One of the brainiest and certainly the best educated of the early
Egyptologists
was Swiss scholar Henri Edouard Naville, born in Geneva on June 14,
1844, the
son of Adrien and Sophia Naville. No other Egyptologist of his
generation (or
later ones?) could claim such a thorough preparation for participation
in the
discipline. A Swiss Protestant, he was schooled at the University of
Geneva; at
Kings College, London; and at the universities of Bonn, Paris and
Berlin, with a
special emphasis in philology. At Berlin he devotedly studied under
Karl
Richard Lepsius and later would serve as the latter s literary executor,
editing
five volumes of notes to Lepsius's Denkmäler (with the
assistance of
Ludwig
Borchardt, Kurt Sethe and others), which were published between 1897 and
1913. Naville first visited Egypt at the age of twenty-one in 1865, and while there copied religious texts in the Temple of Horus at Edfu, which he published as Mythe d Horus in 1870, as his first contribution to the literature of Egyptology. During the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-1871, Naville served as a captain in the Swiss army, helping to escort prisoners of Bourbaki s army into Switzerland following their defeat near Dijon. After the war he returned to his philological studies, particularly working on solar texts in the royal tombs of the Valley of the Kings, which he published in 1875 as Litanie du soleil; inscriptions recueillies dans les tombeaux des rois Th bes. He then turned his attention to translating the Book of the Dead, and by 1882 his name was already prominent in Egyptology as a major scholar in the field.
By this time he had also earned a reputation as a controversialist in certain scholarly matters, especially where he vigorously differed with the Berlin School on the Germans proposed Semitic origin for the ancient Egyptian language, and with his Berlin contemporaries for their improvements on the science of Lepsius and Heinrich Brugsch, which Naville considered very doubtful. R.H. Hall said in his Journal of Egyptian Archaeology obituary of the Swiss scholar that if he thought an idea was wrong he said so with emphasis. In addition to his running controversy with the Berlin School, Naville would also later argue with Sethe and American scholar James H. Breasted over Thutmosid succession, and Hall wrote of this dispute that the Swiss struck shrewd blows, and got by no means the worst of the argument on the whole, though on certain points the verdict must be given against him.
Another of Naville s early scholarly activities was his assistance of Eug ne Lef bure in the latter s publication of the Theban Tomb of Seti I; but it was as an excavator that the Swiss Egyptologist was best known publicly in his own day and to present-day students of Egyptian archaeology. He began the excavation side of his career when he was nearly forty years old, modeling his archaeological techniques on the best earlier examples known to him, particularly the work of Schliemann, Mariette and Maspero. That is to say, he excavated in the somewhat haphazard old school manner rather than employing the more exacting methodologies which were then being introduced by his younger contemporary and fellow EEF archaeologist Flinders Petrie, with whom he would often find himself in vigorous disagreement. Naville, a connnoisseur at heart rather than an anthropologist, preferred to work clearing great temples and standing monuments; the non-spectacular occupation sites and humble cemeteries which were attacked with gusto by Petrie held no attraction for the erudite gentleman from Geneva. He cared not at all for what he called les menus objects (petty things).
Naville's European reputation was already well established when, in 1882, he was invited by the British-based Egypt Exploration Fund to undertake excavations for the newly founded society. He began what would be a long association with the EEF (and later the renamed Egypt Exploration Society) in January 1883, with his excavations at Tell el Maskhuta, the official report of this work (The Store-City of Pithom and the Route of the Exodus, 1885) establishing the format for all of the memoir publications of the Society until 1920. In 1885-1886 Naville explored the Wadi Tumilat and identified at its west end what he thought was the biblical Land of Goshen. From the winter season of 1886 until 1889, he excavated at the site of Bubastis, particularly recovering materials associated with the Libyan Twenty-second Dynasty. From Bubastis and other Delta sites, Naville took back to England numerous monumental architectural and sculptural pieces, in particular the colossal head of Amenemhat III now in the British Museum; other museums (Cairo and Boston) were also the recipients of huge columns and Hathor-capitals excavated by him at these sites.
Naville returned to Egypt, especially to the Delta, to excavate for the EEF year after year: he was at Tell el Yahudiya and at Saft el Hinna in 1887, at Hierakeoplois in 1890-1891, and at Mendes and Tell Mukdam in 1892. Then in 1893 he went to Upper Egypt to begin what would be his most important excavation-work, at the Deir el Bahari Mortuary Temple of Hatshepsut. He labored there for the next three years (through 1896), revealing the long-buried great monument, recording its extensive inscriptions and reliefs, and undertaking a physical reconstruction of its architecture. In this he was assisted by D.G. Hogarth, Somers Clarke and a young Howard Carter; and Naville subsequently prepared a total of six royal folio volumes (The Temple of Deir el Bahari, 1895-1908) published by the EEF.
Some years later (1903-1906) he returned to Deir el Bahari to excavate the Montuhotep temple-tomb there with Henry R. Hall. Naville undertook an examination of the royal necropolis at Abydos in 1910 and his last field-work was the excavation of the Osireion at the same site, assisted by G.A. Wainwright; this was interrupted by the outbreak of World War I in 1914 and left unfinished.
In his obituary of Naville, Hall described him as a big man, personally, of imposing presence and strong features. ...His brown topi, tweed Norfolk jacket, and full trousers were well known in Egypt [unalterably worn by] ...the tall figure with the pince-nez on the prominent nose, [his] benevolent face framed in old-fashioned side-whiskers.... Naville married Marguerite, daughter of Count Alexandre de Pourtales in 1883; she was a talented artist who frequently executed plates for his publications. In addition to his many books, he published innumerable articles and reviews. A professor at the University of Geneva, the Swiss scholar was the recipient of a great many honorary doctorates and distinctions from British and other European universities; he was also vice-president of the Egypt Exploration Society and a Foreign Associate of the Institute of France. He died at Malagny near Geneva, age eighty-two. DCF Next: Jean Francois Champollion (1790-1832)