The Noah Sphinx

I have never attended a séance, but from what I have read they seem to consist largely of interrogating the deceased. As this is odd on so many more obvious levels, it has never before struck me that it is also a strange (if not downright rude) way to go about having a conversation. A true dialogue with the dead would surely include these knowledgeable souls initiating topics for discussion rather than just responding to our agenda.

Dialogues with the Dead: Egyptology in British Culture and Religion, 1822-1922 (Classical Presences)

David Gange (Author)

OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

368 pages

$123.96

David Gange never explicitly explains the title of his book, nor does he develop the metaphor of dialogues with dead. Nevertheless, his splendid cultural history of British Egyptology is an account of a century of people studying the land of the pharaohs in order to get answers to the questions that interested them rather than to find out what mattered to ancient Egyptians.

And what the Victorians wanted to know was what those who had dwelt beside the Nile long ago had to say about the Bible. A lazy assumption of secularization has infused accounts of modern history, making people imagine that a religious focus was decreasing as the 19th century progressed. Like the plagues of Egypt, however, it actually intensified at the end. Thus the Egyptology of the 1880s and 1890s was significantly more preoccupied with scriptural connections than was that of mid-century.

I have always admired the clever way that Jeanette Winterson used the first eight books of the Old Testament as the chapter titles in Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit. Similarly, Gange's five well-researched chapters are named after the chronology of ancient Egypt, complete with first and second intermediate periods. The tour de force chapter that dramatically and convincingly overturns the existing narrative is thus "The Middle Kingdom: Orthodox Egypt, 1880-1900."

In the 1840s, religious iconoclasts were smirkingly confident that Egyptology would debunk orthodox Christianity. Higher critics assumed that findings would strengthen their case against a traditional reading of the Bible. Unitarians expected soon to be able to demonstrate that the doctrine of the Trinity was borrowed from Egyptian paganism. Freethinking polemicists improved on the hint: "Bind it around thy neck, write it upon the tablet of thy heart: Everything of Christianity is of Egyptian origin." Religious conservatives glanced at the pyramids nervously.

But the tide turned, and the new expectation in the last quarter of the century was that ancient authors would be proved accurate—whether it be Homer, Herodotus, or Hosea. The Assyriologist George Smith translated some tablets held by the British Museum which turned out to contain part of a Babylonian account of a Great Deluge. Like the New York Herald sending Stanley to find Livingstone, in 1872 the Daily Telegraph commissioned Smith to go dig around in the Middle East and come back with the rest of the story. He went to the site of ancient Nineveh and uncovered more of this biblically resonant flood narrative after just one week of fieldwork!

This stupendous success created a sanguine generation which hoped to decide what scriptural proofs it wanted most and just go off and get them like they were ordering takeaway. Let's find Joseph's mummy next! The Egypt Exploration Fund was founded in 1882. Its first task was to discover the route of the Exodus—which it promptly did to its own satisfaction.

In the following year, digging began at what was identified as the site of Pithom, a city which the Hebrew slaves were forced to build (Ex. 1:11). Thrillingly, the structure uncovered was made of more than one type of brick; the top portion—believe it or not—of bricks that did not use straw. The novelist and Egyptologist Amelia Edwards enthused: "We see the bricks which they had to make, and did make, without straw, while their hands were bleeding and their hearts were breaking. Shakespeare, in one of his most familiar passages, tells us of 'sermons in stone'; but here we have a sermon in bricks."

The Egypt Exploration Fund, apparently imagining Tudor masonry, wanted 1,000 bricks sent back as sacred-relic mementos for its donors, but shipping these large, heavy objects in any significant quantity was impracticable—and probably only the most pious of Victorians would really have wanted a huge, disintegrating hunk of mud monopolizing the surface of their mahogany desk.

While such over-reaching is good for a laugh, Gange is careful to observe that the biblical associations were often being made by the best archaeologists and linguists—and in reasonably responsible ways. Flinders Petrie, "indisputably the most significant figure in the history of British Egyptology," first became interested in ancient Egypt through listening to the sermons of his Plymouth Brethren father.

Even the most gifted scholars were so immersed in the scriptures that they often saw the Bible everywhere they looked. There was a serious theory that the Great Sphinx at Giza was a monument to Noah. It was decided that the pharaoh Akhenaten wrote the original version of Psalm 104. Petrie visited an orphanage and his trained eye could not fail to notice that two of the children were Hittites.

A related question was: What is a good Christian to think of Egyptian religion? In the middle of the 19th century, the trend was to emphasize its repulsiveness (a people in such spiritual darkness that they worshipped dogs!) and to use this as an object lesson in divine judgment. As the Victorian age wore on, however, the Egyptians were increasingly enlisted as witnesses to sacred truths. The most optimistic of such observers claimed to have found in the religion of the pharaohs confirmation of the doctrines of the Trinity, the immortality of the human soul, and even the resurrection of the body.

Dialogues with the Dead is an impressive and important scholarly contribution, and part of what makes it so satisfying is Gange's grasp of the fact that the discipline of Egyptology was thoroughly entwined with mass culture. Popular enthusiasm for ancient Egypt was unbounded. When the businessman John Marshall decided to build a new flax mill in Leeds, he had erected an imposing neo-Egyptian structure, the Temple Works. A huge obelisk dubbed Cleopatra's Needle was transported at great expense to adorn London. (Its twin went to New York.) When Knowledge, a weekly journal of popular science, was founded in 1881, its editor understood full well what it would take to grab people's attention. The first issue included "Was Ramases II the pharaoh of the Exodus?", a series which, like a film franchise too popular to end, was stretched out for three months.

Moreover, the meshing of biblical and Egyptological enthusiasms defied any neat boundaries. Religious skeptics of long standing would suddenly be overcome with fascination that a particular scriptural text was being confirmed by archaeology. Conversely, orthodox clergymen would plunge into occult Egyptian rituals. The Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor was actually led by an Anglican vicar. The archbishop of Canterbury, E. W. Benson, was so enamored with ancient Egypt that the family cat was named after the god Ra. Primed with such zeal, his daughter, Margaret Benson, had Egyptology and Anglicanism so thoroughly blended together in her head that when she arrived in situ she found herself, in the fullness of her heart, confessing her sins to the Sphinx. But as ever in this story, the zany lies side by side with the substantial: Benson went on to become the first woman to lead an Egyptian excavation.

Many people believed Charles Piazzi Smith—who, indeed, was brilliant—when he claimed that the Great Pyramid was a divine revelation of mathematics. (Part of what the Almighty wished to communicate was that the inch was a sacred rather than merely arbitrary form of measurement. God-fearing Americans who stubbornly resist the metric system might want to look into it.)

Ancient-civilization novels such as H. Rider Haggard's King Solomon's Mines (1885) became wildly popular. Haggard befriended leading Egyptologists, toured the Nile, and collected antiquities. Not content with such due diligence, he also continued his researches with the aid of spiritualism and finally—leaving no stone unturned, as it were—hallucinogens.

Enthusiastic amateurs set off to see the sites in such numbers that Petrie eventually took to excavating in just his pink underpants as a polite hint that he was not currently taking social calls. On the other hand, the line between amateur and professional was not easily drawn. William Myers was an army officer who spent his boyhood at Eton and was killed in the Boer War. In between, he was stationed in Egypt. The boredom was unbearable. He failed at sketching and, in near despair, attempted the clarinet (it was "harder than I thought"). He was at last saved by developing an interest in antiquities, and his collection, donated to his alma mater, is one of the most impressive private ones in the world.

Looking back in 1903, the clergyman C. H. W. Johns observed how so many finds had played out in the public consciousness: "We seem to have a repetition of an old experience. Something is discovered which is first hailed as a remarkable confirmation of Scripture, then seen to be a serious impeachment of its accuracy, finally known to be purely independent and unconnected."

The last chapter of Dialogues with the Dead, "The New Kingdom," deals with the period after 1900, when the discipline managed to insist that it needed to listen to the distinctive music of the Nile rather than continue to allow Moses to call all the tunes. The longsuffering dead would finally get a chance to natter away about their own preoccupations.

Timothy Larsen is McManis Professor of Christian Thought, Wheaton College. His sixth monograph, The Slain God: Anthropologists and the Christian Faith, is just out from Oxford University Press.