THE OBJECTS LAY quiet for thousands of years, many of them in tombs where love or superstition had placed them. When they were golden they sometimes tempted thieves; brick, stone, marble — when they were of these materials they built houses; when they contained animal matter or lime they were broken up to fertilize the fields; now and then they served as amulets. But they did not work on the general imagination of the living, or disturb sober governments, until the fifteenth century after Christ. It was then that Italy began to take an interest in ‘the antique.’
‘I go to awake the dead,’ cried Cyriac of Ancona; and an evocation began which seemed tremendous to contemporaries. The objects — mainly statues — were routed out of the earth, treated with acids and equipped with fig-leaves and tin petticoats; they were trundled about to meet one another, until they formed collections, which collections were presently dispersed through death or defeat, and the trundling recommenced. In the eighteenth century Egyptian objects also weighed in — not heavily at first, but Napoleon’s expedition drew attention to them; and then the pace quickened. In the nineteenth century the soil was scratched all over the globe, rivers were dammed, rocks chipped, natives tortured, hooks were let down into the sea. What had happened? Partly an increase in science and taste, but also the arrival of a purchaser, wealthier than cardinals and quite as unscrupulous — the modern European nation. After the Treaty of Vienna every progressive government felt it a duty to amass old objects, and to exhibit a fraction of them in a building called a Museum, which was occasionally open free. ‘National possessions’ they were now called, and it was important that they should outnumber the objects possessed by other nations, and should be genuine old objects, and not imitations, which looked the same, but were said to be discreditable. Some of the governments — for example, the French and the Italian — were happily placed, for they inherited objects from the connoisseurship of the past; others, like the German and our own, had less; while poor Uncle Sam started by having none, and Turkey relegated all to the will of Allah. The various governments passed laws restricting exportation, and instructed their custom officials accordingly; and they also hired experts to buy for them and to intrigue against other experts. But an example will make the situation clearer. Let us follow the fortunes of B.M. 10470, or the ‘Papyrus of Ani.’
Ani lived at Thebes about one thousand and five hundred years before the birth of Christ. He was chancellor to Pharaoh and overseer of the royal granaries at Abydos, and, like all ancient Egyptians, he was troubled by the certainties of death. There was nothing vague in that river beneath the Nile, over whose twelve reaches Ani would have to make the voyage to the palace of Osiris. Its course was only too clear: there were myriads of details in it, and woe upon him if he forgot one! for he would be expelled from the god’s boat and be damned. Everything spoke in that world of the under-waters. Even the lintel of the palace of Osiris said, ‘Who am I?’ and the bolts, ‘Who are we?’ The four Apes at the prows of the boat were vocal, and it was necessary to address them in precisely the following words: ‘... Let me pass through the secret doors of the Other World: Let cakes and ale be given to me as to the Spirits, and let me go in and come out from Rastan,’ so that they might reply: ‘Come, for we have done away thy wickedness and put away thy sin, and we have destroyed all the evil which appertained to thee on earth. Thou shalt enter Rastan and pass through the secret doors of the Other World. Cakes and ale shall be given unto thee....’ Ani could not hope to address the apes with accuracy. His memory was but human; so, buying a strip of papyrus eighty feet long, he had it inscribed with all he would have to say, and it was placed in a square niche in the north wall of his tomb, and was tied with a cord of papyrus and fastened by a clay seal. No apes and lintels would trouble him now, for his ‘Book of the Dead’ would undertake every dialogue, and having reached the palace he would himself become Osiris, Osiris-Ani, an immortal.
The papyrus lay in its niche during the flash of time that we call history, not seeing the sunlight until A.D. 1886. It was then discovered by some natives. Egypt was still a nation, and had so far advanced as to have a Museum at Cairo and a Director, M. Grébaud. Britain had become a nation with a Museum in Bloomsbury, and had sent her Mr. (now her Sir Wallis) Budge to take w hat he could from Egypt. It was to Sir Wallis that the natives turned, because he paid more than M. Grébaud, although they risked imprisonment and torture. Going by night with them to the tomb, he broke the clay seal, and was ‘amazed at the beauty and freshness of the colours of the human figures and animals, which, in the dim light of the candles and the heated air of the tomb, seemed to be alive.’ From that moment Ani was dumb. His voice, his ‘Book of the Dead,’ was taken, and he can no longer reply to questions in the Under World. Sir Wallis put his find into a tin box, and hid it in a house whose walls abutted on the garden of a hotel at Luxor. M. Grébaud sailed in pursuit, but his boat stuck. However, he sent on a messenger, who told Sir Wallis that he was arrested on the charge of illegally acquiring antiquities, and then asked for bakhshish. ‘We gave him good bakhshish, and then began to question him.’ As a result, the native dealers gave a feast to all the policemen and soldiers in Luxor, and an atmosphere of good-fellowship was created. The house containing the Papyrus of Ani and other stolen objects had been sealed by the police, pending M. Grébaud’s arrival; guards were posted on its roof, and sentries at its door. The dealers invited the sentries to drink cognac or to take a stroll, but they refused. However, the manager of the hotel was more sympathetic, and his gardeners dug by night through the abutting wall into the house, so that Sir Wallis could remove all the antiquities — though he left a coffin which belonged to the British military authorities, in the hope that it would make bad blood between them and M. Grébaud. Next day the Papyrus reached Cairo, and was smuggled across the Kasr el Nil bridge as the personal luggage of two British officers, to whom Sir Wallis related his trouble. The officers loved doing the Egyptian Government. Even more helpful was Major Hepper, R.E., met in the Mess. Major Hepper thus expressed himself: ‘I think I can help you, and I will. As you have bought these things, which you say are so valuable, for the British Museum, and they are to be paid for with public money, they are clearly the property of the British Government.’ He then placed the Papyrus of Ani in a case which was labelled in sequence with some government property, and took it, in his military capacity, to England, where he gave it to the British Museum. It may not be on exhibit, but we have it, which is what matters. It would be humiliating to think it was on exhibit at Cairo.
The above yarn, and many another, are told by Sir Wallis in the jolliest way in his reminiscences By Nile and Tigris. He has something of the Renaissance desperado about him, and one can well imagine him ‘collecting’ for Sismondo Malatesta or Isabella d’Este with the assistance of a poignard. He enjoys being cruel to M. Grébaud, whose honesty and simplicity he despises; he enjoys pushing a young Turkish official into the waters of the Tigris. He has written a most delightful book, and yet he leaves an impression of vulgarity at the close. The vulgarity is not personal. It emanates from the system that he so ably serves. The dreariness and snobbery of the Museum business come out strongly beneath this tale of derring-do. Our ‘national possessions’ are not accessible, nor do we insist that they should be; for our pride in them is merely competitive. Nor do such fractions as are accessible stimulate our sense of beauty or of religion: as far as Museums breed anything it is a glib familiarity with labels. Yet to stock their locked cellars these expeditions and intrigues go on, and elderly gentlemen are set to pick one another’s pockets beneath tropic skies. It is fine if you think the modern nation is, without qualification, fine; but if you have the least doubts of your colossus, a disgust will creep over you and you will wish that the elderly gentlemen were employed more honestly. After all, what is the use of old objects? They breathe their dead words into too dead an ear. It was different in the Renaissance, which did get some stimulus. It was important that the Laocoon should be found. But the discovery of the Hermes of Praxiteles and the loss of the sculptures of Sargon II. are equally meaningless to the modern world. Our age is industrial, and it is also musical, and one or two nice things; but its interest in the past is mainly faked.
Sir Wallis’s own interest is no doubt genuine; he is certainly interested in his fellow-men, and there are moments when one feels him the ideal Oriental traveller. He is accommodating over bakhshish: ‘I found that in Baghdad a “little gift in the bosom made blind the eyes”’; and yet he can treat the Oriental respectfully. On one occasion he was entertained by some thieves:
‘My difficulty of the previous day repeated itself, and not a man, old or young, would accept a gift from me: when I pressed them each said it would be a “shame”; and the shêkh refused even tobacco. Just as we were going to mount the shêkh came up to me and said, “Knowest thou how to write?” I said, “Yes.”—” Then,” said he, “take thy pen and write in thy book this: ‘I and my camels nighted in the house of Sulâmân ibn Khidr, shêkh of the thieves, and when I rose and left him at daybreak, of all my possessions I had lost nothing except the service of Sulâmân ibn Khidr.’” When I had rendered his words to the best of my ability I took out my knife and began to cut the leaf out of the book, stupidly thinking that he wanted to have the paper as a witness of his honesty towards his guests. But he stopped me saying, “Cut not, cut not; keep the writing and thou shalt remember Sulâmân.” Then I realized that all he wanted was that I should not forget the most opportune service which he had rendered me, and that he had treated me as a friend and wished to be remembered as a friend.’
Indeed, Sir Wallis makes friends all over the East, who appear when most he needs them, and turn his career into an unending triumph. In practice it was probably a tousled compromise, like most careers, but he does not tell us so; and when he does come a crash (as in the Rassam libel case) he carries it off with a swagger. Of his adventures on rafts and in caves; of the old man who said Hû until he dislocated the traffic of Mosul; of the lady in the same city whose garment was unwound by a dog; of the stewponds of Abraham and Potiphar’s wife; of the Nile boatmen who grounded, and cultivated melons upon the mud until the river rose again; of the parrot that cried, ‘Damn the minor Prophets!’ — of these and of other treasures the book is an inexhaustible mine; while the archaeologist will find in it a convenient résumé of the excayations in Mesopotamia, together with much other information. Despite its formlessness, it is the most fascinating travel-book that has appeared for years, for Sir Wallis has not only learning and vitality, but the sense of fun and the sense of beauty.
‘The afternoon was bright, and the view one of the finest I have ever seen. The buildings of the city stood out clear with their domes and minarets, and the setting sun painted the stonework a blood-red hue.... The city was surrounded with living green, and lay like a great green fan on the living desert which hemmed it in. The sight of it thus made it easy to understand why Arab writers and poets have raved about Damascus and called it the “garden of the East,” the “spot where beauty passeth the night and taketh its rest,”
“the region the stones of which are pearls, the earth ambergris, and the air like new wine,”
“the beauty spot on the cheek of the world, an eternal paradise with a Jahannum of anemones that burn not,”
“the city which is so truly a paradise that the traveller in it forgetteth his native land,” etc. To the sun-scorched and desert-weary Arab, Damascus, with its waters and its green fields and gardens and its fruits and flowering trees, was the Earthly Paradise. And Muhammed the Prophet, who stood on Mount Kasyun one evening and gazed over the city for a long time, decided not to go down the mountain and rest there lest its delights should spoil his enjoyment of the Paradise of God in Heaven.’
Of the Missions recounted, by far the most thrilling is the third (1888-9), in which Sir Wallis, accompanied by a Mr. N. White, sails from Constantinople to Alexandretta and thence goes overland to Mosul. The position of the British Museum was different in Mesopotamia from what it was in Egypt: the injured rather than the injurious party, it was trying to stop the leakage of objects from sites that the Turkish Government had given it to excavate. Sir Wallis’s adventures were tremendous, and his description of the caravan which slowly accreted round himself and Mr. N. White, and was finally robbed by the murderous Shammar, is a masterpiece of cumulative effect. Mr. N. White is also a masterpiece. Though nothing definite is told us about that young gentleman, one knows him through and through. He was the son of our ambassador at Constantinople, who obliged Sir Wallis to take him as the price of his diplomatic assistance. Handsome, clever and generous, but utterly selfish, he came as near as a human agent may to thwarting the British Museum. Sometimes he hurt his knee, sometimes he strayed with Turkish officers, sometimes he arrived with masses of petitions and petitioners from the neighbouring villages and wished Sir Wallis to take them to Europe. He tried to break loose in India, but was brought as far as Egypt, where his father’s agent met him and put him on a boat which sailed, not to Constantinople, as he expected, but to Manitoba! Mr. N. White must have been a great drag on Sir Wallis, and perhaps for that reason our hearts go out to him. For, delightful as these volumes are, they lack one quality: they fail to enlist our sympathies with the author — the touch of the filibuster in him prevents it. It is fun when he pushes the Turk into the Tigris, but it would have been funnier had he fallen in himself. We part from him with admiration, but without tenderness, and with an increased determination to rob the British Museum. ‘The Keeper of the Egyptian Antiquities is understood to be entirely prostrated as a consequence of the daring theft of the celebrated Papyrus of Ani.’ Would that one was in a position to write such a sentence and to post it to M. Grébaud for his use in the Under World!
[1920]