller Burchardt, he got an introduction to Salt, the British Consul-General in Egypt, and contracted with him to bring the “colossal Memnion bust” (Rameses II, now’ in the British Museum) from Luxor to Alexandria. This was in 1815, and the next five years he spent in Egypt, excavating and collecting antiquities, first for Salt, and afterwards on his own account, and quarrelling with rival excavators, notably Drovetti, who represented the French Consul. Those were the great days of excavating. Anything to which a fancy was taken, from a scarab to an obelisk, was just appropriated, and if there was a difference of opinion with a brother excavator one laid for him with a gun.
Belzoni’s account of his experiences in Egypt, published in 1820, is one of the most fascinating books in the whole of Egyptian literature, and I should like to quote from it at length—how, for instance, he dropped an obelisk in the Nile and fished it out again, and the full story of his various squabbles. We must confine ourselves, however, to his actual work in The Valley. Here he discovered and cleared a number of tombs, including those of Ay, Mentu•her•khepesh•ef, Rameses I, and Seti I. In the last named he found the magnificent alabaster sarcophagus which is now in the Soane Museum in London.
This was the first occasion on which excavations on a large scale had ever been made in The Valley, and we must give Belzoni full credit for the manner in which they were carried out. There are episodes which give the modern excavator rather a shock, us, for example, when he describes his method of dealing with sealed doorways—by means of a battering ram—but on the whole the work was extraordinarily good. It is perhaps worth recording the fact that Belzoni, like everyone else who has ever dug in The Valley, was of the opinion that he had absolutely exhausted its possibilities. “It is my firm opinion,” he states, “that in the Valley of Beban el Malook, there are no more (tombs) than are now known, in consequence of my late discoveries ; for. previously to my quitting that place, I exerted all my humble abilities in endeavouring to find another tomb, but could not succeed ; and what is a still greater proof, independent of my own researches, after I quitted the place, Mr. Salt, the British Consul, resided there four months and laboured in like manner in vain to find another.”
Plate VI
INTERIOR OF THE TOMB OF RAMESES IX
In 1820 Belzoni returned to England, and gave an exhibition of his treasures, including the alabaster sarcophagus anil a model of the tomb of Seti, in a building which had been erected in Piccadilly in 1812, a building which many of us can still remember—the Egyptian Hall. He never returned to Egypt, but died a few years later on an expedition to Timbuctoo.
For twenty years after Belzoni’s day The Valley was well exploited, and published records come thick and fast. We shall not have space here to do more than mention a few of the names—Salt, Champollion, Burton, Hay, Head, Rosellini, Wilkinson, who numbered the tombs, Rawlinson, Rliind. In 1844 the great German expedition under Lepsius made a complete survey of The Valley, and cleared the tomb of Rameses II, and part of the tomb of Mer•en•Ptah. Hereafter comes a gap; the German expedition was supposed to have exhausted the possibilities, and nothing more of any consequence was done in The Valley until the very end of the century.
In this period, however, just outside The Valley, there occurred one of the most important events in the whole of its history. In the preceding chapter we told how the various royal mummies were collected from their hiding-places, and deposited all together in a rock cleft at Deir el Bahari. There for nearly three thousand years they had rested, and there, in the summer of 1875, they were found by the members of a Kurna family, the Abd-el-Rasuls. It was in the thirteenth century B.C. that the inhabitants of this village first adopted the trade of tomb-robbing, and it is a trade that they have adhered to steadfastly ever since. Their activities are curbed at the present day, but they still search on the sly in out-of-the-way comers, and occasionally make a rich strike. On this occasion the Find was too big to handle. It was obviously impossible to clear the tomb of its contents, so the whole family was sworn to secrecy, and its heads determined to leave the find where it was, and to draw on it from time to time as they needed money. Incredible as it may seem the secret was kept for six years, and the family, with a banking account of forty or more dead Pharaohs to draw upon, grew rich.
It soon became manifest, from objects which came into the market, that there had been a rich find of royal material somewhere, but it was not until 1851 that it was possible to truce the sale of the objects to the Abd-el-Rasul family. Even then it was difficult to prove anything. The head of the family was arrested and subjected by the Mudir of Kench, the notorious Daoud Pasha, whose methods of administering justice were unorthodox but effectual, to an examination. Naturally he denied the charge, and equally naturally the village of Kurna rose as one man and protested that in a strictly honest community the Abd-el-Rasul family were of all men the most honest. He was released provisionally for lack of evidence, but his interview with Daoud seems to have shaken him. Interviews with Daoud usually did have that effect.
One of our older workmen told us once of an experience of his in his younger days. He had been by trade a thief, and in the exercise of his calling had been apprehended and brought before the Mudir. It was a hot day, and his nerves were shaken right at the start by finding the Mudir taking his ease in a large earthenware jar of water. From this unconventional seat of justice Daoud had looked at him—just looked at him—“and as his eyes went through me I felt my bones turning to water within me. Then very quietly he said to me, ‘This is the first time you have appeared before me. You are dismissed, but—be very, very careful that you do not appear a second time.’ and I was so terrified that I changed my trade and never did.”
Some effect of this sort must have been produced on the Abd-el-Rasul family, for a month later one of its members went to the Mudir and made full confession. News was telegraphed at once to Cairo, Emile Brugsch Bey of the Museum was sent up to investigate and take charge, and on the 5th of July, 1881, the long-kept secret was revealed to him. It must have been an amazing experience. There, huddled together in a shallow, ill-cut grave, lay the most powerful monarchs of the ancient East, kings whose names were familiar to the whole world, but whom no one in their wildest moments had ever dreamt of seeing. There they had remained, where the priests in secrecy had hurriedly brought them that dark night three thousand years ago; and on their coffins and mummies, neatly docketed, were the records of their journeyings from one hiding-place to another. Some had been re-wrapped, and two or three in the course of their many wanderings had contrived to changer their coffins. In forty-eight hours—we don't do things quite so hastily nowadays—the tomb was cleared ; the kings were embarked upon the Museum barge; and within fifteen days of Brugsch Bey's arrival in Luxor, they were landed in Cairo and were deposited in the Museum.
It is a familiar story, but worth repeating, that as the barge made its way down the river the men of the neighbouring villages fired guns as for n funeral, while the women followed along the bank, tearing their hair, and uttering that shrill quavering cry of mourning for the dead, a cry that has doubtless come right down from the days of the Pharaohs themselves.
To return to The Valley. In 1898, acting on information supplied by local officials, M. Loret, then Director General of the Service of Antiquities, opened up several new royal tombs, including those of Thothmes I, Thothmes III, and Amen•hetep II. This last was a very important discovery. We have already stated thut in the Twenty-first Dynasty thirteen royal mummies had found sanctuary in this Amen•hetep’s tomb, and here in 1898 the thirteen were found. It was but their mummies that remained. The wealth, which in their power they had lavished on their funerals, had long since vanished, but at least they had been spared the last indignity. The tomb had been entered, it is true; it had been robbed, and the greater part of the funeral equipment had been plundered and broken, but it had escaped the wholesale destruction that the other royal tombs had undergone, and the mummies remained intact. The body of Amen•hetep himself still lay within its own sarcophagus, where it had rested for more than three thousand years. Very rightly the Government, at the representation of Sir William Garstin, decided against its removal. The tomb was barred and bolted, a guard was placed upon it, and there the king was left in peace.
Plate VII
INTERIOR OF THE TOMB OF RAMESES IV, SHOWING THE SARCOPHAGUS.
Unfortunately there is a sequel to this story. Within a year or two of the discovery the tomb was broken into by a party of modern tomb-robbers, doubtless with the connivance of the guard, and the mummy was removed from its sarcophagus and searched for treasure. The thieves were subsequently tracked down by the Chief Inspector of Antiquities, and arrested, although he was unable to secure their conviction at the hands of the Native Court. The whole proceedings, as set forth in the official report, remind one very forcibly of the records of ancient tomb-robbery described in the preceding chapter, and we are forced to the conclusion that in many ways the Egyptian of the present day differs little from his ancestor in the reign of Rameses IX.
One moral we can draw from this episode, and we commend it to the critics who call us Vandals for taking objects from the tombs. By removing antiquities to museums we are really assuring their safety: left in situ they would inevitably, sooner or later, become the prey of thieves, and that, for all practical purposes, would be the end of them.
In 1902 permission to dig in The Valley under Government supervision was granted to an American, Mr. Theodore Davis, and he subsequently excavated there for twelve consecutive seasons. His principal finds are known to most of us. They include the tombs of Thothmes IV, Hat•shep•sut, Si-Ptah, Yua and Thua—great-grandfather and grandmother these of Tut•ankh•Amen’s queen—Hor•em•heb, and a vault, not a real tomb, devised for the transfer of the burial of Akh•en•Aten from its original tomb at Tell el Amarna. This cache comprised the mummy and coffin of the heretic king, a very small part of his funerary equipment, and portions of the sepulchral shrine of his mother Tyi. In 1914 Mr. Davis's concession reverted to us, and the story of the tomb of Tut•ankh•Amen really begins.
With the full sympathy of my collaborator, Mr. Mace, I dedicate this account of the discovery of the tomb of Tut • ankh • Amen to the memory of my beloved friend and colleague
LORD CARNARVONwho died in the hour of his triumph.
But for his untiring generosity and constant encouragement our labours could never have been crowned with success. His judgment in ancient art has rarely been equalled. His efforts, which have done so much to extend our knowledge of Egyptology, will ever be honoured in history, and by me his memory will always be cherished.
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By Lady Burghclere
If it is true that the whole world loves a lover, it is also true that either openly or secretly the world loves Romance. Hence, doubtless, the passionate and farflung interest aroused by the discovery of Tut•ankh•Amen’s tomb, an interest extended to the discoverer, and certainly not lessened by the swift tragedy that waited on his brief hour of triumph. A story that opens like Aladdin’s Cave, and ends like a Greek myth of Nemesis cannot fail to capture the imagination of all men and women who, in this workaday existence, can still be moved by tales of high endeavour and unrelenting doom. Let it be gratefully acknowledged by those to whom Carnarvon’s going must remain an ever-enduring sorrow, that the sympathy displayed equalled the excitement evoked by the revelations in The Valley of the Kings. It is in thankful response to that warm-hearted sympathy that this slight sketch of a many-sided personality, around whom such emotions have centred, finds place here as introduction to the history of that discovery to which the discoverer so eagerly devoted his energies and ultimately sacrificed his life.
To those who knew Lord Carnarvon, there is a singular fitness in the fact that he should have been the hero of one of the most dramatic episodes of the present day, since under the quiet exterior of this reticent Englishman, beat, in truth, a romantic heart. The circumstances of his life had undoubtedly fostered the natural bent of his character. Bom on June 26th, 1866, George Edward Stanhope Molyneux Herbert, Lord Porchester, enjoyed the inestimable privilege of being reared in an atmosphere coloured by romance and permeated by a fine simplicity. Nor was he less happy in his outward surroundings. Even when matched against the many “stately homes of England,” Highclere must rank as a domain of rare beauty. Much of its charm is due to its contrasted scenery. From the close-cropped lawns, shaded by giant cedars of Lebanon, where in a past century Pope sat and discoursed with his friend, Robert Caroline Herbert, the godson and namesake of George II’s queen, the transition is brief to thickets of hawthorn, woods of beech and oak, and lakes, the happy haunts of wildfowl; while all around stand the high downs either densely timbered or as bare and wild as when the Britons built their camp of refuge on Beacon Hill, the great chalk bastion that dominates the country-side. To children nurtured on Arthurian legends it needed little mental effort to translate the woodlands, where they galloped their ponies, into the Forest of Broceliande, or the old monkish fishponds, where they angled for pike and gathered water-lilies, into that magic mere which swallowed up the good blade Excalibur; whilst a mound rising from a distant gravel-pit merely required the drawbridge, erected by the obliging house carpenter across its surrounding trickle of water, to become Tintagel.
If, as any Catholic priest would assure us, the indelible impressions on the human mind are those stamped in the earliest years, Porchester graduated in a school of Romance and Adventure. Moreover, hereditary influences combined with environment to give an individual outlook on life. The son of two high-minded parents who were ever striving to give practical effect to their ideals for the benefit of others, there was nothing to unlearn in the early education. Indeed, it can confidently be asserted that, throughout his childhood, the curly-headed little boy neither heard nor witnessed anything that “common was or mean” The village, the household, were members of the family. It was the feudal, the patriarchal system at its best, the dreams of “Young England” realized. For the law that governed the community at Highclere was the law of kindness, though kindness that permitted no compromise with moral laxity. An amusing commentary on the standards recognized as governing—or at any rate expected to govern —home life, was furnished on one occasion by the children’s nurse. One of her nurslings, throughly scared by the blood-curdling descriptions of Hell, and Hell-fire, contained in a horrible little religious primer, “The Peep o’ Day” (now mercifully discarded by later generations) administered to her by an injudicious governess, naturally turned to the beloved “Nana” for consolation. She did not seek in vain. “Don’t worry, dearie, over such tales,” said the good old woman, “no one from Highclere Castle will ever go to Hell!”
By common consent, Porchester’s father, the fourth Earl of Carnarvon, was regarded as a statesman who had never allowed ambition to deflect him by a hair’s breadth from the path mapped out by a meticulous conscience. But although he had resigned from the Derby-Disraeli Government rather than support the Franchise Bill of 1867, he was the reverse of a reactionary. Both in imperial and social schemes he was far in advance of most of his contemporaries on both sides in politics. Indeed, it is interesting to speculate how much of blood and treasure would have been spared to this country if the measures and judgment of this truly Conservative statesman had commanded the support of the Cabinets and party with which he was connected. Little boys are not interested in politics—except in lighting bonfires to celebrate successful elections— but whatever are the eventual developments, environment and heredity are the bedrock whence character is hewn. The fifth Earl of Carnarvon— the archaeologist—in his physical and mental “makeup,” to use the modern phrase, did not recall his father. But it was from the latter that he inherited the quality of independent thought, coupled with an extreme pleasure in putting his mind alongside that of other men. Moreover, the power of scholarly concentration which he brought to bear on the many and varied subjects in which he was interested, was certainly part of the paternal heritage, for the fourth Earl was one of the finest classical scholars of his generation. Indeed, there are those still living who can bear witness to his faultless Latin oration as Viceroy at Trinity College, Dublin, and remember his admission, when pressed, that he could as easily have made the speech in Greek.
In 1875 a shadow fell across the boy’s life. His mother died after giving birth to a third daughter. The shadow was destined to be enduring, since Evelyn Stanhope, Lady Carnarvon, was one of those rare women who are in the world and yet not of it, and the want of her clever sympathy was a lifelong loss to Porchester. His whimsical wit and her keen sense of humour were made for mutual understanding. She would have helped him to overcome the ingrained reserve, which it needed the action of years to wear away, at the outset interpreting an unusual character to the world, and the world to her son.
Even when the surviving parent is as devoted a father as was Lord Carnarvon, it is perhaps unavoidable that the mother’s death should bring an element of austerity into children’s lives, though it also tends, as it certainly did in this instance, to tighten the links between brother and sisters. After their mother’s death, Porchester, or “Porchy” as he was then habitually called, and the little girls were, however, unspeakably blessed in the devoted affection lavished upon them by their father’s sisters Lady Gwendolen Herbert and Eveline, Lady Portsmouth. The former was a delicate invalid around whose sofa young and old clustered, secure of sympathy in sorrow or in joy. The fact that an unhappy chance had cheated her of her share of youth’s fun and gaiety made her the more intent on securing these for the motherless children, in whose lives she realized her own life. She was the natural interpreter when vengeance threatened to follow on chemical experiments resulting in semi-asphyxiating and wholly malodorous vapours, or when excursions amongst water-taps sent cataracts of water down the Vandycks. The schoolroom discipline of the ’seventies was not conceived on Montessori lines. The extreme mildness of Lady Gwendolen’s rule did not always commend itself to tutors and governesses. They recalled that a spear, which at his earnest entreaty she had bestowed on Porchy, was fleshed in a valuable engraving; while another of her gifts, a large saw, was regarded as so dangerous that it became “tabu” and hung suspended by a broad blue ribbon, a curious ornament on the schoolroom wall. Nor can it be denied that to present a small boy with half-a-crown to console him for breaking a window is a homœopathic method of education, which would excite protests from pastors and teachers of any age. But despite her unfailing indulgence, her influence was never enervating. It is what we are, not our sayings, and still less our scoldings, that count with those keen-eyed critics, the younger generation. Naughtiness in Gwendolen’s neighbourhood was unthinkable. In her own person she so endeared the quality of gentleness—not a virtue always popular with the young of the male sex—that Porchy’s sisters and small half brothers never suffered from roughness at his hands. A tease he was, a terrific tease then and to the end of life, in sober middle-age getting the same rapture from a “rise” out of his friends or family as a fifth-form school boy. But the strand of gentleness that ran through his nature was not its least attaching quality, fostered in those early days by the one effectual method of education, the example of those we love.
Long years afterwards when her nephew laid Lady Gwendolen to rest at Highclere, he reverted with grateful tenderness to the memories, the lessons of that selfless love. “What a blank.” he wrote, would the absence of “that little figure in grey” mean to him at the family gatherings, the christenings, the weddings, where her presence carried him back to all the lovely memories of childhood.
Never robust, it is doubtful whether Lord Carnarvon would have accomplished even his brief span of life but for the part played in his boyhood by Lady Portsmouth and her home, Eggesford, which became his second home. The England of the seventies was still an age of hermetically closed windows, overheated rooms, comforters and—worst horror of all—respirators. Fortunately for the boy, Lady Portsmouth, a pioneer in many phases of work and thought, was a strenuous advocate of open air. The delicate, white-faced child, after a couple of months spent in hunting and out-of-door games with the tribe of cousins in North Devon, was transformed into a hardy young sportsman. At Eggesford horses and hounds were as much the foreground of life as politics and books at Highclere. “Mr. Sponge’s Sporting Tour” replaced “Marmion,” though it was “The Talisman” and “Ivanhoe” that Lady Portsmouth read aloud to the family in the cherished evening hour, the climax of the busy, happy day at Eggesford. Different as the two houses might appear, they were, however, alike in essentials. They owned the same ethics, they acknowledged the same standards. Highclere could not be called conventional. But Eggesford, in a country which before the advent of the motor preserved much of the flavour of the past, was distinctly unconventional. The meets brought into the field a motley assembly of men, boys, horses and ponies, such as probably outside Ireland could have been collected in no other comer of the United Kingdom. Of these not the least individual figure was Lord Portsmouth, probably the most popular M.F.H. in England. Seldom, indeed, can goodwill to men of goodwill have been more clearly writ large on a human countenance than on this great gentleman’s, whose very raciness of expression only the more endeared him to the Hunt.