The Sphinx, in Cornelis de Bruijn's 1698 Reizen van Cornelis de Bruyn door de vermaardste Deelen van Klein Asia (Wikimedia)
YOU CAN LISTEN TO THIS EPISODE HERE OR ON YOUR USUAL PODCAST APP
Abd al-Latif did not have a great deal of time for the contemporary architecture of Egypt. That is not to say that he disparaged it, that he dismissed it. He simply did not put pen to many pages where it was concerned, not compared to Egypt’s older, ancient structures. However, he did still have some admiration for the Egyptian construction of his own time, for its architecture and clever design, for the well-planned use of the available land, the spacious residences with their windows facing north and wind towers projecting upward, funnelling cooling breezes down into the house. On the more luxurious end, those wind towers could be lined with marble but on the cheaper side were probably more like the plastered-wood ones of more recent centuries.
The streets and markets were wide, the buildings high and assembled in baked red brick and cut stone, and the latrine drainage channels well-made enough to outlast the houses above them. The residential compounds and dams showed equal expertise, and the bathhouses, the bathhouses were the real stars of the show.
They were of such quality that Abd al-Latif would write that “in no other land [had he] seen any that [were] more skillfully planned, more perfectly thought out, or finer either in appearance or to experience.” Their water, brought from a well, was heated in a series of cauldrons in rock, salt-lined furnaces before flowing into the baths, “a remarkably clever system,” our author noted. The changing areas were “beautifully laid out and elegantly built,” and for those who wished to avoid mingling with the crowd, there were private compartments too.
At one bathhouse, Abd al-Latif described a pool with marble facing, columns supporting a cupola, and coloured patterns on the vaulted ceiling. There were walls that had decorative stripes below and whitewashed sections above. The floor was paved in designs of contrasting marble, and coloured glass admitted light in “brilliant hues.” It all sounds incredibly nice.
Indeed, Abd al-Latif wrote, “The overall effect is such that, once one has entered the place, one is loath to leave it: even if some member of the ruling elite were to spare no expense in building a palace for receiving guests in state, and were to see his plan through to perfection, it would not be finer than one of these bathhouses.”
Safe to say that our writer did have some time for the more modern Egyptian building, but not much time, not many pages. Structures like those bathhouses were largely not what he would focus on, not compared to the remnants of Egypt’s past. Today, we’ll be talking about those.
Hello and welcome. My name is Devon, and this is Human Circus: Journeys in the Medieval World, the history podcast devoted to the stories of those who made those journeys across that world. It is, as you may by now have heard, a history podcast supported by a Patreon, a place where you can listen a day early, without any advertising, and to extra mini episodes—the last few have been asides on the Abd al-Latif story: unpleasant alchemy, a villainous physician—and you enjoy all of that for as little as dollar a month or as much as makes sense to you, and you can very much help me out in the process and keep this podcast on the road for many more journeys to come. Thank you very much everyone who has done so or continues to do so.
And now, back to the story, back to the Abd al-Latif al-Baghdadi in Egypt story.
Last time out, we were dipping into his writing on flora, fauna, and the health impacts of humidity and other factors. This time, we turn to the buildings and monuments of medieval Egypt, or rather not so much “medieval” Egypt in particular. There was, as you just heard, some material relating to the works of his contemporaries, but much like many people ever since and, indeed, today, his writing shows a fascination with the remains of ancient Egypt and what they contained.
Of these, Abd al-Latif said there were those “such as [he had] never seen nor heard tell of in other lands.” He set out to restrict himself to those which were most remarkable and which he had himself examined in person. He didn’t waste any time before getting to the pyramids.
Those were, as you might expect, the very first structures he would mention, and, even then, around the year 1200, he acknowledged they were “already so extensively discussed, described, and surveyed by so many.” It was like that with the lighthouse at Alexandria which he only wrote of as ‘so well-known that it need[ed] no detailed description,” but he didn’t skip over the pyramids in the same way. “They [were] very numerous,” he wrote. “All [were] situated on the Giza side of the Nile, and extend[ed] in the direction of Memphis, spread out along a distance of about two days’ journey … . Some [were] of clay and mud brick, but most [were] of stone; some [were] stepped, but most of them taper[ed] smoothly.”
Three at Giza specifically caught his eye, much as they still do now. Two of them, being of similar size, had in particular caught the attention of poets, who likened them, a little lazily one might say, to breasts swelling up from the ground. Those two, Abd al-Latif had read, were the tombs of the ancient prophets Agathodaimon and Hermes, though we know them to be those of the pharaohs Khufu and Khafre. The third, that of Menkaure, seems small in comparison, at least at first. Then, quote, “when you move closer to it until it alone fills your vision, the spectacle is so awe-inspiring that your sight will falter as you try to take it all in.”
This sense of awe extended to Abd al-Latif’s contemplation of the pyramids’ design, their construction, their creators. In one particularly striking passage, he muses over how their remarkable design and execution had, quote, “enabled the pyramids to endure time’s passing eras; or rather, it [had] meant that time itself [had] to endure the Era of the Pyramids.” A similar note had been struck by a poet in the previous century: “All that man builds is doomed to fear Time’s passing years; Alone on earth, these are the monuments Time fears.” It also reminds me of a Terry Pratchet novel.
These mighty efforts which alone allowed humanity to stare down time itself led Abd al-Latif not only to awe but to the minds of their makers. To meditate upon them, was to encounter the minds that had achieved their design and the expertise that had birthed them into reality. “Because of this,” he wrote, “they all but speak aloud of their builders, telling us what sort of [people] they were, giving voice to their scientific attainments and their intellects, relating the stories of their lives and times.”
On a more tangible note, Abd al-Latif provided his reader with measurements given by earlier surveyors, mentioning that were it possible he would have measured the pyramids himself. He did prefer to rely on his own observations, but here they are limited. He watched an archer fire an arrow up the face and saw the shot fall short, which tells us fairly little. He then heard that there were locals who routinely climbed to the top, something that he was clearly not prepared to do. Such a man was sent for, paid, and to the spectators’ amazement, went up as one might climb a staircase, “even more swiftly,” in sandals and a long, trailing robe. As instructed, the climber measured out the flat top with his turban and then recreated the dimensions with it on the ground.
So there was that, his mediated experience of the exterior—he could inspect the great stones joined by paper-thin mortar himself—and there would be something similar as to the interior of one of the pyramids too, one of the two larger pyramids in which there was an opening, not a door but an enterprising tunnel work that had happened to meet a hall within, the “Robbers’ Tunnel” you’ll see it called. Here, Abd al-Latif writes in vague terms of the “narrow corridors, labyrinthine passageways, well shafts, pitfalls” that had been recorded by others who had ventured aside, “obsessed with the pyramid and filled with fanciful ideas about it,” and always reached some point beyond which they could not go. He mentions how the route that most followed, one which you can find photos of online if like me you haven’t been yourself, took intruders into the pyramid up a slippery ramp to a square chamber—the “King’s chamber” as it’s known to us—and a stone sarcophagus.
Abd al-Latif would not be reaching that sarcophagus himself. He did start in, and most of the people he was with ascended to that chamber, but he did not, for he suffered an attack of vertigo and, quote, “only made it back out at [his] last gasp.” One can see why he would have been amazed by the local man who simply flowed up the outside of the pyramid in his sandals. From others, who had made their way in, he heard of pigeon-sized bats and how the multitude of the creatures and their droppings nearly blocked the way. It all sounds a bit claustrophobic to me, even if there were, as he wrote, “shafts leading upwards … to admit the breeze.”
Of course all of stone had to come from somewhere, and while the red granite was from elsewhere, the limestone came from quarries just across the Nile, the cavities shaped by the stone’s absence forming cavernous, interconnected grottos, known collectively, Abd al-Latif wrote, as “the City,” a place one could ride through, a horse beneath you and a lance held upright. You could ride for an entire day, he says, and still never reach the end, which I am assuming he didn’t actually do, as the excavations were not quite that extensive as all that, impressive as they were.
What impressed Abd al-Latif most though was neither those grottos nor perhaps even the pyramids across the Nile from them. It was another still-famous feature quite near those pyramids. “A learned man once asked me what was the most marvellous sight I had seen,” he wrote, before recording his reply: “The harmonious proportions of Old Father Dread’s face.” “The Terrifying One,” the Arabic is sometimes translated, or “The Father of Dread.” It’s likely better known to you as the Sphinx.
It was the facial features that attracted our writer to Old Father Dread, the “red pigment that [then shone] brilliantly as if still fresh,” the exquisitely harmonious proportions of nose, eyes, ears, and mouth, particularly impressive on such an enormous scale, and yes he did include the nose in his praise. This was nearly 200 years before that face was disfigured in the 1370s by a man known as “The Eternal Faster” who found it idolatrous, at least according to al-Maqrīzī. There were other attributions and explanations. There would continue to be, all the way up to stories of Napoleon’s cannons being fired at that ancient face. Abd al-Latif’s visit was also well before the excavations of the 19th and 20th centuries that brought its body back up from the sand. He knew of Old Father Dread simply as a head and neck protruding from the ground, based on which he extrapolated the size of its body, not knowing what that body actually was, perhaps, it is reasonable to suppose, assuming that a human figure might stretch down into the earth, obscured from sight.
That was not all that Abd al-Latif saw that remained mysterious to him. At Ain Shams, in the stone of the pyramids, and on buildings and monuments around them, he saw inscriptions in ancient writing which he did not understand, “engraved representations of humans and other living beings, and many inscriptions in the unknown characters; you seldom see a stone that is blank,” he wrote, “without either an inscription or some other engraving or image on it.”
Abd al-Latif could not make any sense of the hieroglyphs, and fair enough. He didn’t meet anyone who knew anyone else who could read them either.
One of the themes of this section of the book, much more so than any confusion over mysterious characters on the wall, is a sense of wonder and admiration. For Abd al-Latif, it was no different to marvel at human works than it was to marvel at those of nature, for an effort of impressive engineering itself “result[ed] from capabilities that [were] endowed by nature.” “God has created not only you,” he quoted, “but also what you make.”
One of the places where we really get that sense of wonder, is in the passages about Memphis, the ancient city of Misr as it appears in the text. There, Abd al-Latif wrote, a city had thrived in the Abrahamic period until it was destroyed by Nebuchadnezzar and lay dormant for forty years. There, a city had been, quote, “ruled over by nation after nation and rooted up by people after people.” There, the ruins stretched for a half-day’s journey in length and width. There, despite what time and human predation had done to the place, you, quote, “still [found] in Memphis wonders to elude the understanding of the most meditative mind, and to tie the most eloquent tongue that tries to describe them.” Closer examination did not rid them of their mystery. Rather, it made them seem ever more marvellous and moving, their “meanings yet more curious.”
So it was of the many skillfully made stone figures, with their wonderful attention to detail—in “the twist of the vein of the forearm,” “the softness of flesh,” “the tension of sinew”—with their exquisite proportionality which Abd al-Latif enthused over at substantial length. It was a quality he clearly placed great value on. As Abd al-Latif wrote, these were virtues that, despite what the quote/unquote “common people” thought, didn’t require their makers to live to a great age, have enormous bodies, or use magic wands that whisked massive stones away at their whims, an amusing parallel to the “It was the aliens who did it!” enthusiasts of our own time. Instead, they could only be achieved through “observation, dissection, and minute examination,” not to mention “a knowledge of engineering, the ability to focus one’s energies, an abundance of tenacity, perseverance in one’s labours, competence in the use of tools, [and] devotion to work.”
So it was also with a place known as the Green Chamber, a room cut from one block of stone within a great temple and covered within and without by engravings. On the outside, you find a sun, turned toward the sun rising over the horizon, along with stars and human and animal figures. Abd al-Latif saw these as not merely ornamental but allegorical for higher, nobler matters, signs indicating esoteric truths.
That chamber had resisted so much, standing solid and sturdy with its granite supports, but, quote, “ignoramuses and imbeciles [had] dug beneath them in their lust to find buried treasure. As a result, the chamber was displaced, its symmetry upset, and its centre of gravity disturbed, so that its own unequally distributed weight caused it to fracture… .”
It’s a striking image, a striking bit of outrage at those “ignoramuses and imbeciles,” and it’s a theme that we’ll pick up again after this break.
…
That Green Chamber at Memphis was not at all the only victim of Abd al Latif’s “imbeciles.”
There were the stone idols which Abd al-Latif wrote of with much admiration, of “...the sort of beauty that draws the onlooker’s eye, and at which one never tires of gazing.” Time had frayed at many. Hands had hewn the stone from some.
There were the stones of Memphis, smashed, Abd al-Latif deemed, by the most despicable people who “displayed the heights of avarice and the depths of rascality” in order to get at the metal clamps that had been used in their construction.
There was the immense Pillar of Columns at Alexandria, once, the Alexandrians he talked to agreed, surrounded by hundreds of lesser pillars of the same stone, but they had been broken and thrown down at the shore by a certain governor. To protect against forceful waves, he had claimed, or against the mooring of forceful visitors, but for Abd al-Latif it was, quote, “really an act of wanton and puerile vandalism, and the deed of someone who cannot distinguish between what is useful and what is harmful.” It is of course possible that it was both of those things, and the threat of hostile ships, perhaps crusading ones, was hardly an empty fear.
There were also the pyramids.
Those were very numerous, he observed, but not as many as they had been, not as many as they had been only recently. Abd al-Latif remarked on the pyramids’ time-defying properties, but that did not mean those same structures could entirely resist human folly.
The tone of Abd al-Latif’s writing here, or, at points, the substance of it, is that this was a time of folly. This was a time of the, quote, “proverbial third stone under the cooking pot,” the proverb in question a reference to how, when cooking outdoors, one might use two stones and then make do with the mountainside as the third leg of that tripod. When Allah threw the “third stone under the cooking pot” at you, after the first two had gone unregarded, that was the mountain crashing down around you and your ambitions.
Like with so many lamentable decisions over the years as to what buildings were to be preserved and how the landscape ought to be shaped—my own city of Vancouver has made a good many of those blunders in its relatively short existence—our author saw the damage done by his contemporaries and those who had come only just before him, the way their own prideful ambition had brought down that mountain.
He picked out a man named Qārāqush as one of those who was responsible, an emir in the time of Salah ad-Din he said, a time which had ended less than ten years earlier. It was this Qārāqush who had built the city walls of Cairo and Fustat, along with the citadel and its step wells, and the arches at Giza, “Marvelous structures,” Abd al-Latif said of the arches, “to be numbered among the works of giants.” He had, however, taken stone from many of the pyramids to accomplish all of this, and then those marvellous arches had been left in the hands of another, who was, quote, “devoid of foresight,” a man who mismanaged the arches in an attempted irrigation project and left some of them “shaken and cracked” without ever actually succeeding in the irrigation. “Rubble and other stones too small to have been suitable” remained of the pyramids that had been demolished. As for the big three, even those had not come away entirely unscathed, though as to those, Abd al-Latif would not be blaming Qārāqush.
This time, it was Salah-ad Din’s son Al-Malik Al-Aziz Uthman who was responsible, for his choice of friends if nothing else, for listening to his more foolish ones, Abd al-Latif says. At their urging, he sent forth an army of emirs, administrators, miners, workers, and artificers, along with soldiers on horse and foot, all following his order to destroy the three great pyramids.
In 1196-97, this army laboured for 8 months at their assigned task. They exhausted themselves both physically and mentally, striving until their resolve was in tatters, but what did they have to show for it? They would take the entirety of the day to bring loose one or two massive stones, and as each one tumbled with a great crash, it would bury itself in the sand, needing them to exert themselves to bring it loose again and then, with driven wedges, to break it down enough to be brought away.
They moved enough stone in this way that you would think it enough for the entire pyramid to be gone, but instead, Abd al-Latif wrote, “the only goal they attained was that of disfiguring the pyramid and exposing their own impotence and incompetence.” As for the damage they had managed, when Abd-al Latif asked a foreman of the stonemasons if he could ever manage to replace one of those huge stones were he given 1,000 dinars to do so, the man replied that he could never manage the repairs, even if paid many times more. That damage was done. Those stones were never going back. That pyramid would never again be quite as it was.
Maybe “folly” isn’t entirely the right word here for all of this, for Abd al-Latif was impressed by some of the works that had been achieved, those “marvellous structures” before they had been mismanaged for example. Sometimes reusing the resources at hand is the right thing to do, often even, but there does seem to be some regret to his writing, regret for all the present was doing to the past, for how the present was consuming a past that was pillaged for stone to facilitate new construction, for material wealth, for the product of human remains.
Abd al-Latif writes of how rulers of the past had long ensured the preservation of the ancient monuments, no matter their own ideas about them, or about their makers’ beliefs, and this had provided benefits. That historical record was preserved and carried forward. The words of scripture, which mentioned such monuments, were confirmed. And the surviving structures, quote, “remind[ed] one of the fate of past peoples and recall[ed] the end that befell them.” They were indicators as to how those people lived, how they thought, and more. But such things had stopped being valued.
As Abd al-Latif puts it, “people [had] been left to their own devices, at liberty to roam day and night,” which sounds fine, but the implication in the text is that this was indeed, not fine at all. Left to their own devices, free to follow their own whims and fancies, the people had strayed from the good. Those ancient monuments may have inspired awe at first, but then people’s thoughts had turned to baser desires, of the dinar and the dirham. They were, he wrote, like the proverbial wine drinker:
“Everything he saw, he thought to be a cup;
Everything he saw, the boy who tops it up.”
In this case, everything those people saw was less like wine and much more like loot, every fissure and crack in earth or stone, a potential path treasure, every idol and statue, a guardian and signal of wealth below. They chipped, and they dug, and they smashed. They crept into natural clefts in the hill “like cat burglars who have found devious ways into houses.”
For most, this thirst was left unquenched, and they spiralled into ruin, sinking all that they had into the hunt for treasure, but the desire remained, fuelled by the underground chambers that were discovered, filled with the, quote, “vast and innumerable throngs of the ancient dead,” and with the dead went treasure, of a kind.
There was gold foil, sometimes wrapping certain body parts, and other gold too at times, jewelry, ornaments, and ingots. You might find the tools of the profession the person had worked in life, a whetstone and razor for a barber or a weaver’s equipment. The cloth in which the bodies were wrapped was made into clothing or else sold to those who made packaging for druggists. So there was value in those tombs, just not necessarily always the kind of “treasure” one might be thinking of. And then there was the mūmiyā.
Mūmiyā was the substance “found in the body cavities and brain pans of ancient corpses,” the stuff that soaked in and saturated the bones. Apparently the root word for the English term “mummies,” mūmiyā is here described as being “black, like mineral pitch,” sticky and runny when exposed to the heat of the sun, and smoky when placed on lit charcoal, emitting a smell that Abd al-Latif thought indicated a mix of asphalt and myrrh. Indeed, the embalming fluid is known to have included, at different times, such substances as bitumen, wood pitch, wood tar, frankincense, and myrrh.
Abd al-Latif differentiates this mūmiyā, that of the unearthed body cavities, from “mūmiyā proper,” that which “comes down from the mountain peaks with the waters that run off them, then coagulates like tar,” that which he quotes Galen as saying “well[s] up from springs, as do tar and naphta.” Where this mountain mineral pitch was not available, the embalming fluid made a very capable substitute for medicinal applications, of which there were apparently a great many, from external wounds to internal issues, and the embalmed product was certainly a very affordable substitute. Abd al-Latif found it plentifully available and purchased three heads of it for half an Egyptian dirham, an amount he termed “a trifling sum.” The seller showed him a sack full of the stuff, meaning a sack of objects like, quote, “a thorax and abdomen packed with mūmiyā.” It was a fairly grim business, but just one of those resources which were gathered in harvesting the human past. Sometimes you did not always find human remains at all.
In one grotto complex which Abd al-Latif examined, he found room after room with different animals, all mummified: dogs, cats, cattle, etc. In his travels, he found, quote, “God knows how many skulls of cattle, and also of sheep and goats,” found “entire hillocks composed of the remains of dogs, containing in all perhaps 100,000 individual dogs or more.” One might find all manner of birds, beasts, and insects. There is a story of a stone sarcophagus, within which was found another sarcophagus, and then, within that, a coffin. At the centre of this Russian doll was an “albino lizard.”
From one informant, Abd al-Latif heard of how the man had been approached by treasure hunters who reported a sinkhole that had opened up, and their suspicion that valuables were there to be had below. They went to the location, accompanied by armed men, for surely there were those who would let you do the digging and then try to collect the prize for themselves, and when they dug down, they found a large, sealed jar. They had been right. There was treasure, and when they cracked it open, they found many small objects wrapped in cloth. But the first one, when they unwrapped it, proved to be a small fish that had “as good as turned to dust,” and the second, the same. They took the jar back to town and set it before the governor, but though they unwrapped every last little bundle in the jar, all they had to show for were the crumbing remains of innumerable ancient fish. It was time-consuming. It gained them nothing. But it could be worse.
A passage which I’ve found particularly startling ever since I first read it, and which you may have heard me talk about before, concerns another group of treasure hunters. Searching for riches near the pyramids, they cracked open a sealed jar to find honey, and naturally, they began to taste it, as one would. That was when one of them happened to notice the hair stuck to his finger. That was when he noticed and he pulled, and he brought the entire well-preserved body of a boy to the surface. From my perspective this was indeed, quite a bit worse, but then the treasure hunters in question probably weren’t too upset, for the body was decorated with “jewelry and other ornaments.” That, I would imagine, would be considered to be a good haul.
Towards the end of this section, Abd al-Latif despairs of ever communicating all he’d seen. At Abusir alone, he wrote, he had seen, quote, “more marvels than this book could possibly contain.”
Towards the end of this section, he considered those ancient dead once more. Some were so shattered by time that they had come to look like the fibres of a date palm. Most, however, were “better preserved than the remains of the people who perished in the year[s] 1200 and 1201.”
We’ll end on that ominous note, and we’ll get to those years, to those people, next time.
Thank you for listening, everyone. If you are listening on the Patreon feed, you’ll see something extra on that same feed soon. If not, I’ll be back here with the next Abd al-Latif episode, and I’ll talk to you then.