Amelia B. Edwards Amelia Edwards Americans - particularly those without money - will sneer when they hear about people like Amelia Edwards. Yes, yes, we know that she was the primary founder of the Egyptian Exploration Society which was established in 1882 to help excavate and preserve the Ancient Egyptian monuments, temples, and tombs. But anyone could do that if you were one of the bored rich kids of Victorian British aristocrats, rich kids with rich fat cat parents, born with a golden spoon, and who spent all their time goofing off with their rich fat cat parents' money. Hold on there, mon amis! For one thing Amelia was not born into a rich fat cat family. Middle class, perhaps but not even the upper middle class. Her dad, Thomas, was a soldier in the British army and then got a job working in a bank. Her mom, Alicia, was a housewife1. Footnote It's also a given that there was at least a maid or two in the household, and at least one of them a live-in. Alicia, seeing that her little girl was smart, encouraged her education. Typically for the times and her economic class, Amelia was taught by private tutors. She showed a particular turn with writing and by the time Amelia was seven she had her first poem published; by twelve, her first story. She also showed talent in music and at age 19 was appointed as the organist for a local church. Her ability in art was manifest early and a professional artist offered to take her on as a student. Her mom, though, scotched any formal study since artists were considered somewhat free spirits and the profession was not deemed suitable for young Victorian ladies. Nevertheless Amelia continued to develop her drawing and painting skills by illustrating stories that she had read. Sifting out details of Amelia's teen years and early twenties isn't simple not the least because there were a lot of other Amelias and Edwardses born over the years. Evidently she had bouts of ill health - including typhus - which truth to tell wasn't unusual in the 19th century. But she still managed to continue sending out stories and articles although it's not clear how much, if anything, she was paid. Still despite Amelia's precociousness, her proper Victorian parents wanted her to get married. Although in the strictest sense most English marriages were not arranged, the parents were supposed to have considerable input in any selection. And if dissatisfied they might reject their daughter's choice of helpmeet. And indeed, Mrs. Edwards tried to set Amelia up with a promising young swain. Amelia, though, preferred one of her cousins in Ireland (yes, at the time marriages of cousins, even first cousins, was fairly common). But for some reason Amelia's mom wanted to keep things out of the family and eventually her preferred arrangement fell through as did Amelia's hope to hook up with her cousin. Amelia never did marry. Not having family wealth to fall back on, Amelia turned to her writing to help support her now relatively aged parents (when Emily was 19 her dad was over 60). At this time newspapers and magazines were quite numerous, and although most of her work was freelance we read she was on the staff of the Saturday Review and the Morning Post. Like most beginning journalists she wrote about almost anything: feature articles, book reviews, and current events. She also kept sending out short stories and when she was 23 she had her first novel published. One activity that was acceptable for young Victorian ladies was travel particularly through continental Europe. After the mid-century, long distance transportation was largely by train since it could be cheap and quick - but (as Amelia pointed out) trains were not always comfortable. Fortunately Europe is small compared to the United States (one gentilhomme Français got most indignant when he found out that France was smaller than Texas). Even then - as now - you could take day trips from London to Paris. Amelia stuck mostly to France and Italy and of course when she was young propriety mandated she travel with various relatives. It was after one such excursion that Amelia came back to find that one of her books had not only received good reviews but was also selling well. Suddenly Amelia was a burgeoning young author. Then in 1864 she really hit the big time with Barbara's History, a book which - not to detract from Amelia's ability - may have also sold well as it touched on a rather titillating subject. But it was just before she published Barbara's History that both of Amelia's parents died and only a week apart. Fortunately by then she was self-sufficient and as she had no real desire to stay in London, she moved to Westbury-on-Trym, a suburb of Bristol. Westbury-on-Trym is at the mouth the River Severn2 that opens into the long bay that forms the northern boundary for the Southwest Peninsula that holds the counties of Devon, Cornwall, and Somerset. Amelia moved in with a widow, Ellen Braysher, who was 27 years her senior3. Footnote Why the heck the British name their rivers backwards is one of Life's Great Mysteries. Footnote Today there's been much interest in Amelia's preferences. Some have seen her leaning in one particular monogendereal direction and Ellen has been listed as Amelia's "partner" and even "spouse".
So Amelia started off her new career. This was, after all, when new laws were mandating that kids get an education and so more people were learning to read. And without the Internet, television, or even radio, the only real sedentary recreation was reading. With more readers, there were more magazines and newspapers and so an increasing market for short stories (yes, newspapers often printed short stories). It was with the opening of this new and lucrative market, that fiction writers began to earn a real living at it4. Footnote In the early to mid-19th century most writers had to have - quote - "real jobs" - unquote. Edgar Allan Poe ("The Raven", "Murders in the Rue Morgue") was an editor and literary critic, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow ("Hiawatha", "Evangeline") was a college professor, and Washington Irving ("The Legend of Sleepy Hollow") was a diplomat. One of Amelia's specialties was ghosts stories. Her most famous was The Phantom Coach which is still sometimes included in the Best-Ghost-Stories-Of-All-Time collections. All in all she wrote nine novels in addition to her short stories, poetry, and journalism. Ellen, though, didn't seem to have shared Amelia's wanderlust and no doubt their age differences were a factor here. So when Amelia went trekking over rough and forbidding terrain she traveled with an unmarried lady a couple of years younger named Lucy Renshawe (sometimes also spelled Renshaw). In 1873 and after one of their trips, Amelia published her first travel book, Untrodden Peaks and Unfrequented Valleys. This book detailed their ramble (Amelia's word) in the Dolomites which is a mountain range in the northeast Italian Alps. Although Amelia cautioned that only those who could stand eight to ten hours of riding on mules should visit the area, the book was readable, popular, and sold well and is still in print. That same year Amelia and Lucy took a trip to France to sketch and draw. The vacation was a bust as it rained almost continuously. So they figured that they had to 1) stay indoors all the time, 2) return to England, or 3) find some place where the sun shines best. They opted for the latter. There were three choices: Algiers (the capital of Algeria with its Casbah), Malta (the Mediterranean island south of Sicily), and Cairo. They decided on Cairo not the least reason being there were lots of English and French tourists there along with a sundry peppering of Americans. So they sailed from the port of Brindisi in southern Italy and arrived in Egypt November 29. After two days quarantine in Alexandria, they reached Cairo's opulent Shepherd Hotel just in time for dinner. They were dusty and sunburned and didn't have time to put on proper dining clothes5. Footnote Middle and upper class Victorians expected everyone to wear formal dress for the evening meal, particular at the table d'hôte. Nowadays the dress codes used by the Victorians can cause unintended mirth since you'll sometimes read that at a meal the people didn't bother to "dress for dinner".
When Amelia and Lucy got to Cairo they saw that there was quite a bit to see in the city. They visited the pyramids but only stayed on the site for about an hour and just looked around without going inside or attempting the climb. They also visited some mosques where in one they saw a performance of "howling dervishes" (usually called "whirling dervishes". They were also able to watch the beginning of pilgrimage that was leaving to Mecca which Amelia said was waiting for hours to watch a procession that passed in a few minutes. But if there was a lot to see in Cairo, Amelia and Lucy realized that there would be a lot more to see if they took a cruise along the Nile. So after some difficulty - it was harder finding a suitable boat, Amelia said, than buying a house - she found an acceptable dhahabiyyah (Arabic: ذَهَبِيَّة and in classical Arabic pronounced something like thah-hah-BEE-yah). A dahabeeyah - as Amelia spelled it and dah-hah-BEE-yah as she pronounced it - was a sailing boat, a houseboat if you like, and traditionally was made of wood. In Amelia's time, though, steam power had become the norm, and indeed there were steamers that would take you on a Nile cruise. Steamers, of course, were made of iron, and there were even sail-powered iron boats as well. However, Amelia noted on her trip that they saw three steamers that had run aground. She even saw an iron dahabeeyah that had gotten stuck and where it remained for three weeks. The problem, she realized, was that the iron ships, whether steam powered or sailing boats, were keel-bottomed and were heavy. So if they ran aground on the shifting shoals and sand bars, it was nigh on impossible to break them free. But the wooden dahabeeyah's were flat-bottomed and shallow draft. They were light enough that a relatively small crew could pole them off if they ran aground. So the best boats for Nile travel, she felt, were the old-fashioned tried-and-true wooden vessels. And to this day you can book a tour on a sailing dahabeeyah. If there was a problem, Amelia found it was finding a dahabeeyah that was large enough but not too large, well-maintained, and with an expert and trustworthy crew. Along the banks in Cairo there were hundreds of boats for hire and it took them quite a while to find one to suit their needs. But the sailing boats, for all their leisure had some drawbacks, not the least that they were expensive to rent. Eventually, Amelia and Lucy settled on the Philae (pronounced fill-LIE), a dahabeeyah which would take them up the Nile to the Second Cataract in present day Sudan and back. Two weeks after landing in Egypt, the ladies managed to set sail up the Nile6. Footnote The designation of "up" and "down" for the Nile is confusing since on the maps "down" is "up" and "up" is "down". That is the Nile flows north and so if you sail DOWN south, you are headed UPstream. Just how much did the trip cost? Well, Amelia tells us straight up - £10 per day. So for a three month trip7 we're talking about £900. That's a lot of dough. At that time an entry level bank clerk would take home maybe £100 a year as would an engineer who at that time would not have been university trained. A - and we quote - "rising professional man" - unquote - earned about £700 a year. In other words, £200 less than the cost of the trip! Just how the hey could Amelia afford it? First we have to realize that attempts to relate cost of living from times past is really a futile exercise. There are just too many differences in what people bought, how they lived, and what services they used. Also in the Victorian times, actual earning power was not simply the amount received in wages since some jobs also provided the meals and even lodging for the employees8. Footnote Such mixed compensation was possible in an era where income tax was nothing or minuscule. Today company subsidized "perks" as they are called are sometimes considered taxable income and this can wreak havoc with accounting and tax assessment - and the desire to be socially responsible.
Still we wonder. Yes, Amelia was a best-selling author. But could she have paid for a three month vacation costing £200 more than a professional man made all year? Certainly some bestselling authors could. The Strand Magazine paid Arthur Conan Doyle about £500 for a typical Sherlock Holmes story. That's $2500 or in today's currency over $50,000. So a couple of stories and Sir Arthur could have gone on the trip easy. Of course, it's unlikely that Amelia - regardless of how well her stories and books sold - was pulling in the cash that Sir Arthur was. But in 1873 she was 41 years old and could have delved into her savings. After all, her travels in Europe had not been that expensive. Hotel costs varied considerably. True, really posh suites could run £30 per week but there were perfectly nice accommodations where a couple of pounds a week - that's a week - could get a single room with breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Amelia was no spendthrift and was perfectly content to stay wherever she found a place. She loved going to out-of-the-way places where finding a roadside inn was a luxury. In fact, she kind of liked roughing it. But we also have to remember Lucy. She came from a wealthy family and so she certainly chipped in her share. So if £10 was the total cost would be knocked down to £3/6s/8p when divvied up among three people. Ha? (To quote Shakespeare.) Three people? Where did that extra traveler come from? Well, we forgot not only Lucy but Lucy's maid, Jenny Lane9. Yes, a maid. Absolutely no proper wealthy Victorian lady did anything without a maid. So Lucy would have paid Jenny's costs. Footnote Jenny kept her own diary which only recently was sold by her descendants to Oxford's Griffith Institute, where it certainly should reside. Sadly the journal has not yet been published as it adds more details of the trip and identifies the other passengers on the trip which Amelia didn't identify. For instance, the professional artist who was on the trip was the landscape painter, Andrew McCullum. His works hang in a number of galleries and it's interesting to compare his paintings of the Egyptian trip with Amelia's. Andrew's pictures may have a bit more of the professional polish, but still Amelia kept up with him pretty well. And there were also other people on the trip. There was a newly married couple, a professional artist, a rich chap, and a gentleman's gentleman named George who could do about everything10. So at peak capacity, the Philae was hosting at least eight people. So if the £10 represented total cost, we're talking £1/5s per person. Footnote That three women would hie off on a vacation by themselves - particularly to regions that were considered on the edges of civilization - was still unusual. Most women traveled in groups which included a male - often the spouse of one of the women or another male relative. We see, though, that there were men along on Amelia's Nile trip and so prudence was observed. We see then that if you had a full complement for a dahabeeyah, then each person would pay about £8/15s per week. That's still a quite substantial payment and more than you'd pay at even a good hotel in England or on the Continent. OK. So just what did you get for the £10 a day? Pretty much everything. A good dahabeeyah would provide a cabin for the passenger (some single, other double), parlors (called "saloons"), meals, and bathrooms - not just a "head" but with full facilities for bathing. The crew included the captain, deckhands, cooks, and at least one dragoman (a guide and translator). And when you disembarked to visit ruins, tombs, and the like, some of the other crew would come with you as guards. The accommodations were in fact quite nice. Amelia was amazed at the food. Although it was cooked by an Egyptian crewmember using only a simple charcoal brazier set up on the deck, it was top-notched cuisine. Alas, the passengers had to pay for their own wine. Amelia, who was sympathetic to and spoke highly of the indigenous people, quickly noted the discrepancies between being a crew member and a passenger. The passengers ate their five-star meals and slept in comfortable quarters. The crewmembers slept on the decks rolled up in blankets and ate bread that they had baked in communal ovens in the towns wherever they docked for the night. When the wind didn't blow enough to push the boat along, the crew would disembark, hitch up ropes, and pull the boat along11. Footnote Such a means of powering a boat has been quite common across many cultures. In early America in the era of the canals this was the usual modus pullerandi. However, the pulling was usually done with mules rather than men.
Without cameras, Amelia and the others would sketch or paint what they saw. For painting she worked in watercolors which required nothing but the solid paints, brushes, paper, and water12. The quality of her work was good enough that they were reproduced as engravings for her book13. Footnote Amelia also kept notebooks and would jot down quick pencil sketches when visiting ruins. These sketches are often rudimentary as you might expect by someone who was winding her way though darkened temples and tombs with nothing but a flickering candle. Footnote Amelia paid an unusual tribute to the engraver of her illustrations, George Pearson. This was a time when engravers were beginning to be seen more and more as (ptui) mere craftsmen since they were trying to produce actual facsimiles of the original paintings, drawings, and photographs - rather than render an artistic interpretation. To reproduce Amelia's watercolors George had to reduce the images down in size and copy them onto wood blocks to be handed to the engravers (George probably did little of the copying or engraving himself).
So in December, Amelia, Lucy, Jenny and the rest set off up the Nile (that is DOWN south). They were there to see the sights and pick up souvenirs. Although then as now Egypt had a Department of Antiquities as a watchdog over the excavations and conservation of the monuments, the sampling of artifacts by tourists was quite common - and illegal. The pioneering Egyptologist Auguste Mariette was the Director of Antiquities since at that time it was agreed that a Frenchman - then the leaders in Egyptology - would be in charge. This situation came about because nominally Egypt was under the control of the Ottoman Empire (centered in Turkey) but in 1854 the French struck a deal to dig the Suez Canal. France would run the Canal for 99 years while Egypt would retain their share in the Canal Corporation. But the reality was that whoever controlled the Canal controlled the country. England realized that and not long after Amelia took her trip, the British bought out the Egyptian interest in the Canal. This let them more or less take over although France kept the right to supply the head of the Antiquities Department. Even at that early date most of the ancient and historical sites had at least a nominal guard. This was usually a local man who if tourists showed up would let them look around and accept a fee. "Look around" is a generic term since in the tombs, temples, and pyramids there were no electric lights. So the guides would provide the visitors with candles or lanterns. The Philae shoved off from Cairo and headed south to Mit Rahina (Arabic: ميِتْ رَهيِنَة, Mitrâhîneh as Amelia spelled it), the site of the ancient town that Egyptologists call Memphis. Memphis was the original capital of the Pharaohs starting in the First Dynasty. Amelia and the rest hired donkeys to take them to the site of the ancient city. From their vantage Amelia could see the Pyramids of Giza (which Amelia spelled Ghîzeh), the Step Pyramid of Saqqara (Sakkârah), and the pyramids at Dashur (Dahshûr). As you can guess a lot of their time was spent going to and from the sites - donkeys are a lot slower than modern tour buses - and a lot dustier. At other times they had to go by camel. Far more cantankerous than donkeys, these "ships of the desert" would tend to roll over on the rider, bite the passengers' feet, and with their flexible necks turn around and spit. Even if they were well-behaved the camels made a disagreeable din, complaining all the time. Amelia commented "I never heard any dumb animal make use of so much bad language in my life." At Saqqara they found that there were artifacts lying in the sand. In fact, they realized they were walking over human bones and were trodding on an ancient cemetery. At first Amelia felt a bit uneasy but soon got used to picking up bits of statuary among the bones. But there wasn't much at Memphis. It certainly wasn't like it was described by the ancient tourists Herodotus and Strabo. These historians had said the ruins stretched out as far as you could walk. Instead she saw that Memphis was now "a few huge rubbish-heaps, a dozen or so of broken statues, and a name." She added that "Memphis is a place to read about, and think about, and remember; but it is a disappointing thing to see." And yet, she added, it was a place you couldn't miss or you would leave out the first part of the history of Egypt. As the group continued up the river, Amelia noted how over the centuries the sites had been looted. Even in Amelia's day there were active tomb robbers who would break into undiscovered ancient tombs and sell the contents to antiquities dealers. Sometimes the stolen artifacts were even bought by representatives of museums who knew full well who they were dealing with and what they were buying. Ernest Alfred Wallis Budge, the head of the Egyptian Department of the British Museum and later head of the museum itself, was particularly noted for his sneaky and surreptitious acquisitions. Of course, Wallis thought he was just making sure the antiquities had a good home. The voyage up the river went as planned, sort of and more or less. But since the Philae was a sailing vessel, everyone was subject to the vagaries of the wind. If it was too weak they could only move by the crew pulling the boat with ropes. If it was too strong they had to lay over until the wind moderated. The usual schedule was to start off in the morning, move up the river, and then dock at the next site. Everyone would disembark. Some of the crew would come along serving as guides and guards. They made it down to Badrashin (البدرشين , Bedreshayn), Minya (المنيا , Minieh), Asyut (أسيوط , Siût), and finally to Luxor (الأقصر) - the famous Thebes. There they saw the Temple of Karnak. Even though its restoration had not yet begun, it was still impressive. But on this leg of the journey, they didn't stop at the Valley of the Kings knowing they would be returning. The boat continued up the Nile and ultimately landed at Aswan (أسوان , Assûn) where they were surprised by the cool weather. It was comparable to that of England at that time of the year, and in fact, except for the few weeks of their return trip never did the heat get uncomfortable. The only awkward time was when the Governor and two local officials stopped by for a visit. Speaking through an interpreter made sustained conversation a bit difficult and after chatting for a bit, the tourists asked to see the slave market. The smiles vanished from the officials' faces. There was no slavery in Egypt, they said, and so no slave market. How ridiculous! How absurd! Rather than take the hint the tourists kept pressing the matter. They insisted that they been told on good authority there was a slave market at Aswan and so they were curious to see it. Not that they were intending to cause problems, of course. But the Governor kept denying that there was either slavery or a slave market. Not unexpectedly the rest of the visit was a bit stiff. Moving on up the Nile the boat reached the first cataract. The cataracts are areas where the Nile falls over inclines as it flows from the highlands in the interior of Africa to the Mediterranean. The cataracts are also peppered with rocks although there were channels through which the boat would fit. The passengers didn't need to disembark and the boat was pulled up the inclines by the crew and a large group of the local residents. Amelia seemed surprised that they went up the first incline in about fifteen minutes. On the next step the rope broke and the haulers considered this a bad sign. So they said they had to wait until the next day but even then they felt disinclined to proceed. It was only with some difficulty - after one of the men used an Arabic insult from a list he was making - that the tourists managed to get them to haul the boat up to level water so that they could continue the trip. Visiting the Island of Philae was one of the main reasons for the trip. Philae had been one of the largest centers for the worship of Isis - a religion that was exported even to Europe. Officially Theodosius I had banned all public pagan worship from the Roman Empire in 393 CE (AD). But because of its relative inaccessibility - it's a long way from the Mediterranean - Philae continued to function as a temple to Isis until it was finally shut down in 553. Amelia said that it would be nice to know how the religion finally ended - whether it was actively suppressed by the Christian rulers or if it simply piddled out due to lack of worshipers. But it's something no one really knows. The temple was later adapted as a Coptic Church and Amelia found the site was a mixture of the original Ancient Egyptian structure and remnants of later settlers. It wasn't until the Middle Ages that the site was finally abandoned. If you visit the temple today - a major tourist stop on the Nile cruises - you won't be on the same island as Amelia. Philae's now submerged under Lake Nassar which was formed after the Egyptian High Dam at Aswan was completed in 1970. To avoid losing the building, the Egyptian government moved the temple complex to Agilkia Island a little ways off. Of particular interest was when Amelia and the rest found two copies of the Rosetta Stone - but where the Greek inscription - vital to the decipherment of the hieroglyphics14 - was omitted. There was space left for the Greek and Amelia guessed that Philae was so far removed from the Ptolemaic court in Alexandria that the priests just didn't bother adding the Greek translation. Footnote Using the word "hieroglyphics" to refer to the Ancient Egyptian inscription will call down the wrath of the scholastic community. The characters you will be told in indignation are hieroglyphs. Get it right!
After leaving Philae, the group went down to Korosko - a center for trade caravans - and then on to Abu Simbel (أبو سمبل, Abou Simbel). That, of course, is where the famous temple with the four massive statues of Rameses the Great were carved into the cliff. It was there that Amelia really got interested in Egyptology. They spent six weeks there and began some digging. Then they continued down to the Second Cataract where they saw their first crocodile. Although crocodiles and hippopotamus were found up to the Delta in ancient times, by the 19th century they were restricted to the southernmost parts of the country. Crocodiles can still be found in Lake Nassar but most hippopotamus live in the Sudan and further south. The land around Abu Simbel - the ancient Nubia - was far less settled than the northern part of the country and the cultivated fields shrunk to no more than a few yards on either side. Amelia advised her readers that once they saw Abu Simbel they should just turn around and head back downstream. On the trip north the tourists stopped again at Abu Simbel where they carried out additional excavations even more extensive than before. They even discovered a rock cut tomb and informed the local official who operated pretty much independent of the Government. He let them continue. Hoping to find a burial chamber, they kept digging until they found some human bones. These were, though, from a Nubian grave from a later time and not Ancient Egyptian. Back at Thebes they met Mustafa Aga Ayad. Amelia mentioned that he was the British consul but actually he was a consular agent - that is a representative for the country who offered certain services and assistance to British citizens. Mustapha (as Amelia spelled his name) was also, we should point out, the consular agent for Belgium and Russia. Mustapha invited them to a traditional - but elegant - Arabic dinner. Everyone came in, had their hands washed, and received their own towel which was also their dinner napkin. When served they all ate with their fingers which Amelia said she had never done. She was surprised how well your fingers worked for eating, and afterwards they all sat on the floor or lounged on the diwans. Back at Luxor they stopped for several days as they intended to visit the Valley of the Kings (باب الملوك, Bab el-Malek). Amelia was struck at the contrast of the valley with the lush farms along the Nile and how abruptly the cultivated fields ended as you took the road to the Valley. They first visited the tomb of Seti I - the father of Rameses the Great. Of course, the tombs were bare of any artifacts, although a number of them still had the stone sarcophagus in stages of repair that ranged from intact to completely shattered. It was also at Thebes that Amelia got a first hand look at the illegal antiquities trade. At one point the group got wind that a tomb had been discovered and that a mummy and a papyrus were being offered for sale. Amelia said she wasn't interested in a mummy but the papyrus was something else. After they expressed interest, they found themselves deluged by - to quote Amelia - "every mummy-snatcher in the place15". Footnote The Egyptian village of Qurna (Arabic: القُرْنَة) was located at the ancient cemetery of the private citizens of Thebes and in the 19th century was a source of much of the illicit antiquities that found their way on the market. One of the most prominent of the - ah - "dealers" - was the Al-Rashid family. Two years before Amelia's trip, they had discovered a royal tomb and had been selling its contents.
Amelia and Lucy finally agreed to meet with one of the dealers who had both a mummy and the papyrus. He offered them a cut-rate bargain - £100 for both. But Amelia told him they weren't interested in a mummy and they weren't going to buy a papyrus without seeing it. The dealer kept haggling and Amelia figured - correctly - that he was trying to play one buyer off the other. And in fact, two of the other tourists (two ladies identified by Amelia only as the "M. B.'s" and who had hired a separate boat) ended up paying an exorbitant price for both papyrus and mummy. But the smell of the latter acquisition was so bad that after a week they dumped it in the river16". Footnote The odiferous nature of the M. B.'s purchase suggests a possibility that the mummy was fake - that is, it was a modern corpse that had been buried in the sand until it dried out sufficiently that to non-expert eyes it looked like a mummy but it wasn't sufficiently cured to completely halt decomposition. Although real Egyptian mummies were not actually odorless, they rarely smelled of putrefaction. This practice of manufacturing fake mummies for the tourists has been attested to as late as the mid-1950's by a modern journalist who wrote that he had interviewed one of these modern mummy makers. One exception to the low odor of authentic mummies was the famous "Screaming Mummy" or more correctly the mummy of "Unknown Man E". This mummy was found in the famous cache of royal mummies discovered in the Valley of the Kings in 1886. When the coffin was opened there was a horrible stench. There is some reason to believe that Unknown Man E is Prince Pentawer son of Rameses III. Rameses III - who served as the model for the make up of Boris Karloff in the movie "The Mummy" - is believed to have been murdered in a palace conspiracy. The mummy was not properly mummified but simply covered in natron to dry it out and then wrapped in a sheepskin. If the identification is correct Pentawer was either executed or more likely permitted to commit suicide for his part in the plot. An even more gruesome possibility is that Pentawer was placed on the sheepskin while alive - his hands and feet were bound - and then he was covered in natron and wrapped up in the coffin to die a horrible death. Heady stuff, surely, but appealing to mystery buffs. All in all the group spent a lot of time meeting with various disreputable characters in what Amelia called "dens". All of this negotiating was, as Amelia admitted, completely illegal which she said made it all that more fun17". Footnote Lest modern tourists get any ideas, trafficking in illegal antiquities in Egypt and even picking up artifacts from the ground are serious offenses and can - at the least - get you some real time in Egyptian jails. After their second visit to Luxor everyone returned to Cairo where this time Amelia and Lucy actually climbed to the top of the Great Pyramid. At the top she found it wasn't completely flat and there were places they could sit and rest in the shade. Amelia asked the guides why didn't someone cut steps to make the climb easier. They just laughed and said if they did that then the ladies wouldn't need guides to give them a helping hand when they needed it18". Amelia, Lucy, and Jenny then headed back to England. If you read books on Ancient Egypt you read how wonderful it was in the Rare Old Times. A country where travel was easy - get in a sailboat and the wind would blow you up the river. To come back, why you just lowered the sail and flowed down with the current. Amelia's description pretty much puts a scotch on any such an idyllic picture. We saw that for all her praise of the dahabeeyah's qualities, the Egyptian wind was anything but reliable. To sail leisurely upriver (ergo, down south) you had to have just the right amount of wind. Too much and you had to furl the sails and dock at the shore. Too little and the crew had to disembark and haul the boat. Keeping to an exact itinerary was impossible and they had no idea when they would reach any particular site or when they would return. Even floating back wasn't certain particularly for the last 300 miles. As Spring returned the Nile waters had receded. The crew had to continually pole for shoals and the level of the river would sometimes drop so low that the crew still had to get out and pull the boat. Also summer was approaching and the temperature was no longer that of a temperate and even cool clime where they sometimes had to put on shawls and extra blankets on the beds. The temperature rose to 99 degrees and even the wood surfaces became too hot to touch. Amelia's book about her trip - A Thousand Miles Up the Nile - was a best seller. The trip kindled Amelia's interest in Ancient Egypt and she and Reginald Stuart Poole, an employee at the British Museum, decided to set up an organization to help fund proper and responsible excavations. Originally called the Egyptian Exploration Fund, it was later changed to the Egyptian Exploration Society and they quickly raised enough money to launch the organization and fund the first excavations. Without doubt the most important archeologist that got his dough from Amelia and Stuart was William Flinders Petrie. He began excavations which focused on obtaining knowledge and not just artifacts. The money also helped Flinders make sure he found all objects. One archeologist had mentioned that they only found large artifacts, but nothing small. That simply meant the workers were swiping the small objects for later sale. What Flinders did was pay his workers a bonus for finding the objects and in an amount commensurate what they'd get from a tourist. He also made sure to record where the objects were found and how they lay in the ground. Once he found a beaded necklace in a tomb. The threads had long since disintegrated, of course, and Flinders spent days cataloging the position of each bead so he could reconstruct the necklace as it originally was made. Amelia had a knack for raising cash and even went to America to help spread the word and get the dough. However, during her frequent absences from London an (all male) committee in the British Museum began calling the shots rather than the officers of the Exploration Society. When Flinders saw what was going on, he expressed his disgust on how Amelia had been "cut out" of the Society. To her credit Amelia kept up her work. Sadly she didn't live much longer after she returned from her America trip in 1889. She was no longer the robust gal as in her earlier wandering days (she even broke her arm while in America) and she died in 1892 after contracting influenza. But in her will she left money enough to fund the first real professorship of Egyptology in an English college. This was at the University of London and it went to Flinders Petrie, eventually to be Sir William. References and Further Reading Elementary: The Life of Amelia Edwards, Brenda Moon,
Egypt Exploration Society, 2006. "Amelia Blanford Edwards, 1831-1892", Barbara Lesko, Breaking Ground: Women in Old World Archeology, Brown University. "Edwards, Amelia Ann Blanford (1831-1892), Author and Egyptologist", Deborah Manley, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004, 2013. "Amelia Ann Blanford Edwards (1831-1892)", Mary Mark Ockerbloom, A Celebration of Women's Writers, University of Pennsylvania Digital Library. "Amelia Edwards' Remarkable Travels in Egypt", Tabea Tietz, Sci Hi, June 7, 2016. A Thousand Miles Up the Nile, Amelia Edwards, Longmans, Green and Co, London, 1877, 2nd Edition: 1891. "Untrodden Peaks and Unfrequented Valleys. A Midsummer Ramble in the Dolomites", Amelia Edwards, Longmans, Green and Co, London, 1873. "Inventing Egypt for the Emerging British Travel Class: Amelia Edwards' A Thousand Miles up the Nile", British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, Volume 40, Issue 2, pp. 149-161, 2013. "The Story of The Strand", Chris Willis, Strand. December, 1998 (Reprinted on strandmag.com).
"Andrew McCollum", Art Cyclopedia. Passenger Fares for Overseas Travel in the 19th and 20th Centuries, Brandon Dupont, Drew Keeling, Thomas Weiss, Annual Meeting of the Economic History Association, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, September 21-23, 2012. "Destination as Destiny: Amelia B. Edwards's Travel Writing", Patricia O'Neill, Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, Vol. 30, No. 2,pp. 43-71, 2009, University of Nebraska Press. John Addington Symonds (1840-1893) and Homosexuality: A Critical Edition of Sources, Sean Brady, Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. "The 200 Year Pound to Dollar Exchange Rate History", ExchangeRates.org.uk. "Wages and Cost of Living in the Victorian Era",
James Skipper, George P. Landow, Professor of English and Art History, Brown University, The Victorian Web. "When Bankers Were Good", Emily Dugan, The Independent, November 20, 2011. Dirty Old London: The Victorian Fight Against Filth, Lee Jackson, Yale University Press, 2014. "The Victorian Middle Classes", Liza Picard, British Library, October 14, 2009. "The Nile Cruise, 1847 and 1897", Travelers in the Middle East Archive, Middle East Archive. "Jenny Lane Journals", Griffith Institute, University of Oxford. "Journals of Jenny Lane", Egypt and Egyptology, Bonhams. "Pack Your Bags: Travelers' Guidebooks", Nile Notes of Howadji - American Travelers in Egypt, Smithsonian Libraries. "Travel Back to Victorian Egypt", Adrian Lam, Inside Hook, October 26, 2017.
A Model for the Rest of us
A Role Model ...
(Click image to zoom in and out.)
Curmudgeons roll their eyes in exasperation and point out that two unmarried women sharing living expenses in the Victorian Era with each other is no indication of any particular orientation. Such inability to appreciate social practices of earlier times, they say, is what leads to absurd conclusions foisted on a credulous public such as claiming we know that Abraham Lincoln preferred the - ah - "company" of men because he would "share a bed" with his circuit buddies.
Of course, in Abe's days single room accommodations were a major luxury. So you often had to double up if you were traveling regardless of who you preferred doubling up with.
Well, yes, such criticism of our tabloid dominated culture is often warranted. But in Amelia's case we have that rare commodity called contemporary documentation. The British poet John Addington Symonds wrote Havelock Ellis that Amelia told him personally that she tended toward same gender preferences and that she had once even been part of a willing ménange-à-trois in a clergyman's household. The minister had even performed a marriage ceremony for Amelia and his wife. But the obliging clergyman and his wife weren't Ellen and her husband.
But as far as Ellen's relation with Amelia, they continued to share their residence for the rest of their lives (both women died in the same year). As for their relationship, we haven't found anything where Amelia made any comment about it, with her feeling no doubt, quite rightly, that it was no one's business but hers and Ellen's.
That's sort of like the time a lady was invited to a bridge party and she asked the host what she should wear. "Oh, nothing," was the reply.
For instance one company decided to reduce the number of vehicles required for their employees commuting - a program which in addition to reducing traffic on the local roads would also reduce air pollution. So they provided free van pools for their employees.
Things went along well. But then some official in the gov'mint (to quote Papp Finn) decided that the van pools were in fact a form of compensation. Hence they should be taxed.
So the company was required to develop an income equivalency for riding the vans. The riders were then informed that this - quote - "extra income" - unquote - would be taxed. So although the van riders' take-home pay wasn't going to change, their income tax would go up.
As you can guess, the van pools died a swift death, and people returned to driving their own cars. Not to mention that the administrations that mandated the "van pools are taxable" was then swept out of office after the next elections.
Such huge disparities in living conditions between the people in the Third World who provided the muscle and a lot of the brains to create opulent lifestyles for the Westerners was not lost on the people of the country. By the time the Millennium rolled in - the 1901 Millennium, that is - the number of Egyptians calling for independence of their country was on the rise and would keep growing for more than half a century.
Wood engravings are not the same as woodcuts. While the woodcut artists might use only knives and gouges, the wood engravers employ the same tools as metal engravers - burins, gravers, needles, and the like - to produce finer lines and details.
But to make a wood engraving the blocks must have a fine uniform grain. So the blocks are made by slicing the tree trunk in a cross-cut, not sawing the tree vertically along the grain as done when making planks. The flat end is sanded down to produce a smooth surface. Engraving the wood across the end grain avoids having the long side grain influence the way the block can be cut and allows far more detail in the final print.
A highly skilled engraver can make blocks that reproduce images that look similar to today's black and white photographs. So wood engraving made major improvements in the pictures in magazines and newspapers. Increasingly the goal of the engraver was to produce as exact a facsimile as possible.
The trick, then, became how to more accurately reproduce the image onto the surface of the block for the engravers to follow. This required skilled draftsmen. But as more and more complex images were being printed, the time required to produce a block was becoming increasingly prohibitive. So methods of creating an image on the block were developed and Amelia mentioned that George was directly photographing her images onto the block.
What? Don't you mean George had to transfer a copy of the image to the block. Surely he didn't actually use the wood block as a photographic plate.
Actually, he did and Amelia's information was literally correct. The woodblock was coated with egg white where ammonium chloride had been added. After drying it was then floated face down in a solution of silver nitrate. The silver adsorbed onto the surface producing silver chloride dispersed over the surface of the block.
The surface of the film was now an active photographic plate and the block was mounted in a camera. A picture of the painting was then taken using the block as if it were a wet-plate. The image could then be developed using normal darkroom techniques. Since the albumin (egg-white) layer was extremely thin, the engraver could then take the developed block and carve out the areas that were to show up as white space.
Wood engravings had advantages over other types of reproduction. Most metal engravings of the time were intaglio plates where the lines of the drawing were cut into the plate and not raised areas as in wood engravings. So the metal plates had to be inked completely and then wiped to remove all the ink except that in the grooves. This inking process had to be repeated for each page and each image printed. The paper also had to be dampened and run through special high pressure presses so that the paper would be forced down into the inked grooves. This meant that the text and images had to be printed separately on the same paper.
But in wood engraving, the dark lines and areas were from the raised part of the block just like the type for printing letters. So the block would be simply inked and printed just like the text. The big advantage of the wood vs. metal intaglio is the blocks could be mounted on the same page with the text and only a single printing was required. Also - and this seems strange to many - the woodblocks were stronger than metal plates and many more prints could be made.
Eventually technology was developed where metal plates were both stronger and had the black areas raised and so they could be mounted side-by-side with the text as the wood engravings were. These were prepared by projecting the negative of the photograph onto the plate covered with a coating that hardens with light. The black regions of the negative - which would show up white on the print - were unexposed. The coating therefore didn't harden and could be rinsed off with mild solvent, leaving the hardened film on the areas that were to be printed as black.
The plate was then treated with acid which etched away the exposed metal (the back and sides of the plate were protected with wax). Any acid was then washed away and the hardened film was removed with stronger solvents. The plate now had the raised areas that were to be printed as black and could be mounted in the same frame as the text that was to be printed.
For years - decades, even - paintings and drawings reproduced better than photographs. Therefore a lot of images in magazines - particularly ads - were made from paintings and drawings. Although we know that the photographs eventually took over, it wasn't until the 1980's that motion picture companies lamentably abandoned paintings and drawings for movie posters and instead substituted (ptui) photographs for their posters.
However, the same people use the word hieratic and demotic with aplomb. So what's wrong with using hieroglyphic or hieroglyphics?
Actually, nothing at all. In English it is perfectly acceptable and commonplace to use adjectives in the place of nouns. We talk about the American Civil War being against the "Blue and the Gray" and how Americans salute the "Red, White, and Blue". Adjectives-as-nouns can be inflected for plurals as well. If you see a herd of longhorn cattle, you'll say you've seen a herd of "longhorns".
So there is nothing wrong with referring to "hieroglyphic writing" as "hieroglyphic" or saying that the "hieroglyphic characters" are "hieroglyphics". As to this being correct or not, linguists will tell you that the predominate usage is in fact the correct usage.
The sudden opulence of the Rashid family naturally prompted suspicion. Even after two of the brothers, Muhammed and Abdul, were "questioned" (Ahmed walked with a limp the rest of his life), they claimed to know nothing. It wasn't until 1881 that Muhammed decided he wasn't getting a fair split and took the officials to the tomb.
The tomb was in fact that of a high priest, but it turns out that in the reign of Rameses IX (there were a lot of Rameses) the Ancient Egyptian officials had found that royal tombs were so plundered that to protect the pharaohs and their families from further desecration they moved their mummies and their possession to this tomb. There things lay until the Rasuls discovered the tomb.
That tomb robbers were in cahoots with low level officials and the tomb guards has been the traditional story. More recent scholarship, though, has suggested that among the major plunderers of the Tombs of the Pharaoh's were, yes, the Pharaohs themselves. After Rameses II, Ancient Egypt began its long decline. But it still cost a lot to pay the workman who made and decorated tombs, not to mention the cost of fielding an army even if it kept losing battles. The gold in them-thar tombs wasn't doing anyone any good, so the later Pharaoh's would help themselves from time to time. One prominent Egyptologist, Nicholas Reeves, studied the way in which the mummies had been damaged and concluded that the later Pharaoh's were even responsible for riffling the mummies for the goodies that adorned the departed Pharaoh's.
"Egypt and Europe in the 19th Century", Jim Jones, West Chester University of Pennsylvania, 2014.
"The Victorian Era Wages Salary Earnings for Various Jobs", Victorian Era England & Life of Victorians
"Photography in Engraving on Wood - Presented as part of the Special Issue: 'Revolution in Print: Graphics in Nineteenth-Century America'", Stephen Rice, Nineteenth-Century Graphics in America, Vol. 7, No. 3, April 2007.
"History of Periodical Illustration", Nineteenth-Century Newspaper Analytics, North Carolina State University.
"Amelia Ann Blanford Edwards (1831-1892)", Find-A-Grave.
"Ellen Drew Braysher (1804-1892)", Find-A-Grave.
"Wonderful Things: A History of Egyptology - 1: From Antiquity to 1881", Jason Thompson, American University in Cairo Press, 2014.