Past Perfect: In Defense of the Realm

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It’s not surprising that the young Herbert Eustis Winlock (1884–1950), son of one of the highest officials at the Smithsonian Institution, was exceedingly curious about the world. After completing his studies in ancient history at Harvard, the 22-year-old Winlock signed on as the youngest member of the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art’s expedition to the royal necropolis at el-Lisht, an early-second-millennium B.C. site 25 miles south of Cairo. Winlock was later transferred to the Kharga Oasis, about 100 miles west of Luxor, where he helped restore a temple of the god Amun. In 1911 Winlock began excavating the mortuary complex of the 11th Dynasty pharaoh Mentuhotep II (2010–1998 B.C.) at Deir el-Bahri in the Valley of the Kings. Here he made a most remarkable discovery: the bodies of 60 soldiers slain in battle and buried in linen shrouds decorated with the cartouche of Pharaoh Mentuhotep. (This find is vividly described in the following excerpt from his Excavations at Deir el Bahari, 1911–1931, published in 1942.) Winlock’s work at Deir el-Bahri concluded his career in the field; in 1932, upon returning to the U.S., he was named director of the Metropolitan Museum. As his eulogist remarked following his death in 1950, Winlock had the rare ability to “‘retroject himself’ into a past civilization and make some of it come alive again for his contemporaries.”

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The month-long Mohammedan fast of Ramadan was upon us in March that year, and we had kept on only a small gang of men for just such jobs as this. The tomb was re-opened and all of its gruesome tenants brought outside … In the hot sun they were extraordinarily unpleasant—to put it mildly—and they had all the look of the dried-up corpses of Copts of whom many had been buried in the neighborhood. Still there was something not quite Coptic about the bandages, and the men were told to start early in the cool of the next morning, sorting out the linen which the thieves had ripped off of the bodies, to see if by any chance it was marked. It seemed unlikely, but to assure a conscientious search a bakshish was offered to any man who would discover a bit of inscription.

By seven o’clock next morning the men were down at the house with some thirty bits of marked linen (see photo of marked linen in this article), and by noon the number had been doubled. What we never expected had happened. Here were sixty-two absolutely typical examples of Eleventh Dynasty linen marks … [including] a curious, enigmatic ideogram which we had already found on the bandages of ’Ashayet and the women of Neb-hepet-Reµ×’s [Mentuhotep’s] harim. Furthermore, only a few weeks before, we had recognized the same mark on a chisel dropped by some stone-cutter in the catacomb tomb 032at the bottom of the hill, and we had concluded that it must have denoted property of the royal necropolis, or of its dead, in the reign of Neb-hepet-Reµ× [Mentuhotep]. After all, then, the sixty corpses in the tomb were four thousand years old, preserved in that dry, hermetically sealed, underground corridor in an unbelievable way.

From the point of view of physical anthropology the find had attained an unexpected importance … [Thus far] we had obtained a disappointingly small amount of information on what physical manner of men had descended from Thebes about 2000 B.C., conquered Memphis, and started the second great period of Egyptian culture. Here, however, were sixty individuals definitely of the very race we wanted to know about, and an urgent telegram was sent off to Dr. Derry to come up from the medical school in Cairo to examine them …

The first and most obvious thing which we remarked about these bodies was the simplicity in which they had been buried. As we had already seen, probably no more than two or three could have had coffins and in the crypts the rest must have been stacked up like cord-wood with no other covering than their linen wrappings. These last, where enough had been left by the thieves to judge, seem to have averaged no more than some twenty layers of sheets and bandages, which are less than one may expect to find on even a middle-class body of the period. As our examination went on, this same hurried cheapness became evident in the embalming—or perhaps more accurately lack of embalming, for at the most little could have been done to these bodies beyond a scouring off with sand …

So far as we could see, all of [the bodies] had been buried under identical conditions and all at the same time. Moreover, all were men, and as Derry’s examination proceeded they turned out to be remarkably vigorous men, every one in the prime of life. We found none who showed any signs of immaturity and only one whose hair was even streaked with gray. Another curious point was that there did not seem to have been a single shaven head among the lot. On the contrary, every one of these men had a thick mop of hair, bobbed off square at the nape of the neck as on the contemporary statuettes of soldiers from Assiuµt [shown below]. Sometimes it was curled and oiled in tight little ringlets all over the head.

However, it was broiling hot; Derry’s time was short; and ahead of us lay a long unpleasant task. We were wasting no time on theories, therefore, and had methodically measured the first nine bodies when the tenth was put on the table and Brewster noticed an arrow-tip sticking out of its chest …

Up to that time our work-tent had been a mere laboratory. From this moment onward it took on some of the gruesomeness of a field dressing station—only the front was four thousand years away.

Before we were done, we had identified a dozen arrow wounds and we felt certain that we had missed many others. So neat and small were they that they would easily pass unnoticed in the dried and shriveled skin except in those cases where some fragment of the arrow had been left in the bodies. Of head wounds we noted twenty-eight and again we felt justified in concluding that every one of these sixty men had met a violent end. This seemed especially likely when we discovered that six of the bodies on which no wound was visible to us had been torn by vultures or ravens, and that could hardly have happened except on a battlefield.

Obviously what we had found was a soldiers’ tomb. To judge from the cheapness of their burial perhaps only the three who had had coffins 033were more than soldiers of the rank and file, and yet they had been given a catacomb presumably prepared for dependents of the royal household, next to the tomb of the Chancellor Khety. Clearly that was an especial honor … This fight must have been one which meant much to the King Neb-hepet-Reµ× [Mentuhotep]. To us, unfortunately, lacking a single line of inscription from the tomb—for the linen marks [shown below] tell us nothing beyond the date—it was only a nameless battle of the dim past.

And yet, without unduly stretching our imaginations, we can see how it was fought.

It was not a hand-to-hand encounter. We saw nothing that looked like daggers or spear stabs; none of the slashes which must have been inflicted by battleaxes, and no arms or collar bones smashed by clubs, as one might expect from fighting at close quarters. Many of the head wounds—for the moment we will omit a certain class of crushing blows on the left side of the skull—were small, depressed fractures in the forehead and face such as would be given by smallish missiles descending from above. From the same direction must have come several arrows which found their marks at the base of the neck and penetrated vertically downward through the chest, or one which entered the upper arm and passed down the whole length of the forearm to the wrist. Such would have been the wounds received by men storming a castle wall, and with this clue to guide us we had only to turn to the contemporary pictures of sieges at Deshaµsheh and Beni Hasan. The defenders line the battlements armed with bows and arrows, with slings and with handfuls of stones. The attackers rush up to the walls with scaling ladders, or crouch beneath them with picks, endeavoring to sap the defenses under a rain of missiles falling on their heads and shoulders, only precariously protected by their companions’ shields.

It must have been during an assault on a fortress, then, that our unknown soldiers fell, under a shower of sling-shots on heads protected by nothing but a mass of hair … One of them had been hit in the back just under the shoulder blade by an arrow which had transfixed his heart and projected some eight inches straight out in front of his chest. He had pitched forward, headlong on his face, breaking off the slender ebony arrow-tip in his fall, and the ragged end between his ribs was found by us all clotted with his blood. It was only after he was long dead that those who gathered up his body had broken off the reed shaft sticking out of his back, for that end had no trace of blood upon it.

With the attack beaten off there had followed the most barbarous part of an ancient battle. The monuments of Egyptian victories always show the king clubbing his captives in the presence of his god, and the battle pictures show the Egyptian soldiers searching out the enemy wounded to despatch them. Usually they grab the fallen by the hair and dragging them half upright, club or stab them, and as they swing their clubs with their right hands their blows fall upon the left sides of their victim’s faces and heads. We recognized at least a dozen who had been mercilessly done to death in this way. One of the wounded had fallen unconscious from a sling-shot which had hit him over the eye; another had been stunned by an arrow which had all but penetrated one of the sutures of his skull; and a third probably lay helpless from loss of blood ebbing from the arteries in his arm torn by an arrow. None of these need have been fatal wounds, but evidently, as soon as the attackers had retired out of range, a party had made a sortie from the castle to mop up the battlefield, and when the last breathing being had been finished off, their bodies were left lying beneath the walls to be worried and torn by the waiting vultures and ravens … The ancient pictures of the carrion birds devouring the slain were made only too real by these mangled corpses.

Unquestionably a second attack on the castle had been successful or these bodies never could have been recovered for burial in Thebes. Furthermore, the reed arrows with ebony tips used by the defenders show that the castle was in Egypt, and we know that no part of Egypt successfully resisted King Neb-hepet-Reµ× [Mentuhotep] … —Reprinted by permission of Kegan Paul International.