fortune and glory - Waterstones

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Fortune and Glory Tales of history’s greatest archaeological adventurers

Douglas Palmer Nicholas James & Giles Sparrow

Contents

Thanks go to Tim Brown for his inspiration and assistance in getting this book off the ground. A DAVID & CHARLES BOOK Copyright © David & Charles Limited 2008

Prologue

7

Introduction: Chronicles and Chronologies

15

The Collectors

23

Pre-history and Discovering Life Before the Flood

29

Human Remains

49

Dinosaur Hunters

81

Empires in Egypt

113

Greek Myth Becomes Reality

145

Cities from the Dust

159

Bible Quests

187

Raids on Buddism

207

The Ancient Maya

222

Mysteries of the Incas

245

Printed in USA by RR Donnelley Co Pte Ltd for David & Charles Brunel House, Newton Abbot, Devon

Epilogue

257

Bibliography

xxx

Commissioning Editor: Neil Baber Editorial Manager: Emily Pitcher Assistant Editor: Sarah Wedlake Copy Editor: Val Porter Designer: Eleanor Stafford Picture Researcher: Sarah and Roland Smithies Indexer: Ingrid Lock Production Controller: Kelly Smith

Index

xxx

David & Charles is an F+W Publications Inc. company 4700 East Galbraith Road Cincinnati, OH 45236 First published in the UK in 2008 First published in the US in 2008 Text copyright © Douglas Palmer, Nicholas James, Giles Sparrow 2008 Images © (see picture credits) Douglas Palmer, Nicholas James, Giles Sparrow have asserted their right to be identified as author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, by photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The publisher has made every reasonable effort to contact the copyright holders of images and text. If there have been any omissions, however, David and Charles will be pleased to insert the appropriate acknowledgment at a subsequent printing. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN-13: 978-0-7153-2959-7 paperback ISBN-10: 0-7153-2959-6 paperback

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Picture Credits

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PROLOGUE It came to pass that the king’s-son, Thutmosis, came, coursing at the time of midday, and he rested in the shadow of this great god. A vision of sleep seized him at the hour (when) the sun was in the zenith, and he found the majesty of this revered god speaking with his own mouth, as a father speaks with his son, saying: ‘Behold thou me! See thou me! My son Thutmosis. I am thy father, Horemakhet-Khafre-Re-Atum, who will give to thee my kingdom on earth at the head of the living. Thou shalt wear the white crown and the red crown upon the throne of Keb, the hereditary prince. The land shall be thine in its length and breadth, that which the eye of the All- Lord shines upon. The food of the Two Lands shall be thine, the great tribute of all countries, the duration of a long period of years. My face is thine, my desire is toward thee. Thou shalt be to me a protector, (for) my manner is as I were ailing in all my limbs. The sand of this desert upon which I am, has reached me; turn to me, to have that done which I have desired, knowing that thou art my son, my protector; come hither, behold, I am with thee, I am thy leader.’ When he had finished this speech, this king’s-son [awoke]… he understood the words of this god, and he kept silent in his heart. He said: ‘Come, let us hasten to our house in the city… and we shall give praise [to]… the statue made for Atum-Horemakhet.’ One morning in early 1818, a 47-year-old Italian sea-captain stood on Egypt’s Giza Plateau, face to face with the most famous statue in the world. The Sphinx gazed implacably back, as it had done for millennia, its eyes fixed on a distant and ancient horizon, only its head and shoulders now visible above the shifting sands that had gone uncleared since Roman times. The Sphinx had proved a magnet to the curious throughout its long existence, and had attracted a thick encrustation of legend and hearsay – not least its association with the monstrous puzzle-setter of Greek myth. The first European to record his visit in detail, the 16th century German traveller Johann Helffrich, believed it represented the goddess Isis, and sketched the statue with prominent breasts. He also perpetuated a myth that the Sphinx was hollow – with a tunnel, he believed, that had allowed ancient priests to hide inside and fool their credulous followers that the goddess herself was 

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Prologue

speaking. Even at the turn of the nineteenth century, apparently realistic renderings added the artist’s own interpolations and extrapolations to the remains, such as elaborate headdresses and jewellery. The man who now sought audience with the Sphinx came with a different purpose in mind. Captain Giovanni Battista Caviglia was an excavator and treasure hunter as well as a sailor, and was currently in the employ of Henry Salt, the British Consul in nearby Cairo. At Salt’s behest, he was determined to expose the Sphinx to the world, digging away the centuries of sand that had long ago overwhelmed its gargantuan, leonine form. With a team of up to a hundred Arab labourers, Caviglia assaulted the sands of Giza for several months, but his effort was doomed to failure, for the Sphinx’s body was far larger than anyone had predicted. When it was eventually freed by dint of massive effort almost a century later, it proved to have a length of 57m (185ft) from forepaws to haunches, and to tower 20m (65ft) above its surroundings: it was, and still is, the largest rock-cut statue in the world. Caviglia abandoned his efforts in the heat of June, suffering from a severe eye inflammation. But his labours were not in vain; he had successfully exposed the statue’s chest and forepaws, revealing the buildings and debris that lay around it. There were fallen fragments of the statue’s headdress and beard, a nearby temple apparently dedicated to the statue, and most intriguing of all, a red granite slab or stela, some 3.5m (11ft 10in) high. The upper section of this monument showed an easily interpreted scene of a pharaoh making offerings to the sphinx, while below this was a long inscription in the thenimpenetrable hieroglyphic script of the ancient Egyptians. Caviglia was lucky to live in a time when some of the finest minds in Europe were intent on deciphering the secrets of this ancient language, and the mysteries of Egyptian writing were finally solved a few years later. Before he died in 1845, the Italian captain knew that on that first day before the Sphinx, he had stood in the place of an illustrious predecessor. The carvings, translated above and already some 32 centuries old when they were rediscovered, told of how the 18th-Dynasty pharaoh Thutmosis IV, when still a junior prince, rested one day beneath the Sphinx whilst on a hunting expedition. As he slept, he heard the voice of the god Horemakhet speaking to him through the Sphinx, promising that he would rise to

be pharaoh if only he cleared away the sand that already threatened to overwhelm the God’s earthly avatar. And so, in pursuit of power and prestige, prince Thutmosis was true to his word. The Sphinx was cleared and restored, and Thutmosis did indeed succeed his father Amenhotep II, though he reigned for only ten years. The Dream Stela was placed at the foot of the Sphinx in commemoration of the pharaoh’s deal with his god, and later it in turn fell victim to the inevitable tides of history, buried with its guardian until the Italian captain resurrected it. Though separated by a hundred generations, Tuthmosis and Caviglia were both spiritual ancestors of modern archaeologists – each dug in the ground in order to bring past treasures back into the light. But their motivations, principles and operating methods were very different from those of their modern followers. While today’s archaeologists are trained professionals, searching for historical evidence that will bring history back to life, these first excavators and explorers were driven by dreams of fortune and glory.





This is a book about the discovery of the past, and the way in which archaeology evolved over little more than a century from mere treasure hunting to a science in its own right. It tells the story of a great age of adventure, when tomb raiders, passionate eccentrics and scholars alike risked their lives and reputations to uncover lost worlds. Such tales are as close as archaeology ever really got to the exploits of fictional explorers such as Tintin, Indiana Jones and Lara Croft, and, just as fiction often reveals a great deal about the preoccupations of the time in which it is written, so these true-life adventures frequently tell us as much about the times of their protagonists as they do about the civilizations whose remains they excavated. As we shall see, the seeds of true archaeology grew from the European Enlightenment. Until this time, occasional discoveries and unavoidable evidence of ancient relics were treated as mere curios, to be explained away in folktale and legend: Stonehenge and Carnac were the playgrounds of giants, flint axe heads the work of fairies, and even Imperial Rome took on a semimythical status. The Enlightenment was born slowly, the result of a series of blows to old authority inflicted by new discoveries and theories throughout the 17th century. And it was only then, it seems, that people dared to look at the

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Prologue

world with their own eyes, describe what they really saw, and form their own theories to explain the evidence. (It’s true that they still mistakenly thought Stonehenge was built by the druids who fought Julius Caesar, but at least this was better than giants.) Growing realization that the past wasn’t exactly like the present was paralleled by recognition that the rest of the world was not just like Europe. Investigation into history, both at home and abroad, formed part of the same intellectual ‘project’ as inquiry into the nature of the forces governing the world, and the collection of anthropological and natural history specimens. The new importance attached to evidence, coupled with a new aesthetic sense, created the antiquarians and collectors of the 18th century, many of whom were proto-archaeologists themselves, while others certainly sponsored them. But while archaeology was born in the European Enlightenment, it undoubtedly came of age in the era of imperialism, when half the atlas was tinted in the pink of the British Empire, and rival powers vied to extend their spheres of influence through those parts that weren’t. Indigenous cultures were often seen as ignorant and backward, awaiting the benevolent influence of European civilization and religion – and if the Europeans happened to benefit from the deal too, then so much the better. This period of colonization and exploitation of natural resources was undeniably accompanied by a cultural element to empire, but in this postcolonial world it’s easy to ignore the fact that it cut both ways. France, Britain and Germany at the height of their imperial ambitions were enthralled and fascinated by the majesty of ancient civilizations, yet they mostly accepted them on their own terms, as peoples indigenous to the lands that had since unfortunately descended from such lofty heights. This realization that any people might rise to glory only to fall back into so-called barbarism was a blow to misguided theorists trying to explain why Europe (and Britain in particular) was historically and scientifically destined to rule, but only a few eccentrics such as the British Israelites tried to turn things on their head and claim direct descent from these earlier apogees of civilization. Throughout the 19th century, great and rising powers sought to accumulate the monuments of earlier civilizations around them for the glorification of their own national image. Depending on one’s point of view, this fascination

with fallen empires of the past might indicate either a subconscious awareness of the brevity of power, or an amusing and ironic ignorance of the subtext to all these fallen pharaohs and kings. Certainly the poet Shelley had a point to make when, inspired by reports of the ruined Ramesseum and shattered statues at Thebes, he wrote:

10

11

‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!’ By the late 19th century, the museums of Europe and the United States were overflowing with treasures accumulated from ‘antique lands’ around the world – not just from the old world civilizations of the Mediterranean and the Near East, but from as far afield as South-East Asia, South America and subSaharan Africa. Some of these finds were the bequests of individual collectors, but an increasing number came from organized academic expeditions, which sometimes went so far as to transport entire buildings back to their homelands. These days, of course, a lot of nations want their stuff back: the Elgin Marbles are an ongoing source of diplomatic spats between Greece and the United Kingdom, Native American tribes are lobbying for the return of artefacts from prestigious museums, and Egypt is considering copyrighting the Sphinx. The boot is most definitely on the other foot. This sea change began in the aftermath of the World War I, with the dissolution of the old Ottoman Empire government, the gradual loosening of British imperial ties (which would not disappear completely until another war had driven Britain herself to the point of bankruptcy) and the rise of self-government and nationalism. Lest we forget, very little of the material shipped off to western museums was simply stolen: even the worst plunderers described in this book usually operated with the agreement of what were, at the time, legitimate kings, governments and local chieftains. The nationalization of archaeological treasures, begun by Egypt in the wake of the Tutankhamun discovery of the 1920s, has been understandably important to the self-image and development of many countries, but conversely, the major museums themselves are now international treasures in their own right, visited and appreciated by millions of people from around the world in a continuation of the Enlightenment spirit. Both sides have a point,