Dan Snow's History Hit - The Pioneers of Egyptology

Episode Date: November 18, 2020

Chris Naunton joined me on the podcast to talk about the work of the many people who contributed to our understanding of ancient Egypt.Subscribe to History Hit and you'll get access to hundreds of history documentaries, as well as every single episode of this podcast from the beginning (400 extra episodes). We're running live podcasts on Zoom, we've got weekly quizzes where you can win prizes, and exclusive subscriber only articles. It's the ultimate history package. Just go to historyhit.tv to subscribe. Use code 'pod1' at checkout for your first month free and the following month for just £/€/$1.

Hi everyone, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. There's one area of history that I always think is sort of peculiar because it's almost hived off. It's been hived off. It's got its own kind of academic departments, ecosystem, fan-based publishing world, a culture around it, and that's Egyptology. The study of those extraordinary nilotic civilisations. 3,000 years. Something like 200 well-attested rulers of that part of the world. And it's left behind the most extraordinary architectural and artistic legacy. My favourite Egyptologist, of course, Chris Naunton. He's a legend. He's been on the podcast before. And every time he

comes on the podcast, I ask him the same question because I'm stupid. I ask him, how many tombs are still out there? How many tombs are still out there? And we're talking just about the tombs of pharaohs, rulers, basically. And he always answers, and I actually have learned it now, that there are about 200 well-attested pharaohs over that 3,000 year period. And around half of them, half of them, have tombs that have not yet been found. So there you go. That's what's happening, everybody. This podcast is sort of about that. This podcast is about his new book, which is The Early Egyptologist.

This bizarre bunch of misfits, travellers, tomb robbers, tourists, adventurers, who went to Egypt and fell in love with the gigantic legacy of that period of history. If you want to subscribe to History Hit TV, it's our third birthday this week, everyone. Now is the time to subscribe at historyhit.tv.

Use the code POD1. You can listen to all Chris Norton's previous podcasts. You can watch shows about Egypt and Egyptology. You can do anything you like, really. It's absolutely brilliant. It's like Netflix, but just for history.

And why don't you go to the shop and buy a silly hat while you're at it? Why not? In the meantime, everyone, enjoy Chris Naunton. Chris, good to have you back on the podcast. Thank you so much, Dan. Very nice to be back. The subject of your next book, which sounds fascinating, which is talking about these scholars and Egyptologists and all of their documents, their drawings, and the way in

which you must have got inside their heads working on this new project. scholars and Egyptologists and all of their documents, their drawings and the way in which you must have got inside their heads working on this new project. One of the things I was trying to do with this is to capture some of the excitement of what it was like to be in Egypt at a time when, certainly in terms of the earliest European travellers in the 17th, 18th century, they're the kind of earliest that I dealt with for the purposes of this book anyway, when they were going to Egypt they were going to somewhere that was foreign and almost completely unknown. And they had texts with them, which might have been written in classical times, they might have had biblical texts in mind, and they just did not know what they were going to

see. And so they were wandering through Egypt, finding the remains of ancient places and wondering where these were, and in some cases stumbling upon great cities like Memphis and Thebes and Alexandria. And so, yeah, I did want to capture something of the magic of that. That's possible thanks to their diaries, their sketches, paintings, etc., etc., which are the sort of beginnings of Egyptology and the source material on which our whole subject is built. Who are these people? Were they wealthy, leisured gentry from Europe, beginnings of Egyptology and the source material on which our whole subject is built. Who were these people? Were they wealthy,

leisured gentry from Europe or were they tomb robbers? Who were they? No, you're right. They were often wealthy, I guess, kind of, you know, people who had just an intellectual curiosity. They were travellers mostly in the beginning. So the book is called Egyptologist's Notebooks and everybody who features in the book made a contribution to Egyptology. But the word Egyptology itself doesn't even get coined until the middle of the 19th century. So a lot of the people that we're sort of calling Egyptologists for the purposes of the book actually were travellers of one kind or another or scholars, just people who had an interest in the world generally. Knowledge of ancient Egypt was really pretty small if you go back as far as the 17th and 18th centuries. Certainly by comparison with what was known of, say, the classical world,

there were plenty of people who could read and were reading texts in Greek and Latin. But Egypt is kind of much more distant and exotic than that somehow. So not very many people went. It wasn't a very hospitable place for people early on. It was difficult to travel around. It was a dangerous place to a certain extent. So you needed money, obviously, to get there, but then you needed money to equip yourself and you needed to take the risk of sailing up the Nile into this, I mean, really completely uncharted territory in the hope that you might see something interesting when there was no guarantee because this just wasn't known. But of course, people very quickly did begin to find that there were very spectacular things to see and to document them so that they could make their accounts available to people back home. And this is the beginnings of our subject. Who are some of your favourites? The first character in the book actually is a guy called Athanasius Kierke, who's the only person in the book who never went to Egypt. He's kind of a favourite of mine in a way that he maybe wouldn't approve of. He's important to us

because he's one of the first people to have a good crack at trying to read the Egyptian language. He was a great scholar, polymath, and did all kinds of things in addition to his little bits and pieces of Egyptology. But he was also a very religious man and very interested in ancient sort of spirituality and wisdom. And he wanted to read into the Egyptian language, these ancient kind of wisdom texts. He believed that the hieroglyphs encoded the things that he believed, basically. And he was horrendously misguided in this, absolutely wrong in his translations. He had no basis to make these claims. But in a strange way, in generating interest and excitement in this, he is an important contributor to Egyptology because he sends people, he sets people interested in the country.

And so he essentially sets them off travelling to the country to begin gathering copies of inscriptions, descriptions and drawings of monuments. Another of my, I guess, my favourite characters from early on is an English traveller called George Sands, who published an account of his travels around Europe and the Middle East, a description of the East and some other countries, which is a strangely vague title, but there you go. And he made drawings of, he didn't get very far up the Nile Valley, actually, but he visited Alexandria. He visited Giza. And although he doesn't give it the name that we know it by now,

it's pretty clear that he visited Saqqara and probably was right in standing on the spot that represented the centre of the ancient capital city of Memphis. But in some ways what I really love about these early descriptions is that it isn't always possible to say exactly where they were and to identify what they were looking at, but there's this sort of tantalising possibility that these people were among the very first to take an interest in a cemetery like Saqqara, which, as you know, Dan, is one of the richest archaeological sites in the world. And we know now just exactly how much there was to find there. And Sands was there at a time when almost nobody had been inside these tombs for centuries and centuries, and they were still full of mummies, coffins, grave goods of all kinds.

So, you know, to try and sort of imagine what it must have been like to have been there, if it was possible to travel back in time and kind of accompany him on his journey across the desert to Saqqara, you know, wow, what a thrill. Had anything valuable been removed and what was left was just regarded as, you know, junk? anything valuable been removed and what was left was just regarded as you know junk well i mean a lot of stuff was really lost in the sense that it was no longer visible so to take the pyramids and the sphinx as an example those things are much too big to ever become completely buried they loom so large in the kind of imagination of writers and travellers from the time they were built until the present day. Those things were never forgotten about. But other things were, you know, were lost. It's really striking how little was known of somewhere like Saqqara, which, okay, maybe doesn't quite

have the celebrity of Giza, but it's the place where the first monumental stone building in the world was built. And what an incredible monument the Step Pyramid is, and what a striking monument on the landscape. And yet, you you know this place does seem to have disappeared from the minds it's true also that some places had really fallen into ruin to the extent that they were a disappointment actually to some of our travelers so sands in particular is really shocked and clearly disappointed by what he finds in Alexandria. And Alexandria in his time, the beginning of the 1600s, had shrunk. It was nothing like the size in terms of population and area that it was in the Ptolemaic and Roman period. And most of the very grandest buildings,

which he could read about very easily in the descriptions of Strabo and others, had just vanished. You know, he was expecting to see the descriptions of Strabo and others, had just vanished. You know, he was expecting to see the remains of this great city, and it just wasn't there. But once people got their eye in, and once people, I guess, became a bit more determined, and it became a bit more possible, there comes a certain moment,

end of the 18th century, beginning of the 19th century, and interestingly enough, Napoleon Bonaparte plays an important role in this. Europeans came to travel to Egypt in much greater numbers and came to settle in Egypt as well. And that made it much easier for Europeans to go there, to settle, to spend protracted amounts of time there and to do things like study monuments without risk of their health declining or, you know, or even worse. That gives Egyptology the opportunity to sort of develop. But prior to that point, the knowledge was very low and there just wasn't a lot to see, actually, in many cases. Alexandria is a really good example of that. So much of it had just vanished. In the early Egyptology that you're looking at, is it a matter of sort of just doing a bit of dusting and finding places just

literally in centimetres below the sand? That's a really good question. It's a bit difficult to know that, actually, because, as I say, the descriptions are often quite brief and a little bit vague. In the case of Alexandria, where an entire grand city has been lost, then a lot of work would have been necessary, much more than a traveller like Sands, who's got a couple of weeks maybe in Egypt before he's got to move on. In the case of somewhere like Saqqara, and if not sands, but then somebody who followed him, a British-Irish priest and traveller, a guy called Richard Pocock, visited Egypt in the 1730s. He was able to make quite accurate plans of tombs in places like Saqqara and in Luxor. And they're identifiable, these places, which show

quite clearly that he was able, with maybe a little bit of digging, maybe a little bit of assistance from a local who knew an interesting thing, he could show a European wealthy traveller for a bit of backsheesh, a bit of money. But these things were just there, in some cases, waiting. So it is a bit difficult to know that.

And you also, in your book, you're careful to remind us that there were some remarkable women on these expeditions as well. Yeah, absolutely. It was very important to me when I started out on this project. The book is intended to be a kind of celebration of the visual. Egyptology is a very visual discipline and sketches and drawings and things are really important. So it was intended to be a visual celebration. But as well as that, it is also a kind of overview history of Egyptology down to the middle of the 20th century. And that story has been told a number of times. It's not a terribly well-known story, but it has been told before. But it's tended to be told from a quite straightforward academic standpoint. And that often means that it's been told as the stories of

great men, great white men, whose names go on the front of published accounts. And those stories have tended to forget lots of other people. And sad to say, but in the past, those stories have not included women to the extent that they should. And in the 19th century, there were a lot of extremely influential women in Egyptology, some of whom could claim to be as influential as anybody ever was in Egyptology. So Amelia whom could claim to be as influential as anybody ever was in Egyptology. So Amelia Edwards, for example, who travels to Egypt as a travel writer, but becomes a kind of self-taught Egyptologist and great campaigner for ancient Egypt, founded the first ever chair of Egyptology in the UK. She deliberately chose UCL for that chair

because it was the only university offering degrees to women at the UK. She deliberately chose UCL for that chair because it was the only university offering degrees to women at the time. And she founded the Egypt Exploration Society, which was the first foreign institution sponsoring archaeological projects in Egypt. So the first kind of enduring presence that would excavate in Egypt over a long period of time, and it's still going 130 odd years later. So her legacy is incredible. But there are a number of women who, absolutely contrary to the way things worked in so many other fields at that time, were pioneering figures in the intellectual world, in archaeology, in travel, in managing to make things happen in a foreign, conservative Muslim country.

So people like Marianne Brocklehurst, who travelled to Egypt a number of times independently, at one point at the same time as Amelia, Nina Macpherson, who was married to Norman de Garis Davis, who becomes arguably the finest artist, copyist of Egyptian decoration there ever was. These are stories that, you know, really need to be told. There's a kind of rebalancing here, I think that, you know, really need to be told. There's a kind of rebalancing here, I think. And so I was really keen to include as many of those kinds of stories in the book as I could. Have we stepped away now from sort of unalloyed appreciation, celebration of these people? Are we thinking about them in different ways

in relation to them presumably destroying quite a lot of places as they were looking for other places, or removing items that, you know, without asking permission and without any thought that this might be imperialism. When you're writing this book, how do you think about those issues? Yeah, that's very tricky because in some ways, you know, what we wanted for this book, and part of the intended appeal of this book, is that we're transporting the reader back to that time when it was possible to make the discoveries like almost almost kind of easily you know you can go to Egypt and just walk into the desert and find something incredible there's a great magic to that and in some ways what I'm trying to do with the book is to transport

people back to that time and to tell these magical stories of these people who did these wonderful things. But you're absolutely right that it would be irresponsible to present all of this as if it was unalloyed kind of success, you know, and just something that was nothing but absolutely wonderful. A lot of these discoveries in inverted commas played out against a backdrop of imperialism, colonialism in Egypt. And that is another aspect of the story of the history of Egyptology that has kind of been pushed under the carpet a little bit. And we're a long way away yet from the point where everybody understands Egyptology and archaeology in Egypt and elsewhere in that part of the world to have played out, you know, to have a kind of balanced understanding of the good and the bad of that. But one thing that I was very keen, again,

to try and do in this book is to just emphasise the role of the Egyptian people in the story. They tend to be one of the much less appreciated groups. So in almost all cases, when it comes to digging things up, the majority of the people actually doing the digging were Egyptians who have been silent in the story and unacknowledged up to now. And in many cases, the people who were actually revealing these monuments did so because they had a very great skill in recognising what they were looking at as they were removing debris. And quite often, the archaeologists who get all the credit are not even present. So it's quite striking that Howard Carter's account of the discovery of

the tomb of Tutankhamun begins with him arriving on site to find that his Egyptian workmen, his excavators, his diggers, have gone quiet because they found something. He wasn't even there when they found the steps. And so that's not to say that, you know, Carter has nothing to do with this, or, you know, he wasn't involved, or he wasn't directing the work. But the story of the Egyptians on the other side is unacknowledged. So I've tried where possible to sort of explain that that is the way the story's been told up to now. There is a different story, and there's a rebalancing we need, we need to appreciate the Egyptian people's role in this story a bit more. And also that a lot of the time, it was the colonialists, imperialists who were kind of forcing a way of doing things onto the country without really asking the local people whether they wanted this or not. So it's a very tricky sort of line to walk that on the one hand,

you're trying to say, look at these great people and the great thing they did. On the other hand, you're also trying to say, but maybe they weren't entirely all that great. And we should be aware of that too. Thank you very much for the podcast. What's the book called? The book is called Egyptologists Notebooks. It is a visual celebration of the history of archaeology and Egyptology in Egypt. Good luck with it, buddy. Thank you very much Hi everyone thanks for reaching the end of this podcast

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