Pharaohs and Pyramids

The Nile slashes through the eastern Sahara Desert like an arrow, a stalk of green amid some of the most arid landscape on earth. Each summer, floodwaters from deep in tropical Africa inundate the floodplain, depositing fertile silt and nourishing growing crops, enabling an Egyptian civilization to endure for five thousand years. Along the river’s banks, pharaohs, considered to be living gods, created a palimpsest of pyramids, rock-cut tombs, and temples that have fascinated the traveler since Herodotus’s day. Egypt was the land of Ra, the sun god, whose golden rays shone day after day in an unchanging chronicle of human existence and immortality— birth, life, and death. Ra’s rays shine between the serried pillars of Karnak’s Hypostyle Hall, darken the jagged contours of the Valley of Kings in deep shadow, project the steep slopes of the pyramids of Giza over the surrounding desert. Ancient Egyptian ruins cast a profound spell over the visitor, especially in the days before Egyptologists measured the ruins and recorded their secrets. They were desolate, unfamiliar, their gods irrevocably gone, the hieroglyphs on the walls unintelligible except to a privileged few—and that only after about 1830, when Jean François Champollion’s decipherment came into common use. But the sense of time and history these monuments conveyed was, and still is, pervasive. The figures on temple and tomb walls expose the habits, fantasies, and beliefs of thirty dynasties. Even today, there is an underlying sense of permanence along the Nile. The pharaohs have vanished, succeeded by caliphs, pashas, colonial overlords, and presidents, but life along the Nile still follows a timeless routine of planting and harvest, of life and death. The traveler has been part of this timeless landscape for more than two thousand years. We have already encountered Roman tourists at the Colossi of Memnon. Christian pilgrims on their way to Jerusalem passed through, too, although travel was difficult for the faithful in what was now Islamic territory. The founding in London of the Levant Company in 1581, originally to foster trade with Turkey—among other things, trade in coffee—brought more visitors, some of them in search of mumiya, pounded-up Egyptian mummy, considered to be a powerful aphrodisiac.

The Antiquarians

“Time we may comprehend,” wrote the English physician Sir Thomas Browne in 1643. “’Tis but five days older than ourselves.” Browne’s view of the past encompassed the Greeks and Romans and a humankind created by God in the Old Testament. Also in the seventeenth century, Archbishop James Ussher of Armagh in Ireland used the long genealogies in the Scriptures to calculate that the world had been created on the evening of October 22, 4004 B.C. Thus, according to Christian dogma, the entire span of human existence was a mere six thousand years. After the collapse of the Roman Empire, the study of the past fell into oblivion. Babylon reverted to desert; Petra slumbered in its secluded canyon. Ancient ruins of any kind were a curiosity, often thought to be the work of giants. With the Renaissance came a renewed interest in classical learning and in the remains of ancient civilizations. Thomas Browne and his English contemporaries were steeped in knowledge of ancient Greece and Rome. The Renaissance was an age of collectors and scholars, of acquisitive cardinals and nobles who flocked to Mediterranean lands and returned laden with antiquities for their private collections and for what were then known as “cabinets of curiosities.” Soon, a stream of young travelers followed in their footsteps to Italy, taking what became known as the “grand tour” as part of their education (see Chapter 3). Such often frivolous travelers became the first archaeological tourists, but not necessarily the most perceptive. By 1550, it was fashionable to be an antiquary, a collector or student of ancient things. But only the wealthiest traveler could afford a grand tour and could pay for classical treasures. The less affluent indulged their passion for the past at home, collecting Roman coins and inscriptions and, above all, traveling the countryside in pursuit of what the English schoolmaster William Camden (1551–1623) called “the backward-looking curiosity.” This open-ended inquisitiveness took Camden and his contemporaries to eroded burial mounds on windy uplands, to ancient fortifications in Denmark, and to the mysterious stone circles known as Stonehenge.

Travel as Commodity

Thomas Cook started it all with his meticulously organized archaeological tours up the Nile. He harnessed the revolutionary technologies of Victorian travel to a growing desire on the part of the middle class to explore the world and its ancient history. Cook was the first to realize the potential of the railroad for group tours. A devout Baptist and an advocate for temperance, he began his business by organizing rail excursions to temperance meetings in nearby towns in central England. The enterprise was so successful that he took advantage of steamships and continental railroads to organize what we now call package tours to France and Germany. From that, it was not much more difficult to organize tours to Egypt and the Holy Land, now readily accessible thanks to the new technology for Victorian travel: the railroad, the steamship, and the telegraph. Then, in the twentieth century, came ocean liners, massive cruise ships, and the Boeing 707, followed by the jumbo jet, all of which together made archaeological travel part of popular culture. We live in a completely accessible world of intricate airline schedules and instant communication, where you can visit the great moiae of Easter Island as easily as you can take a journey to Stonehenge or the Parthenon, the difference being a longer flight and the need for the correct visas and a foreign rental car at the other end. And if you become sick or injured, you can be evacuated from most places within hours: Peter Fleming or Ella Maillart would have been in real trouble had they become sick or injured in the vast expanses of central Asia. We forget that to travel east of the Holy Land was considered highly adventurous until after World War II, and that central Asia was virtually inaccessible to outsiders until the late twentieth century. Much of the adventure of archaeological travel has vanished since the 1960s in a tidal wave of mass tourism and its attendant businesses. Leisure travel is now the world’s largest industry, and the mainstay of many national economies, including that of Egypt, where at last count six mil-lion tourists visit each year. According to Statistics Canada, global cultural tourism will grow at a rate of about 15 percent annually through the year 2010.

Maya and Inca

Bernal Diaz de Castillo was a young soldier serving under Hernán Cortés on that memorable day in November 1519 when a small detachment of conquistadors gazed down at the city of Tenochtitlán, the spectacular capital of the Aztec civilization. Diaz wrote these words when he was in his seventies, the experiences of the Spanish conquest etched in his memory so clearly that it was as if they had happened a week before. The conquistadors gaped in amazement at a native American metropolis larger than Seville, then Spain’s most populous city, and certainly better planned than many chaotically organized European capitals. Diaz relished his memories, but then added an almost melancholy footnote: “Today all that I then saw is overthrown and destroyed . . . nothing is left standing.” Nothing is left standing. Diaz wrote the literal truth. Today, the architectural, cultural, and material legacy of the Aztecs lies buried under the urban sprawl of Mexico City. Cortés himself hastened the disappearance, ordering the construction of an imposing Catholic cathedral atop the central precincts of Tenochtitlán, where temples to the sun and rain god reeked with the blood of human sacrifice. The conquistadors wandered through an enormous market attended by more than 20,000 people a day. There one could buy gold and tropical feathers, jade and chocolate, every valuable and commodity possible, at the heart of a sprawling city of singlestory houses, terraced pyramids, canals, and well-defined ethnic neighborhoods. More than 200,000 people lived in Tenochtitlán in 1519. Two years later, the city was a smoking ruin. Within a century, the native population of the former Aztec domains was less than a fifth of what it had been a century earlier. Measles, smallpox, and other infectious diseases decimated the people. The population of the Basin of Mexico declined from an estimated 1.5 million to about 325,000 between 1519 and 1570. By that point, it was almost as if Aztec civilization had never existed. Those who had survived had been forcibly converted to Catholicism—the old beliefs, customs, and oral traditions destroyed by church decree.

Tourists Along the Nile

Until 1830, the traveler to India faced a long, and often stormy, passage around the Cape of Good Hope. The advent of the steamship changed everything. Now you could take a steamer from England or Marseilles to Alexandria, then spend a few days or weeks in Cairo waiting for news that the ship for India was approaching Suez. You then took a camel, horse, or wagon across the desert to meet the vessel at what was then a small village. Hotels opened in Suez and Cairo to accommodate transit passengers. The British Hotel in Cairo, soon to be renamed Shepheard’s Hotel after its manager, welcomed its first guests in 1841. This magnificent Victorian institution became world famous, especially after the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, when it became the hotel of choice for the British Raj on its way to and from India. The hotel also catered to a new breed, the archaeological tourist. Bubonic plague epidemics periodically claimed thousands of lives in Egypt until 1844, when it suddenly and mysteriously disappeared. Cholera arrived from India to take its place, but despite this scourge, Egypt became a recommended destination for travelers wishing to escape damp European winters. By this time, a journey up the Nile to the First Cataract was routine, although one had to endure long quarantines on account of the plague. Nile travel became so popular that the London publisher John Murray commissioned the Egyptologist John Gardner Wilkinson to write a guide, one of a series aimed at a new audience of middle-class tourists.Wilkinson traveled in style, his baggage requiring a small army of porters. The contents of his baggage included an iron bedstead, a sword and other oddities, and “much more,” including a chicken coop, ample biscuits (cookies), and potted meats. He lamented the high cost of living in Egypt and the changes brought by a rising tide of visitors. “The travelers who go up the Nile will I fear soon be like Rhine tourists. & Cheapside will pour out its Legions upon Egypt.” His Handbook for Travellers in Egypt first appeared in 1847, went through multiple editions until 1873, and was still in common use half a century after its first appearance.

From Babylon to Persepolis

Babylon, Nineveh: the ancient cities of the Old Testament lay in a remote Mesopotamian world far off the beaten track for European travelers two centuries ago. In a devout age, Western people knew about the East only through the Scriptures. The biblical cities of Nineveh and Babylon appeared in the Old Testament. At a time when the classics and the Scriptures formed the basis for most education, people considered the Bible the literal historical truth. They remembered how the prophet Zephaniah had thundered against Nineveh: “He will stretch out his hand against the north and destroy Assyria; and he will make Nineveh a desolation, a dry waste like the desert.” The writings of the few travelers who crossed the desert to reach the Tigris and Euphrates rivers and Mesopotamia confirmed the prophecies. If these wanderers reached either city, they found nothing more than dusty foundations and crumbling buildings. The eminent Arab geographer al-Mas’udi, who visited Nineveh in 943, found it to be little more than “a complex of ruins.” Yet there were small villages among the mounds. “Here,” he added presciently, “one finds stone sculptures covered with inscriptions.” The few Europeans who visited what was then an impoverished province of the Ottoman Empire stayed in Baghdad, which had begun modestly as a village before 762, when the caliph al-Mansur turned it into a military camp and, later, into a thriving city that was to become a great center for both commerce and Islamic learning. The wealth and luxury of the Abbasid court resounded through the world. But eighteenth- and nineteenth-century travelers to Baghdad found themselves in a crumbling city living on its past, long-vanished glories. The few Europeans who lived there endured dust storms, sweltering heat, and occasional outbreaks of plague. On January 6, 1766, the Danish traveler Karsten Niebuhr rode into Baghdad on the way home from his long expedition to Persepolis via Egypt. He was the sole survivor of a government expedition to Arabia whose members had never got along with one another. All of them except Niebuhr perished of fever either during or after a long journey through the harsh deserts of Yemen.

Greece Bespoiled

The grand tour took the young and wealthy to Rome and Naples, but not as far as Greece, which had sunk into oblivion under its Byzantine emperors, who began to rule in A.D. 527. For seven hundred years Greece remained masked in obscurity as Crusaders, Venetians, and then Turks established princedoms and trading posts there. The Turks entered Athens in 1455 and turned the Parthenon and Acropolis into a fortress, transforming Greece into a rundown province of the Ottoman Empire. Worse yet, the ravages of wind, rain, and earthquake, of villagers seeking building stone and mortar, buried and eroded the ancient Greek temples and sculptures. Only a handful of intrepid artists and antiquarians came from Europe to sketch and collect before 1800, for Greek art and architecture were still little known or admired in the West, overshadowed as they were by the fashion for things Roman that dominated eighteenth-century taste. A small group of English connoisseurs financed the artists James Stuart and Nicholas Revett on a mission to record Greek art and architecture in 1755, and the first book in their multivolume Antiquities of Athens appeared in 1762. This, and other works, stimulated antiquarian interest, but in spite of such publications, few travelers ventured far off the familiar Italian track. The Parthenon was, of course, well known, but places like the oracle at Delphi, the temple of Poseidon at Sounion—at the time a pirates’ nest— and Olympia were little visited. In 1766, however, Richard Chandler, an Oxford academic, did visit Olympia, under the sponsorship of the Society of Dilettanti. The journey took him through overgrown fields of cotton shrubs, thistles, and licorice. Chandler had high expectations, but found himself in an insect-infested field of ruins: Early in the morning we crossed a shallow brook, and commenced our survey of the spot before us with a degree of expectation from which our disappointment on finding it almost naked received a considerable addition. The ruin, which we had seen in evening, we found to be the walls of the cell of a very large temple, standing many feet high and well-built, its stones all injured . . .

Beginnings

The intoxicating fascination of archaeology and ancient ruins comes not from a melancholy romanticism brought on by shattered towers and collapsing walls, but from what the English novelist and traveler Rose Macaulay called “the soaring of the imagination into the high empyrean where huge episodes are tangled with myths and dreams; it is the stunning impact of world history on its amazed heirs. . . . It is less ruin-worship than the worship of a tremendous past.” Macaulay herself was an indefatigable traveler in search of the ghosts of the past. She looked at far more than the serried columns of the Parthenon in Athens or the ruins of Roman Palmyra. Her travels took her to sites that required imagination as well as some specialized knowledge. “Nineveh and Babylon . . . are, in fact, little more than mounds.” Macaulay was not the first to articulate this. The nineteenth-century English archaeologist Austen Henry Layard wrote of the “stern, shapeless mound rising like a hill from the scorched plain, the stupendous mass of brickwork occasionally laid bare by winter rains.” He was an archaeologist of energy and vast imagination, intoxicated with the grandeur of the Assyrian bas-reliefs on Nineveh’s palace walls—human figures, gods, kings, warriors, human-headed lions. Nineveh captivated the Victorians. “Is not Nineveh most delightful and prodigious?” wrote one young lady to her brother in India. “Papa says nothing so truly thrilling has happened in excavations since they found Pompeii.” Layard and others wrote books about the mighty palaces that once dazzled the ancient world. Inevitably, the tourists came to wander through the tunnels that Layard’s workers had carved into the city’s mounds. Inevitably, too, many of them succumbed to fever, recovering to remember an exotic underground world they had seen in their delirium. Today, you must rely on your restless imagination amid bare heaps of earth, desert on every side. You inescapably remember the words of the Old Testament prophet Zephaniah as you tread on twenty centuries of Assyrian history: “And he will stretch out his hand against the north, and destroy Assyria, and will make Nineveh a desolation, and dry like a wilderness. . . . How is she become a desolation, a place for beasts to lie down in!”

Individualists

The French-speaking Swiss traveler Ella Maillart (1903–1997) was a remarkable personality. By age thirty, she had taught French in a Welsh school, sailed in the Olympics for the Swiss team, acted on the Parisian stage, captained the Swiss women’s field hockey team, assisted on an excavation in Crete, studied film production in Moscow, published a book about a north-south walk through the Caucasus, and ridden a camel across the Kizil Kum Desert in present-day Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, southeast of the Aral Sea—in midwinter. No one knows why she had such a penchant for adventure and variety: perhaps she was rebelling against the staid and thoroughly conventional family life of her childhood. The freedom and self-assertion taken for granted by many women today could then be achieved only by being unconventional and heading off into the unknown. At the age of twenty-eight, Maillart gazed on China for the first time. “In 1932, having gone east from Moscow, I climbed a mountain nearly 17,000 feet high on foot, and succeeded in reaching the eastern frontier of Russian Turkestan. There, at least, from the heights of the Celestial Mountains I could decry, on a plain far away and still further to the east, the yellow dust of the Takla Makan desert. It was China, the fabulous country of which, since my childhood, I had dreamed. There the caravan trails that were as old as the world, still wound. Long ago, Marco Polo followed them as far as Peking.”1 But she was unable to obtain a visa to enter Chinese Turkestan, which, like Outer Mongolia, was virtually isolated from the world by political turmoil. “Sadly,” she wrote, “I retraced my steps, turning my back on the limitless unknown that beckoned.” Maillart traveled in romantic lands whose very names evoke adventure— Pingliang, Yarkand, Kashgar. For centuries, the Silk Road was synonymous with danger, mystery, and high adventure beyond the frontiers of the Western world. The men and women who explored this remote and unfamiliar realm had no illusions about the dangers and political disorder that awaited them, but they would have been quietly horrified to hear their travels described as adventures.

To Desert and Steppe

The vast reaches of central Asia are redolent with history, with stirring tales of Marco Polo’s epic journeys and all the romance of the Silk Road, an arduous caravan route that connected Asia and the West for hundreds of years. The archaeology of both central Asia and the Silk Road has yet to reveal all their secrets, for the area presents formidable obstacles for even the most experienced researchers and travelers. A century ago, the obstacles were even more severe—no rail lines, no roads beyond caravan tracks and horse trails, and endemic political instability, to say nothing of harsh deserts and high mountain passes. Despite these obstacles, Afghanistan, Tibet, and other countries along the Silk Road were the arena for what became known in the nineteenth century as the “great game,” the hide-and-seek struggle between Russia and Britain for control of a strategically vital area north of British India. Here, archaeological travel was in the hands of explorers and truly dedicated scientists, and certainly was not the domain of tourists. The logistics and enormous distances ensured that anyone traveling in central Asia vanished from civilization for months, and more often for years. During the nineteenth century, the occasional British army officer and political agent, and also French and German travelers, ventured widely through the region, although their concerns were predominantly military and strategic rather than scientific. The great game culminated in Colonel Francis Younghusband’s military and diplomatic expedition for Britain into Tibet in 1904, prompted by rumors that Russia had its eye on the country. After Younghusband’s return to India and because of his account of the fascinating, mountainous regions to the north, the rugged terrain that formed India’s northern frontier became a place where solitary young officers went exploring, hunting, or climbing mountains for sport. During this period, only a handful of travelers penetrated central Asia with scientific objectives, among them the Swedish explorer Sven Hedin, who traveled via Russia and the Pamirs to China in 1893–1897. He nearly died crossing the western Taklimakan Desert in the Tarim Basin to reach the Khotan River. This huge basin was a melting pot of different religions and cultures, a bridge for silk caravans between East and West.