In the Valley of the Kings Read Online Free PDF Page A

was not only the monetary value of this treasure that kept Carter at work into the small hours of the night, but also its beauty. For the artistic impulse was very strong in Carter—he was alive to the marvels of ancient Egyptian art. From the very beginning of his career, his notebooks are filled with comments about form and color and design.
    This sensitivity extended to his natural surroundings as well, the desert landscape that he lovingly sketched and painted. In fact, it was this highly developed aesthetic sense that helped him to bear the solitude of the excavator’s life. For though Carter glossed over it quickly in his memoir—“a young excavator, all alone except for his workmen, on the threshold of a magnificent discovery”—this unrelieved solitude had led more than one excavator to quit because they found it unbearable.
    It was as much a spiritual solitude as a geographic one. An unbridgeable distance existed between the foreign archaeologists and the Egyptian fellahin, or native peasants, who worked for them. It was felt even by an excavator as close to his workers as Flinders Petrie, Carter’s most important mentor in Egypt. There are passages in Petrie’s memoirs where he admired the peasants’ exuberance and simplicity. He sympathized with their difficulties; he harshly criticized those archaeologists who dealt with them as if they were machines to sift and haul and dig; and he shocked hiscolleagues by having, in his words, “gone some way toward the fellahin” (that is, dispensed with formalities that most Europeans considered essential).
    In his description of Egypt at that time, Petrie described the alienation, even the menace, felt by excavators living in remote villages and at desert sites. “There is the lack of intercommunication, the suspicion of strangers; the absence of roads; and the mental state of the people…. The man who can read and write is the rare exception in the country…. There is gross superstition, innumerable local saints….
    “We [Europeans] cannot see the world as a fellah sees it; and I believe this the more readily because after living years among the fellahin … I yet feel the gulf between their nature and my own as impassable as ever….
    “In the villages, derwish parties are formed from a few men and boys, perhaps a dozen or twenty: they are almost always held in moonlight…. The people stand in a circle and begin repeating Alláh with a very strong accent on the latter syllable; bowing down the head and body at the former, and raising it at the latter. This is done all in unison, and slowly at first; gradually the rate quickens, the accent is stronger, and becomes more of an explosive howl, sounding afar off…. The excitement is wilder, hideously wild, until a horrid creeping comes over you as you listen and you feel that in such a state there is no answering for what may be done. Incipient madness of the intoxication of excitement seems poured out upon them all….
    “The children unintentionally reveal what is the tone and talk of the households in private; they constantly greet the European with wails of Ya Nusrani!, O Nazarene! The full force of which title is felt when your donkey boy urges on his beast by calling it, ‘Son of a dog! Son of a pig! Son of a Nazarene!’ Any abuse will do to howl at the infidel, and I have been for months shouted at across every field…. That a massacre of the Coptic [Egyptian] Christians wasfully anticipated by them when Arabi drove out the foreigners [a failed revolt of 1882] should not be lightly forgotten.
    “This fanaticism is linked with an unreasoning ferocity of punishment. I have seen a coachman suddenly seize on a street boy and for some word or gesture lash him on the bare legs with the whip again and again with all his might….”
    The suppressed violence of desperate poverty and thwarted national hopes could be felt on every side. The archaeologist Gertrude Caton-Thompson, a friend and admirer of