oi.uchicago.edu MOST ANCIENT EGYPT oi.uchicago.edu oi.uchicago.edu Internet publication of this work was made possible with the generous support of Misty and Lewis Gruber MOST ANCIE NT EGYPT William C. Hayes EDITED BY KEITH C. SEELE THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS CHICAGO & LONDON oi.uchicago.edu Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 65-17294 THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS, CHICAGO & LONDON The University of Toronto Press, Toronto 5, Canada © 1964, 1965 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. Published 1965. Printed in the United States of America oi.uchicago.edu WILLIAM CHRISTOPHER HAYES 1903-1963 oi.uchicago.edu oi.uchicago.edu INTRODUCTION WILLIAM CHRISTOPHER HAYES was on the day of his premature death on July 10, 1963 the unrivaled chief of American Egyptologists. Though only sixty years of age, he had published eight books and two book-length articles, four chapters of the new revised edition of the Cambridge Ancient History, thirty-six other articles, and numerous book reviews. He had also served for nine years in Egypt on expeditions of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the institution to which he devoted his entire career, and more than four years in the United States Navy in World War II, during which he was wounded in action-both periods when scientific writing fell into the background of his activity. He was presented by the President of the United States with the bronze star medal and cited "for meritorious achievement as Commanding Officer of the U.S.S. VIGILANCE ... in the efficient and expeditious sweeping of several hostile mine fields.., and contributing materially to the successful clearing of approaches to Okinawa for our in- vasion forces." Hayes' original intention was to work in the field of medieval arche- ology. His first field experience, however, was with the University of Michi- gan expedition digging the ruins of ancient Carthage. Thus archeology and art engaged his attention early in life, and he had won an M.A. and an M.F.A. at Princeton before he even dreamed of becoming an Egyptologist. Already a member of the Metropolitan Museum's Egyptian expedition at Deir el Bahri in 1927, Hayes found his place quickly and developed rapidly. He began his hieroglyphic studies with the private study of Alan H. Gardiner's epoch-making Egyptian Grammar (Oxford, 1927). This kindly giant of Egyptology was his inspiration, and the veteran found in his young disciple a kindred spirit, gave him personal instruction for several summers in England, and held him in close friendship to the end. Ultimately the older man was to outlive the younger by less than six months. Hayes was endowed with a beautiful mind. The perfection of his work- vii oi.uchicago.edu INTRODUCTION and he was ever a perfectionist-was well exemplified even in his first book, Royal Sarcophagi of the XVIII Dynasty (Princeton, 1935), which in every respect was a model publication and one of the most useful Egypto- logical Ph.D. dissertations ever printed. Its preparation took him into the eerie darkness of those ancient labyrinths in the Valley of the Tombs of the Kings where, surrounded by painted gods, snakes, headless spirits, and wailing ghosts of the departed, he copied hieroglyphs and studied the de- veloping form and decorative style of the quartzite coffins, the resting places of the Pharaohs. Thus he was able, in the tombs of the kings, to establish their chronological order, long disputed by the philologists and historians, by the style of their sarcophagi. Most of these wonderful monuments still lie in the tombs because of the sheer impossibility-lacking a Belzoni-of removing the gigantic monoliths from the depths to which they were lowered at the royal funerals so long ago. But Hayes was strong and adroit and determined. He was already as adept at handling stone fragments weighing a ton as at piecing together with his tweezers the faience fragments of broken tiles from the palace of Ramesses II. He did this in his second book, Glazed Tiles from a Palace of Rameses II at Kan~tr (New York, 1937); several of his articles record the assembly of mighty statues and sphinxes of Queen Hatshepsut and the shattered sarcophagus of her favorite, the Chief Steward Senmut. The ambitious Senmut possessed not one tomb but two in the Theban necropolis. One of these was discovered by the Metro- politan Museum expedition. The other was cleared by the expedition, and from some of the humblest and least glamorous objects which could possibly be found in such an operation Hayes produced his remarkable book, Ostraka and Name Stones from the Tomb of Sen-mut (No. 71) at Thebes (New York, 1942). A portion of this book was devoted to the pictures and inscriptions often rather crudely sketched or written on limestone fragments (ostraka), yet significant and interesting because the author was able to demonstrate that they were preliminary drafts of scenes and texts which were to be executed on the walls of the tomb. Since the tomb is now a sadly demolished wreck, some of the sketches provide the only surviving evidence of the nature of that noble funerary monument of ancient Thebes. A second section of Ostraka and Name Stones is a penetrating analysis of some obscure words pertaining to building, masonry, etc., found in the work records written on ostraka from the tomb. Here Hayes appears as the lexicographer, and every student of hieroglyphic can transfer welcome new meanings to his copy of the Egyptian Dictionary. But Hayes' philological studies were by no means confined to a nar- row segment of the Egyptian language. At Lisht the Metropolitan Mu- seum had conducted extensive excavations, and he had a good volume to show for his work there in The Texts in the Matabeh of Se'n-Wosret-ankh viii oi.uchicago.edu INTRODUCTION at Lisht (New York, 1937). It was a publication of some Twelfth Dynasty copies of the ancient Pyramid Texts. Among them he discovered a hitherto unknown pyramid text, and he was likewise able to demonstrate that the Middle Kingdom copies were derived from early originals though not actu- ally copied from the examples still preserved in the pyramids of the Fifth and Sixth Dynasties. On his return from Egypt in 1936 Hayes had become Assistant Cura- tor of Egyptian Art. Henceforth he was to devote most of his energy to the study of the Egyptian collections of the Metropolitan Museum. They are the finest and most extensive in the western hemisphere. With the instinct of a born educator he set out to interpret them to the public and to reveal their role in the development of civilization. He had already made a note- worthy contribution in this direction in one of his longest articles, his pop- ular "Daily Life in Ancient Egypt," illustrated in part with thirty-two extraordinary paintings done under his direction by H. M. Herget. This remarkable work, published in 1941 in the National Geographic Magazine (and still available in book form), combined the intimate knowledge of Egyptian art, crafts, industries, recreation, religion, and customs, which Hayes had by this time thoroughly mastered, with the artistic talents of Mr. Herget. A vast audience of National Geographic readers was thus given by far the best picture of Egyptian life ever achieved by modern scholar- ship, with each interpreted detail based on precise archeological evidence. It must be supposed that Hayes' mind was deeply preoccupied with the desire to interpret Egyptian culture to his contemporaries and to utilize for that purpose the rich collections of the great museum to which he was devoting his life. For within a year after his release from the United States Navy at the end of the war he had completed the manuscript of the first half of what was to be his greatest achievement, which he modestly entitled The Scepter of Egypt, a Background for the Study of the Egyptian Antiquities in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, though publication of the work was delayed for several years until 1953. The subtitles of the two volumes reveal their actual historical character: Part I covered the period in Egypt From the Earliest Times to the End of the Middle Kingdom, while the second volume (Part II) carried the story through The Hyksos Period and the New Kingdom (New York, 1959). In these two rich volumes, sumptuously printed with a multitude of carefully chosen photographs, Hayes traced the history of Egypt from the prehistoric beginnings to the end of the New Kingdom as the story was illustrated by actual objects in the collections. While guides and other handbooks to museum collections had been produced before- and some of them very good indeed-none was quite so ambitious as The Scepter of Egypt and none so fully and successfully enlightening to the user. In a total of more than nine hundred pages of text and with over five hundred ix oi.uchicago.edu INTRODUCTION photographic reproductions, the Egyptian objects in the Metropolitan Mu- seum tell their story to the visitor in a manner unparalleled in the world. But William C. Hayes' mind operated not only within the circle of his own museum. His developing historical interest led him to delve wherever he saw an opportunity to interpret the culture of ancient Egypt. Thus, be- tween the two parts of The Scepter of Egypt he produced a work of pure scholarly research which probably ranks as his best scientific publication. The Brooklyn Museum possessed a tattered papyrus manuscript acquired more than fifty years previously by Charles Edwin Wilbour. It consisted of five to six hundred torn fragments, many of them exceedingly small, and these were mingled in exasperating confusion with similar scraps of other papyri written in a virtually indistinguishable hand.