The Travellers Who Shaped the Ancient World

 

In the 1800s, a trio of women forever changed the study and understanding of ancient Egypt. So why have their legacies been overlooked?

In 1864, English travel writer Lucie Duff Gordon sat in her home atop the Luxor Temple, looking out the window across the west bank of the Nile River to the Libyan mountains. Her face basked in the sunshine as she listened to the cacophony of camels bellowing, donkeys braying, and dogs barking below. She missed her family, whom she had left behind in London while she recuperated in Egypt’s hot desert climate to ease the symptoms of tuberculosis. She lived in the Maison de France, or French House, built by a military contingent in the area around 1815. She loved her self-proclaimed “Theban palace,” and wrote letters to her family from her balcony almost every day.

These Letters from Egypt, which chronicled her time in the country in great detail, were published as a book a year later. Vividly describing Egyptian politics, religious customs, and Duff Gordon’s relationships with her Egyptian neighbors, the book stood out as a social and cultural commentary at a time when most women writers were writing fiction. Duff Gordon’s example of traveling (and living) in Egypt as a British woman alone soon inspired other women travelers to do the same.

A little over a decade later, the writer Amelia Edwards, moved by Lucie Duff Gordon’s experiences, visited Egypt and published a best-selling travelogue, A Thousand Miles up the Nile. Edwards’s work, in turn, piqued the interest of Emma Andrews, a wealthy American traveler who further advanced archaeology in Egypt in the early 20th century by funding dozens of tomb excavations, many of which are still actively studied today.

Although these three women initially came to the country as tourists, each had a profound impact on Egyptology (the scientific study of ancient Egypt). And in doing so, they not only shaped our view of one of the ancient world’s most important civilizations, but also the way tourists traveled to Egypt at the turn of the 20th century.

From November 1873 to March 1874, Edwards and his companion Lucy Renshaw travelled up the Nile on a houseboat, the Philae. They visited all the sites recommended in their Murray guidebook: the pyramids of Giza; the pyramids of Saqqara; the cemetery of Beni Hasan; the temple of Dendera; the temples of Luxor; the Valley of the Kings and other tombs at Thebes; plus the sites of Esna, Aswan and Abu Simbel. Conservation work on these sites had not yet begun, so most of the places they visited were in ruins. Edwards wanted to change that.

That March, the women stayed in Luxor for several weeks. Edwards was drawn to Duff Gordon’s old house. But when she looked up at the pile of bricks atop the temple, she was shocked by its state. Having barely survived several years of flooding from the Nile, Duff Gordon’s beloved “Theban palace” was now hardly livable. Edwards climbed inside and went to the window, looking out over the river and the Theban plain beyond. Seeing what Duff Gordon saw, Edwards wrote that the view “furnished the room and made its poverty splendid.” She dreamed of living there: “If only I had that wonderful view, with its infinite beauty of light, color, and space, and its history, and its mystery, always before my windows.”

It was Edwards’s only trip to Egypt, but her poetic travelogue attracted countless other women travelers to the country. Published in 1877, A Thousand Miles up the Nile would become one of the best-selling travel books of all time. Part travelogue, part well-researched history, Edwards’s narrative vividly described the sights along the Nile. But unlike Murray’s guidebook, Edwards not only recommended that visitors stop to see these monuments and sites; she advocated for their preservation for future generations. The popularity of her book effectively made the Pyramids of Giza, the Valley of the Kings, and other now-famous tombs essential stops for travelers to Egypt for the next 50 years, but more importantly, its wide circulation among scholars has shaped the study and reception of these sites to this day.

The success of Edwards’ book led her to co-create the Egypt Exploration Society (EES) in 1882. Inspired by Edwards’ goal of exploring to conserve monuments in Egypt, the EES raised funds for excavations through subscribers. These subscribers, mostly from the British middle class, received annual reports of excavations and sites. These reports, containing maps, lists, drawings, and new studies, educated and informed the public’s view of ancient Egypt for nearly 150 years.

A Thousand Miles up the Nile also simultaneously stimulated and benefited from the rise of package holidays that offered archaeological tourism. Starting in 1855, English entrepreneur Thomas Cook’s eponymous travel company began taking people on all-inclusive vacations throughout Europe. Popular with the upper-middle classes and aristocrats, these package tours encouraged people to travel to destinations like Athens and Rome not only to explore their contemporary culture, but also to see their ancient monuments and learn about their historical significance. If you were spending a lot of money on a vacation, the saying went, you should learn from it and support local economies, too.

Cook’s Company expanded into Egypt in 1869, making archaeological tourism in North Africa accessible to the masses, and to women who wanted to travel alone and safely. By the late 1880s, Cook’s Company was guiding more than 5,000 people down the Nile each year, closely following Edwards’ itinerary. Due to the popularity of their vacations, the company had control over Nile boat travel for all visitors.

In 1889, 15 years after Edwards left Egypt, Andrews and his companion, Theodore Davis, (two American millionaires and collectors of archaeology) arrived in Egypt carrying a copy of Edwards’s book and several of Cook’s pamphlets. The couple were members of the American branch of the EES, which had spread to the United States only a few years after its founding. Inspired by Edwards’s travel journal, they quickly rented and equipped a private houseboat to make their first river voyage.

A Thousand Miles up the Nile and Cook’s pamphlets guided the pair as they traveled up and down the Nile. They stopped at all the sites Edwards (and later Cook) had suggested. Like Duff Gordon and Edwards before them, they immediately fell in love with Egypt. The couple would travel up the Nile every year for the next 25 years. They were the quintessential archaeological tourists: members of the upper class, eager to vacation and learn about the ancient sites they encountered. They purchased ancient artifacts, amassing huge collections. Andrews was influenced both by her travels and by Edwards’s exhortation in his travel journal: “We are always learning, and there is always more to learn; we are always seeking, and there is always more to find.” From 1900 until their departure from Egypt in 1914, Andrews and Davis would pay for and personally excavate between 25 and 30 tombs in the Valley of the Kings, some of the most important archaeological investigations in the country.

Excavation laws in Egypt at the time required that most finds be deposited in the Cairo Museum, with duplicates going into the private possession of the patron or archaeologist. In 1905, the pair and their team found tomb number 46, the tomb of Yuya and Thuya, parents of Queen Tiye (the chief wife of Pharaoh Amenhotep III) and great-grandparents of Tutankhamun. At the time, this tomb was the best-preserved Egyptian tomb ever found, with most of the funerary equipment still inside. Their magnificent coffin masks are still on display in Cairo, and their intact chariot, only the second of its kind ever found, lies directly behind them.

The finds are important, but Andrews’s diaries are crucial to our understanding of the sites. Her records provide a detailed account of her and Davis’s activities over a quarter of a century. She meticulously recorded their excavations with maps and daily reports of their visitors and the artifacts they uncovered. Davis used many of Andrews’s diaries in his published reports of the sites, never giving her due credit. Crucially, Andrews also included in her accounts the people ignored by so many male writers: Egyptian workers, antiquities dealers, ship captains and crews. Her perspective is the foundation for understanding centuries of Egyptian history.

Andrews’s legacy also lives on at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. She and Davis donated much of their collections, more than 1,600 Egyptian artifacts, and their fortunes to the Met. Millions of visitors each year marvel at the artifacts, including the canopic jars from the controversial tomb KV 55. Thanks to Davis’s shoddy excavation practices, archaeologists still can’t say for sure whose remains are mummified inside. There’s also a restored ornate water bottle from King Tutankhamun’s funeral procession, one of the few Tutankhamun artifacts found outside of Egypt. Andrews’s work has made these fragments of ancient Egyptian life and death accessible to scholars and scholars, giving the West a rare glimpse into how ancient Egyptians honored the dead.

Our contemporary fascination with and understanding of ancient Egypt is largely due to this trio of forgotten women. Like their male counterparts, their work was not without controversy: they were relatively wealthy individuals who traveled, lived, and profited professionally from Egypt by removing ancient artifacts from their historical homeland. However, their often-ignored legacies effectively laid the foundations of modern Egyptology and have influenced our understanding of the ancient world from the very beginning.

Kathleen Sheppard is a professor in the department of history and political science at Missouri S&T and the author of Women in the Valley of the Kings. [BBC]

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