The Glory of the Pharaohs

The Glory of the Pharaohs by Arthur Weigall

Arthur Weigall opens by championing the field-based Egyptologist over the purely museum-bound scholar, arguing that direct experience of Egypt's climate, landscape and modern inhabitants is essential to sound historical work. He contends that fieldwork builds health and vigor, contrasts true "roughing it" with affected hardship, and insists that a scholar's imagination must be disciplined by firsthand knowledge of Egypt rather than Western assumptions, citing his own correction of doubts about Akhnaton's age at death as proof of this principle. He then attacks the practice of Western museums acquiring antiquities hacked from Egyptian monuments, citing the mutilated reliefs of Queen Tiy, Khaemhet, Anena, and Horemheb as examples of destruction driven by curatorial demand, and argues that museums should instead function as repositories for stray objects, documentary archives, and exhibitions of casts rather than as magnets for looted originals. He stresses that Egypt itself now safeguards its monuments far better than popular imagination credits. Weigall next argues that archaeology, properly practiced, is a "merry science" tied to human gaiety, not dust and gloom, and that the archaeologist's duty is to reconstruct and interpret the past imaginatively rather than merely catalogue bones and artifacts. He illustrates this with the story of Wenamon, an envoy of the High Priest Herhor sent under Rameses XII to procure cedar from Zakar-Baal, Prince of Byblos, recounting Wenamon's robbery at Dor, his seizure of silver from Sicilian merchants, his tense negotiations and humiliations at Byblos, his flight pursued by ships of Dor, and his shipwreck and rescue by Queen Hetebe of Cyprus, before the surviving papyrus breaks off. He condemns wartime German and Futurist arguments for destroying art and monuments, defending antiquities as irreplaceable historical records and as a universal bond of human sympathy that transcends nationality. Turning to the ethics of excavation, he defends scientific tomb-opening as preferable to native plundering, argues excavators bear a solemn duty to record everything faithfully, criticizes profit-driven or reckless digging (including Mariette's methods), and argues mummies deserve dignified, limited exhibition rather than public spectacle. Finally, Weigall argues against the stereotype of ancient Egyptians as solemn and death-obsessed, presenting them instead as a gay, pleasure-loving people fond of flowers, wine, music, dancing, love poetry, humor and festivity, drawing on tomb inscriptions, love songs, and depictions of feasting and drunkenness. He closes with accounts of his own excavation experiences, including fruitless digs with Flinders Petrie at Abydos, the discovery of the tomb of Yuaa and Tuau, Schiaparelli's intact Theban tomb find, and the opening in January 1907 of a newly found royal tomb in the Valley of the Kings, where a dismantled gilded funeral shrine blocked the passage.

By Arthur Weigall · First published 1923 · Genre: Non-fiction Essay, Educational Writing, History · 18 chapters · 108,737 words

First lines

In this first chapter I propose to extol the Egyptologist who works abroad in the field, in contrast to him who studies at home in the museum; for, in reading over the papers collected into this volume, I see that there is a sort of _motif_ which runs through them all, linking them together, namely that the archeology of Egypt, to be properly appreciated, must be studied, so to speak, at the lips of the Sphinx itself.

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Egyptology · Archaeology · Ancient Egypt · Modern Egypt · Pharaohs · Ancient Egyptian customs · Valley of the Kings · Thebes · The Nile River · Fieldwork · Direct observation · Excavation methods

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