CLASSICAL CORNER

245: TUT TUT

Thanks to characteristic Canada Post ineptitude, I’ve only just received FT386 (October) and seen Maria J Pérez Cuevo’s excellent Egyptian survey and the magazine’s notice of Scott Creighton’s

The Great Pyramid Hoax. Herewith, some friendly amplifications, counting also as a Welcome Back to Tut’s latest British excursion.

Hysteron Proteron (Last First – Wikipedia notice exemplifies from Virgil and the Koran). I was puzzled by the claim that only the royal cartouche is evidence for pharaoh Khufu building the Great Pyramid (I always thought it was Jack Hawkins in Land of the Pharaohs) c.2550BC.

Creighton (2017) argues – you can hear his podcast – that the cartouche was forged by Howard Vyse in 1837. Not a new notion; I’m staying neutral. Zecharia Sitchin had made the same claim back in 1980 – ‘For Fame and Fortune’. Both are old hands at Egyptological fantasy. In two earlier books, The Giza Prophecy (2012) and The Secret Chamber of Osiris (2015), Creighton asserted that the pyramids were not tombs but ‘recovery vaults’ for storing evidences of Egyptian civilisation against forthcoming catastrophe. As for Sitchin, I doubt if many will be impressed by somebody who believes the pyramids were built by aliens from a mysterious ‘Twelfth Planet’ – getting near to David Icke territory here, also the more plausible idea in Star Trek’s Who Mourns for Adonis? that aliens were glimpsed by ancient Greeks and taken to be gods.

For an effective demolition of Creighton’s book, see the online review by Jason Colavito.

Herodotus in his Book Two on Egypt ascribes, with blistering criticism of his oppressive rule, the great pyramid to Cheops (Khufu). Now, this proves nothing in itself. Herodotus could not read hieroglyphics (what non-Egyptian could?), therefore relied on priests and dragomen – all modern tourists know of what local guides are capable. Even if untrue, it remains evidence of belief, which may count for something.

More to the point, the Egyptian priest Manetho (c. 300 BC), who presumably would know his pharaonic onions, also says Khufu (using his Hellenised name Suphis) built the thing.

Even more to the point, there are the papyrus documents discovered by French archaeologists in 2013 in a cave (shades of the Dead Sea Scrolls) at Wadi al-Jarf on the Red Sea coast. These are the log-books of Merer, an official in charge of transporting stones from the Tura limestone quarry to Giza in the 27th year of Khufu’s reign.

One section (there is an online translation) shows concern for the workers’ living conditions. This may go a long way to vindicating Herodotus’s much-ridiculed claim that the (now lost) hieroglyphics on the pyramid listed leeks, radishes, and other foodstuffs provided by Cheops for his workers; cf. my almost-as-ancient defensive ‘How Credulous was Herodotus?’ Greece and Rome 11 (1964), 167-77.

To Maria J Pérez Cuevo’s detailed and delightful Egyptian coverage, I would add to the Bibliography Julie Hankey’s A Passion for Egypt: A Biography of Arthur Weigall (2001). Arthur Edward Pearse Brome Weigall (1880-1934 – his name deserves a cartouche) was an English archaeologist-cum-designer-cum-journalistcum-film critic-cum-prolific author. Having worked under the distinguished though demanding Flinders Petrie, he replaced Howard Carter as Chief Inspector of Antiquities for Upper Egypt, this giving him experience with and insight into the personalities and archaeological politickings of the major English and French excavators.

As Daily Mail correspondent, he witnessed the opening of Tut’s tomb (1923), reportedly saying of Lord Carnarvon’s jocular entrance into the tomb, “If he goes down in that spirit, I give him six weeks to live.” Cue to the Curse. Fort (Books, pp678,701,884) makes three sceptical references to it. He includes the statistic that 14 people fell victim to the Curse. Pérez Cuevo says six, a figure echoed on many websites, though some expand the death-toll to two dozen – yet more warning about the dangers of secondhand and Internet reporting. Pérez Nuevo makes the obvious point – I’ve made it myself elsewhere: Why did Howard Carter, opener/despoiler of the tomb, survive to 64, dying in 1939?

Scientific explanations for Carnarvon’s death include toxins in the air and lethal bat-droppings. Saw plenty of those creatures when I ‘despoiled’ the great pyramid in 1963. Since this edifice also comports a Curse, I should perhaps count myself lucky to be alive – some CC readers may think themselves otherwise…

Weigall, who missed Tut’s tomb by 50 yards in 1911, had much to say about the Curse, pointing to similar stories involving the heretic pharaoh Akhnaten (husband of ancient beauty Nefertiti – see the 1954 film Sinuhe The Egyptian), and for good measure read one of Michael Pearce’s Mamur Zapt novels.

Nicely enough, British Museum Egyptologist Wallace Budge believed that Weigall’s death (otherwise attributed to drugs and disease) “was the unfortunate victim of the curse of the failure and the hardships which he had wished for others”.

There are many enticing titbits in Hankie’s biography. For easy instances, Weigall’s belief that, via Irish lineage, he himself was descended from the Pharaohs, and his discovery of modern Egyptian fellahin who still worshipped the god Amen – Hammer Films’ The Mummy (1959) had a similar premise. His Nubian excavation reports emphasised the degree to which these people kept up the customs of ancient times. Alas, no possible confirmation of Herodotus’s claim that various peoples in these regions ejaculated black spunk.

Weigall could be very peculiar, evinced in his biography of Roman emperor Nero (1930), in which he sought to cast such crimes as his matricide in a favourable light, albeit such modern writers as Massimo Fini’s (in English translation) Nero – 2000 Years of Lies (1993) have gone down the same path.

Those who blame their old school for everything bad will point to Weigall’s detestation of his own institution’s regimen which included compulsory beer drinking at dinner and three rounds of boxing before breakfast – latter might have done Billy Bunter some good…