Interview with M. Mariette

On the way, Achmet had told us of a Frenchman who had been all summer digging in the sand, near Sakkara. After we bad crawled into the subterranean depot of mummies ibises, and nearly choked ourselves with dust in trying to find a pot not broken open; and after one of our donkeymen went into a human mummy pit and brought out the feet and legs of some withered old Egyptian, we saw before us the residence of this Frenchman; a mud hut on a high sand-bank. It was an unfortunate building, for nearly all the front wall had tumbled down, revealing the contents of his kitchen. One or two Arabs loitered about, but a large number were employed at the end of a long trench which extended to the hills.

Before reaching the house a number of deep pits barred our path, and the loose sand, stirred by our feet, slid back into the bottom, as if eager to hide the wonders they disclosed. Pavements, fresh as when first laid; basement-walls of white marble, steps, doorways, pedestals and fragments of pillars glittered in the sun, which, after the lapse of more than two thousand years, beheld them again. I slid down the side of the pit and walked in the streets of Memphis. The pavement of bitumen, which once covered the stone blocks, apparently to protect them and deaden the noise of horses and chariots, was entire in many places. Here a marble sphinx sat at the base of a temple, and stared abstractedly before her; there a sculptured cornice, with heavy mouldings, leaned against the walls of the chamber into which it had fallen, and over all were scattered fragments of glazed and painted tiles and sculptured alabaster. The principal street was narrow, and was apparently occupied by private dwellings, but at its extremity were the basement-walls of a spacious edifice. All the pits opened on pavements and walls, so fresh and cleanly cut, that they seemed rather the foundations of a new city, laid yesterday, than the remains of one of the oldest capitals of the world.

We approached the workmen, where we met the discoverer of Memphis, Mr. Auguste Mariette. On finding we were not Englishmen (of whose visits he appeared to be rather shy), he became very courteous and communicative. He apologized for the little he had to show us, since on account of the Vandalism of the Arabs, he was obliged to cover up all his discoveries, after making his drawings and measurements. The Egyptian authorities are worse than apathetic, for they would not hesitate to burn the sphinxes for lime, and build barracks for filthy soldiers with the marble blocks. Besides this, the French influence at Cairo was then entirely overshadowed by that of England, and although M. Mariette was supported in his labors by the French Academy, and a subscription headed by Louis Napoleon’s name, he was forced to be content with the simple permission to dig out these remarkable ruins and describe them. He could neither protect them nor remove the portable sculptures and inscriptions, and therefore preferred giving them again into the safe keeping of the sand. Here they will be secure from injury, until some more fortunate period, when, possibly, the lost Memphis may be entirely given to the world, as fresh as Pompeii, and far more grand and imposing.

I asked M. Mariette what first induced him to dig for Memphis in that spot, since antiquarians had fixed upon the mounds near Mitrahenny (a village in the plain below, and about four miles distant), as the former site of the city. He said that the tenor of an inscription which he found on one of the blocks quarried out of these mounds, induced him to believe that the principal part of the city lay to the westward, and therefore he commenced excavating in the nearest sand-hill in that direction. After sinking pits in various places he struck on an avenue of sphinxes, the clue to all his after discoveries. Following this, he came upon the remains of a temple (probably the Serapeum, or Temple of Serapis, mentioned by Strabo), and afterward upon streets, colonnades, public and private edifices, and all other signs of a great city. The number of sphinxes alone, buried under these high sand-drifts, amounted to two thousand, and he had frequently uncovered twenty or thirty in a day. He estimated the entire number of statues, inscriptions and reliefs, at between four and five thousand. The most remarkable discovery was that of eight colossal statues, which were evidently the product of Grecian art. During thirteen months of assiduous labor, with but one assistant, he had made drawings of all these objects and forwarded them to Paris. In order to be near at hand, he had built an Arab house of unburnt bricks, the walls of which had just tumbled down for the third time. His workmen were then engaged in clearing away the sand from the dwelling of some old Memphian, and he intended spreading his roof over the massive walls, and making his residence in the exhumed city.

The man’s appearance showed what he had undergone, and gave me an idea of the extraordinary zeal and patience required to make a successful antiquarian. His face was as brown as an Arab’s, his eyes severely inflamed, and his hands as rough as a bricklayer’s. His manner with the native workmen was admirable, and they labored with a hearty good-will which almost supplied the want of the needful implements. All they had were straw baskets, which they filled with a sort of rude shovel, and then handed up to be carried off on the heads of others. One of the principal workmen was deaf and dumb, but the funniest Arab I ever saw. He was constantly playing off his jokes on those who were too slow or too negligent. An unlucky girl, stooping down at the wrong time to lift a basket of sand, received the contents of another on her head, and her indignant outcry was hailed by the rest with screams of laughter. I saw the same man pick out of the sand a glazed tile containing hieroglyphic characters. The gravity with which he held it before him, feigning to peruse it, occasionally nodding his head, as if to say, “Well done for old Pharaoh!” could not have been excelled by Burton himself.

Strabo states that Memphis had a circumference of seventeen miles, and therefore both M. Mariette and the antiquarians are right. The mounds of Mitrahenny probably mark the eastern portion of the city, while its western limit extended beyond the Pyramids of Sakkara, and included in its suburbs those of Abousir and Dashoor. The space explored by M. Mariette is about a mile and a half in length, and somewhat more than half a mile in breadth. He was then continuing his excavations westward, and had almost reached the first ridge of the Libyan Hills, without finding the termination of the ruins. The magnitude of his discovery will be best known when his drawings and descriptions are given to the world. A few months after my visit, his labors were further rewarded by finding thirteen colossal sarcophagi of black marble, and he has recently added to his renown by discovering an entrance to the Sphinx. Yet at that time, the exhumation of the lost Memphis – second only in importance to that of Nineveh – was unknown in Europe, except to a few savans in Paris, and the first intimation which some of my friends in Cairo and Alexandria had of it, was my own account of my visit, in the newspapers they received from America. But M. Mariette is a young man, and will yet see his name inscribed beside those of Burckhardt, Belzoni and Layard.

We had still a long ride before us, and I took leave of Memphis and its discoverer, promising to revisit him on my return from Khartoum.

From A journey to central Africa; or, Life and landscapes from Egypt to the Negro kingdoms of the White Nile
by Bayard Taylor, 1852