After remaining on this spot and spending all their money, as their toil and fatigue continually increased while their resolution dwindled and their strength wore out, those of the commission were forced, shamed, and censured to abandon the undertaking. Far from achieving their design, all they did was to spoil the pyramid and show manifest proof of their inability. Contemplating the mass of stones collected by this demolition, one may imagine the pyramid ruined to its foundation. But on looking at the structure it seems as if it had suffered no injury….
Witnessing the extreme difficulty experienced in dragging down a single stone, I questioned one of the foremen as to whether, if offered a thousand dinars to replace just one of the stones in the position it was in before, he thought himself competent to the undertaking. His answer was that were he offered that sum many times over, he would never be able to accomplish the task. This he affirmed with an oath.
Seneferu’s pyramids at Dahshur and the big three at Giza—Cheops and Chephren and Mycerinus—have lost their starkly elegant smoothness. But at least sheer bulk has preserved their shape enough for them to remain the most instantly recognizable structures in the world. Their relations fared far worse: Of nearly a hundred other pyramids in the field that stretches from Abu Ruwash just north of Giza to Illahun sixty miles south, most are little more than dunes of rubble. Three such mounds rise from the edge of the valley at Abu Sir, between Giza and Saqqara. The temple walls and corridors and subsidiary courts of just one of them, the pyramid complex of Sahure (2458–2446 B.C.), originally boasted a mind-boggling 12,000 square yards of carved limestone reliefs. Of these, a mere 180 square yards have survived, and most in pretty rough condition.
It would be nice to think that stolen stones were always put to good use, but this was not the case. Some destructions were malicious. In A.D. 1378 a Sufi sheikh known as Sayim al-Dahr—the Perpetual Faster—attacked the face, ears, and nose of the Giza Sphinx in a fit of iconoclastic zeal. The ancient idol took revenge, so Arab chronicles say, by blowing a veil of sand over the bothersome village at his feet, whereupon the peasantry lynched the skinny Sufi.*4
Long before, other great monuments had fallen to organized vandalism. The Assyrians sacked Memphis in the seventh century B.C. The Persian emperor Cambyses, who conquered Egypt a century later, was so enraged by an attempted uprising that he wrecked the ancient Temple of the Sun at Heliopolis to its foundations. And not only did he slaughter Memphis’s sacred Apis, a live bull that was kept in the Temple of Ptah and worshiped as a manifestation of the god, but, as Herodotus tells us, he also “broke open ancient tombs and examined the bodies.”
Cambyses’ morbid curiosity was hardly unique. The pyramids, of course, had long since been divested of their human contents. And long after the Persians had gone, when the city of Memphis declined, the villages that took its place found tomb plunder a useful supplement to farming. The mummy-grubbing was to continue through the advent of Islam and down to the present.
The rewards could be surprising. Abd al-Latif of Baghdad recounts this gruesome tale:
A credible person told me that, joining once in a search for treasures near the pyramids, his party found a tightly sealed jar, on opening which and finding honey, they ate it. One of them noticed a hair that had stuck to his finger: He pulled it toward him and a small infant appeared, the whole of the limbs of which seemed still to have preserved their original freshness….
The fashion for digging up mummies peaked in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when by a grisly twist of credulity Europeans came to believe that the gooey interiors of the rotted corpses had healing powers. Formed into a poultice, this momia was thought to make an excellent remedy for cuts and bruises. Some prescribed that it was best swallowed. One Vincent le Blanc of Marseilles, writing of Saqqara in 1660, said,
’Tis where the greatest part of Mummy, or flesh buried and roasted in the sand is gotten, which the wind uncovering, the next passenger brings to town for sale, it being very medicinable. Here you see a dead man is often more serviceable to the living than the living themselves; yet some approve not of the physick.
A compatriot of his, a certain Monsieur de Thevenot, wrote an all-too-believable account of his own visit in 1654 to what he calls the Village of the Mummies. The villagers near Saqqara were, he says, “Very greedy of Money, and spare not to do any thing so they may come by it. And as they fancy, that the Franks carry always a good deal about them, when they have them in their Clutches, they squeeze them all they can….” Having paid the grand sum of eight piasters to be shown a fresh mummy pit, Thevenot was lowered into a hole in the ground that had plainly long since been exposed. His guides extracted another piaster for the job of chopping open the coffin he found in the tomb, and then the mummy inside was so decayed that the only salvageable parts were its hands. These the tourist took home with him to France.
Thevenot had reason to complain. A few years earlier, the Roman antiquarian Pietro della Valle had paid a mere six piasters for the privilege of removing two intact, perfectly wrapped mummies from Saqqara. Not only this, but his prizes both bore exquisite portraits of their owners. One showed a young man with curly black hair and beard dressed in a long linen robe adorned with gold and jewels. On his belt was inscribed the Greek word “Eupsychei,” meaning “Farewell.” The other portrait appeared to be of his wife. Her picture was lavished with similarly rich adornment, including rings on every finger. A century later della Valle’s descendants sold these two rich citizens of Roman Memphis to a German nobleman. He carried them to Dresden, where these first discoveries of what were to be known as Fayoum Portraits can be seen today at the State Museum.
The rise in mummy prices reflected a sad truth. Happy to keep the apothecaries of Europe supplied, Cairene merchants had plundered the ancient necropolis to such effect that they were running out of bodies. This proved but a minor obstacle. The mummy-traders found that fresh corpses would do perfectly well. They bought the unclaimed bodies of criminals and the indigent, stuffed them with pitch, and left them in the sun to ripen. This profitable ruse lasted, we are told, until one dealer’s disgruntled slave betrayed his master to the governor of Cairo. The Ottoman pasha had the whole profession clapped in irons.
It was at about this time, too, that some savvy Cairene huckster produced The Book of Buried Pearls and of the Precious Mystery, Giving the Hiding Places of Finds and Treasures. This Arabic tomb robber’s manual detailed magic formulas for outwitting the jinns who guarded ancient tombs. It gave precise directions to mountains of jewels and a bottomless well of silver it claimed was sunk deep inside the Great Pyramid. The book was still circulating early in the twentieth century, having been, as a curator of the Egyptian Museum claimed at the time, the greatest single cause of damage to the country’s antiquities.
The Romans avidly collected pharaonic knickknacks, which explains why Rome prickles with thirteen obelisks—more than any city in Egypt. Augustus Caesar himself launched the fashion. Soon after defeating Cleopatra and her lover Marc Antony in 30 B.C., and so ending Egypt’s independence, he ordered the twin granite obelisks of Tutmosis III to be removed from the Temple of the Sun at Heliopolis. These early spoils were not to make it to Rome. They remained stuck at Alexandria for nineteen centuries before crossing the seas as gifts from Egypt to London and New York.
hest prizes from ancient sites. Their unrestricted scavenging formed the basis of the great collections of Paris, London, Leiden, and Turin.
Egypt’s own nineteenth-century rulers proved equally keen for spoils. The disdain of the good Muslim for paganism, however, made them less discriminating. In their impatience to catch up with the West, they sacrificed countless ancient monuments on the altar of progress. A dozen entire temples vanished forever during the single decade of the 1820s, among them those at Armant and Elephantine, at Antinoe and Ashmunein. The ancient stones, consumed in lime kilns and crushed to provide mortar and plaster, rose again as the chimneys of provincial factories and as walls for the palaces of pashas in Cairo.
It was not until 1857, with the founding of the antiquities museum at Cairo by the pioneering archaeologist Mariette Pasha, that the wholesale plunder diminished. By the end of the century guards protected the major sites. The vast Memphite necropolis ceased to be seen as a mere mine. Instead, it was to be exploited for tourism and scholarship. Even so, in 1880 a hundred camel-loads of stone per day were being carried into the capital from the pyramid of Cheops’s son Djedefre near the village of Abu Ruwash. Only a public outcry prevented the great Giza pyramids themselves from being quarried to build the first dams on the Nile, the Delta barrages to the north of Cairo, which were completed in 1891. And right into the early twentieth century, farmers continued to level the humus mounds covering ancient Memphis, having found that the city’s remains made excellent fertilizer.
JEREMIAH WAS RIGHT, for once. The doomsaying biblical prophet had warned that God would smash “the images of Bethshemesh that is in the land of Egypt” and would burn with fire “the houses of the gods of the Egyptians.” The “images” of Beth Shemesh, which in Hebrew meant House of the Sun—that is, Heliopolis—were indeed destroyed.*5 The site of the sacred Benben stone, whose worship dated back to prehistoric times; the home of Ra the sun god, whose temple once owned 100,000 acres employing 12,000 peasants; the place where legend claimed that Thoth had invented writing; the On of the Bible, where Joseph wed the daughter of the high priest Potiphar; the center of mathematics and astronomy, where the first 365-day calendar and 24-hour clock were devised and where the finest minds of Greece studied—of all this glory all but the merest traces vanished. The only intact piece of ancient Heliopolis to endure was its lone obelisk.
As to this survivor, Diodorus Siculus states that it was one of a pair of obelisks erected by the pharaoh Sesostris I. This king went suddenly blind, says the ancient Sicilian geographer, and seeking a cure he consulted an oracle. “Adore the god of Heliopolis,” the oracle told him, “and sight will return when you wash your eyes with the urine of any wife who has never known a man outside of wedlock.” Easy enough to have obelisks raised as a sign of devotion, but the second part of the bargain was harder to fulfill. Poor old Sesostris had to burn many an adulteress alive, including his own wife, until at long last a certain gardener’s spouse passed the rinse test. The pharaoh married this chaste dame, concludes Diodorus, as soon as he regained his sight.
The truth is more prosaic. The ancient Egyptians were never so archly misogynistic as Diodorus would have us believe. Besides, inscriptions on the surviving obelisk state simply that it was one of a pair built to commemorate the thirtieth jubilee of Sesostris, in about 1940 B.C.
What is most certain is that the obelisk watched the city around it disappear. Its twin fell sometime in the twelfth century A.D. Its broken pieces no doubt ended up in some unknown walls of Cairo. But when Strabo saw Heliopolis 2,000 years ago he could already dismiss it as a deserted mound: “It is said that anciently this was the principal residence of the priests, who studied philosophy and astronomy. But there are no longer such a body of persons or such pursuits.” So the lonely monolith stood for twenty centuries among fields, a helpless sentinel at the northern approach to Cairo, impassive to the glories of succeeding armies of Arabs, Crusaders, Turks, Frenchmen, and Britons who all camped at its foot, until the obelisk suffered the final indignity of being engulfed in a dingy suburb of the brash twentieth-century metropolis.*6
But Memphis’s position at the head of the Delta still made it, as Diodorus says, “the gateway to Egypt, the master of the commerce passing upstream to the country above.” Its port of Peruw-Nefer (which rather charmingly meant Bon Voyage) was the busiest in the country. The pharaoh’s palace in the center of town, close by the Temple of Ptah, was the seat of Egypt’s administration for most of the time—if not the preferred residence of the king himself. Both great institutions, as well as the city’s vast necropolis, were added to by successive rulers down to the thirtieth and last wholly Egyptian dynasty. Ramses II had two colossal statues of himself erected at Memphis. The highest offices of Egypt’s bureaucracy must still have been based there in his reign (1304–1237 B.C.), to judge from the fact that many of the greatest nobles chose to be buried at Saqqara. Ramses’ son Khaemwes, who as crown prince assumed the title of high priest of Ptah, was himself entombed in the desert overlooking Memphis. Half a millennium later, the Twenty-sixth Dynasty ruler Apries (589–570 B.C.) built a vast new royal palace just north of the Temple of Ptah. (Sadly, he built it in mud brick, so all that remains today is a large hummock of higher ground amid fields.)
When Herodotus passed through in 450 B.C. Memphis had been reduced to a provincial capital within the vast Persian Empire. Yet it remained a cosmopolitan city. Herodotus mentioned prosperous quarters of Greeks, Indians, Canaanites, Medes, Sumerians, Scythians, and Kurds. The Phoenician deities Baal and Astarte had long enjoyed their own temples here. The presence of Levantine traders was so familiar that the Egyptian word for haggling was “to speak like a Syrian.” All these foreigners transmitted Memphite customs and beliefs far afield. The Greeks, for instance, derived their picture of what happens after death from the topography of Egypt’s capital. The crossing of the river Styx to Hades was modeled, wrote Diodorus, on the dispatch of funeral barges from Memphis across a lake that separated the city from the Saqqara necropolis, a lake he describes as “surrounded by beautiful meadows and canals, with lotus and flowering rushes.”
Alexander the Great captured Egypt’s ancient capital in 332 B.C. Unlike the Persians, who had scorned Egyptian beliefs, he took care to woo the Memphites. He organized games and concerts. He paid tribute to the sacred Apis. But he also inadvertently sealed the fate of Memphis by founding Alexandria. The port city became the seat of the dynasty established by the emperor’s general Ptolemy Soter, who grabbed Egypt as his slice of Alexander’s legacy. The Ptolemies’ three-century reign transformed Alexandria into a rich metropolis that was the preeminent city of the Hellenistic Age.
While Memphis faded by comparison with this upstart rival, the city did share in the prosperity that Ptolemaic rule brought to Egypt. Its large Greek community fared especially well. O
ne can see this by the profusion of Greek papyri describing bustling trade in such things as slaves, glass, bronzework, and the sweet white wine that Memphis was famed for—including one third-century shipping document that details a bribe of ten drachmas paid to the city’s chief customs inspector. The Greek-speaking Ptolemies were sensitive to their position as alien rulers. Recognizing Memphis’s centrality in Egyptian tradition, they made a great show of patronizing its temples and shrines. They enlisted the Apis bulls into a new, amalgamated deity—Sarapis—whose cult became a sort of official religious doctrine. The Temple of Ptah, now associated also with Sarapis, Isis, and above all the now deified Imhotep, god of wisdom and healing, was once again the most popular pilgrimage site in Egypt. Supplicants would sleep within its precincts, then pay one of the city’s many professional seers to interpret their dreams. It was here, too, that Ptolemaic kings continued to be crowned, and with the full pomp of their Egyptian predecessors.
Indeed, the event recorded by that key to the cipher of hieroglyphics, the Rosetta Stone, is the gathering of the entire priesthood of Egypt at Memphis for the Receiving of the Sovereignty by Ptolemy V Epiphanes Eucharistus in 196 B.C. In the form of Ptolemaic decrees, the inscription is in three languages: ancient hieroglyphics, the more current demotic Egyptian script, and Greek. The text amounts to a sophisticated public-relations pitch, showing clearly how concerned the rulers were to placate their native subjects: “Inasmuch as the king is well disposed to the gods,” it reads, “and inasmuch as he has lightened taxes, amnestied rebels, and defended the country; has restored temples throughout the land; has given gifts to and made arrangement for the burial of sacred bulls—because the king has done these things, henceforth higher honors will be paid to him and to his ancestors.”