ANCIENT EGYPT IN AMERICA

BY MRS. SCHUYLER VAN RENSSELAER

I

THE tremendous ploughshares of the French Revolution, rooting out and burying many time honoured things, upturned into the light of day others long forgotten, unregarded, or misprized. Thanks to the guiding hand of General Bonaparte, one of these recoveries was the art of ancient Egypt. The French occupation of the Nile country lasted less than three years, yet it bore immediate and splendid fruit in the encyclopædic work called Description de l'Egypte. Other explorations, other great illustrated books, soon followed. England was awakened to interest by important collections taken from the French when they surrendered at Alexandria in 1801. Travelling savants and wealthy tourists began to bring home works of art. So did more or less commercially minded "antiquity hunters", exploring the sandshrouded temples, entering the Pyramids, discovering hidden tombs. The most successful of these was the Italian Belzoni, who worked partly on his own account, partly as agent for Henry Salt, the British consul-general at Cairo. Publishing the story of his adventures and exhibiting some of his finds in London in 1820, Belzoni figured for a time as a popular hero. Many of Salt's acquisitions were bought for the British Museum in 1823, others by the King of France for the Louvre. In 1824 Champollion made known his great achievement, the reading of the hieroglyphs. In 1836 the obelisk of Ramses the Great was set up on the Place de la Concorde in Paris, and soon the collections and the writings of Lepsius, and Wilkinson's books of a more popular kind, were spreading in Germany and in England the new knowledge of a civilization in regard to which Herodotus had remained for twenty-three centuries the chief authority.

Nor was America untouched by this new knowledge. Many

American travelers must have examined the collections rapidly growing in European cities, while the most indifferent could not escape acquaintance with some of the elements of Egyptian art as they had affected, especially in the designing of furniture, the development in France of the style of the First Empire. Not until near the middle of the century were the products of this style wholly submerged by successive waves of nondescript forms and patterns. So in old-fashioned American houses may still be seen beautiful pieces of Empire furniture brought home in the 'thirties and 'forties, and also a variety of articles de Paris modeled at long distance!-upon Egyptian suggestions: little marble sphinxes, sarcophagi, and obelisks adorned with makebelieve hieroglyphic inscriptions, which served as thermometers, inkstands, paper-weights, or "mantel ornaments". And every self-respecting American bookcase then contained at least one book on Egypt-Sir Gardiner Wilkinson's Manners and Customs of the Ancient Egyptians, first published in 1837.

But this was not all. More Americans than might be supposed visited Egypt; a number of them wrote books about it, two of which are still remembered,-Prime's Boat Life in Egypt and Nubia and Curtis's delightful Nile Notes of a Howadji,—and some of them brought home valuable antiquities for the benefit, as it has proved, of the public of today. The earliest of these was a Colonel Cohen of Baltimore, who believed that in 1832 he had been the first to carry up the Nile the flag of the United States. His collection, which contained a part of Henry Salt's, was not exhibited until 1884, when it was given by his heirs to Johns Hopkins University. But even before his day mummies had been more than once shown to our public. Between 1842 and 1850 George Gliddon, an Englishman whose father had acted as the first consul of the United States in Cairo, lectured here on Egypt with the aid of objects of art and of paintings enlarged from one of the great illustrated books. A volume of his lectures, printed in New York in 1843, had by 1847 run through fifteen editions, each of several thousand copies.

Of course all this does not mean that any real knowledge of Egyptian art was spread abroad in our far-off country when it had as yet no help from museums of art or even from photography.

Nevertheless there was interest enough, in America as in England, to show in the designing of many important buildings. Most of them, like Egyptian Hall in London, where Belzoni's collections were displayed, were grotesque, ridiculous travesties of Egyptian precedents. Much better were two of those in New York -the detention prison so commonly called the Tombs that it bequeathed the name to its successor on the same site, and the distributing reservoir on Fifth Avenue where the Public Library now stands. The architect of the one, finished in 1838, was John Haviland; the other, into which the water was turned in 1842, is thought to have been designed by the chief engineer of the Croton aqueduct, John Bloomfield Jervis, to whose credit High Bridge is also put. It is a pity that the Tombs and the reservoir outlived their usefulness, for as the best results of a passing phase of popular taste they had a certain historic value, and they were not travesties but frank and simple adaptations which served their purpose well and did not displease the mind or the eye.

On the other hand, many of our eastern cities and towns contain, or used to contain, would-be Egyptian buildings which anyone might rejoice to see destroyed, or buildings, even churches, in which pseudo-Egyptian and pseudo-Greek features were very queerly combined. They seem all to have antedated the Civil War, but since then Egyptian motives have often been used in cemetery gateways and monuments, recommended by their solidity and gravity of air and by the close connection of Egyptian art with the memory of the dead.

It was just before the Civil War that for the first time an American institution acquired an Egyptian collection-a very valuable one of more than 2000 objects, much the finest yet brought to this country and the first to be exhibited here. Formed by an Englishman, Dr. Henry Abbott, during a residence of twenty years in Egypt, it was shown in New York in 1853, and in 1860 was bought by a popular subscription in which many noted men of other cities joined, and given to the New York Historical Society. Unfortunately there was then no museum of art where it might have been more appropriately placed and better cared for. As many experts-Lepsius, Prisse d'Avennes, Wilkinson, and

Poole among them-had given Dr. Abbott aid and advice, the existence and the value of his collection were remembered in Europe. But in America, confusedly shown in over-crowded cases, uninstructively catalogued, and housed in a building which could not be visited without a permit, it lay for many years in a truly Egyptian darkness of oblivion. Even if a New Yorker remembered it, he could tell little more about it than that it contained certain mummied bulls reputed to be the only ones in existence. Yet from time to time other early collections came to keep it company. In 1908 the Society moved into a new building which it opened to the public, and in 1917 it put its Egyptian treasures in the hands of an expert for proper care, display, and explanation.'

The long neglect of these treasures was one of the signs that the interest excited by the opening of the ancient land to modern eyes had died down. More and more tourists were, indeed, "going up the Nile," but for the sake of health or the pleasures of travel rather than the study of antiquity. Even after the establishment of our museums of art interest revived but slowly. The first of them to give hospitality to ancient Egypt was the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, which in 1872 acquired by gift more than a thousand objects gathered early in the century by a Scotch collector-the nucleus of a collection which is now surpassed in this country only by the possessions of the Metropolitan Museum in New York. Close to the Metropolitan the obelisk of Thutmose III was erected in 1881. In 1889 the English traveler, Amelia B. Edwards, lectured here on Egypt-how successfully anyone will know who has read her book, A Thousand Miles up the Nile, still the best one, graphic, alluring, and illuminating, to prepare a tourist to enjoy his voyage. During the eighteen-nineties two American universities, Harvard and Chicago, began to offer instruction in Egyptology. And in 1899 the first American exploring expedition was sent out-by Mrs. Phoebe Hearst for the benefit of the University of California.

Public and private collections were now growing and multiply

1 A fuller account of our early collectors and collections may be found in an interesting article by Mrs. Williams, the curator of the Abbott Collection, in the issue for April, 1920, of The Quarterly Bulletin of the New York Historical Society.

ing. The Metropolitan Museum began its purchases of Egyptian material in 1886, although not until 1906 did it create that Egytian department which has developed with a rapidity astonishing to anyone who does not know why, in recent years, there have been better chances to acquire Egyptian works of art than those of many nearer lands and times. During these years the Government of Egypt has both stimulated and regulated exploration by granting to responsible institutions and individuals from other countries exclusive rights in certain selected places, all valuable finds to be divided between the explorers and the museum at Cairo. Under these conditions several American universities and museums have year after year kept their own expeditions in the field, while others have contributed to the cost of similar English undertakings and shared in the rewards. Generous persons have furthered this work, and others have conducted, under expert guidance, very successful explorations. By these private as well as corporate enterprises many of our museums and colleges have profited, as also by frequent and important gifts from friends who found their chance when valuable antiquities came into the market.

Meanwhile American Egyptologists, although still too few in number, have taken rank with the most accomplished; notably, by virtue of his writings as well as his explorations, Dr. Breasted of the University of Chicago, and Dr. Reisner who, working for the Boston Museum and Harvard University, has recovered from the veiling yet preserving sand the history of Ethiopia, at one time the vassal, at another time the overlord, of Egypt.

II

I should like to show how rich America now is in the multiform artistic products of ancient Egypt. And I should like to point out their special interest for the lover of art, their purely æsthetic significance. But I want still more to comment upon a certain peculiar importance that they have for the public at large, certain fundamental, elementary lessons that they teach more distinctly and more emphatically than could the assembled products of any other land.