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Wilbour and the Stela of the Seven Years’ Famine: Part II

Tom Hardwick on June 29, 2010

The first part of this story showed the American Egyptologist Charles Edwin Wilbour discovering and translating a long rock-cut text on the island of Sehel. Wilbour was very excited by the text. It described a seven year long famine in Egypt which was only brought to the end by the intervention of the God Khnum, the god of nearby Elephantine.

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?

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Wilbour and the Stela of the Seven Years’ Famine: Part I

Tom Hardwick on June 24, 2010

Wilbour's letters to his family, kept in the Museum Archives, give a vivid picture of his travels in Egypt and the research he carried out there. Much of this work consisted of his checking earlier publications of Egyptian monuments against the originals themselves, but sometimes he was the first to discover and translate an inscription. In this post we can follow Wilbour making an important discovery on the island of Sehel in the First Nile Cataract, just south of modern Aswan. 

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.

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Fashion Design and Costume History in the Library's Collection

Beth Kushner on May 11, 2010

The fashion plates, magazines, photographs, and scrapbooks now on view in the Library display cases complement two exhibitions: Healing the Wounds of War: The Brooklyn Sanitary Fair of 1864, in the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art Herstory Gallery, and American High Style: Fashioning a National Collection, in the Schapiro Wing.

Leloir, Héloïse Colin (1820-1873) Costumes d'Enfants. Fashion plate from La Mode Illustrée, 1864.

Just as American High Style spotlights important objects from the Brooklyn Museum's costume collection, this small display hints at the extensive resources on fashion design and costume history in the Library's collection.  We narrow our focus on the Civil War era to match the Brooklyn Sanitary Fair exhibition, but the Library also holds significant examples of 20th century American fashion design, including original sketches.

Voigt, Lewis Towson. Fashions for October: Promenade Costume and Boy's Dress. Wood engraving from Harper's New Monthly Magazine, v. 27:no. 161 (Oct. 1863), p. 719.

Le Moniteur de la Mode and Godey's Lady's Book are precursors of today's glossy, full-color Cosmopolitan and Vogue. Women's magazines of the 19th century printed many black & white fashion plates and a few hand-colored ones in each issue. The fashion plates from Harper's New Monthly Magazine are captioned: "Furnished by Mr. G. Brodie, 300 Canal Street, New York, and drawn by Voigt from actual articles of costume." You'd probably dash off to Brodie's and say, "I saw your promenade costume in Harper's-- make me one in green taffeta." Several plates from Harper's New Monthly, like this one, can be found in The New York Public Library's Digital Gallery. You can browse the complete contents of Harper's New Monthly (from 1850 to 1899) in Cornell University Library's Making of America Collection.

 

Studio portrait photographs by J. Renowden, Brooklyn NY ; Johnson, Williams & Co., New York NY ; Rintoul & Rockwood, New York NY, et al., circa 1860s.

Studio portrait photographs are valuable sources for costume research. The stiffly-posed children in these pictures are wearing their best (and probably itchiest) dresses. Boys, as well as girls, wear dresses in these photos and engravings.

 

I hope you'll visit the Library to see this display, and if it sparks your interest in the 1860s, make sure to visit the Civil War Dressing Room on the 4th floor and the 5th floor gallery called A Nation Divided: The Civil War Era.

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