The Precinct as a whole covers around twenty feddans (acres), and contains three temples and a large, horseshoe-shaped (though now partly silted) Sacred Lake, an important part of the worship of Mut. Sacred Lakes of Mut were called Isheru (transliterated as "Asheru" in the 19th century). That the name referred to a type of Sacred Lake rather than a specific area of Karnak was not understood in the 1890s, giving rise to the misunderstanding which led Maggie and Nettie to call their book The Temple of Mut in Asher.
The three temples in the Precinct are the Mut Temple, which was to be the main object of Maggie and Nettie’s work, the Temple of Khonsupakherod ("Khonsu the Child"), to the east, and a temple of unknown dedication, built by Ramesses III, to the south-west.
Little attention had been paid to the site before the Benson and Gourlay expedition. A plan of it had been drawn by the Savants who accompanied Bonaparte’s ill-fated military expedition to conquer Egypt in the late 18th century, and had been investigated by Lepsius’s royal Prussian expedition in the mid 1840s. But Maggie and Nettie were the first to make any significant excavations there. Indeed, the site was not excavated again until the 1920s.
However, since 1976, the situation has changed enormously, with excavation, conservation and research being undertaken by the Museum of Brooklyn and the Johns Hopkins University – who only this year, in fact, bravely undertook an unusual summer expedition, to investigate the lake. They publish the results of their excavations online, and give full acknowledgement to Maggie and Nettie.
It is unclear why Maggie chose to excavate the Temple of Mut. She herself claims in The Temple of Mut in Asher that: "there was something about the place so beautiful, even so romantic, that a suggestion casually made about digging in Egypt came to mind."
She also attempts to make light of her aims, stating that "our first intention was not ambitious. We were desirous of clearing a picturesque site. We were frankly warned that we should make no discoveries; indeed if any had been anticipated it was unlikely that the clearance would have been entrusted to inexperienced direction." (Note the use of the plural here is misleading, as Nettie Gourlay was not at this point involved). She declares herself surprised at the "unexpected discoveries" that she and Nettie made.
The Politics
She was not, however, being fully sincere. It’s plain from the Bechard photo alone that the site was obviously rich in antiquities. Indeed, there is an entire chapter of The Temple of Mut in Asher called "previous plans", which lists the work done there by earlier archaeologists and explorers. So it was fully evident that the site was important, even if little had been done there.
But why should she, of all people, a woman of exceptionally strong moral ideals, want to mislead? And the answer is, politics. We need to remember just who she was; the daughter of the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Primate of All England, the highest ranking churchman and commoner in Britain and a member of the government. Her family were close friends of the Gladstones, the most famous of who was William Gladstone, one of the most outstanding and long-serving Prime Ministers of the Victorian era. Whatever she did, or wrote, or said, would not pass un-noticed, especially at a period when war with France threatened, following the Fashoda Incident.
Although Egypt had been under British occupation since 1882, parts of its administration, including the Antiquities Service (now the Supreme Council of Antiquities), were run by the French, who had previously been the main colonial power. The Director of Antiquities in 1895, when Margaret commenced work, was M. Jaques de Morgan (Antiquities Director 1892-1897).
It was a very uneasy time in Anglo-French relationships. As one book says: "During these years… Anglo-French imperial rivalry ran rampant, culminating in the showdown at Fashoda on the Sudan in 1898."
At this point, I need to explain the Fashoda Incident, a temper-tantrum of the imperialistic mindset. A French force had occupied the small Sudanese town of Fashoda, with the intention of adding the Sudan to the French Empire. A larger British force sailed up the Nile to confront them, with the intention of instead adding the Sudan to the British Empire, and allowing the map to be printed red from Uganda to the Mediterranean. Outnumbered, the French force were obliged to withdraw from Fashoda, but then followed a lot of blustering, threatening and general posturing between the French and British governments. However, neither side could hope to win a war; the French army was larger than the British, yet the British fleet larger than the French, resulting (fortunately) in stalemate. Besides, both countries soon realised that there was a greater threat to both of them – Germany – and so eventually calmed down and made friends.
The Fashoda Incident took place only the year before The Temple of Mut in Asher was published. Therefore, with Franco-British ill-feeling still at its height, M. de Morgan might have been heavily criticised at home for having given permission for an amateur Englishwoman to excavate an important site under his protection. So Maggie had to be careful for his sake what she wrote about how he came to his decision.
According to her account in The Temple of Mut, de Morgan initially refused her application to excavate, but was persuaded to change his mind by the intervention of the famous Swiss archaeologist, Eduard Naville, who was at that time excavating the Hatshepsut Temple at Deir el-Bahri, on the West Bank at Luxor.
But did she perhaps over-emphasise his initial refusal of her application to excavate? Given that he approved the excavation as soon as Naville supported her application, did he merely insist that it was supervised by a competent archaeologist? It seems possible, as in The Temple of Mut in Asher we are told that in 1895, when Maggie was beginning her excavation "M. Naville had been with us [i.e. at the time Maggie alone] a day or two previously, to interview our overseer and to show us how to determine our course of work"
However, we need to ask why Naville supported her application. I shall return to that question below.
Maggie and Nettie were in any case very diplomatically careful to give effusive thanks in their book to both de Morgan, and M. Georges Daressy, the Secretary General of the Antiquities Service.
They also acknowledge help from other distinguished archaeologists. These included Emile Brugsch, (also known as "Brugsch Bey", from an Egyptian title that he held), who was the discoverer of an important "mummy cache" near Luxor, and who was to have a long career in the Egyptian museums service. There was also Ludwig Borchart, then Cultural Attaché of the German Embassy, who later, as Director of the German Archaeological Institute, was to gain notoriety for removing the famous head of Nefertiti to Berlin.
And of course there was Flinders Petrie. At the time Petrie was working nearby, at the Ramesseum, and is acknowledged by Maggie and Nettie as having made "important and most helpful suggestions". Indeed, it’s possible that he may have been responsible for recommending, if not actually introducing Nettie to Maggie Benson. Nettie had been one of his first students at University College London following his acceptance of the Chair of Egyptian Archaeology and Philology in 1892.
In fact most of Flinders Petrie’s first students were women. And what was more, in a spirit of equal opportunities that was almost unique at the time, he encouraged his women students to join his and other excavations.
At the Ramesseum, for example, his expedition included two of his students, a Miss Paget, and a woman who was to go on to have a successful Egyptological career of her own, Annie Abernethie Pirie (1862-1927). She married the notable Egyptologist James Quibell, and was to assist both her husband and Petrie in further digs. She published books on Egyptian art, and on her experiences in the country, as well as illustrating other books. She also undertook work in the Egyptian gallery of the Aberdeen museum.
P
ercy Newberry, from a passport photo, 1925.
But the greatest help came from the Egyptologist Percy Newberry (1868-1949). In fact an entire section of The Temple of Mut in Asher, Part V, "Inscriptions", was written by him. This describes the inscriptions found at the site, and prints them in hieroglyphs, as well as in English, another feature of the book which was progressive for its time, and which greatly increases its value for specialists.
Newberry’s academic career included appointments as Brunner Professor of Egyptology at Liverpool University in 1906, as Fellow of King’s College London in 1908, and as Professor of Ancient History and Archaeology at Cairo in 1929. Between 1884 and 1905 he was employed by the Egypt Exploration Fund (EEF) (now the Egypt Exploration Society), and from 1890 onwards directed the Fund’s "Archaeological Survey". The Survey, rather over-ambitiously, aimed to survey every ancient site in Egypt, though was never able to do so. The Survey started off with tombs at Beni Hassan. Newberry published the inscriptions found there, and no doubt this is why Beni Hassan is mentioned so frequently in "Inscriptions."
From The Temple of Mut in Asher we learn that Newberry was staying in Luxor at the time when Maggie started work, most likely assisting Eduard Naville, who was also at that time employed by the EEF. Naville himself may have become interested in the inscriptions found at the Temple of Mut, as he was one of the outstanding hieroglyphic scholars of the time. And this might in fact have been the reason for his persuading de Morgan to allow Maggie to excavate the site.
Maggie, plainly, could not have worked without help. She would at least had a rough idea from her brother Frederick’s archaeological work what she needed to cope with. And this raises various (unanswerable, unfortunately) questions. Did she indeed decide to excavate in the Mut Precinct on little more than a impulse, as she claims in her book, or was she at least pointed in a certain direction?
After all, once she had the concession for the site, then the way would have been open for organisations like the EEF to unofficially step in – as indeed they did. This may explain why the EEF evidently gave Naville and especially Newberry leave from their work for such a time-consuming project.
And besides, having the Archbishop of Canterbury’s daughter (and thereby the British Establishment) on their side would have been more than welcome to not only the EEF, but also to Petrie.
This was because de Morgan’s immediate predecessor as Head of the Antiquities Service, M. Eugène Grébaut, had been unwelcoming towards the EEF, stating that he would not "abandon Ancient Egypt to the English societies and become the humble servant of English tourists". What was more, even the British Consul-General of Egypt, Lord Cromer, did not support British Egyptologists, preferring "deferring to France in Egyptology in return for concessions elsewhere".
Under these circumstances, British Egyptology plainly needed all the support in high places it could get, and at that time few were more highly placed than the Bensons.
Finally, of course, there is the possibility that – and remember this was an age when people competed to put their flag on various pieces of ground – that the Benson and Gourlay expedition planted, as it were, a small Union-Jack (with an EEF symbol sewn onto it) on what was otherwise the exclusive French territory of Karnak Temple. This is hardly imaginable to us, living in an era when Egyptology is truly international, but of course this is history, and we have to try to think like people in the 19th century.
Finally, perhaps Maggie had a certain advantage, in all these politics, of being a woman. Men such as de Morgan, Naville and Newberry were, of course, gentlemen, in the old-fashioned sense; they might have found it personally disagreeable to disoblige a lady. Besides, we know that Maggie, as were most upper-class women of the time, was taught French and German; no doubt Nettie was too. So when speaking to men like de Morgan and Naville, they would have done so in their own languages, which can only have eased things further.
There is also the question of Maggie Benson’s own personality. Was she, in fact, a person who it was easy to say "no" to? We might wonder, in fact, if anyone in her social position was ever told "no", especially by some mere civil servant, even if he was the head of the Antiquites Department! Certainly until her illness in 1896 she seems to have been exceptionally energetic, and not one to let difficulties stand in her way.
To be continued...
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