Issue No. 600
Heritage
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22 - 28 August 2002 Issue No. 600 Heritage |
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The museum's founding father
The French Egyptologist François Auguste Mariette, celebrated forefather of modern archaeological excavation, spent his career calling for the construction of a suitable museum that would do credit to the display of Egypt's great heritage. Although he assembled the first collection in what he regarded as a temporary museum in Boulaq (see column), he sadly did not live to see his dreamed-for Egyptian Museum come true.
Mariette's first exposure to ancient Egyptian history was as a six-year-old in 1827. He learned hieroglyphics, demotic and Coptic, and at 12 he could decipher Coptic texts. Due to his exceptional ability, the Louvre in Paris sent him to Egypt when he was only 18 to acquire Coptic, Ethiopic and Syrian manuscripts. However, he soon forgot the aim of his mission and set about digging at the Serapeum at Memphis and the avenue of sphinxes leading up to the Saqqara necropolis, a series of excavations which culminated in 1851 when he found the Apis tombs. He spent all the money he had been allocated and asked the Louvre for more but, not surprisingly, they refused. They no longer wanted a man who gambled with their funds.
But Mariette could hardly resist the temptation to go ahead with his excavation of the Apis tombs in the Saqqara Serapeum. These rock-hewn galleries were flanked by chambers containing huge granite sarcophagi, each weighing an average of 65 tons and measuring some four metres in length, two metres in width and more than three metres high. This is how he described the discovery:
"[When] I penetrated into the sepulchre of the Apis, I was so overcome with astonishment that, although it is now five years ago, the feeling is still vivid in my mind. By some inexplicable accident one chamber of the Apis tombs, walled up in the thirtieth year of Ramses II, had escaped the general plunder of the monuments, and I was so fortunate as to find it untouched. Three thousand five hundred years had had no effect in altering its primitive state. The finger mark of the Egyptian who set the last stone in the wall built up to cover the door was still visible in the mortar. Bare feet had left their traces on the sand strewn in a corner of this chamber of the dead; nothing had been disturbed in this burying-place where an embalmed ox had been resting for... centuries."
When the Khedive appointed Mariette as director of Egyptian monuments in 1858 he began an extensive series of excavations on the Giza necropolis and at Karnak, Esna, Edfu and other sites in Upper Egypt, as well as at Sais, Mendes and Bubastis (Tel Basta) in the Delta. He was reputedly able to do this by employing 7,280 workmen in all.
According to Tarek El-Awadi inspector at the Supreme Council of Antiquities, it was his phenomenal endurance that led to such major discoveries. Mariette's three greatest achievements were the creation of the first National Antiquities Service; the formation of the first national museum in Boulaq, and the development of a firstly Egyptian, then world- wide conscience about the destruction, expropriation, and proper care and conservation of antiquities. It was he who prepared the way for the foundation of the French Institute for Oriental Archaeology in Cairo. On a lighter but equally enduring side, he also helped with the libretto for Verdi's opera Aida
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