history of Egyptological Work teamworks

More than two thousand Greek and Latin graffiti carved on tombs in the Valley of the Kings indicate the interest of classical travelers in ancient Theban monuments two millennia ago. Even in dynastic times, the Egyptians themselves had showed a fascination with Theban history, and several kings boasted of conducting research and excavations in order to accurately restore ancient monuments. 

-->  In classical times, Diodorus Siculus described Thebes as a great city filled with “huge buildings, splendid temples, and other ornaments ... more opulent than the others in Egypt or anywhere else.” Even then, Theban monuments were being carried back to Europe where they were admired for their size, beauty and mysterious hieroglyphs.

 But surprisingly, all that interest in Thebes, even the knowledge of its location, disappeared from Europe for over fifteen hundred years. From the fourth to the eighteenth century, almost no mention is made of Thebes in European texts and there is no evidence that more than a handful of Europeans even visited the site. This may have been due in part to the inaccessibility of Upper Egypt for political or practical reasons. 

It was not until 1726 that a French Jesuit, Claude Sicard, relocated and correctly identified Thebes. Other travelers followed. A Danish engineer, Frederick Norden, drew sketches of Theban temples in the 1730s. At about the same time, an Englishman, Richard Pococke, drew a map of the Valley of the Kings and briefly described eighteen tombs he visited there. The accounts of Thebes  published by these early travelers and the Egyptian objects that made their way into European collections once again fired the European imagination. Tourism, exploration, and collecting slowly began to revive. 

James Bruce, for example, visited in 1769 and explored the tomb of Rameses III in the Valley of the Kings. It became known as Bruce’s Tomb after his publication of its scenes in 1790. Bruce also visited Madinat Habu and wrote a description of the techniques ancient artists had used to decorate its walls. 

By far the most significant early expedition to Thebes was that of Napoleon’s army, which arrived in Egypt in 1799. The 130 scholars that accompanied the army were charged with making a detailed record of the country. One of the French scholars, Vivant Denon, described the awe his soldiers felt when they first saw Thebes: “At nine o’clock, in making a sharp turn round the point of a projecting chain of mountains, we discovered all at once the site of the ancient Thebes in its whole extent; this celebrated city, the size of which Homer has characterized by the single expression of ‘with a hundred gates’... The whole army, suddenly and with one accord, stood in amazement at the sight of its scattered ruins, and clapped their hands with delight.” Their work was published between 1809 and 1828. Called the Description de l’Egypte, one of its elephant folio volumes was devoted to drawings of Theban monuments and provided the first accurate record of Theban sites to appear in Europe. Hundreds of plates recorded architecture, relief decoration, and painting in tombs and temples, and accompanying volumes of text described what the scholars had seen. Even today, the Description can profitably be consulted by scholars because much of what it contains has vanished, victims of erosion, vandalism, and theft. 

--> As interest in ancient Egypt grew in Europe among scholars, decorators, and collectors, other records of Theban monuments appeared. Jean-François Champollion, who had published the key to the decipherment of hieroglyphs in 1822, visited Thebes in 1828, accompanied by an Italian colleague, Ippolito Rosellini. They recorded scenes and inscriptions in the Valley of the Kings, Madinat Habu, the Ramesseum, and several nobles’ tombs. Emile Prisse d’Avennes published a collection of elegant watercolors of tomb paintings in 1847. Other artists, too, painted Thebes: Alma Tadema (1836–1912), David Wilkie (1785–1841), Edward Lear (1812–1888), John Frederick Lewis (1805–1876), and most importantly, David Roberts (1796–1864). Some of them published very accurate paintings of Theban monuments, others produced scenes of ancient Theban life that were purely flights of fancy. 

Of all the teams to record Thebes, the Prussian expedition of Carl Richard Lepsius was the most ambitious and the most accurate. Lepsius led an epigraphic expedition in 1842–1845. He spent much time at Thebes, and his publication, Denkmäler aus Ägypten und Äthiopien (1849–1859), immediately became an indispensable reference for scholars. Detailed and remarkably accurate, it still is a primary research tool. 

Giovanni Belzoni visited Thebes between 1816 and 1821. During the course of digging in the Valley of the Kings, he discovered six tombs, including those of Mentuherkhepshef, Ay, Rameses I, and Sety I. He also worked in the memorial temples of Amenhetep III and Rameses II (the Ramesseum) and carted off many objects to England, including several huge statues. Belzoni’s techniques were primitive: “Every step I took, I crushed a mummy in some part or other,” he wrote at one stage. But his London exhibition of impressions from walls of the tomb of Sety I was extremely popular and contributed greatly to ancient Egypt’s popularity. So did the hugely successful book by Amelia Edwards, A Thousand Miles up the Nile (1877), a beautifully-written personal account of Egypt and its monuments. 

The Englishman John Gardner Wilkinson worked at Thebes in 1824 and 1827–1828, recording with great skill scenes of daily life on the walls of nobles’ tombs. The book he published, The Manners and Customs of the Ancient Egyptians (1837), is a tour de force that reconstructs in anthropological detail aspects of ancient life from kinship to cooking, chronology to costume. It was also Wilkinson who first established the numbering system still used today to identify tombs in the Valley of the Kings. Later, Norman (1875–1941) and Nina de Garis Davies continued this recording tradition, producing beautiful copies of private tomb paintings. (The originals are now displayed in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York). Meticulous and highly detailed epigraphic surveying was developed by the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago and has  been used by them at Thebes since 1924 to record inscriptions and scenes in the temples of Madinat Habu, Luxor, and other Theban monuments. 

By late in the nineteenth century, photography was used to record Theban monuments, first by such famous photographers as Francis Frith and Maxime du Camp, later by the highly skilled photographers Felix Guillmant and Harry Burton. The latter was the photographer for Howard Carter’s clearing of the tomb of Tutankhamen.

Early excavations of Theban sites were rarely more than the careless work of villagers or the hasty searches by Europeans for objects to install in Europe’s many new museums. Richard Pococke complained of the cavalier treatment of the monuments by local villagers: “They are every day destroying these fine morsels of Egyptian Antiquity, and I saw some of the pillars being hewn into millstones.” Champollion boasted that by shipping Theban monuments back to France he was performing a noble act: “One day you will have the pleasure of seeing some of the beautiful bas-reliefs of the tomb of Osirei [Sety I] in the French Museum. That will be the only way of saving them from imminent destruction and in carrying out this project I shall be acting as a real lover of antiquity, since I shall be taking them away only to preserve and not to sell.” Other collectors included Henry Salt (1780–1827), whose collections formed the core of several of Europe’s major museums, and Bernardino Drovetti (1775–1852), who collected for the Louvre and the museum in Turin. 

These early collectors usually worked with the knowledge and permission of the Egyptian government. But by 1858 it was clear that greater control over Egypt’s antiquities was necessary if the sites were to be protected. The Egyptian government, at the urging of Auguste Mariette, a French scholar, established a national museum and shortly thereafter, a national antiquities service. The export of antiquities was not banned by the new service (that did not happen until the 1960s) but it was more strictly controlled, and attempts were made to guard and protect principal archaeological sites. 

Over the next several decades, the new Antiquities Service employed several committed and talented people. Eugène Lefébure (1838–1908), for example, came to Egypt in 1881 after a career in the French Post Office. Consumed by an interest in Egyptology, he set out to record the texts in tombs in the Valley of the Kings. His two-volume publication, Les Hypogées royaux de Thebes (1888), was the first attempt to systematically record that famous site. A few years later, men like Victor Loret devoted several seasons to the excavation of tombs in the Valley of the Kings (in 1898–1899). Loret’s excavation techniques were primitive by modern standards, but he and others added many more tombs to those already known in the Valley of the Kings. 

Since the mid-nineteenth century, the quality of archaeological work at Thebes has been steadily improving. In the Valley of the Kings, for example, one can cite the work of Edward Ayrton, Arthur Weigall, and Howard Carter. 

Carter (1874–1939), self-trained in England as an artist, had come to Egypt in 1892 to work with Flinders Petrie. Seven years later, he was appointed Chief Inspector of Antiquities in Upper Egypt and immediately began work in the Valley of the Kings. His artistic talents and insistence on meticulously recording what he uncovered set a high standard. They served him well when, after a sometimes tumultuous career in the Antiquities Service, Carter discovered the entrance to the tomb of Tutankhamen in 1922. It is arguably the most famous archaeological discovery ever made, and one that demanded almost infinite patience to clear and record. 

--> The French have worked at Karnak almost continuously since 1899, the year part of the great Hypostyle Hall collapsed due to weakened foundations. They have undertaken excavation and publication as well as highly important engineering and conservation projects. The Open-Air Museum at Karnak, in which several important monuments have been reconstructed, is a tribute to their admirable work.There have been other excavators whose work has made significant contributions to our knowledge of ancientThebes. Ernesto Schiaparelli (1856–1928) excavated the workmen’s village at Dayr al-Madina, bringing to light thousands of ostraka that tell us more about daily life in ancient Egypt than almost any other source. Uvo Hölscher excavated around the memorial temple of Rameses III at Madinat Habu in the 1930s, making it possible to trace in detail the history of the Madinat Habu complex. Herbert Winlock and his colleagues from the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York worked in the Dayr al-Bahari cirque from 1911 to 1932 on some of the most important excavations ever made at Thebes. 

Visitors to the West Bank of Thebes today can still see the headquarters of these expeditions. Howard Carter’s original house stands behind the offices of the antiquities inspectorate; his later house lies in a grove of trees at the north end of the necropolis. German House, reputedly burned down by the British at the start of World War I and again at the start of World War II, has been rebuilt west of the Ramesseum. The original Chicago House, headquarters of the University of Chicago, is now the Marsam Hotel, behind the memorial temple of Amenhetep III. (Its current headquarters are on the east bank of the Nile, in Luxor.) Metropolitan House, headquarters of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and later of the Polish Mission to Dayr al-Bahari stands before the memorial temple of Dayr al-Bahari. The home of Norman and Nina de Garis Davies lies about two  hundred meters to its west. The house of the American businessman Theodore Davis, who funded many expeditions early in the twentieth century, lies near the start of the dirt track into the West Valley of the Kings, a satellite dish incongruously mounted beside the front door. 

Today, there are many projects working at Thebes, but few are there to excavate. Instead, they are projects to record, clear, stabilize, and conserve the fragile remains of its tombs and temples. Such measures are overdue and the need for them is rapidly increasing. Over eight thousand tourists visit the West Bank sites every day and that number is expected to rise to twenty-five thousand per day within a decade. The development of conservation measures and plans for site management are urgently needed if ancient Thebes is to survive. Egyptologists are finally aware of the serious threats to the monuments, and it is hoped that these new projects will ensure that ancient Thebes will survive for another five thousand years.