Category Archives: Egyptologists and Egyptology

Posts involving people with trowels.

Famed hotelier outed as vandal

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Marleen de Meyer of the University of Leuven and the Netherlands-Flemish Institute in Cairo emailed this week to draw my attention to a bit of graffiti she’d found in a Giza tomb. It reads ‘1860 S. Shepheard Eathorpe’. This has to be the work of the Samuel Shepheard, founder of Shepheard’s hotel, Cairo. Eathorpe is the address of his home in England, which he departed Egypt for in 1860. This defacing of a monument must have been one of Shepheard’s last (and least welcome) contributions to Egypt before retiring.

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The tomb, says Marleen, is G6020 and belongs to a man named Iymery; it’s located in the cemetery field to the west of Khufu’s pyramid. It is published in Kent Weeks’ Mastabas of Cemetery G6000 (Boston Museum of Fine Arts, 1994). The photos here are courtesy of Marleen.

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The Grammar of Ornament

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Speaking of London’s Great Exhibition of 1851, which I was a few posts ago in relation to St Mark’s church in Alexandria, another of the architects involved in that fantastic project had a strong connection with Egypt and that was Owen Jones.

Educated at England’s Royal Academy, Jones travelled in Egypt (where he joined the party of painter Robert Hay), Greece, Turkey and Spain from 1833 to 1834 making copious notes and sketches along the way. These became the basis for a lifetime’s work as a highly influential writer, architect-decorator and illustrator. He was commissioned to work on the interior arrangements at the Great Exhibition. When the venue for the exhibition, the Crystal Palace, was disassembled moved and reassembled in south London, Owen was tasked with creating a series of decorative courts themed on Egypt (pictured above), Greece, Rome and the Alhambra. He was assisted in this by Egyptologist Joseph Bonomi.

In 1856, Jones published the work for which he is best known, the mesmerising Grammar of Ornament. In this he presents in a series of painted plates key examples of design through the ages from around the world, but particularly the Middle East. It is a sumptuously beautiful thing, available in modern facsimile, which is large, heavy and expensive, but happily also online in the archives of the University of Heidelberg. Go take a look for yourself.

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Egyptian Museum original drawings

From the online archives of the Bibliothèque nationale de France, the original watercolour designs for Cairo’s Egyptian Museum by French architect Marcel-Lazare Dourgnon – also responsible for the Egyptian pavilion at the 1900 Exposition Universelle, which I blogged about a couple of months back (here). Click to enlarge.

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The art of Susan Weeks

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Poking around in the archives of the American University in Cairo the other week I came across a box labeled “Susan Weeks”. Susan was the wife of Egyptologist Kent Weeks, rediscoverer of the KV 5 tomb in the Valley of the Kings. Susan worked with Kent as part of the Theban Mapping Project, for which she was ceramics expert, registrar, headquarters supervisor, project archivist and chief architect until her tragically premature death in December 2009. The box contained some of her pencil and ink sketches and watercolours. If you’ve ever seen a copy of Kent’s book The Lost Tomb, then you will have seen Susan’s sketches, one of which heads each chapter. Unfortunately, the reproductions in the book are not very good – not in the paperback, anyway – so to see the original pieces is a thrill. Plus the book is in black and white and doesn’t have any colour pieces. Below is a selection of some of the work from the archive, only two of which feature in the book. It’s just a small sampling, pieces I particularly liked, and there is much, much more. It’s a shame the work is so little seen. Maybe one day we’ll get to see it published in a book.

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Belzoni, Soane and Seti I

The Sir John Soane Museum is one of the most extraordinary places in London. It is not really a museum, it is the former home of a great Georgian architect and collector extraordinaire. It is actually three houses knocked into one – that does it an injustice, the houses are intricately interlinked – and all are filled with a cornucopia of antiques, painting, sculpture and architectural bric-a-brac. Rather than me try to describe it any further, take a look at these photographs:

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Basement Ante Room in the Soane Museum. Photo_ Gareth Gardner

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Right now there is more reason than ever for anyone with an interest in Egypt to visit. Soane’s greatest acquisition was the sarcophagus of the pharaoh Seti I, which is on permanent display in the basement space. Running until April is a temporary exhibition on the background to the sarcophagus. It was removed by Belzoni from Seti I’s tomb in the Valley of the Kings and transported to England where it was first offered to the British Museum. When the museum declined to meet Belzoni’s asking price, Soane stepped forward. Getting the 3,000-year-old relic into the house involved knocking down a sizeable chunk of the back wall. When all was done, and the wall rebuilt, Soane then threw a three-day party to introduce London to his new prize possession.

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This exhibition retells the story and also includes some of the wonderful watercolours made by Belzoni and his assistants in Seti’s tomb.

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Even if you can’t make it for the exhibition, Sir John Soane’s home is worth a visit any time you are in London. And the sarcophagus will still be there.

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Mrs Goodison at the Atkinson

Further to the last post, here are images from the actual exhibition at Southport’s Atkinson Museum, courtesy of the museum. No caption information, I’m afraid. For anyone interested, there will be a catalogue, but not just yet.

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Adventures in Egypt: Mrs Goodison and Other Travellers

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If you find yourself anywhere near northwest England between now and next March, there is an exhibition well worth catching. It’s called ‘Adventures in Egypt: Mrs Goodison and Other Travellers’. I haven’t yet seen it but I did attend a talk this week here in London given by Egyptologist Tom Hardwick, who curated the show and who explained what it was all about.

Born in 1845, at the age of 22 Anne Padley married George Goodison of Waterloo, Liverpool. He was a successful civil engineer, who laid a sewerage system for which he had a road named after him, and when a football stadium was built on that road it too took his name, which it retains until today – Everton FC’s home ground of Goodison Park. We know precious little about Mrs Goodison except that she twice visited Egypt, in 1886–87 and 1890–91 and, while there, became an enthusiast for all things ancient and Egyptian. Back then, it was quite easy for the amateur enthusiast to acquire antiquities and using her husband’s wealth, Mrs Goodison amassed a sizeable trove of over a thousand artifacts. None of the pieces were outstanding in their own right, being mainly small pieces such as shaabti, bits of faience, beads, some textiles and some jewellery, but taken together they made a creditable collection. Her husband, however, was unimpressed and as soon as his wife died, in 1906, he sold the whole lot to the Bootle Museum in Liverpool. That museum closed in the 1970s and the collection eventually made its way to Southport and the Atkinson Museum, where it remains today and where the new exhibition on Mrs Goodison takes place.

It combines objects from her collection with some beautiful loan pieces from London’s British Museum, Petrie Museum and National Portrait Gallery, and New York’s Brooklyn Museum to evoke the Egyptian tourist scene of the 1890s and give context to the world of the Victorian-era collector of Egyptology. In addition to carved stones from Amarna, granite heads from the Temple of Mut at Karnak, watercolours by Howard Carter and cartoons by Egyptian satirist Abou Naddara, I am honoured to say that some of my vintage posters, luggage labels, guidebooks and brochures also feature in the exhibition.

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imageNote, these are pics of the Atkinson’s permanent Egyptology galleries, not the Goodison exhibition – I’ll post exhibition pics when I visit.

If you have never been to Southport, a sedate seaside resort just north of Liverpool favoured by pensioners on mobility scooters and footballers out on the lash, it is a place for which local historians make some imaginative claims. When exiled Prince Louis Napoleon – the future Emperor Napoleon III – lived in Southport for a short time in 1838, it’s claimed he so admired its long, wide, straight, tree-lined main parade that he ordered his engineer Baron Hausmann to remodel Paris along similar lines. Hausmann’s Paris was, of course, the model for Ismail’s modern Cairo of the 1860s. So instead of ‘Paris on the Nile’, Downtown Cairo is really ‘Southport on the Nile’.

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Christmas chills with Amelia

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A few weeks ago a visitor to this site posted a comment in which he guessed that I would be familiar with Amelia Edward’s A Thousand Miles Up the Nile. I’ll say. Grand Hotels of Egypt begins with Amelia and her claim that she wound up in Egypt for no better reason than to escape the rain that was dampening her enthusiasm for Europe. Even if I don’t fully believe her, I still tip my hat to her show of nonchalance as she embarks on her grand adventure. Her account of a season on the Nile in a dahabiya remains an enthralling read and I reference it numerous times in my own book, On the Nile. So, yes, I know Ms Edwards.

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Except it turns out I don’t, not really. I know the Amelia Edwards whose voyage up the Nile inspired her to become a tireless campaigner for the preservation and research of ancient Egypt, who co-founded the Egypt Exploration Fund in 1882, and who bequeathed her collection of Egyptian antiquities to University College London, where it formed the basis of the University’s Egyptology Department. This is the Amelia Edwards commemorated with an English heritage blue plaque, unveiled on her former London home last March.

It was another visitor to this site who alerted me to another Amelia, the author of tales of the supernatural and a woman not afraid to assert her individuality. On his excellently eccentric blog greydogtales, John Linwood Grant writes, “Her private life seems to have been as lively as her professional one. Acquaintances said that she was involved with more than one other woman (in one case, she seemed to have formed a menage a trois).”

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Long before she made the trip to Egypt that would alter the course of her life, Edwards (above) was also a highly successful novelist. Her Lord Brackenbury (1880) went to 15 editions. And she wrote short stories, ranging from tales of adventure to ghost stories. Her best known of the latter is “The Phantom Coach”, which is about (and I’m paraphrasing John Linwood Grant here because I haven’t read it myself yet) a young man struggling through the onset of a snowstorm. Finding temporary shelter, he is advised of a local coach that might take him back to his wife twenty miles away – but what will he meet on the road?

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Edwards was acknowledged as one of the best ghost-story writers of her day and was one of the select band invited by Charles Dickens to contribute suitably chilling tales to the Christmas numbers of his magazine All the Year Round. I’ve just start reading a collection of her stories – I love a good Christmas ghost story – and they are excellent. You can still pick her up in print, with a collection called All Saint’s Eve available in a cheap Wordsworth Edition or, if you have a Kindle or a Kindle app on your phone, a similar collection titled The Phantom Coach is available on Amazon for not very much at all. As a bonus, it includes a piece by Edwards about “My Home Life” which offers an insight into the mind and life of one of the Victorian era’s most fascinating women.

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Hotel du Nil

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If anybody talks about the properly historic hotels of Cairo, then invariably it’s Shepheard’s that gets mentioned. Rightly so – until it was destroyed in 1952 it had renown and a guestbook to rank with any hotel in the world. But there were hotels in Cairo before Shepheard’s, including the Orient, Giardano, Levick’s and the British Hotel, formerly Hill’s, which is where Samuel Shepheard got his start in the trade before he opened an establishment under his own name in 1851. Chief among the early hostelries, though, was the Hotel du Nil.

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The du Nil was established in 1836 by the half-German, half-Italian Signor Friedmann. Like all the early hotels that came before Shepheard’s, it was buried in the alleyways of the medieval city, just off the Muski, one of the busiest commercial streets in Cairo at that time. It was a traditional and sizeable Arab house with striped stonework and mashrabiya, set around a large courtyard filled with palms, and banana and orange trees. Famously, it’s where Gustave Flaubert and companion Maxime du Camp stayed in late 1849 at the start of their voyage around Egypt. Du Camp photographed Flaubert wearing native dress in the garden.

At a later stage management added covered terraces and a large veranda, as well as a curious rooftop tower of scaffolding, known as the “belvedere of Cairo,” which provided guests with views over the city. From up here the then-owner, Cavaliere Battigelli, conducted observations that he published as a daily meteorological bulletin.

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Before then, however, the hotel received William Howard Russell, an Irish reporter, who had previously covered the Crimean War, including the Charge of the Light Brigade; he passed through Cairo in 1868 and was not a fan of either the city or the Hotel du Nil:

In the dark, among the dogs, through lanes and alleys of infinite closeness, nastiness, and irregularity, we stumbled, the playthings of dragomans and donkey-boys, till some of us disappeared in one hole or other, were swallowed up in a gateway, or were absorbed round a corner. I and a few more ran to earth in a mansion apparently situated among quarries and lime-kilns. It was called the Hotel du Nil, and it well deserved the name, for we could get nothing to eat, not even a piece of bread, when we arrived. In a long, ill-lighted room, at a lanky table covered with a dirty cloth, sat three men smoking vigorously and talking in lingua Franca. One of whom told us, “Signori! Avete patienza e averete qualche cose subito”. Subito meant just two hours, at the end of which time the council of three resolved themselves into waiters, and appeared with the very smallest and moldiest chickens I ever beheld. These were supported by omelettes made of eggs, which were just about to make chickens … but our appetites were better than the food, and washing the meal down with copious draughts of a wine which tasted like writing fluid, we stretched ourselves on chairs, tables, and sofas, and sunk into a sleep which relieved the mosquitoes from the smallest anxiety of interference in their assiduous labours. My Diary in India, in the Year 1868-9 by William Howard Russell

Not all Englishmen were as sniffy about the place. Egyptologist Flinders Petrie was recommended the hotel when he first arrived in Egypt in 1880; for the next 11 years he stayed there whenever he was in Cairo.

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The Hotel du Nil survived into the first decade of the 20th century but its facilities must have been hopelessly outdated, especially when measured against the offerings of the glut of new hotels that were appearing around this time. The exact date of closure isn’t known, According to 11th edition of Murray’s Handbook, published in 1910, the hotel closed in 1906, although the garden and the tower were still accessible (thank you Susan J. Allen for this bit of information). Soon after, the Bristol Hotel on Khazinder Square, which had opened in 1894, was marketing itself as the Hotel Bristol et du Nil – it was common practice in Cairo at this time for a new hotel to absorb the name of a recently defunct old hotel in order to inherit its clientele.

So where exactly was the Hotel du Nil? Thanks to an amazing set of fire-plans of Cairo, drawn up in 1910 for insurance purposes, and now owned by architect Nick Warner, we can pinpoint its former location precisely:

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It stood on the western edge of the Khalig al-Masri (the canal that once ran off the Nile north through the city) and just to the south of the Muski (coloured red on the map). The main approach to the hotel was originally from the Muski, but when the canal was filled in to become Port Said Street (orange) in 1900, that then became the main route to the hotel, as described in an article in the Egyptian Gazette of that year. The line in yellow on the map shows roughly the route of what is now Al-Azhar Street, which crashes through the site of the du Nil. However, Al-Azhar Street was only created in the 1920s and the du Nil disappeared long before then. The likelihood is that it was lost to a widening of Port Said Street, which since its creation had become one of the city’s busiest tram routes. Nick Warner’s map then must be one of the last recordings of the existence of the hotel.

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The Gayer-Anderson Museum (and its departed cat)

Earlier this year I had a piece published in Canvas, the magazine of Middle Eastern art, about the Gayer-Anderson Museum in Cairo. It’s one of the most fantastic places I know and I go back every few years just to reassure myself that it really exists.

The museum is named for a British Army doctor who came to Cairo in 1906. From his lodgings at Shepheard’s Hotel, he set one day, accompanied by a dragoman, to see the sights and one of the places he visited was the great ninth-century mosque of Ahmed Ibn Tulun. As he approached he stopped to admire a fine stone-built house that stood either side of the passage leading to the main door of the mosque, its two parts connected by an aerial bridge. A woman leaned out of one of the latticed windows on the upper floor and called to him.

“What does she say?” he asked his dragoman.

“She’s inviting you to view the house.”

The Englishman declined and went on into the mosque. Despite remaining in Cairo for the rest of his working life, it would be almost a further 30 years before John Gayer-Anderson got round to venturing inside the house. When he did, he immediately fell love with the place, and within the year he’d taken possession of it and made it his home.

He only lived there for seven years (1935-42) but in that time he created something so unique that it has been preserved in his name ever since. To begin with the house – actually two houses – is extraordinary, medieval in origin and laid out like an interlocking puzzle, full of jogging corridors, split level chambers, winding staircases and disguised rooms. All this Gayer-Anderson meticulously restored. He had a passion for Egyptology and Oriental studies, and he purchased or otherwise obtained a vast array of art, crafts, furniture and fittings from around the Middle East, Near East and Far East, which he installed in his Cairo home. So you have a Damascus Room with walls and ceiling covered with painted wooden panels acquired from a 17th-century house in the Syrian capital. You have rooms full of pharaonic antiquities. The roof terrace has its edges fenced by mashrabiya screens rescued from demolished houses, while one wall is lined with Ottoman-era marble basins and sink backs. Elsewhere there are Coptic icons, Sufi crutches from the 19th century, galleries of bad art (the portrait of Gayer-Anderson at the head of this post is one of the better pieces), death masks of his family and, a personal favourite, an ostrich egg painted with topographical scenes of Egypt, which can be rotated by means of a little handle on top.

 

 

He collected what pleased him, more taken with novelty than value. The exception to this was one piece of real worth: this was a lifesize, regal-looking cat cast in bronze wearing gold earrings and a gold nose ring, discovered in the necropolis of Saqqara and dating back to around 600 BC. This he bequeathed to the British Museum in London, where these days it’s a prize exhibit – visitors can purchase ‘Gayer-Anderson cat’ T-shirts and necklaces, or a scale replica for the cool price of £450. Cairo’s Gayer-Anderson Museum, which receives fewer visitors in a year than the British Museum does in five minutes, also has to make do with a replica.

The photos here, which were taken to accompany my story in Canvas, are by Cairo-based photographer Barry Iverson.

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