Wonderful Things: A History of Egyptology, Volume 3: From 1914 to the Twenty-first Century

By Jason Thompson

The discovery of ancient Egypt and the development of Egyptology are momentous events in intellectual and cultural history. The history of Egyptology is the story of the people, famous and obscure, who constructed the picture of ancient Egypt that we have today, recovered the Egyptian past while inventing it anew, and made a lost civilization comprehensible to generations of enchanted readers and viewers thousands of years later. This, the third of a three-volume history of Egyptology, follows the progress of the discipline from the trauma of the First World War, through the vicissitudes of the twentieth century, and into Egyptology's new horizons at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Wonderful Things affirms that the history of ancient Egypt has proved continually fascinating, but it also demonstrates that the history of Egyptology is no less so. Only by understanding how Egyptology has developed can we truly understand the Egyptian past.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The American University in Cairo Press
• Release date: Oct 16, 2018
• ISBN: 9781617978647

Jason Thompson

Jason Thompson is an instructor at Ashford University, American Public University, and Rutgers university, as well as dissertation chair, committee member, and associate faculty at University of Phoenix. He also has a very wide variety of corporate experiences in financial services and the insurance industry.

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WONDERFUL

THINGS

WONDERFUL

THINGS

A HISTORY OF EGYPTOLOGY

3: From 1914 to the Twenty-first Century

Jason Thompson

The American University in Cairo Press

Cairo New York

This electronic edition published in 2018 by

The American University in Cairo Press

113 Sharia Kasr el Aini, Cairo, Egypt

420 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10018

www.aucpress.com

Copyright © 2018 by Jason Thompson

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, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

ISBN: 978 977 416 760 7

eISBN: 978 161 797 864 7

Version 1

To the memory of Gaballa Ali Gaballa,

Egyptologist and friend

Contents

       Chronological Outline of Ancient Egyptian History

       Maps

       Preface

       Acknowledgments

1     Egyptology and the Great War

2     Resuming the Field

3     Wonderful Things

4     The Pharaoh’s Curse

5     Winds of Change

6     George A. Reisner and His Colleagues at Giza

7     Farther South: Nubia and Sudan

8     New Dimensions in Prehistory

9     Interwar: The Library

10   Years of Uncertainty

11   Nazi Egyptology and the Second World War

12   An Egyptological Intermediate Period

13   Nubian Rescue: The Temples

14   Nubian Rescue: The Archaeology

15   Resuming the Field—Again: Saqqara and Lower Egypt

16   Resuming the Field—Again: Upper Egypt and Beyond

17   Language and Art

18   Writing Ancient Egyptian History

19   Women in Egyptology

20   Points of Departure

       Notes

       Bibliography

Chronological Outline

of Ancient Egyptian History

¹

Predynastic Period, c. 5300–2950 bc

Early Dynastic Period, c. 2950–2613 bc

First through Third Dynasties

Old Kingdom, c. 2613–2160 bc

Fourth through Eighth Dynasties

First Intermediate Period, c. 2160–2055 bc

Ninth through Eleventh Dynasties

Middle Kingdom, c. 2055–1640 bc

Eleventh through Fourteenth Dynasties

Second Intermediate Period, c. 1640–1550 bc

Fifteenth through Seventeenth Dynasties

New Kingdom, c. 1550–1069 bc

Eighteenth through Twentieth Dynasties

Third Intermediate Period, c. 1069–715 bc

Twenty-first through Twenty-fifth Dynasties

Late Period, c. 715–332 bc

Twenty-fifth through Thirty-first Dynasties

Ptolemaic Period, 332–30 bc

Roman Period, 30 bc–fourth century ad

Coptic or Byzantine Period, fourth century ad–ad 641

When Lord Carnarvon, unable to stand the suspense any

longer, inquired anxiously, Can you see anything? it was

all I could do to get out the words, Yes, wonderful things.

—Howard Carter, opening the

tomb of Tutankhamun

Preface

When you lie down, guard your heart yourself,

For no man has adherents on the day of woe.

—from The Instruction of King Amenemhet I to his son Senwosret¹

This, the last of the three textual volumes of Wonderful Things, addresses the history of Egyptology from 1914 until the near present. It might seem strange that the preceding volume should cover a relatively brief span of thirty-three years while this one is devoted to a full century in which there have been immense and astonishing advances in Egyptology. Those advances, however, are to a very large degree predicated on institutional and conceptual developments of earlier ages, and especially those of what came to be known as the Golden Age of Egyptology, 1881–1914. So numerous and so far-reaching have been the changes during recent decades that the later chapters of this volume move toward general trends rather than attempt to encompass all the individuals, projects, and issues that have arisen. Also, in approaching the present it becomes less appropriate to focus on personality than in earlier times. Descriptions of quarrels between Egyptologists in bygone ages can be instructive, but more recent foibles of personality are best left to the next generation of historians of Egyptology when they can be examined dispassionately within their full contexts.

Exceptions to the reverse telescoping that runs through this volume are the two chapters about Howard Carter and his discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamun in the Valley of the Kings. That is in addition to substantial space given to Carter’s earlier achievements in the previous volume of Wonderful Things. But Wonderful Things is the overall title of the textual trilogy, and I felt it appropriate to accord some space to the events that inspired Carter’s words when he first beheld the tomb’s dazzling treasures—even if those words were later edited slightly. The saga of the famous discovery is worth recounting in some detail because it and the resulting controversies prefigured the different ways Egyptology and archaeology were subsequently done in Egypt.

The practice of providing parenthetical birth and death dates for Egyptologists employed in the previous volumes of Wonderful Things is discontinued here. Many people mentioned in the later chapters of this volume are still with us. It would be morbidly anticipatory to leave an open date for their Westward departure. Know the grave doth gape for thee were appropriate words to say to Sir John Falstaff, but they present a grim prospect for living Egyptologists, even if Egyptologists are more acquainted with mortality than members of most disciplines.

In Wonderful Things I have tried to show that the history of Egyptology is composed of many histories: of discoveries, ideas, sites, institutions, politics, and more. Individual artefacts often have extensive stories of their own. Above all, the essence of the history of Egyptology is the people who have made the discipline what it is. For a few, Egyptology was a way to fame, even fortune; for most, especially the minor characters who labored in obscurity, the rewards have been more modest but nevertheless fulfilling. Recalling his discovery of the tomb of Seti I in the Valley of the Kings in 1817, Giovanni Battista Belzoni wrote, I do not mean to say, that fortune has made me rich, for I do not consider all rich men fortunate; but she has given me that satisfaction, that extreme pleasure, which wealth cannot purchase; the pleasure of discovering what has been long sought in vain.² The discoveries that Egyptologists make nowadays might not include a fabulous tomb, though those are still to be found. Their finds might be discernment of a hitherto unperceived inflection on an Egyptian verb, new insights from reexamining records from past archaeological expeditions, or other nuances that will go largely unheralded. But they are all integral and important parts in the ongoing development of the seemingly inexhaustible field.

Yet, even as Egyptology embraces the future, it is Janus-faced, looking behind as well as ahead. Chris Naunton observes that Egyptologists and archaeologists are increasingly aware of the benefits of understanding the processes by which information about the past has been acquired, interpreted and presented, and of the effect that the political, economical and personal contexts, and the era in which the work was undertaken, had on the results obtained.³ That is one of the reasons for the growing interest in the history of Egyptology not only among Egyptologists and archaeologists but also among the wider public who have fallen under the irresistible spell of ancient Egypt—or, as August Mariette might have put it, have been pecked by the Egyptian Duck.⁴

Textual Note

Spellings of pharaonic names primarily follow those in John Baines and Jaromir Malek, Atlas of Ancient Egypt. Transliterations of Arabic names and words are generally given in simplified form without diacritics or ayns. Unless otherwise indicated, translations are by the author.

Acknowledgments

Iagain attempt to express some measure of the depth of my gratitude toward all those mentioned in the Acknowledgments to the previous two volumes. In many cases their encouragement, assistance, and valuable insights have continued to the present. To their number I should add Ronald E. Zitterkopf, from whose intimate knowledge of the Eastern Desert of Egypt, literary skill, and close reading of the final chapters of this volume I have benefited. Professor James P. Allen set me on the right path toward understanding of the development of language studies. It is not his fault that I probably then went astray in the marvelous world of ancient Egyptian philology. I cannot understand how I never mentioned my late, esteemed friend Professor Gaballa A. Gaballa, who helped me in so many ways. I recall all the pleasant days of hospitality he and Genny afforded me in their home in Maadi where a number of pages in this volume were composed. It is to Gabby that this volume is inscribed. And again and always my thanks to the American University in Cairo Press and its people who contributed substantially to the fabric of Wonderful Things and patiently guided its volumes through production.

1  Egyptology and the Great War

In such a time a man considers his friend to be an enemy.

—Admonitions of Ipuwer

Like nearly everything else in the modern world, Egyptology was profoundly affected by the First World War, 1914–18. Fortunately the discipline had already come of age and was firmly established in Europe and North America. It was well represented in academic posts, museums, and organizations devoted to ancient Egypt, with strong popular interest and participation. The future of Egyptology in Egypt at the time of Gaston Maspero’s retirement from the director-generalship of the Antiquities Service in early summer 1914 also seemed assured, at least from a western point of view. As required by the first article of the Entente Cordiale of 1904 between Britain and France, the diplomatic understanding that aligned Britain and France against the growing menace of Germany, Maspero was replaced by a Frenchman, Pierre Lucien Lacau, a highly qualified Egyptologist with experience in Egypt as director of the Institut Français d’Archéologie Orientale du Caire (IFAO). Lacau was still in France when events in Europe ensured that it would be some time before he returned to Egypt and assumed his new post.

When Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria and Duchess Sophie were assassinated in Sarajevo in late June 1914, most western Egyptologists and archaeologists who lived and worked in Egypt, like Lacau, were absent on summer leave. Academic Egyptologists in Europe and the United States were also enjoying their long vacations. The diplomatic crisis fizzled slowly for several weeks until it exploded on 4 August, plunging Europe into war. The Ottoman Empire joined the German and Austro-Hungarian Empires in November 1914 to form the Central Powers coalition against allied Britain, France, and Russia.

The pretense, maintained by Britain since 1882, that Egypt was a province of the Ottoman Empire was implausible now that the Ottomans were enemies, so what had been known as a ‘veiled’ British protectorate of Egypt became a blatantly real Protec-torate on 18 December 1914. The khedive, Abbas Hilmy II, suspected of not supporting Britain strongly enough, was deposed and replaced with his elderly uncle Hussein Kamil, who was given the exalted title of sultan. That did not enhance Kamil’s virtually nonexistent powers but merely emphasized the end to Egypt’s long relationship with the Ot-toman Empire. Nascent Egyptian parliamentary and self-governing initiatives were suspended; martial law was declared as the British reasserted full control and organized Egypt to support the overall war effort and resist an Ottoman invasion. These measures were wel-comed by most western Egyptologists, who regarded Egyptian na-tionalist sentiment as a minor nuisance.

Egyptologists and archaeologists who were preparing for the winter 1914–15 season of fieldwork in Egypt feared their projects would have to be postponed. But, as Clarence Fisher learned when he arrived in Egypt in December 1914 at the head of the Eckley Brinton Coxe Jr. Expedition from the University of Pennsylvania, the government was heartily in favor of archaeological work being carried on as in normal times. Fisher, who had wanted a major city site, was awarded Memphis, the greatest ancient city site of all in Egypt, although also one of the most difficult. While the Coxe expedition prepared to work at that challenging place, George Reisner loaned it a small portion of his concession in the Giza cemeter-ies.¹ Eckley Brinton Coxe Jr., generous Egyptological patron and participant, passed away in September 1916, having fol-lowed archaeological events in Egypt until his final moments. Fisher’s latest report from Memphis was under Coxe’s pillow when he died.² The section of the University Museum at Phil-adelphia that houses the Egyptian collection was dedicated as the Coxe Wing in 1926.³

The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Egyptian Expedition carried on with the 1914–15 season at Thebes and al-Lisht with only slight delays, an achievement that Norman de Garis Davies, one of the expedition’s leading artists, credited to the stubborn courage of A.M. Lythgoe, the resourceful director of the Met’s De-partment of Egyptian Art.⁴ But the conflict could not be ignored. Davies reported somberly within the first year of conflict that the effects of the great war have penetrated even into the hypogea of Thebes.⁵ Beyond the age for military service in his native Britain, Davies was on station with his talented wife, Nina, for the expedition’s Graphic Section by November 1914. Their work was supported by the recently established memorial fund for Robb de Peyster Tytus,⁶ an American Egyptologist whose premature demise in 1913 cut short a highly promising career. Am-brose Lansing kept the archaeological side going. Excavations were under way at Malqata during the 1916–17 season, but shipments of antiquities to New York were suspended after a German submarine sent the S.S. Arabic and a load of antiquities to the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean.

The Met continued working at Thebes through the 1916–17 season, but the entry of the United States into the war compelled it to suspend operations for two seasons, with the unin-tended benefit of freeing time and energy for much-needed consoli-dation at home. The expedition’s most serious loss of personnel was Arthur C. Mace, who discontinued his work at al-Lisht to join the ex-clusive Artists Rifles battalion. It was probably Mace’s good fortune, and the good fortune of Egyptology, that he was transferred to the Army Service Corps before the Artists Rifles went into action in France, where it incurred the highest casualty rate of any British bat-talion in the war.

The American archaeologist George A. Reisner and the Harvard University–Museum of Fine Arts Expedition were busy as ever at his large concession at the Pyramids of Giza during the 1914–15 season. Later in 1915 Reisner began operations in Upper Nubia at Gammai and at Gebel Barkal, where he did a full season the following year. Meanwhile he continued his excavations at Kerma and began the first of several seasons at Nuri. Thus he was able to maintain his long-standing commitments at Giza and in Nubia and Sudan that would define his career. Reisner turned to Middle Egypt in 1915 and excavated the tomb of the Middle Kingdom nomarch Djehutynakht (Tomb 10A) at Deir al-Bersha. Thieves had long ago ransacked it, resulting in the loss of many precious items, but the jumbled mess they left on the floor was nevertheless the largest Middle Kingdom burial assemblage ever discovered. Reisner en-trusted the clearance of the tomb to a registrar from the Museum of Fine Arts named L. Lyman Story whose work left much to be desired, but Reisner meticulously recorded everything from the tomb before the finds were transported to the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. The war years were a very productive time for Reisner.

Despite the devastation that the Great War inflicted on France, the French Egyptological presence in Egypt con-tinued. When Pierre Lacau was appointed director-general of the Antiquities Service, his replacement at the Institut Français d’Archéologie Orientale du Caire was Georges Foucart, an expert on ancient religion with twenty years of field experience throughout Egypt. IFAO and the Antiquities Service usually worked closely to-gether, although relations between Foucart and Lacau were never good. Foucart maintained the momentum developed by his energetic predecessor Émile Chassinat and worked tirelessly to extend French Egyptological influence in Egypt. After he retired in 1928, Foucart remained in Egypt for twenty years longer and kept in close contact with Egyptological developments, as copious entries in his visitors’ book show.⁷ But the war nevertheless had a stifling effect on French field operations. The work of IFAO at Abu Rawash, which had resumed in 1913, was suspended. On the other hand, the French commenced their long-running project at Deir al-Medina in 1917, at the very height of the war. Meanwhile, Georges Legrain kept at his magnificent restoration work at Karnak until his demise in 1917. IFAO also continued annual publication of its influential Bulletin.

German operations in Egypt were not resumed in the autumn of 1914. Most German and Austrian scholars and ex-cavators had left Egypt for the summer and could not return. Of those few who remained, some were interned and later sent to Malta. One of the interned was Count Riamo d’Hulst, who had once assisted Édouard Naville at Bubastis and Ahnas. D’Hulst’s collection was sold at public auction in 1916. The Protectorate government took over all German and Austrian concessions for the duration of the war and did not immediately re-award them to others as some had hoped. The Imperial German Institute of Archaeology effectively passed into British receivership. From Germany Ludwig Borchardt tried, with George Reisner’s help, to maintain the Institute, to see that servants’ salaries were paid and insurance kept current. Borchardt’s former assistant at Amarna, Friedrich Rösch, was killed on the western front during the first month of fighting. The German work at Amarna, so well begun, was left unfinished, as were other projects.⁸

The German dig house at Thebes was destroyed in 1915. Somers Clarke informed E.A. Wallis Budge with satisfaction that that ugly ridiculous red abomination emblematical of German pushful vulgarity had vanished.⁹ The story went around that it had been dynamited, and suspicions fell on Howard Carter, who had learned to handle explosives while working for Édouard Naville at Deir al-Bahari. In fact, the dig house had not been dynamited and Carter was not involved. Orders for its destruction came directly from the newly appointed British high commissioner to Egypt, Sir Henry McMahon, who had no experience in the Middle East. The American agent for German affairs (the United States looked after German diplomatic matters in Egypt until its entry into the war, when the Swedish General Consulate assumed responsibility) reported from Cairo in 1916, I have been informed by the Authorities that the house in question was found by them to be the centre of illicit antiquity trade, as well as otherwise undesirable from the point of view of the British Military Authorities who, therefore, ordered that it should be pulled down in November of last year. In a poignant afternote to the incident, Norman de Garis Davies erected a small memorial, inscribed in German, on the site where the house had stood. The German House’s Visitors’ Book, with its records of stays by many distinguished Egyptologists, artists, and other interested persons from different nations, has been pre-served.¹⁰

While German Egyptological fortunes plum-meted in Egypt, the war greatly improved the prospects for Italian Egyptologists and excavators. Having been compelled to curtail their operations because of British displeasure over Italy’s invasion of Libya in 1911, they returned to favor when Italy belatedly declared war on Austria–Hungary in May 1915 and on Germany in August 1916. Ernesto Schiaparelli continued his series of highly successful cam-paigns until 1920.

Most of the younger Egyptologists whose ca-reers were already well under way came through the war reasonably well, but there were casualties. Among the British, the former civil service employee Raymond Faulkner was severely wounded, but he put his convalescence to good use by renewing his study of the ancient Egyptian language that he had begun under Margaret Murray at University College London (UCL). The archaeologist Leonard Woolley was captured in 1916, after his ship was blown up off the southern coast of Turkey, and spent the rest of the war in a prisoner of war camp. Flinders Petrie remembered a K. Frost who worked with him at Sinai and was killed while manning a machine gun single-handedly and given a military funeral by the Germans.¹¹ James Alfred Dixon, a promising young draftsman and archaeologist, died at Gallipoli in 1915. The pioneer of Egyptian paleopathology, Sir Marc Armand Ruffer,¹² perished at sea in 1917 when the SS Arcadian was torpedoed in the eastern Mediterranean.

Others from Britain survived unscathed, alt-hough they had to abandon their Egyptological and archaeological labors during military service. Guy Brunton, fresh from digging with Petrie at al-Lahun, put his Egyptian experiences to good use as a lieutenant in France, where he directed the Egyptian Labour Corps.¹³ Some, like Raymond Faulkner, used the time in service well, as did the premier Egyptological photographer Harry Burton, who performed administrative duties for the government in Cairo and continued Egyptological work in his spare time. James Starkey’s service in the marines involved long periods of lighthouse keeping where he whiled away the idle hours by reading extensively about ancient Egypt. After the war he attended Margaret Murray’s evening courses at University College London, went on to work at Qau al-Kebir, and became field director of the University of Michigan’s Expedition at Karanis in the Fayyum before transferring to excavations in Palestine.

Margaret Murray, a nurse before becoming an Egyptologist, went to work at a hospital in France. Francis Ll. Griffith, too old for the army, worked in the Oxford hospitals, where he re-garded no task as too menial for him. Percy E. Newberry, the former Brunner Professor of Egyptology at Liverpool and now in his late forties, served as an ordinary mechanic, making gauges. Alan H. Gardiner’s age of thirty-five when war broke out put him well within the range of conscription, but he avoided military service through his influential connections: and to this day I am glad that I had no active part in wrecking our world, he declared. Gardiner’s sole contribution came late in the war when, he wrote, he was called upon to give a couple of hours a day to reading and summarizing Scandinavian newspapers for the Ministry of Information. That was all!¹⁴ Gardiner’s British friends took a more critical attitude. When James H. Breasted saw him in London in September 1919, he wrote home to his wife, Frances, There is much feeling here against Gardiner, both for his pro-German feeling and backwardness to do anything to help,—they all say he was a pacifist, and that his friends have all had rather warm differences with him on the sub-ject.¹⁵

French Egyptologists fared worse than their British colleagues. Instead of going to Egypt in his capacity as director-general of the Antiquities Service, Pierre Lacau took up arms and was severely wounded at the front. Bernard Bruyère was wounded and taken prisoner but survived the war to join IFAO and begin his famous work at Deir al-Medina. Papyrologist and exceptionally promising Byzantinist Jean Gaston Maspero, third son of Gaston Maspero, was killed in the Argonne. François Maurius Daumas, a draftsman at IFAO, rushed to the colors only to be killed in the opening weeks of the war. He did not live to see the birth of his son, François Félix Eugène Daumas, who was so inspired by his father’s drawings and antiquities that he became an Egyptologist after studying with Lacau and Gustave Lefebvre. Chassinat entrusted the younger Daumas with the publication of the temple at Dendera, which became the major work of his career.¹⁶ Georges Daressy lost a son at the front. Even the German Émile Brugsch might be considered a French casualty of sorts. He retired to the south of France in 1914, reasonably expecting to enjoy his autumnal years in tranquility, only to suffer the trashing of his house and possessions because of his German nationality. Newly retired Gaston Maspero, who knew Brugsch well from his long years of service in the Cairo Museum, rallied to his defense.

French Egyptological losses during the war were not confined to the battlefield. Georges Legrain, a highly ac-complished Egyptologist, had performed miracles as director of the Antiquities Service’s permanent operation at Karnak since his ap-pointment to the post by Jacques de Morgan in 1895. The travel writer Amédée Baillot de Guerville visited Karnak in 1905 and wrote, I truly ask myself what must be admired more, the ancient people who cre-ated these marvels, or the modern people who, like M. Legrain, are giving the best part of their lives to make them be re-born.¹⁷ Most Egyptologists would have readily agreed with that assessment, but not Gaston Maspero, who heartily disliked Legrain and hindered him with opposition and difficulties, as a well-informed observer noted after both men were dead.¹⁸ Because of the pressing nature of the work at Karnak, Legrain extended his working season far into the summer of 1917, until he wrote to a friend on 19 August to say, I can do no more. I have never suffered thus. I must leave. I shall take the train on Thursday evening. He missed that train because he died of pneu-monia at age fifty-one the day before his scheduled departure. Legrain’s intended grand publication of his accomplishments at Kar-nak was never completed.¹⁹ Most of his large accu-mulation of papers and photographs was dispersed after his death.²⁰

Even before the United States entered the war in April 1917, American attitudes had become strongly partisan. Col-leagues at the University of Chicago stopped speaking to each other. For a long time the German-trained James H. Breasted remained favorable to Germany, home of so many of his old Egyptological friends and new ones such as Eduard Meyer with whom he had be-come close, and who had once made a serious effort to lure him to an academic post in Germany. It was said that Breasted and his German colleagues baffled British censors by corresponding with each other in hieroglyphs. When Dows Dunham, who had become an ardent supporter of the Allied cause while he was in Egypt, went to the University of Chicago for a fellowship year in September 1916, he found the pro-German atmosphere impossible and left after just a few months to join the American Field Services as an ambulance driver, forgoing the unique opportunity to have studied under both Breasted and Reisner.

Reisner’s deep love of Germany left him in an intense quandary before he finally decided for the Allies. Dunham, who was with him at the time, thought it might have been the hardest decision Reisner ever made. I remember the tears which rolled down his face as he stated his position—truth and right at whatever cost to his personal feelings, Dunham wrote.²¹ Even when the United States was still neutral, Reisner offered his services as an unofficial consultant to the British government in Cairo. On the other hand, to keep their fieldwork secret from possibly talkative British censors, Reisner and Dunham, like Breasted and his German correspondents, wrote in hieroglyphs to each other.²² Breasted likewise eventually decided for the Allies. When his son Charles entered the U.S. Army, Breasted gave him the German dictionary he had used during his student days after inscribing it with the note Dictionary of the Enemy’s Language.²³

Because their country was later in entering the war, American Egyptologists were spared the losses suffered by their European colleagues. Herbert Winlock served as a major 1917–18, and Dows Dunham gave up his ambulance for a commission in the U.S. Army. David Randall-MacIver (British but by then librarian of the American Geographical Society) left his promising Egyptological career to become a member of the Intelligence Staff in France. He never returned to Egyptian archaeology after the war, devoting himself to Etruscan and Italian studies instead. Oric Bates, author of The Eastern Libyans (1914), wrote to Francis Griffith in 1917 to say, I cannot close without saying how rejoiced we all are here that at last we have joined the cause: Harvard already resembles a training camp . . . I hope to make myself useful.²⁴ Thir-ty-four-year-old Bates fell ill and died at a military camp in Kentucky, cutting short a promising career. James H. Breasted’s son Charles nearly suffered the same fate in his training camp. The artist Joseph Lindon Smith, in his fifties, performed various kinds of war service. His outspoken wife, Corinna, was a strong interventionist.

The established Egyptologists—Breasted, Griffith, Maspero, Erman, and others of their generation—were be-yond the age of military service, but that did not exempt them from suffering and loss. Newly retired Gaston Maspero informed Breasted in 1915: The death of my son on the 17th of February dealt me a new blow. Until now I felt considerably younger than my age: I cannot tell you how suddenly I olded. Maspero died the following year. Charles Breasted remembered his childhood playmates, the two sons of Eduard Meyer, whom I had so often watched as they campaigned with lead soldiers in the garden at Gross-Lichterfelde. Both were killed at the front. So was young Peter Erman. His father, Adolf Erman, the preeminent figure of the renowned Berlin School of Egyptology, de-fended his country’s actions during the opening phases of the war but wrote to James H. Breasted in 1916, "It is so unnatural that boys of twenty like Peter should die, and the old like ourselves should live on. I bury myself in my researches, and crave to live only long enough to leave the Dictionary completed, and perhaps see the world once more at peace."²⁵

Erman’s student Max Burchardt was an assis-tant in the Egyptian Department of the Berlin Museum and had worked on the long-running preparation of the dictionary of the ancient Egyptian language that Erman craved to complete. He was killed at Saint-Souplet in September 1914. Young Hermann Kees survived service in the German army to go on to study with Sethe at Göttingen and work with Adriaan de Buck on Göttinger Totenbuchstudien, only to have his career take a darker turn during the Nazi era. Wilhelm Spiegelberg, though in his midforties, sought active military duty but was disqualified because of a heart condition. He was assigned to the army library service instead.

It was in the up and coming generation that Egyptology sustained a severe loss the extent of which can never be calculated, as many who might have made names in the discipline were sacrificed. The young university men who became the new lieutenants, captains, and majors were the first to die when they went over the top. An experienced professor lamented, Of my pupils at Cambridge at least one-half, and practically all the best, have been killed or maimed for life; the work that I did has been for the most part wasted.²⁶ After the slaughter on the battlefield ceased, an even deadlier influenza epidemic ravaged the world. It is not too much to speak of a ‘lost generation’ of Egyptologists as a result of the First World War.

France suffered heavily from the war with a large portion of its country invaded and occupied and from the hor-rifically devastating fighting on its soil. The Netherlands managed to maintain neutrality, as did Switzerland where Édouard Naville served as acting president of the International Committee of the Red Cross. Naville’s nationality and post required strict outward neutrality, but his personal sentiments were with the Allies, despite Egyptological training in Berlin and reverence for his former professor, the renowned Richard Lepsius.

Much of Belgium was overrun at the war’s outset, and the northern stretch of the western front ran through Flanders. Belgium’s outstanding Egyptologist was Jean Capart, who had studied with Karl Wiedemann at Bonn. Capart was assistant conservator in the Egyptian collections at the Musées Royaux du Cinquantenaire in Brussels when the war began. A few days after the Germans occupied Brussels, he wrote apprehensively to Percy Newberry, My fate is now to remain in the Museum and to make my best to preserve our collection against every possible damage.²⁷ His concern was well founded. Less than two weeks later the Germans deliberately destroyed the University of Leuven’s library with barbaric disregard for the incalculable loss to culture and scholarship. The German Egyptologist Friedrich Wilhelm von Bissing became a political adviser to his father, the governor-general of German-occupied Belgium, and interfered blatantly in Belgian academic affairs while producing pro-German propaganda under the pseudonym Anacharsis le Jeune, the hero of an eighteenth-century novel by Jean-Jacques Barthélémy that was once widely read.²⁸

Imperial Russia might be considered one of the casualties of the Great War. The Bolsheviks seized the central gov-ernment in late 1917, and the former empire plunged into civil war, inflicting incredible hardships on the general population. The premier Russian Egyptologist Vladimir Semionovitch Golénischeff, long resident in Egypt and France, never returned to Russia after 1917.²⁹ He lost his personal fortune and most of the money from the collection he had sold to a Russian museum when the Bolsheviks refused to honor the debt. Golénischeff’s former student and now Russia’s premier Egyptologist Boris Alexandrovitch Turaev, weakened by starvation, succumbed to illness in Petrograd in 1920. The Coptologist Oskar Lemm had died in 1918. Egyptology indeed fell on hard times in Russia, but fortunately some of Turaev’s key students survived to carry on. Meanwhile, Golénischeff was appointed to the first chair of Egyptology at the Egyptian University (later Fouad I University, then Cairo University) in 1920 and was also employed at the Egyptian Museum where he catalogued hieratic papyri. He might be seen frequently on hotel terraces in Cairo and Luxor, conversing fluently in one of many languages with Egyptologists and distinguished visitors, sharing the abundant insights he had gathered during his long, productive career and stored in his phenomenal memory.

Even at the height of the war, Egypt and Egyptology were never forgotten in British and French governmental and intellectual circles as they looked ahead to postwar settlements. Just as the core Middle East was divided into prospective spheres of French and British political influence by the Sykes-Picot Agreement that assigned Syria to France while the British would take Palestine and retain their position in Egypt, the British offered an archaeological corollary. They suggested that France have a free archaeological hand in Syria in return for British control of Egyptian antiquity, but the French remained steadfast in their determination to hold onto what they considered their rightfully preeminent place in Egyptology and strong institutional presence in Egypt.³⁰

Meanwhile the British high commissioners ruled Egypt under the Protectorate with nearly absolute authority, a situation that generally suited western fieldworkers in Egypt because the gov-ernment was almost invariably supportive. Alan Gardiner talked seri-ously about the establishment of a British Imperial Institute of Archaeology in Egypt. His British colleagues looked ahead to greater control of the Antiquities Service and reorganization of the museum in Cairo. They thought they would be able to deal with the French, but they reckoned without the Egyptians.

Having had its way in Egypt during the war, the British government intended to continue to do so after peace was finally made in November 1918. No thought was given to the forces of Egyptian nationalism and the resentment that had been accumulating throughout the war years. The Egyptians had accepted the Protec-torate and the hardships it imposed on them only grudgingly, expecting its termination when the war ended, but the British acted as if it would last indefinitely. When Egyptian concerns were brushed aside as Britain prepared for the postwar conference in Paris, Egypt exploded in a series of violent protests and deadly clashes. Order was firmly restored, but the politicians in London reluctantly realized that the status quo in Egypt could not be maintained indefinitely.

After some debate and indecision, the gov-ernment of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland unilaterally declared on 28 February 1922 that the British protectorate over Egypt is terminated, and Egypt is declared to be an independent sovereign State. Egyptian sovereignty was limited, however, by the Reserved Points in the declaration, which, among other things, pro-vided for continued British military presence in Egypt and control of the Suez Canal. A British high commissioner for Egypt and Sudan remained on station and wielded considerable authority. One of the Reserved Points also ordained that the situation in Sudan, ruled by an allegedly joint Anglo-Egyptian Condominium, but one in which the British had the controlling interest, would remain unchanged for the present. That would have major implications for the conduct of Egyptology and archaeology in Sudan. One point left unreserved was European control of the Antiquities Service. More time passed before western Egyptologists fully understood what that meant for how they did business in Egypt.

2  Resuming the Field

Great have been the changes since the peace of the world was broken. In Egypt the main actors are gone.

—Somers Clarke, Ancient Egypt, 1920

One western Egyptologist who understood how extensively things were changing in Egypt was Pierre Lacau, director-general of the Antiquities Service. Lacau had been appointed to the post in October 1914, but he was in France, determined to serve in the trenches against the German invaders. He traveled to Egypt only briefly during the winter of 1915–16 to take care of the most pressing business before hurrying back to the front, where he was severely wounded. Not until August 1917, when Georges Legrain died in Luxor, leaving France with no senior personnel in the Antiquities Service, did the convalescing Lacau accede to repeated requests from the French consul-general in Egypt to come to Cairo and assume the helm and thwart British efforts to take control.

Among French Egyptological and governmental circles there was serious, well-founded concern that the British were still attempting to control the Service as they had during the closing years of Maspero’s director-generalship. Lord Kitchener, the de facto ruler of Egypt at the time, had steadily encroached on the prerogatives of the director-general, a process Lacau was determined to stop. He believed Maspero should have fought harder against Kitchener. In any event, the confrontation never occurred. Kitchener was in England when war began and never returned to Egypt. Instead, he was appointed secretary of state for war and perished at sea in 1916 on a diplomatic mission to Russia when his ship struck a mine, so Kitchener and Lacau did not lock horns. Nevertheless, French apprehensions were by no means assuaged, nor should they have been, for the British continued to covet increased control over Egyptian antiquities at French expense. As late as 1935 Sir Miles Lampson, the high commissioner for Egypt and Sudan, wrote, It’s always a little galling to me that the Antiquities here should be French run.¹

Lacau made a good first impression. The expert on ancient Egyptian architecture Somers Clarke saw him as a gentleman and a man of affairs. Howard Carter came away from his initial meeting with a good opinion of Lacau, but it became increasingly qualified. He is on the whole friendly—certainly a gentleman—but a stickler and narrow in what he calls ‘L’idéal au point de vue scientifique,’ Carter informed his patron Lord Carnarvon.² Over time, people found ever fewer kind things to say about Lacau. They called him dictator and little pharaoh of the antiquities of Egypt.³ After Lacau had held the director-generalship of the Antiquities Service for nearly fifteen years, James H. Breasted’s characteristically acerbic assessment was, in him an able scholar was spoiled to produce a rather poor administrator with noticeably bad judgment.⁴ In fact, Lacau was a fairly good administrator, but his critics never recognized the politically charged contexts in which he had to make decisions.

Although Lacau was unfailingly courteous, there was an unmistakably autocratic air about him. A handsome and engaging man in youth and middle age, if somewhat reserved, he became more remote over time. His dignified demeanor and snow-white beard conveyed an almost unearthly quality. Lacau’s nickname—used behind his back, of course—was God the Father. He probably knew that, and he may well have cultivated the image because he needed every advantage he could muster. His powerful office rested on insecure bases. Lacau had to tread a precarious path between influential western Egyptologists on the one hand and increasingly assertive Egyptian nationalists on the other, all the while fending off British and American threats to his power. He could never satisfy everyone, but he knew the Egyptian government held ultimate authority and that Egyptians, not Europeans, now ran that government. Within those constraints, however, Pierre Lacau ruled the Antiquities Service more imperiously than his predecessor Gaston Maspero, sometimes without the latter’s diplomacy and willingness to recognize the needs and desires of others.

Soon after Lacau took control, peace returned and the pace of archaeology in Egypt accelerated. The operation of the IFAO at Deir al-Medina, already under way, gained new momentum, and increased its productivity. Known in ancient times as Set Maat, or ‘the Place of Truth,’ and later as Deir al-Medina (the ‘Monastery of the Town’) because of its use as a Coptic convent, it was the residence of the skilled workmen who labored in the Valley of the Kings during the New Kingdom, a fact firmly established by Jaroslav Černý in 1929. The well-worn path they took to that major job site is still in use today. Deir al-Medina was inhabited by the craftsmen and their families for nearly five hundred years, until they abandoned it during the troubled reign of Ramesses XI for the comparative safety of nearby Medinet Habu.

Deir al-Medina is remarkable in having so many elements so close together—town, sanctuaries, a temple, and the tombs to the west of town that the skilled artisans carefully designed and constructed for themselves. Nowadays one sees an orderly, cleared site with the foundations of the houses plainly laid out as if in a two-dimensional floor plan. The major tombs in the adjoining cliff are sharply defined. But at the beginning of the twentieth century the town was covered by shapeless mounds of earth, and the tombs appeared as nothing more than irregular, gaping holes in the hillside.

Relatively untouched in earlier times, Deir al-Medina began to be heavily pillaged during the nineteenth century. Many artefacts that enrich museums around the world today, and no doubt at least as many more that have disappeared into private collections, came from Deir al-Medina during those years, although their exact provenance can never be determined. The Napoleonic Expedition did not notice the site, but Henry Salt and Bernardino Drovetti, or rather their agents, dug and collected there. Several scholars also recorded at Deir al-Medina, including Gardner Wilkinson and Richard Lepsius. In February 1886 Gaston Maspero opened the tomb of Sennedjem (TT1), a high-ranking artist who lived in the Nineteenth Dynasty under Seti I and Ramesses II, and found it intact. Unfortunately its clearance was poorly recorded, but Sennedjem’s splendidly painted tomb remains in exceptionally good condition.

Maspero awarded the concession at Deir al-Medina in 1905 to his pupil Ernesto Schiaparelli, head of the Italian Archaeological Mission. Schiaparelli’s greatest discovery there came toward the beginning in 1906, when he opened the tomb of the Eighteenth Dynasty architect Kha (TT8) with its undisturbed, neatly arranged grave goods, including a particularly good statuette of Kha himself. Most of those objects are now in the Museo Egizio of Turin. Toward the end of his years at Deir al-Medina, Schiaparelli began uncovering part of the town. Émile Baraize, Alexandre Barsanti’s successor as the Antiquities Service’s director of works, had restored the Ptolemaic temple during 1909–12, and a German team cleared and excavated part of the village close to the temple. But Schiaparelli was also busy at different sites in Egypt, ranging from Heliopolis to Aswan, and operations by the Antiquities Service and the Germans were limited in scope. Systematic work on a sustained basis began at Deir al-Medina only when IFAO was awarded the concession in 1917.

The person most closely associated with Deir al-Medinan archaeology was Bernard Bruyère, a student of the Egyptologist Georges Bénédite at the Louvre. Wounded and taken prisoner during the war, Bruyère joined IFAO in 1921. The following year Georges Foucart, IFAO’s director, entrusted him with direction of operations at Deir al-Medina, where he continued until 1951, apart from an interruption during the Second World War. Bruyère maintained a beautifully written, carefully illustrated manuscript in which he recorded every day’s work, and he scrupulously published the results of each season’s campaign, eventually resulting in the seventeen volumes of his Rapport sur les Fouilles de Deir el Médineh that appeared over the course of nearly thirty years.⁵

The importance of Deir al-Medina for ancient Egyptian urban studies can hardly be overstated. As Jaromir Malek has pointed out, Most of the material which has survived from ancient Egypt concerns kings, officials or priests; information about ordinary people is rare.⁶ Deir al-Medina has been an extraordinarily rich source for matters of daily life in ancient Egypt, such as prices, family affairs, law, medicine, and legal matters, the things that affected ordinary people most closely. The documentation is so extensive that it is possible to know about many of the individuals who lived there, to reconstruct the stories of their lives, even to know which houses they lived in. Most of the information about women in ancient Egypt comes from Deir al-Medina. Bruyère’s more sensational discoveries include the library of the Nineteenth Dynasty scribe Kenherkhepshef in 1928. That same year he also found the unviolated tomb of the Eighteenth Dynasty workman Sennefer (TT1159), undecorated but containing many grave goods and the unmummified bodies of Sennefer and his wife.

Because the specialized occupations of the people who inhabited Deir al-Medina required many of them to be literate, the site accumulated an unusually large number of inscribed ostraca. These are not just potsherds but also smooth, palm-sized pieces of the friable limestone from the Western Mountain at Thebes. They were ideal for taking notes, making plans for the work at hand, and recording incidental information about almost every aspect of the peoples’ lives. The Great Pit alone yielded more than five thousand ostraca. That large abyss, originally a walk-down well, became the town dump over time and was filled with refuse, including cast-off ostraca.

In this aspect of the work at Deir al-Medina, the French were singularly fortunate to have the services of Jaroslav Černý, a superbly trained young Czech Egyptologist who had studied under the pioneering Czech Egyptologist František Lexa in Prague. Černý became especially proficient in hieratic but was unable to obtain an academic post in Czechoslovakia. He had to find employment at a bank, where his ability to read difficult handwriting, the very aptitude that helped him decipher the often difficult hieratic scrawls on the ostraca of Deir al-Medina, was greatly appreciated. Intervention by a powerful political friend persuaded Černý’s bank to grant him a leave of absence in 1925–26 to visit Egypt and begin his long association with Bruyère and Deir al-Medina.

At first Černý worked as an unpaid volunteer, but soon his participation became indispensable. Living conditions for the personnel in the IFAO expedition at Deir al-Medina were not as luxurious as some of the contemporary archaeological expeditions at Thebes, but Černý was well satisfied. He described his quarters:

The old part of the house is built into a former grave; the middle smaller room, which is mine and which I am too conservative to change for another, more spacious one, leads into a room cut in the rock, which had once been the tomb chapel and now serves as a storeroom for various antiquities, as well as whole mummies and their parts, he who believes in the mummy’s revenge, which is fashionable in Europe today, would probably die of fear here.⁷

In 1927, Tomáš Masaryk, president of Czechoslovakia, granted Černý a scholarship that enabled him to resign from his bank, but the financial experience paid off handsomely by stimulating and informing Černý’s early interest in economic and social history that is evident in his 1922 thesis, The Life of Workers in the Necropolis of Thebes.⁸

No one could read the difficult cursive hieratic script on the ostraca as well as Černý, informed as he was by his sensitivity to context, his discerning eye, and his philological brilliance. According to Hana Navrátilová, He tried to understand the meaning of a historical word in the most accurate way, being aware of its possible nuances . . . thus helping to recreate a mental map which the Egyptians themselves used.⁹ Černý became so intimately involved with his materials that he even learned to recognize the handwriting of many different ancient individuals and link them to their familial and social connections. The magnum opus that resulted from his immense labors, Catalogue des Ostraca hiératiques non littéraires de Deir el Médineh, was published in five volumes between 1935 and 1951. Černý also intended to draw on his unprecedented insight into the workers’ lives to prepare a comprehensive history of their community, but he had completed only a portion of it at the time of his death in 1970. That was published posthumously in 1973 as A Community of Workmen at Thebes in the Ramesside Period.

Černý was primarily interested in nonliterary ostraca, the ones that, he wrote, contain the documents of daily life: inventories, receipts for objects purchased or furnished by the artisans and workers, notes concerning the work and the small events of life every day, rough drafts of contracts and judicial actions, and letters. But literary ostraca—containing fragments varying in length of works of Egyptian literature, written by those who wanted to learn to write, or by those who were trying to reproduce a passage learned by heart from a literary work, probably to drive away boredom or test the accuracy of their memory¹⁰—also abounded at Deir al-Medina. Černý put the promising young French Egyptologist Georges Posener to work on those. Although Posener went on to make significant contributions to a wide range of subjects, the literary ostraca of Deir al-Medina became his primary life’s work, published in the three volumes of his Catalogue des Ostraca hiératiques littéraires de Deir el Médineh that appeared between 1934 and 1980. In his midfifties, Posener married Paule Violette Posener-Kriéger, a specialist in Old Kingdom hieratic paleography and director of IFAO during the 1980s—an ideal philological match.

Bruyère’s operations at Deir al-Medina were conducted reasonably well according to the standards of the time, but they were not above criticism, then or now. Černý wrote to his mentor Lexa in 1930, Bruyère and I have to supervise the workers and prevent any stealing; we have had very bad experiences with them.¹¹ In fact, there was no way they could adequately supervise their huge crews of workers, numbering as many as five hundred in 1935. Lax supervision allowed artefacts to pour into the local antiquity market. It has been estimated that about half of the papyri and ostraca excavated at Deir al-Medina during the 1920s were illicitly pilfered. Among them were famous items such as the Sinuhe ostracon and the Chester Beatty papyri.¹² Nor did relations with the workers always run smooth, as Černý noted with concern. When financial constraints compelled large layoffs from the crew, the redundant workers angrily retaliated by destroying an important stela. Some later scholars would regret how this unrivalled opportunity to synthesize contemporaneous textual and archaeological data from a single site has not been fully realized, primarily because of inadequate standards of excavation.¹³

A little more than a kilometer northeast of Deir al-Medina, the Egyptian Expedition of the Metropolitan Museum of Art was back in force for the 1919–20 season at Deir al-Bahari. Albert Lythgoe, always willing to let talent have full play, readily allowed Herbert Winlock to come to the fore on site so that Winlock was effectively head of the expedition, although he did not receive formal appointment until some years later. Winlock was dignified—friends described him as looking like a Roman proconsul¹⁴—full of energy, articulate, and generally very well liked. Thomas Hoving, one of Winlock’s successors as director of the Met, described him thus: Extraordinarily articulate, and a brilliant archaeologist, Winlock was highly respected for his scientific ability and adored for his sunny disposition, sparkling wit and high sense of humor. His wit, like his character, was almost always benevolent, even when he was going after a stuffy and jealous colleague.¹⁵ Arthur Weigall, rarely one to praise others, considered Winlock the most brilliant archaeologist of his generation.

Winlock’s team was of the highest quality. The experienced and valuable members Arthur C. Mace and Ambrose Lansing returned. So did Norman and Nina Davies, the best team of Egyptological copyists in the world. Norman and Nina were, however, just the two brightest stars in the glittering constellation of artistic talent that made up the expedition’s Graphic Section. Another was added when Charles K. Wilkinson came on board in 1920. Norman recruited him from the Slade School of Fine Art at University College London where his teacher thought the Egyptian climate might help in recovery from disabilities incurred in the Great War. Writing about the great nineteenth-century Egyptologist Sir (John) Gardner Wilkinson, Charles Wilkinson stated, While I am no relation to Sir John, I am honored to have helped in a minor way to further his pioneering efforts.¹⁶ Charles Wilkinson was especially adept at full-sized color copies. In that, of course, Nina Davies was the master, but Wilkinson, whose colored copies can also be seen in the Egyptian galleries of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, ran her a close second. He served in the Egyptian Expedition until 1931, when the Met transferred him to its Persian Expedition.

Another new member was the American architect Walter Hauser. Trained at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he later taught mathematics and drawing, Hauser joined the expedition in 1919 and served until 1931, when he transferred to Mesopotamia. Besides his work at Deir al-Bahari, Hauser worked at Kharga and especially at Malqata, where he prepared the master plan for the vast palace complex of Amenhotep III. Informal in manner and direct in approach, Hauser always gave generous assistance to anyone who sought his expertise.¹⁷

In 1914 the Egyptian Expedition had acquired the most renowned photographer in the history of Egyptology, Harry Burton.¹⁸ One of eleven children of a Lincolnshire cabinet maker, Burton was taken under the wing of a neighbor, the Renaissance art historian Robert Henry Hobart Cust, and moved with him to Florence in 1896 as secretary and companion. He became interested in photography and developed into an outstanding photographer of Italian art. Theodore Davis noticed Burton on one of his regular stops in Florence and the two became close friends. When Cust moved back to England in 1910, Davis engaged Burton as an excavator for his final archaeological campaigns in Egypt. Burton’s digging skills were unremarkable, but no one could match him as an archaeological/Egyptological photographer.

Albert Lythgoe was a great believer in photography in archaeology and relied on it probably more than any other excavator, according to Charles K. Wilkinson.¹⁹ When Davies retired from the field, Lythgoe promptly hired Burton as the Egyptian Expedition’s photographer with funds from the Robb de Peyster Tytus memorial bequest. From 1914 until his death twenty-six years later, Burton provided superb photodocumentation for the expedition, especially its campaigns at Deir al-Bahari, and he contributed substantially to other operations. When part of the roof of the tomb of Seti I collapsed in December 1921, he responded to an emergency request from the Antiquities Service and made what is still the only complete photographic record of that magnificent tomb. Burton’s most famous work, as will be seen, was for Howard Carter in the tomb of Tutankhamun.

Although Burton experimented with other media such as color transparencies and movie film, he primarily worked with black-and-white glass plate photography. That medium had come a long way since the days of Francis Frith and other pioneers of Egyptological photography decades earlier,²⁰ but it was still cumbersome and demanding. Yet, despite all difficulties, Burton derived exquisite images from it. When working within enclosed spaces, he used artificial lighting where it was available, but in many instances he directed natural sunlight as far as one hundred feet underground by a series of mirrors manipulated by two Egyptian helpers. Standing inside with his mirror, next to his large, tripod-mounted camera during long exposures, he directed the light around the room or corridor to burn in details as if the areas were suffused with natural lighting. This was then enhanced by fastidious darkroom technique. As Marsha Hill observes in her study of Burton’s life and work, his photography is noted for lack of distortion, fine detail, remarkable evenness of lighting which both reveals the subject and gives the photographs an aesthetic appeal independent of their subject matter, and compelling thoroughness.²¹

Burton was esteemed by his companions as much for thoughtfulness and equanimity as for photographic brilliance. Many years later his colleague Charles K. Wilkinson remembered him as the most amiable of men and considerate of others even under stress. Once at dinner during a Christmas season when he and two other Expedition members were on a difficult assignment, they were served plum pudding ablaze with kerosene because there was no brandy in the camp; it was Burton who ate the pudding so as not to hurt the feelings of the Egyptian cook.²² One is happy that he survived such a dessert. Burton’s wife, Minnie, may have been a bit less amiable, for she had a reputation for snobbishness; even so, her diary provides detailed information about social life at the Expedition’s residence, Metropolitan House. It would be naive to conclude that the Met’s Egyptian Expedition always functioned as one large, happy family, but its mix of personalities and talents, and the comforts of Metropolitan House, assured a congenial and productive working atmosphere.

Who Was Who in Egyptology assesses Winlock’s work at Deir al-Bahari as a classic in the story of Egyptian archaeology. At first glance many of his operations were probably indistinguishable from the much less careful clearances of Édouard Naville during the 1890s, with swarms of workmen raising large clouds of dust. In the peak year of 1924, Winlock employed as many as four hundred Egyptians, a scale that would be most unlikely today. On the other hand, his methods were admirable according to the standards of the day and well reported in Winlock’s engaging prose. A brilliantly successful excavator, John A. Wilson remembered, he had a gift for presenting his reports as exciting detective stories.²³ Thomas Hoving thought Winlock may have been the finest writer who has ever been involved in Egyptology, an assessment with which this writer fully concurs.²⁴ Literary fluency did not come at the expense of scholarly depth. Winlock’s masterful Monastery of Epiphanius at Thebes (1926),