Ancient Egyptian Works of Art by Arthur Weigall

The idea of a 'Curse of the Pharaohs' emerged following the death of George Edward Stanhope Molyneux Herbert, the fifth Earl of Carnarvon after excavation of perhaps the most famous of all ancient Egyptian treasures - the tomb of King Tutankhamun.

The general public were amazed at the unbelievable wealth reflected in the amount of solid gold funerary pieces that were entombed with the minor Pharaoh. This treasure had been buried, along with its owner Tutankhamun, for over 3000 years. His resting place had remained undisturbed until its discovery in November 1922 when Howard Carter and Carnarvon, his sponsor, excavated a step cut into the rock in the Valley of The Kings beneath some workmen's huts at the base of the tomb of Rameses VI. What they discovered was to be the monumental culmination of a number of years (and considerable investment on Carnarvon's part) searching for a tomb they weren't even at all sure existed! Is it surprising that the general public perhaps felt that it was wrong to disturb King Tut? Perhaps people felt that the excavation was a disrespectful act of violation and that the idea of the Curse of King Tut was a justified form of revenge on any invaders of his tomb.

The popular myths of 'The Curse of the Pharaohs' and the 'Curse of King Tut' were fuelled by the British journalist and Egyptologist Arthur Weigall who himself In 1912, whilst working as an Egyptologist, had found a tomb that people originally thought belonged to King Tutankhamun. Weigall worked for the Daily Mail and was the perfect choice to go to Egypt to report on the discovery of the real Tomb of King Tut running, however, into almost immediate opposition with Lord Carnarvon due to the exclusive rights on the story that he had granted to the rival Times newspaper -a monopoly which Weigall regarded as both wrong and politically damaging to British relations with Egypt at a time when nationalist feeling was strong . Lord Carnarvon had signed a £5,000 contract with the London Times, plus 75 percent of all profits from the sale of Times articles to the rest of the world. Weigall was furious about this monopoly on the news and so he and other reporters were forced to find different angles to the story. With an inspired flair for sensationalism, his retaliation was suitably theatrical as he appealed to the public's sensitivity regarding such matters as 'disturbing the dead' and said he felt 'pity' for the 'ordeal' the mummy faced and was quoted when referring to Carnarvon's jovial manner when entering the tomb for the first time: 'If he goes down in that spirit, I give him six weeks to live'.

In the event, it was closer to 4 months before the 'curse' would strike, in the spring of 1923, when Carnarvon was bitten on the cheek by a mosquito. During his morning shaving routines, he further aggravated the mosquito bite which soon became infected and he suffered a high fever and chills. A doctor was sent to examine him but medical attention arrived too late and Lord Carnarvon died. At that exact moment the lights in Cairo mysteriously went out. And so Weigall had already started to play his part in the myths and legends which surrounded the story of the Curse of King Tut. His background in the theatre adding greater appeal to a story that would inspire horror novelists and film makers for many generations to come.

Arthur Edward Pearse Brome Weigall, born in 1880, was an English Egyptologist, stage designer, journalist and author whose works span the whole range from histories of Ancient Egypt through historical biographies, guide-books, popular novels, screenplays and lyrics. Born in the year in which his father, an army officer, died on the North West Frontier, his mother became a missionary in the inner-city slums of late Victorian England. After attending Wellington College, a school with strong establishment and military connections, Weigall started work as an apprentice clerk in the City of London, but a youthful fascination with geneaology led him to the Pharaohs of Ancient Egypt and so into Egyptology, indeed, in his introduction to 'Ancient Egyptian Works of Art', written some 20 years later, he emphasises this long-held belief in the importance of historical context:

'In such an enormous range of time it is not always a simple matter to give a date to an object, but I have tried here, even at the risk of rashness, to assign each piece to a definite reign or epoch, and to avoid the usual generalisations which make the compiler's task so easy but which help the public so little.'

As a young man he found work with the English Egyptologist William Matthew Flinders Petrie - a pioneer of systematic methodology in archaeology and preservation of artifacts, Petrie held the first chair of Egyptology in the United Kingdom, and excavated at many of the most important archaeological sites in Egypt, such as Naukratis, Tanis, Abydos and Amarna, from whom he would learn much about the importance of methodical cataloguing of discoveries. His first job at University College London and then at Abydos in Egypt, but Life with Flinders Petrie was notoriously harsh, and after a while Weigall went to work for Friedrich Wilhelm von Bissing, a German Egyptologist. In early 1905 Howard Carter was staying with Arthur Weigall at Saqqara (a vast ancient burial ground, home to the step pyramid designed by Imhotep for King Djoser (c.2667-2648 BC) and the oldest complete hewn-stone building complex known in history), when an incident with some French tourists took place that was to significantly change both his and Weigall's lives. Because of his stubbornness and his sense of propriety, Carter ejected some drunken French tourists who had been fighting with the Egyptian guards at the burial vaults of the sacred bulls. When the French tourists complained, Carter was asked to give an apology, which he adamantly refused to do and so was forced to resign his post as Chief Inspector of Antiquities for Upper Egypt. Suddenly, at the age of 25, Arthur Weigall was appointed to replace Howard Carter in Luxor, responsible for protecting and managing the antiquities of a region that extended from Nag Hammadi to the border with Sudan.

At Luxor, Arthur Weigall threw himself with immense energy into aspects of the job that in his view had been somewhat neglected by his predecessor – including the protection and conservation of monuments that were steadily vanishing into the ravenous markets of Europe and North America. He remained in Luxor until 1911 amidst a time of intense activity – the discovery of the tombs of Yuya and Tuya, KV55 and the tomb of Horemheb - and during this period wrote both a popular biography of Akhnaten and 'A Guide to the Antiquities of Upper Egypt'. He worked with Alan Gardiner on the tombs of the nobles and may well have helped Howard Carter to the placement with Lord Carnarvon that led to the discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamun. However, the 'glittering' world of Edwardian society in Egypt in which he found himself entangled was too much for him and a nervous breakdown took him from Egypt, and World War I brought an abrupt end to his plans to create an institute of Egyptology for Egyptians.

Stepped Pyramid at Saqqara

In London during World War I Arthur Weigall became a successful set-designer for the London revue stage, and so an association with film began and he worked with Bannister Merwin, Jack Buchanan, and Phyllis Monkton on the film Her Heritage. In the 1920s Lord Northcliffe appointed him film critic for the Daily Mail and it was this decade that saw him compile 'Ancient Egyptian Works of Art' – a book whose focus is set firmly upon the artistic merit of the pieces reproduced within and not, as Weigall himself puts it, the value of the object as a 'curio'. This emphasis upon artistic value, as opposed to archaeological relevance or the transient nature of the fashion-dominated commercial markets similarly reflects both Weigall's desire, ignited during his time in Luxor, for the protection of the antiquities of Ancient Egypt and his 'critic's' search for 'true' art. As Weigall says himself in his extensive introduction:

'The available works on Egyptian art are seldom arranged so much for their artistic as for their archaeological guidance. Egyptology, being in its youth, has had of necessity to remain in the hands of archaeologists; but the time has come for it to submit its material to the scrutiny of ordinary persons of taste, so that Egyptian antiquities may cease to be regarded merely as curios, and that the best may be recognised as glorious works of art.'

Although not the most visually spectacular of books on ancient Egyptian art (all of the images are photographs and therefore in black and white), what 'Ancient Egyptian Works of Art' sought to achieve upon publication was to bring to the public's attention the artistic evolution of such a great culture. Through its chronological layout, it endeavoured to comprehensively chart artistic accomplishment from the considerably skilled tool work of the earliest dynasties, (through inclusion of, amongst other artefacts, a little ivory statuette of a king that, although made over 5000 years ago, shows artistic skill greater than that known in Europe five hundred years ago), to the 31st Dynasty of the Ptolemies and Roman Emperors, the native art of whose age continued to exist side-by-side for many years with the Greek art of Alexandria.

Only a decade after 'Ancient Egyptian Works of Art' was published, at the age of 54, Arthur Weigall died. During his first marriage to Hortense Schleiter, an American, he wrote vivid personal accounts of his life in Luxor and Upper Egypt and his second marriage (to a pianist, the sister of Beatrice Lillie) returned him to the world of show business as a talented writer of lyrics but still, in many people's minds, he will forever be inextricably linked to the sensationalism that surrounded Howard Carter, the excavation of King Tutankhamen’s tomb and 'The Mummy's Curse'.

Contributed by Jane

(Published 3rd Dec 2014)