Introduction

During the summer of 1987 I made my first trip to the Giza plateau. I had gone to Egypt to study at the Center for Arabic Study Abroad, a yearlong program based at the American University in Cairo. Soon after our arrival, my fellow students and I followed Shahinda Karim, an art historian, on a tour of Giza. When we reached Cheops, she pointed out the roughhewn entrance where streams of tourists were pouring in and out of the pyramid. This opening, she said, was not the original entrance, which had been covered over by the original builders. Rather, it was the work of a ninth-century visitor, the caliph al-Mamun. I had heard of him: he was a member of the Abbasid dynasty, which had dominated Southwest Asia from 750 until the mid-tenth century and come to symbolize the so-called golden age of Islamic civilization. Though not as famous as his father Harun al-RashId, the high-living caliph of the Thousand and One Nights, he was known for his interest in science and his sponsorship of translations from ancient Greek into Arabic. But what was he doing in Egypt, so far from his capital of Baghdad? And why did he make an opening in the Great Pyramid?

When I asked Prof. Karim these questions, she referred me to the Khitat (Topography), by the 15th-century Muslim scholar al-MaqrIzl. Al-Maqrlzl turned out to be a figure of interest in his own right. Born in Cairo, he served as a Friday preacher at two of the city’s major institutions: the mosque of ‘Amr, the oldest in Egypt, and the madrasah (law school) of al-Hasan, which still stands at the base of the Citadel. He went on to serve as chief administrator of the mosque of al-Hikim, which stood then as it stands now at the end of Shari‘ al-Mu‘izz. At the madrasah of al-Mu’ayyad, he taught Hadith: the reports of the Prophet’s words and deeds, and the criteria for judging whether particular reports had been accurately transmitted. After working for a time in Damascus, he returned to Cairo and devoted himself to writing history until his death in 1442. Besides the Topography, which describes the major monuments of Egypt, he wrote treatises on the history of the world and the life of the Prophet, as well as essays on famines, price inflation, minerals, honeybees, and coins (Rosenthal 1991 and 2008; Rabbat 2003).

According to al-MaqrIzI’s sources, the Giza pyramids were built by one Surid, a king of Egypt, who foresaw in a dream that the earth would be destroyed by flood and fire:

He ordered that the pyramids be built and filled with figures and wonders and treasures and statues and the bodies of their kings. He commanded the priests to inscribe everything the sages had said, so they recorded on the ceilings, walls, and columns all of the occult sciences claimed by the people of Egypt, including pictures of all the stars and planets, the names of drugs along with their beneficial and harmful effects, and the arts of spell-casting, arithmetic, geometry, and the other sciences, explained for anyone who could read their script and understand their language. (MaqrIzI 1970: 112; cf. SuyutI 1939: 21-2)

Many years later, the pyramids attracted the attention of the caliph al-Ma’mun, who ‘‘decided to demolish one to find out what was inside it.’’ Told this was impossible, he insisted on breaking into a pyramid, evidently Cheops. ‘‘So fire was lit, and vinegar was sprayed, and crowbars were applied, and blacksmiths set to work, and the fissure was created that remains open today.’’ After ‘‘breaking though the wall,’’ the workers stumbled across a precious vessel whose market value turned out to be exactly the amount spent on the excavation up to that point. Apparently, the pyramid builders had planted the vessel as an incentive to stop the demolition. Realizing that he could never prevail against a civilization capable of such accurate predictions, the caliph stopped work on the pyramid (MaqrIzI 1970: 113; cf. SuyutT 1939: 24). But some of al-MaqrlzI’s sources tell a different story. One claims that the caliph’s workmen succeeded in reaching the interior of the pyramid. There they found a sarcophagus containing a figure wearing golden armor and a green gemstone the size of a chicken’s egg (MaqrIzI 1970: 116; cf. SuyutI 1939: 24). Another source offers more detail and a different ending:

In [the pyramid] were passages going down and others going up, all of them frightening and difficult to move through. At the top was a square chamber some eight cubits on each side. In the middle of it was a closed marble basin. When the cover was removed, it was found to contained nothing but decayed remains. Al-Ma’mun then put a stop to further excavations.(MaqrIzI 1970: 118; cf. Suyiltr 1939: 28-9, 30)

What is one to make of this account? For many European readers, al-MaqrIzI’s inclusion of mutually contradictory and often bizarre reports created the impression that his account - and by extension all Arabic accounts of ancient Egypt - are largely fanciful. To correct this impression, it is useful to recall that al-MaqrIzI was trained as a Hadith scholar. In the field of Hadith, a transmitter is bound to convey reports verbatim and to attribute them to their sources without concerning himself with contradictions, absurdities, or questions left unanswered. True to this standard, al-MaqrIzI includes one report that says that the caliph succeeded in breaking into the pyramid and another that says he failed, but offers no explanation for the discrepancy. Even in the case of patent absurdities, such as the story of the buried vessel, ‘‘responsibility lies with the source,’’ as the Arabic saying has it. As it happens, al-MaqrizI did not necessarily believe everything he reports: the first thing he says about the pyramids is that the structures have inspired many stories, ‘‘most of them false’’ (MaqrizI 1970: 111).

Al-MaqrIzI’s account of the pyramids was known in Europe as early as 1801, when it was picked apart by the French Orientalist Silvestre de Sacy (d. 1838; on him see further Irwin 2006: 141-50). In his article, de Sacy points out that the caliph cannot have entered the pyramid by the original entrance since the latter had been deliberately concealed by the builders. Nor could he have made the tunnel that leads to the ascending corridor: ignorant as he must have been of the internal structure of the pyramid, he is hardly likely to have struck upon the corridor merely by removing blocks at random from the outside. De Sacy thus concludes that the expedition never happened. To support his conclusion, he adds that the Syriac chronicle of Denis of Tell Mahre, a Jacobite clergyman who accompanied al-Ma’mun to Egypt, mentions the pyramids but says nothing to indicate that the caliph tried to break into one (de Sacy 1801: 498).

Given the information available at the time, de Sacy’s arguments against al-MaqrIzI are quite cogent. But they have been allowed to stand largely unchallenged for some two centuries (see, e. g., Graefe and Plessner 1965 and 2008) despite the discovery of new evidence, both archaeological and literary, about the nature of the caliph’s project. A modern Egyptologist, Rainer Stadelmann, has proposed what in retrospect seems an obvious solution: al-Ma’mun entered the pyramid by clearing out a tunnel originally torn out by someone else (Stadelmann 1991: 110 ff., a solution actually suggested in passing by de Sacy himself; see ‘Abd al-LatIf 1810: 220). But Stadelmann gives the caliph no credit for curiosity, calling him a plunderer and a treasure hunter (Stadelmann 1991: 264-66). References by other scholars, who usually have no access to Arabic sources, are often equally dismissive and condescending (see, e. g., Lepre 1990: 71). Worst of all are the amateur accounts, which favor garbled versions of al-MaqrIzl’s reports retold in high Orientalist baroque. One particularly imaginative website describes the caliph as ‘‘struggling up the Grand Gallery, his men cautiously pushing his bulk from behind,’’ ‘‘sweating and cursing’’ as he crawls into the burial chamber, and ‘‘absolutely livid’’ when he finds the sarcophagus empty (Ellis 2008). All of this, of course, is nonsense.

The idea that Arabic sources have nothing of interest to say about ancient Egypt may well go back to de Sacy, who complained about the many authors who provide nothing but ‘‘childish fables, ridiculous stories, and traditions apparently devoid of any basis in historical truth.’’ Yet de Sacy himself went on to acknowledge that some Arabic authors ‘‘have added to the mythological history of the country a large number of useful facts and observations’’ (‘Abd al-LatIf 1810: ix-x). Modern scholars, unfortunately, have often proven less perceptive. In their approaches to the tradition, they have made a number of unwarranted assumptions. They assume, for example, that a fantastic story is somehow less of a historical document - that is, a piece of evidence for what people believed to be true - than an archaeological report. They assume that any interest Muslims might have taken in the ancient monuments was confined to robbery and plunder. Most oddly, they often seem to assume that there existed an obvious alternative to fantasy and tomb robbery - namely, modern science - that medieval Muslims perversely declined to pursue. Such a claim does an injustice both to the integrity of classical Arabic responses to ancient history and to the uniquely modern nature of scientific Egyptology.

To assess al-MaqrlzI’s reports about the caliph and the pyramids - or indeed any reports from the Arabic sources - we can examine them as both as records of the collective imagination and as potential sources of new facts about events in the past. In what follows, we will return to the example of al-Ma’mun both to establish what he was really doing in Egypt and to speculate about the significance his activities might have had. To do so, we must venture beyond the reports compiled by al-MaqrizI, who is far from being the only Arabic author to write about Egyptian antiquities. A recent survey by El-Daly lists 26 Arab writers’’ (an inaccurate term, as will be seen) on the subject, ranging from Ibn ‘Abd al-Hakam, who died in 871, to Jalll al-Din al-SuyutI, who died in 1505 (El-Daly 2005: 161-82). Various studies by Haarmann add tlie names of several later authors who wrote about Egypt in Ottoman Turkish (Haarmann 1996 and further references cited). Of the Arabic authors, three - al-Mas‘udI (d. 956), ‘Abd al-LatIf al-BaghdadI (d. 1231 or 32), and al-IdrIsI (d. 1251) - have especially interesting things to say about the reception of Pharaonic Egypt in later times. Before looking at their work, however, it will be useful to address a few matters of historical background.