MODERN EGYPT

A happy ending with a pinch of Salt

Al Aharam Weekly
March 23, 2009

Thousands of miles and thousands of years apart, a son pays homage to his dead father. In a bright new limestone tomb-chapel on the west bank of the Nile at Thebes, the son of the Scribe and Grain Accountant Nebamun offers his father a bouquet of flowers. In the British Museum in the heart of London, a wealthy Egyptian-born financier builds a memorial to his late father, Michel Cohen.

The two events are linked by a series of wall paintings that have been likened to the genius of the Sistine Chapel, but the story of how the paintings came to be in the museum is worthy of an adventure of Indiana Jones.

We begin with Nebamun -- whose name means "My Lord is Amun" -- described as "a Scribe and Grain Accountant of Amun in the Gallery of Divine Offerings". We do not know exactly who he was, but he probably died at some point in the later 18th Dynasty during the reign of Pharaoh Tuthmosis IV (1400 to 1390 BC) or Pharaoh Amenhotep III (1390 to 1353 BC). Nebamun and his wife, Hatshepsut, had two sons and a daughter; the elder son, Netjermes, a priest, seems to have taken over his father's office on the latter's death.

Nebamun prepared for himself a tomb-chapel of shining white local limestone on the opposite side of the river from Karnak Temple. He had the walls painted with vivid images of life, death and the afterlife as seen and understood in the world he knew. The scenes of domesticated animals and wildlife, of dancing girls, of Nebamun counting tributes, and even of his pet cat catching birds in the reeds, are among the finest and most realistic ever found in Egypt.

After Nebamun's burial the tomb below the chapel was sealed, although it may have been opened to permit other family burials. The chapel was left open so that Nebamun's friends and relatives could pay visits and admire the splendid art, just as worshippers in Rome enjoyed the wonderful visions created by Michaelangelo.

Amenhotep III's reign was followed by a period of instability caused when his heir, who called himself Akhenaten, overthrew the priests of Amun and created a new religion and a new seat of rule -- albeit temporary -- at Amarna. This chaos continued until the end of the 18th Dynasty, and Nebamun's tomb was among those attacked by iconoclasts.

Inevitably, as time went by anything of value was removed, and Nebamun and his tomb-chapel were forgotten. As the centuries passed the tomb and its fabulous paintings appear to have escaped further disturbance. In the early 19th century, however, in places a long way from Egypt, interest in the ancient world and its antiquities was growing. This interest was fed by early European treasure seekers and adventurers. Some, like the French agent Bernadino Drovetti (1776-1852), were bent on claiming prizes for personal profit; others, like the British consul-general Henry Salt (1780-1827), retrieved their spoils under the guise of preserving "world" heritage for public collections -- in Salt's case, the British Museum -- although he expected to be paid for his toil on top of expenses. Sadly such treasure hunters paid scant attention to provenance or even location, dragging away anything moveable (as Salt's agent, Giovanni Belzoni dragged the head of Ramses, now in the British Museum) or hacking the prettier sections of paintings and reliefs off tomb and temple walls.

By 1820 Salt was working with a Greek agent, Giovanni "Yanni" d'Athanasi (1798-1854). These two were vying with Drovetti to procure antiquities, and both sides employed subterfuge and trickery against one another. Exactly where d'Athanasi found the tomb of Nebamun is not known, and he himself died (in poverty, in London) without revealing the facts -- probably not through malice, but because such a detail was thought of at the time as insignificant. It was not then understood that an artefact had no real value for scholars unless its context could be established. The tomb in question, however, was most probably at Dra Abul-Naga.

The paintings had been applied on mud-brick plaster mixed with chopped straw smoothed over the hewn rock of the tomb chambers. The plaster was fragile, and the sections d'Athanasi's men removed varied in thickness so that some easily crumbled and cracked. D'Athanasi took the sections he wanted, probably concentrating on those that he thought would appeal to European taste. After removing his chosen fragments he left the tomb and the rest of the paintings, which were probably intact until he found them, to be looted, destroyed, and mostly lost.

Salt shipped 10 fragments to London in 1821. Despite the lack of precise information as to their original location, their transportation and shipment from Alexandria were carefully recorded. "Some care must be taken in carrying them, as jolting would probably destroy them," Salt wrote. That same year two young clergymen on a visit to Egypt, George Waddington and Barnard Hanbury, obtained an 11th fragment which was presented to the British Museum in 1833.

Salt's methods of excavating and acquiring antiquities did not escape censure even in his day. Several contemporary commentators were critical, including the explorer James Burton (1788-1862) who was probably witnessing the destruction of Nebamun's tomb itself when he decried the way the paintings had been destroyed just so that a few pieces could be taken. Other fragments were picked over once d'Athanasi had removed the choicest bits, and some of these ended up in the Musée Calvet in Avignon, the Musée des Beau-Arts in Lyons, and in the Egyptian Museum in Berlin. The Berlin pieces were purchased at the sale of a private collection in 1906. Another three fragments were acquired by the businessman Moise Levy de Benzion (1873-1943), founder of Cairo's Benzion department store. While in Europe during World War II Benzion, a Sephardic Jew, was captured and put to death by the Nazis, and after the war his collection was dispersed. It is believed that these fragments are now stored in the basement of the Egyptian Museum in Cairo.