So who was the king named in the text and shown offering to Khnum and his divine family at the top of the stela? Wilbour tried to decipher the indistinct hieroglyphic signs of his name with little success.

Wilbour’s notes on the royal name on the stela. Brooklyn Museum Archives, Charles E. Wilbour Archival Collection [5.1.019, notebook 3C, p. 327]

Wilbour could tell from the grammar of the inscription that it was written in the Ptolemaic Period (c. 300 BC), but how could a king have reigned for 18 years at this time without leaving behind any other traces?

We now know that the king named in the stela is Djoser, a king of the Old Kingdom ( c. 2800 BC): however, as Wilbour correctly recognised, the stela was written 2500 years later. It was probably created as a ‘pious fraud’ by the priests of Khnum, trying to boost their tax revenues and make their temple look older and more important than it was. The theme of the seven year’s famine may actually have entered the Egyptian text from a Biblical source, rather than the other way round: there was a thriving Jewish community at Aswan in the years before the stela was erected, and Wilbour himself would acquire some documents from this community in 1893.

An unusual coincidence in this story is Wilbour’s meeting with Alfred Maudslay, the British archaeologist who was carrying out groundbreaking excavations of Maya sites. In Central America Maudslay had to take and develop photographs deep in the jungle, away from a reliable source of water (a set of his photographs is now in Brooklyn), so photographing the stela for Wilbour would have posed little challenge.

Alfred Maudslay at Chichen Itza, 1889. Brooklyn Museum Library.

The small Western community in Egypt kept an eye out for interesting new arrivals, and Wilbour will probably have had advance knowledge of Maudslay’s arrival at Aswan. It is tempting to wonder what the two men discussed: the differences and similarities between Egyptian and Mayan pyramids? Did Wilbour, a keen linguist, give Maudslay tips on how to decipher the Maya hieroglyphs (something that was not achieved until the 1960s)?

In April Wilbour left Egypt to spend the summer in France. He was still proud of his discovery of the stela, if puzzled by its text. Within a couple of months he had printed some cabinet cards of Maudslay’s photographs: the backs contained his own thoughts on the stela.

Wilbour’s description and analysis of the stela. Brooklyn Museum Archives, Charles E. Wilbour Archival Collection [9.4.004 and 005]

He sent these out to colleagues to arouse interest in this important text. His hopes were realised: within a year the stela had been fully published by the German Egyptologist Heinrich Brugsch. The famine stela has remained ever since a vital part of the study of Late Egyptian literature and religion.

Wilbour’s role in this episode is key—he discovered the famine stela, translated it, and disseminated it—but he was typically modest in the way he allowed Brugsch to be the first to publish an account of it. Did Wilbour, who never graduated from university, feel that he lacked the intellectual gravitas to do it? Given his background in the murky politics of Tammany Hall, did he feel he should keep a low profile? Perhaps he was just content to have solved the problem to his own satisfaction and felt no need to publish it.

One thing I particularly like about this story is the way it shows Wilbour using the latest technology of the age—cabinet cards—to reproduce the stela accurately and disseminate it as quickly and efficiently as possible. If he were alive today, would Wilbour would have been blogging about his discoveries to his friends?

At the First Cataract the course of the Nile is shallow and full of granite boulders: boats had to be towed through the rapids by the local fishermen (who charged a hefty fee), or a channel had to be dredged for safe passage.

Egypt – Fishermen at the first cataract, Philae. Brooklyn Museum Archives, Goodyear Archival Collection (S03_06_01_018 image 2369).

The boulders, however, were the ideal spot for kings to commemorate their achievements. They were the billboards of their day – but inscriptions carved into granite last longer than paper posters, and Wilbour was in his element discovering and copying these inscriptions. One he discovered, however, gave him particular problems:

Elephantine, February 6, 1889

We sailed in half an hour up to the picturesque island of Sehel. …  Thutmose III on a bigger piece of granite says that on the twenty-second day of the ninth month of his fiftieth year [c. 1425 BC], having ordered the cutting of this channel after he had found it boxed up by stones so that no vessels could pass, he rejoicing, sailed up to hew his enemies. The channel’s name was ‘Goodway Usertesen’; now its name became ‘the way made good by Thutmose III the immortal’, and, he adds, the fishers of Elephantine are to dig it out every year. But for many years these fishers have taken good care not to dig it out; they get money for pulling vessels up the way in which the stones seem to have been accumulating ever since Thutmose’s time. The best inscription I found was of thirty-two long lines, and very hard to make out, of a King Kharser, whose name I have never before seen. We rowed back in three-quarters of an hour.

Stela of ‘Kharser’. Brooklyn Museum Archives, Charles E. Wilbour Archival Collection [9.4.004]

Wilbour returned to Sehel the following year, with his family (‘Lottie’ his wife Charlotte, who was advised to stay in Egypt for her health; ‘Linnie’ and ‘Dora’ his daughters Eveline and Theodora; ‘Ned’ Eveline’s husband) and another Egyptologist, Professor Archibald Sayce of Oxford University, who had his own houseboat, the Timsaah (‘Crocodile’). He continued to work on his stela.

P 552 February 9, 1890

… Dr. Worthington and Sayce breakfasted with us; the doctor examined Lottie and reassured us that her lungs were unaffected. … Then came the mail with letters from New Bedford and Compton and Paris and elsewhere and papers from Montana telling of the election of Republican Senators. May they get in.

February 10, 1890

Went to Sehel and recompared part of the stele I discovered last year.. …

February 11, 1890

To Seheyl again in the morning. After noon we went to the west bank, Linnie and Dora to the old Convent and Sayce and I to Pig Rock, where we copied a store of inscriptions and a considerable fragment of a stele. Dora found the top of another. … In the evening Ned and I went to the Timsaah and Mr. A. P. Maudslay, who has worked seven seasons on the Mayan antiquities in Central America, showed and explained to us many fine photographs taken by him at Copan. He with four others of his family are on one of Cook’s new dahabeeyehs [houseboats], the Osiris.

February 13, 1890

…The unknown king of my stele bothers Sayce and me greatly. The character of the inscription puts it in Ptolemaic or Roman time and how a King not a Ptolemy or an Emperor could have reached the eighteenth year of his reign, passeth understanding.

February 16, 1890

…The Osiris came up and Maudslay gave Ned for me negatives, very fine, of my great stela at Sehel.

(adapted from Travels in Egypt: Letters of Charles Edwin Wilbour (Brooklyn, 1936)

The text of Wilbour’s stela told of a seven year famine in Egypt: the country was starving, temples were shut, law and order had collapsed. In a dream the Pharaoh saw Khnum, the ram-headed god of Aswan, who assured him that the Nile would rise again and the famine would end. In thanks, the King promised Khnum’s priests a share of the revenues from the land around Aswan.

For nineteenth century Egyptologists brought up reading the Bible, the Famine Stela was astonishing: it seemed to confirm the tale of Joseph interpreting Pharaoh’s dream of seven year’s famine.

Next week, I’ll post the second part of this story, where we’ll see what Wilbour made of this intriguing text and how he tried to make his Egyptological colleagues aware of his discovery.  In the meantime, catch up on our ongoing series of posts about Wilbour, if you’ve missed any.

Wilbour spent his winters in Egypt, working at sites throughout the country from 1880 until his death in 1896. Wilbour travelled from site to site by train, postal steamer, or hitching a lift on the steamer belonging to the Department of Antiquities. By the time of his visit in 1886, however, he had decided to buy a dahabiya (houseboat), which would accommodate him, his visiting family, and his library in greater comfort.

Brooklyn Museum Archives. Wilbour’s calling card. Charles E. Wilbour Archival Collection, [9.4.026], Notebook 3A

Travelling by dahabiya was simple: you used the prevailing wind to sail upstream (south), and drifted downstream (north) with the current. This method had changed little over millennia—the Egyptian hieroglyph for ‘travel north’ is a boat with its sail furled, and ‘travel south’ a boat with its sail raised.

Wilbour never regretted the purchase of The Seven Hathors: “Greece and Italy are delightful, but the moment when I feel twice as much alive comes to me when the Nile banks begin to slide past the dahabiya from Bedresheyn to Aswan.”

The following excerpts from Wilbour’s letters to his mother and aunt show his acquisition of The Seven Hathors, and its maiden voyage:

Cairo
November 29, 1886

Thursday Arminius the Copt came to my terms about his dahabiya, declared before witnesses that she was mine, and I went over to raise the Stars and Stripes on her. … We have in the house part a space 16 2/3 feet by 54 feet, just nine hundred square feet, and on the deck about seven hundred feet more covered in by canvas. Below I have to stretch a little to reach the ceiling, so there is no danger of Dora bumping her high hat. I think we shall be comfortable and only wish you had an Enchanted Carpet to transport you suddenly to this Land of the Sun.

Cairo
Monday December 13, 1886

They [Wibour’s wife Charlotte (‘Lottie’), their children, Victor, Evelyn, and Dora, and Evelyn’s husband Ned] arrived Wednesday after a bad voyage and ever since Lottie and I have been running about buying the things for housekeeping. You may get almost everything here, but you have to bargain which takes time.

Lantern Slide Collection: Views, Objects: Egypt. General Views\People [selected images]. View 051: Egypt – Market at Kasr-en-Nil., n.d., T. H. McAllister, Manufacturing Optician. 49 Nassau Street, New York. Brooklyn Museum Archives (S10|08 General Views_People, image 9794).

They are all very much pleased with the boat and instead of wanting to wait and see the splendours of Cairo are anxious to be off up the river. There are yet carpenters and plumbers and painters at work, but Victor says that it seems like home. Lottie is already speaking of the things she will put over to do next year and so her occupation in Egypt which was to be for this winter only, seems already growing to be like the English. We go out mostly afternoons to the boat and see the sunset there, which is gorgeous.

Lantern Slide Collection: Views, Objects: Egypt. General Views\People [selected images]. View 088: Egypt – Sunset on the Nile., n.d. Brooklyn Museum Archives (S10|08 General Views_People, image 9831).

… We have held Council over the boat’s name and have concluded to call her The Seven Hathors. It lends itself to hieroglyphic decoration and Egyptians will call her “Seven,” Seba. We find the Seven Hathors on most of the more perfect temples. In the sky they are the Pleiades. Being a wooden boat she would almost float if full of water, but in order to make a life boat I am having four hundred empty petroleum cans sealed up to be put in her holds at its sides. If she should ever fill with water they will lift seven tons and so prevent her from sinking. I have done this so that Lottie might sleep better…
Seven Hathors
December 20, 1886

We came on board Saturday the eighteenth and have not digested our trunks. And yesterday we took on board four hundred dollars worth of provisions, so you see we have a considerable chaos …

Brooklyn Museum Archives. Wilbour’s Notebooks: cover and supply list for the Houseboat. Charles E. Wilbour Archival Collection Notebook 2N, Notebook 2O and Notebook 3C.

Approaching Beni Suef
December 29, 1886

… Lottie has been struggling this far with our belongings and the rear room is beginning to get into shape. The deck is still pretty much chaos… We bought an eight-dollar sewing machine and Dora has been running it today. The Library is still encumbered with many eatables. But the machine begins to work and when we got back from Saqqara Lottie said she was glad to get “home”. It is a pleasure to have a moving house and ours is as big as the one Columbus first crossed in.

Tuesday January 4, 1887

We sailed to Bibbeh, where next morning we visited the Coptic Convent and Ned made a sketch in the Church of it… New Year’s Day we put up our streamer. The blue end of it was a cook’s apron. A Hathor hieroglyphic is applied to it in white and then on the white and red streamers below is a hieroglyphic 7, thus:

Brooklyn Museum. Wilbour Library of Egyptology. Travels in Egypt: Letters of Charles Edwin Wilbour (Brooklyn, 1936), p. 418.

Altogether it is our American colors adapted to our Seven Hathors name. When we get where there are good Pharaonic Hathors to copy Ned will do something for the decoration of the boat. At Minya we hope to find letters, and butter from Isigny in France, sent up from Cairo by post. Hitherto I have not eaten butter in Egypt. Even at Shepheard’s Hotel they do not have good butter…

I’m delighted to report that on March 6^th we had a well attended talk in the Library as part of a series of lectures presented in memory of Evelyn Ortner, a beloved Library Donor and Museum Guide who gave tours of the Egyptian collections. Our speaker was Dr. John Lundquist, former Curator of Asian and Middle Eastern Collections at the New York Public Library, who discussed nineteenth century references on Ancient Egypt. We own  several of the rare books that were discussed such as Belzoni’s Narrative of the Operations and Rosellini’s Monumenti dell’Egitto—you can even see one of the Rosellini volumes in the To Live Forever exhibition here. We also looked at several volumes of the Description de l’Egypte, the subject of a previous blog.

These rare books were from the personal library of Charles Edwin Wilbour (1833-1896) remembered today as a scholar, collector and accurate copyist. Indeed the collections he assembled  became the foundation of the Brooklyn Museum’s Egyptian antiquities collection and the Wilbour Library of Egyptology. Captivated by Egypt and its monuments, Wilbour spent every winter in Egypt starting in 1880 until his death in 1896.

He used his houseboat, named “The Seven Hathors,” as a place to entertain his fellow Egyptologists, family and friends. Wilbour acquired all of the important texts published on ancient Egypt available at that time and used his personal library as a way to educate himself. He kept key works with him in Egypt so that he could carry the books to specific sites to compare the texts with the inscriptions on the monuments. His unique annotations to these texts are important to researchers especially since they document monuments that have deteriorated significantly since Wilbour’s time. According to his son-in-law, the artist Edwin H. Blashfield (1848-1936), his passion for Egypt was tireless:

“In the center of the space was his steamer trunk, on the same was the huge folio of Lepsius and behind it on a camp-stool was the Egyptologist comparing texts. He stood discomfort wonderfully – with the mercury at one hundred Fahrenheit in February, he could spend long hours some twenty-five feet above the pavement, with his folio propped somehow between ladder and Egyptian gods in incised relief, upon the outer wall of Edfou or some other temple. Very heavy boxes of books accompanied him everywhere …”

After Wilbour’s death his children offered his antiquities and library collection to the Brooklyn Museum as a memorial to their father. Wilbour’s heirs continued to donate objects to the Museum and in 1932, the Charles Edwin Wilbour Fund was set up by Victor Wilbour to support both the Library and the Egyptian collections here at the Brooklyn Museum.

Stay tuned as Tom Hardwick, an Egyptologist who is volunteering here, blogs about letters Wilbour wrote while he was in Egypt and if you are in the museum, drop by to see a selection of photographs, letters and books documenting Wilbour’s work and his family interests on view in the library display cases on the second floor. If you would like to visit the Wilbour Library of Egyptology just send us an e-mail—we’d love to see you!

At the time Preissler made his drawings, Egypt was an inaccessible, mysterious land. Few objects were held in Western museums or collections, and hieroglyphic inscriptions could not be read. Preissler’s drawings are of interest not only because they record objects that may now be lost or damaged, but also because they show how these Egyptian objects appeared to an eighteenth century eye.

J. J. Preissler. Enthroned figure of the god Harpocrates, rear view. Red chalk on paper, c. 1725-1771. Wilbour Library of Egyptology, Special Collections

My favourite drawing shows the back view of a long-haired figure, its right arm bent at the elbow, seated on a falcon-backed throne. It’s hard (but not impossible!) to identify an object just from its backside, and I started to look for other works by Preissler to see if he’d made any other studies of this figure. As luck would have it, the Binghamton Art Gallery has two drawings of the front and side.

(left) J. J. Preissler. Enthroned figure of the god Harpocrates, front view. Red chalk on paper, c. 1725-1771. Binghamton University Art Museum. (right) J. J. Preissler. Enthroned figure of the god Harpocrates, left profile view. Red chalk on paper, c. 1725-1771. Binghamton University Art Museum.

These showed a naked child, holding one hand to his chest, and sitting on a throne shaped like a pair of lions. The Binghamton and Brooklyn drawings show a figure of the child god Harpocrates, and were probably copied from a small bronze statuette, like this Harpocrates now in Brooklyn (not the original of the drawings).

Seated figure of Harpocrates. Bronze, Egypt, Late Period, 664-323 BC. 37.686E, Charles Edwin Wilbour Fund.

In Egypt children were shown with a long plaited side-lock of hair, sucking their index finger. Preissler has misunderstood Harpocrates’s gesture, and the curly end of his sidelock has been turned into a horn floating above his hand. His soft, podgy body and his inquiring face are also more Western than Egyptian in appearance. Preissler didn’t make a straightforward copy of a the bronze figure, but turned Harpocrates into a flesh and blood sketch that looks almost like a study from a living sitter. I wonder if he actually arranged a model in the same pose as the bronze, or if this was all done from the original figure?

Thanks to museum displays and over two hundred years of Egyptological research, we’re now familiar with the basic conventions of Egyptian art: we can easily recognize what makes an object look Egyptian. The drawings show Preissler confronted with an unfamiliar, peculiar object from a far-off land, and struggling to understand and describe it. His puzzlement and wonder are still visible—and contagious—nearly 300 years later.

Susan A. Hutchinson, Founding Museum Librarian, with William Henry Goodyear, Founding Curator of Fine Arts in the Library Reading Room circa 1910.

Since the images collected by William Henry Goodyear (1846-1923) are generating interest today we thought it would interesting to look back at Goodyear and several of his colleagues who built the Museum’s collections over the years. So let’s declare 2009 the year of looking back and learning from history. Hopefully this exercise will educate us all as we move forward and learn about each other and our cultural heritage. Who knows maybe we will end the year in a more peaceful way than we started.

Let me start with a quote from artist John La Farge to William Henry Goodyear: “You have opened the window that has been closed for centuries, and have let in the light”.

I believe that La Farge was referring to Goodyear’s intense interest in photography as a tool to document the world he saw. A Yale graduate and student at the Universities of Berlin and Heidelberg, Goodyear devoted himself to teaching and lecturing about the history of art and architecture. After graduating from Yale in 1867, he traveled to Germany, Italy, Palestine and Syria to pursue his interest in architecture. It was in Pisa in 1870 that he began to focus on architectural details and later published in an article entitled “A Lost Art” in Scribner’s Magazine, the first of many essays he wrote about architectural refinements. Goodyear started his museum career in 1882 as a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and in 1899 came to the Brooklyn Museum as the first curatorial appointment made by the newly founded museum. At Brooklyn, Goodyear led a series of research and collecting expeditions with a mission to build an art collection. He oversaw the growth of the American, European and ancient art collections including the casts of Ancient and Renaissance sculpture as well as designing and installing exhibitions of newly acquired art.

Hall of Sculpture with Casts, circa 1904.

In addition to his curatorial mandate, Goodyear dedicated time to developing his architectural theory that historic buildings were planned with irregularities which he referred to as refinements. This study focused on architectural monuments found around the world from the Cathedral of Pisa to the temples of Egypt with stops in Austria, France, Germany, Great Britain, Greece and Turkey. Like his colleague Stewart Culin, founding curator of Ethnology from 1903 to 1929, Goodyear seems to have been interested in everything and this is evidenced in his photographs of people and places around the world from a street vendor in Istanbul to the vivid depictions of the world fairs of Chicago and Paris. Goodyear recognized the importance of these fairs as an educational tool to introduce cultures from different parts of the world. He, like Culin, also saw objects at the fairs and recommended their acquisition for Brooklyn. These photographs by Alfred Percival Maudslay were exhibited at the Chicago Columbian Exposition and collected for Brooklyn after Goodyear and Culin saw them at the fair. Indeed, Goodyear worked obsessively using photography as a tool to educate and a method to document his findings in the field in addition to his writings.

Maudslay photographs on view in the Chicago Columbian Exposition, circa 1893.

It seems that throughout his long life he developed theories that explored new themes in the history of art starting with his “Grammar of the Lotus” documenting continuing use of the lotus form in decorative art since its use in Ancient Egypt. He also wrote several popular histories of art and was one of the first to use actual photographs, as opposed to engravings, to illustrate these texts. He took and collected photographs and used them in the form of lantern slides to illustrate his many lectures–over 130 for the Brooklyn Museum alone–ranging from the art of ancient civilizations to the art of the nineteenth century. In addition to being known as an architectural historian, Goodyear was a scholar of anthropology, archaeology and ethnology with a focus on America, Egypt, Greece and Rome. All of this is evidenced in the photographs (lantern slides, negatives and prints) and his research (published and unpublished) found in the Museum Libraries and Archives.

His photographs offer detailed images of historic structures before the devastation of world wars and rampant twentieth century architectural “redevelopment.” His documentation of many buildings has served as guideposts to reconstruction of several monuments that have been destroyed or renovated over the years. But his influence went beyond architecture since it was his vision that laid the groundwork for two major art museum collections–the Brooklyn Museum and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He was responsible for recommending the acquisition of several important objects including the antiquities collection and library assembled by Charles Edwin Wilbour, America’s first Egyptologist. Goodyear also established the first children’s museum in America – the Brooklyn Children’s Museum. Today we all benefit from Goodyear’s scholarship and foresight as we see the world before us through his photographs and writings.

More to come about these early visionaries in Brooklyn, but today we are honoring Professor Goodyear by releasing more images from his archives of street scenes and mosques in Turkey in response to comments on Flickr Commons.

Thebes, Qournah plate 43

It is fitting that a volume of the “Description” is part of an exhibition that reflects the eternal aspect of Egyptian life and certainly the ongoing interest in Egyptology. Throughout the text Egypt is repeatedly described as the birthplace of art and science. In the eyes of the French, successive periods of foreign domination had robbed Egyptian society of its former glory. Napoleon feared that soon nothing would be left and the “Description” was seen as a way of preserving, at least on paper, what could be found in Egypt when he and his troops were there. Although some monuments so beautifully described in the “Description” have not survived, many more have been preserved and restored no small part due to the interest in Egypt generated by the “Description” and similar publications that followed it.

Wikipedia has a good account of the “Description de l’Egypte” or the entire contents may be found here.

The letter, dated 1926, was written by Hammad Hassab, a dragoman (guide) employed by Thomas Cook & Sons in Cairo. The letter urged a former client to consider a return visit to Egypt. As an inducement, a post card of one of Cook’s new Nile steamers was included (pictured above). Otherwise, the letter was quite ordinary, but Mr. Hassab’s business card (pictured below) wasn’t. Most of the space on the card identifies Mr. Hassab as a survivor of the Titanic.

Luckily, Titanic Passenger lists are readily available on line and Mr. Hassab is listed among the First Class passengers. At the time, he was a servant employed by Henry Sleeper Harper and his wife, Abigail. Mr. Hassab was said to be a very handsome but mysterious man and a subject of some interest to other passengers. On the night of the disaster, he, the Harpers and their dog were safely evacuated in Lifeboat 3. The following morning, Mr. Hassab sent a Marconigram (a marconigram was an early version of a radio telegram) to his brother Said at the Mena House Hotel. It contained the terse message, “All safe.” More information about Mr. Hassib can be found here.

Almost immediately after the sinking, a legend developed that the Titanic was carrying a ‘cursed mummy’. The story is just a story but Mr. Hassab’s provides a genuine Egyptian connection to the Titanic. If it’s true that ninety per cent of the value of an object lies in the story behind it, Mr. Hassab’s business card is a valuable object, indeed.