SIX

The Sands of the Nile Give Up their Treasures

It’s amazing that a man who is dead can talk to people through these pages. As long as this book survives, his ideas live.

—Christopher Paolini, Eragon

In 1952 workmen digging the foundation for a summerhouse in southern Italy came across the ruins of an ancient church. Digging farther they uncovered a sarcophagus, almost certainly the last resting place of Cassiodorus,¹ the ultimate friend and defender of papyrus paper. A retired statesman under Gothic emperor Theodoric, he wrote a letter to the tax collector of Tuscany in 540 A.D. in praise of papyrus. He was also responsible for eliminating a tax placed on its use.

When the sarcophagus was opened only a few bones were found. Presumably, sometime during the intervening 1400 years, grave robbers had been at work. He had addressed the problem of grave robbing in his own lifetime when, in the name of his King, he demanded an investigation of a country pastor rumored to be rifling through graves and tombs looking for valuables among the blessed dead.

Outraged that “hands which have been touched with the oil of consecration should have been grasping at unholy gains,” Cassiodorus perhaps had some premonition that being touched by such hands might also someday be his fate. Yet, according to some, he would be better off by being touched this way. Sir Wallis Budge, who had risen in the ranks to become a long-serving keeper of Egyptian antiquities at the British Museum, thought so. “Whatever blame may be attached to individual archaeologists for removing mummies from Egypt, every unprejudiced person who knows anything of the subject must admit that when once a mummy has passed into the care of the Trustees, and is lodged in the British Museum, it has a far better chance of being preserved there than it could possibly have in any tomb, royal or otherwise . . .”

Would it be too much to hope that in the case of Cassiodorus some memento of his life had survived undisturbed? Of course, the point could also be made that mementos are unnecessary in his case, since here, at least, is one man of ancient times who could rest on his laurels with dignity. Though not the most outstanding figure of his era, he would not easily be forgotten. Unique among bureaucrats for his invention of a form of letter that combined business and pleasure, defender of Gothic rule, loyal public servant in his fashion, protector of history, and guardian of learning in the face of insurmountable odds, he was sought out during his earlier career by the leaders in Rome, Ravenna, and Constantinople to bring some organization to the far-flung empires that they ruled in the Christian Gothic west and Christian Roman east.

He also insured that his worldly fame would endure because he did so much during his life to preserve not only his own books, but all available classical and sacred literature. That was no mean feat, since all around him barbarian forces were at work sacking and burning, and nothing is easier to burn than a book made of papyrus.

Enduring fame for Cassiodorus is one thing; it is a different matter entirely for others. To some it happens by chance: they fall into a cave, turn over a rock, or step out into a sunlit square at just the right moment. To a chosen few, such as Cassiodorus, fame is an entitlement that comes from some natural ability or talent that has been cultivated through training and dedication; they are born to it. But, for most of us, if it comes at all, it is only after a long, hard life of work and constant attention to detail.

And then, of course, who’s to know? In the early days, unless it was written down somewhere, there was nothing to impress those who came after you. Because Sappho’s poems were once inscribed on papyrus paper, later readers could declare them marked by beauty of diction, simplicity of form, and intensity of emotion. So it was also with Socrates, and his pupil Plato, and in turn, Plato’s pupil, Aristotle; even as their thoughts, works and commentaries were being reduced to the fragments of papyrus paper that survive today, they were being marked for enduring fame.

The same applies to early versions of the Bible; they survived on papyrus paper until the time when they could be transcribed to beautifully colored, elaborate parchment volumes for the Christian emperors. Versions of the Koran, Gnostic gospels, and scrolls likewise appeared first as papyrus texts before they could be later lovingly copied and embellished. These sacred writings live on today and reflect the glory of the patriarchs, the apostles, the Prophet, and God because of papyrus. And they also illustrate the fact that papyrus served well those people who counted in history.²

But, what of the rest of humanity as it evolved over the last five thousand years? Did the common man ever have a chance at enduring fame? Certainly between the years 3000 B.C. and 1000 A.D. there were hundreds of thousands, even millions of people who committed pen to papyrus paper and thus entered the lottery. As it turned out, they all had at least two chances at fame: one being the substance and character of their writing, and the other being the person who discovered, bought, owned, stole or deciphered their document. Many wrote about the immediate problem that had taken over their lives and wouldn’t rest until they unburdened themselves, sought a solution, made contact with a friend, or obtained some satisfaction. Papyrus paper provided them with the medium and the papyrus plant the means, by which they could come to grips with the business of life. In the process, those bits of everyday correspondence often touched on the very essence of life.

Inscriptions cut into stone are as “cold and lifeless as the stone that bears them.” On papyrus paper we see something much more lifelike: “we see the handwriting, the crabbed characters; we see the men who wrote them; we gaze into the nooks and crannies of private life, for which history has no eyes and the historian no spectacles.”³

Today there are many fragments of papyri in existence, the bulk of which belong mainly to the Egypt Exploration Society and are housed by Oxford University in the Sackler Library. The Society owns over 500,000 papyrus fragments, the largest collection of papyri in the world. In the decipherment and translation of these, there still exist numerous chances to provide researchers and professors with at least one small cloud of glory as their reward. The ancient Egyptians would find nothing unusual in this. After all, many of them believed that after death we would eventually all become infinite and immortal.

Of course, conditions applied—a life devoted to good works, a proper burial, and papyrus were the key elements—without which, no matter how adept you were at finance, poetry, writing, or the decipherment and analysis of antiquities, you went nowhere.

Twenty years before Denon showed up in Egypt, a cache of about fifty rolls were discovered in a jar near Giza; these were the ones that were burned to provide a pleasant scent. They differed from the Book of the Dead in that they were written in Greek. They represented part of the large repository of knowledge and day-to-day details of ancient Egypt that still fascinate us today. Known as the Charta Borgiana, the surviving scroll immortalizes the famed collector Cardinal Stefano Borgia.

The first large discovery of papyri was a collection of 10,000 papyri and some texts written on linen. Found in the Fayum area of Egypt, they were bought by Archduke Rainer in the 1880s. The collection caused a sensation, as Rainier was the richest and most popular member of the House of Hapsburg. The collection consisted of secular, Christian, and Arabic material and was deposited in the Imperial Library of Vienna. Subsequently, it formed the basis for the present-day collection of 180,000 papyri, documents, fragments, and other objects. Papyrology as a systematic discipline is said to date from that time.

Then over a period of six years from 1891–97, the British Museum published an amazing collection of texts translated from ancient Greek. The papyri included Aristotle’s Athenian Constitution, the Mimes of Herodas, the Odes of Bacchylides, and some speeches by Hyperides. We are given a taste of how important these four are by historian Leo Deuel in his great down-to-earth treatise on ancient documents, the aptly titled, Testaments of Time. Deuel tells us that the Athenian Constitution by Aristotle represented the only survivor of a series of 170 articles that Aristotle compiled on various ancient constitutions, a vast study in comparative government. The second item, the Mimes, was thought by some to be the greatest literary discovery ever made in Egypt. Totally devoid of poetic magnificence, it consists of eight ancient sitcom scenarios set in iambic meter on the Greek island of Kos, the seat of a considerable culture. As Deuel says, the titles tell all: The Bawd, The Pimp, The Women Worshippers, The Jealous Mistress, and so on.

By contrast, the Odes were the “purest literature from the greatest age of classical lyrical verse” by Bacchylides, a poet ranked with the likes of Pindar.

The last of this illustrious four, the speeches, is nothing short of marvelous. Hyperides teased the humanists of the fifteenth century who were tasked with the Revival of Learning, the effort that led to the European Renaissance. Only one copy existed in a library in, of all places, Transylvania, before it disappeared in 1545. We are told that Hyperides, like Cicero, the darling of the Renaissance, was a master of legal forensic artifices. Perhaps his speeches provided a foretaste of LA Law to Victorian audiences, but because they also revealed the man as well as the age, Deuel felt they were as much history as literature, and were among “the most cherished works returned to life by Egypt.”

The person responsible for uncovering three of the four courses of this feast of the mind was none other than our old friend, Wallis Budge, from the scribe Ani’s Book of the Dead experience. How Budge managed this coup is a story that rivaled all his adventures including the one in Luxor nine years earlier.

I call it “The Affair of the Oranges.”