The Godfather: Peter Corris on Toby Wilkinson’s Egypt
In the mid-1980s I visited Egypt, briefly. I did the usual things – spent some time in Cairo and Alexandria, saw the pyramids and the Sphinx, went up the Nile by boat to Luxor and Karnak and did some temple gazing. The monuments left me cold and, after reading Toby Wilkinson’s excellent book The Nile (Bloomsbury, 2014) I now know why.
Wilkinson is an old Egypt hand with many books on the country to his credit and he has distilled his knowledge into what is cast as a piece of travel writing but is much more. Beginning in Upper Egypt, Wilkinson plots a journey (actually several journeys over some years) down the river all the way to the sea. The book deals with geography, geology, hydrology, history, archaeology, anthropology and politics, all, enlivened for the reader by the sense of being carried along by the great river.
Like the best travel writers (Paul Theroux, for example), Wilkinson knows that when you don’t have a personal story to tell about a place (and he has a few of those), you tell someone else’s story. Through its long history Egypt is an almost inexhaustible source of stories. Like that of Min, the fertility god. The doyen of Egyptologists, Flinders Petrie (grandson of the circumnavigator of Australia, Matthew Flinders), uncovered two huge statues of the god. Wilkinson describes the classic depiction of Min:
A tall, standing figure, swathed in tight bandages with twin ostrich plumes on his head, with one arm raised behind his head, holding a flail, and the other grasping the base of his huge erect penis which protrudes through his clothing.
As his chief backers were two maiden ladies, Petrie was constrained to describe Min as ‘in his usual attitude’, without explanation. And when he published photographs of relief drawings of the god, plaques carrying relevant information were strategically placed.
Egypt exercised a fascination for Europeans from ancient times onwards and never more than for well-heeled Brits in the 19th century. A reaction from academic Archibald Space in the early 1880s is typical:
Every day was a fresh revelation to me, the cloudless skies and warm air … gave me a sense of life such as I had never felt before, and for the first time since I was born I found it a pleasure to live for the mere sake of living.
This kind of intoxication drove some Europeans to write well and some to perform great feats of engineering and archaeological discovery. Others, like Dorothy Eady, who was convinced she had had an earlier life as a priestess in ancient Egypt and had been the lover of a pharaoh, it drove quite mad.
The story of Egypt is one of multiple conquests, religious change, exploitation and wanton destruction of its heritage, but, as Wilkinson, sometimes poetically, demonstrates, the Nile is Egypt and Egypt is the Nile.
After being immersed in the book I became aware of why the temples and statues hadn’t captivated me. Every block of stone moved had a heavy cost in human sweat and blood. If the rulers of Egypt from the earliest times to the present had spent less time propitiating imaginary gods and celebrating their ephemeral power, and more on improving the lot of the people, the country might not be the mess it is today.
