Theft After Life

By Mayo Mohs

THE RAPE OF THE NILE

by BRIAN M. PAGAN

399 pages. Scribners. $14.95.

During the 19th century, an Anglo-Indian tourist decided to make sketches of some bas-reliefs that were on the wall of Pharaoh Amun-Hotpe's tomb. To save himself hours in the hot, stuffy tomb, he chiseled off the bas-reliefs and took them to his boat. When he had finished his sketches, he simply dropped the priceless stones into the Nile.

This anecdote is one of the more outrageous tales that British-born Archaeologist Brian Fagan records in this brisk and knowledgeable history of the plunder of Egypt. But it was only one of thousands of depredations, many carried out on a much grander scale. During the reign of Pasha Mohammed Ali (1805-1849), for example, one-quarter of the great Temple of Dendereh was quarried away by Egyptians to build a saltpeter factory. Ali also ordered the excavation of the exquisite Temple of Esneh because he wanted to use it as a secure munitions depot. Art collectors were scarcely better. A French agent named Jean Baptiste Lelorrain contrived to steal the magnificent carved zodiac from the ceiling of Dendereh by using gunpowder to blast away a section of the temple's roof. He was lucky: the zodiac survived and is now in the Louvre.

Macabre Contest. As Author Pagan points out, looting the past was nothing new in Egypt. Grave robbers went to work shortly after the first pharaoh was laid to rest. The ancient Egyptian tombs were treasure-houses of gold, jewelry, furniture and other artifacts thought to be needed in the afterlife. The poor, who could scarcely get through their present life, took a skeptical view of such hoarding and helped themselves. The security of buried pharaohs became a macabre contest. As grave robbers prepared to descend on a site, loyal priests who had set guards on the mummies would rush the embalmed bodies to secret hiding places, one step ahead of the thieves.

The looting and destruction of Egyptian temples continued down through the centuries. Early Christians, anxious to eliminate residual paganism along the Nile, smashed many monuments. Medieval Europeans created a brisk market for mummy, the bituminous substance used in mummification, which was thought to have a medicinal value.

Brutal Methods. It was Napoleon's Egyptian campaign of 1798-99 that helped launch the 19th century wave of Nile plunder. One of the expedition members most responsible was Vivant Denon, an artist and writer whose illustrated La Description de L'Egypte excited Europe's curiosity about the pharaohs' treasure. Unfortunately, though The Rape of the Nile reproduces dozens of Denon's paintings--and hundreds of other illustrations--only the dust jacket is in color.

Archaeologist Fagan, who teaches at the University of California at Santa Barbara, focuses nearly half his book on the exploits of Giovanni Belzoni, the giant (6 ft. 6 in.) Paduan whom he calls "the greatest plunderer of them all." Belzoni had been a famous circus strong man in England when he met an English adventurer who was searching for talent on behalf of Mohammed Ali. Belzoni became a passionate collector. He sent the giant torso of Rameses II to the British Museum and discovered the entrance to the second pyramid of Gizeh. He uncovered the sand-hidden Temple of Abu Simbel, the huge Nubian monument that was recently raised to high ground to save it from the rising waters of Lake Nasser behind the Aswan Dam. Belzoni's methods could be brutal: he used a battering ram to break open a tomb in the Valley of the Kings, and once broke up some terra cotta sarcophagi just for the modeled heads on their lids.

Belzoni's successors in the great antiquities hunt were more careful in preserving the past. In the 1850s, French Egyptologist Auguste Mariette helped start an Egyptian museum in Bulak, of which he became the first and very jealous curator. When Louis Napoleon's Empress Eugenie coveted the royal jewelry of Queen A-Hatep at the Paris Exhibition in 1867, Mariette flatly refused her request to be given the jewels.

Many other compelling characters, often fierce rivals among themselves, inhabit this fascinating book. Indeed, the volume's chief value to the ordinary reader is that it brings together so many intriguing stories, told elsewhere before but mostly piecemeal. The book is also something of a tract, warning that museum rivalry and the archaeological black market still threaten Egypt's surviving antiquities. Even Soviet technicians made off with papyri, he reports.

Fagan does grudgingly concede that in their rough way the pioneer plunderers preserved much of Egypt's riches for the world's study. It was a Napoleonic war trophy, the Rosetta stone, for example, that allowed Jean Franc,ois Champollion to decipher the ancient hieroglyphics, which provided the key to Egypt's past. Egyptologists have argued with some justification that given the Nile's tumultuous history, the pharaohs and their treasures were more secure--and more celebrated--in the world's museums than they had been in Egypt. A comfortable immortality was, after all, what they had wanted in the first place.

Maya Mohs

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