François Auguste Ferdinand
Mariette (February 11, 1821 – January 19, 1881) was a French
scholar,
archaeologist and Egyptologist, the
founder of the Egyptian
Museum
in Cairo
.
Life
Early career
Born at
Boulogne-sur-Mer
, Mariette proved to be a talented draftsman and
designer, and he supplemented his salary as a teacher at Douai
by giving
private lessons and writing on historical and archaeological
subjects for local periodicals.
Meanwhile his cousin Nestor L'Hote, the friend and fellow-traveller
of
Champollion, died,
and the task of sorting his papers filled Mariette with a passion
for Egyptology. Largely self-taught, he devoted himself to the
study of
hieroglyphic and
Coptic.
His 1847 analytic
catalogue of the Egyptian Gallery of the Boulogne Museum got him a
minor appointment at the Louvre
Museum
in 1849.
First trip to Egypt
Entrusted with a government mission for the purpose of seeking and
purchasing the best Coptic,
Syriac,
Arabic and
Ethiopic manuscripts for the Louvre
collection so that it retains its then-supremacy over other
national collections, he set out for Egypt in 1850.
After
little success in acquiring manuscripts due to inexperience, to
avoid an embarrassing return empty-handed to France and wasting
what might be his only trip to Egypt, he visited temples and
befriended a Bedouin tribe, who led him to Saqqara
. The
site initially looked "a spectacle of desolation...[and] mounds of
sand" (his words), but on noticing one
sphinx
from the reputed avenue of sphinxes that led to ruins of the
Serapeum near the step-pyramid with its head
above the sands, he gathered 30 workmen. Thus, in 1851, he made his
celebrated discovery of this avenue and eventually the
subterraneous tomb-temple complex of catacombs with their
spectacular
sarcophagi of the
Apis bulls. Breaking through the
rubble at the tomb entrance on November 12, he entered the complex,
finding thousands of statues, bronze tablets and other treasures,
but only one intact sarcophagus. He also found the virtually intact
tomb of Prince
Khaemweset, Ramesses II's
son.
Accused of theft and destruction by rival diggers and by the
Egyptian authorities, Mariette began to rebury his finds in the
desert to keep them from these competitors. Instead of manuscripts,
official French funds were now advanced for the prosecution of his
researches, and he remained in Egypt for four years, excavating,
discovering — and despatching archaeological treasures to the
Louvre, following the accepted Eurocentric convention. However, the
French government and the Louvre set up an arrangement to divide
the finds 50:50, so that upon his return to Paris 230 crates went
to the Louvre (and he was raised to an assistant conservator), but
an equal amount remained in Egypt.
Director of Antiquities
However, unsatisfied with a purely academic role after his
discoveries at Saqqara (he said "I knew I would die or go mad if I
did not return to Egypt immediately"), after less than a year he
returned to Egypt on the insistence of the Egyptian government
under
Ismail
Pasha, who in 1858 created the position of conservator of
Egyptian monuments for him.
Moving with his family to Cairo, his career blossomed into a
chronicle of unwearying exploration and brilliant successes:
- gaining government funds to set up the
museum in
Cairo (aka the Bula Museum or Bulak Museum) in 1863 in
order to take the pressure off the sites and stop the trade in
illicit antiquities.
- the
pyramid-fields of Memphis
and
(exploiting his previous success to find a cache of c.2000BC
painted wooden statues such as the
Seated Scribe, and the decorated tomb of Khafra) the tombs of Saqqara
- the
necropolis of Meidum
, and those
of Abydos
and Thebes
- the
great temples of Dendera
and Edfu
were
disinterred
- important excavations were carried out at
Karnak
(marking the first full Egyptian use of the
stratigraphic methods
first developed by Karl Richard
Lepsius and of photographing every object prior to its
excavation), Medinet-Habu and Deir el-Bahri
- Tanis
(the
Egyptian capital in the Late Period) was partially
explored in the Delta
- even
Gebel
Barkal
in Sudan
was
explored
- He cleared the sands around the Sphinx
down to the bare rock, and in the process discovered the famous
granite and alabaster monument, the "Temple of the Sphinx".
In 1860 alone, Mariette set up 35 new dig sites, whilst attempting
to conserve already-dug sites. His success was aided by the fact
that no rivals were permitted to dig in Egypt, a fact that the
British (who had previously had the majority of Egyptologists
active in the country) and Germans (who were politically allied
with the country's Ottoman rulers) protested at as a 'sweetheart
deal' between Egypt and France. Nor were Mariette's relations with
the Khedive always stable. The Khedive, like many potentates,
assumed all discoveries ranked as treasure and that what went to
the museum in Cairo went only at his pleasure. Even early on, in
February 1859, Mariette dashed to Thebes to confiscate a boatload
of antiquities from the nearby tomb of Queen
Ahhotep I that were to have been sent to the
Khedive.
In 1867, he returned to oversee the ancient Egyptian stand at the
Exposition
Universelle, to a hero's welcome for keeping France pre-eminent
in Egyptology. In 1869, at the request of the Khedive, he wrote a
brief plot for an opera. The following year this concept, worked
into a scenario by
Camille du
Locle, was proposed to
Giuseppe
Verdi, who accepted it as a subject for
Aida. For
Aida, Mariette and Du Locle
oversaw the scenery and costumes, which were inspired by the art of
Ancient Egypt. The premiere of
Aida was originally
scheduled for February 1871, but was delayed until 24 December
1871, due to the siege of Paris at the height of the
Franco-Prussian War (which trapped
Mariette with the costumes and scenery in Paris). The opera met
with great acclaim.
Mariette was raised successively to the rank of
bey and
pasha, and European honors
and orders were bestowed on him.
In 1878, his museum was ravaged by floods, which destroyed most of
his notes and drawings. By the spring of 1881, prematurely aged and
nearly blind, Mariette arranged for the appointment of the
Frenchman
Gaston Maspero (a linguist
rather than an archaeologist, who he had met at the Exposition in
1867), to ensure that France retained its supremacy in Egyptology,
rather than an Englishman. At this time, the English comprised the
majority of Egyptologists in Egypt. He died in Cairo and was
interred in a
sarcophagus which is on
display in the Garden of the Egyptian Museum, Cairo.
Legacy
Though not all his discoveries were thoroughly published, the list
of his publications is a long one.
Notes
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References
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