To understand how a boy born to a German farm family in 1733 came to be part of one of his century’s most ambitious and consequential scientific expeditions, we need to look at history. Niebuhr grew up on the threshold of the Age of Enlightenment, that period of growth in Western intellectual development that did so much to shape Europe’s understandings of the rest of the world—including the lands, peoples and cultures to its east, “the Orient.” Unlike many in the West who viewed the Orient judgmentally, Niebuhr adopted a more empathic attitude toward people and places he encountered over nearly six years of travels. As he wrote in his diary, “[c]ultures are not good or bad—they are just different.”
If it had not been for the king of Denmark, however, the expedition to Arabia might have never occurred. Like other learned Europeans of his time, King Frederick v was painfully aware of how little was actually known about the East: Other than the Bible and a few tales of European travelers, the Arabian Peninsula was still almost entirely a terra incognita. The king proposed to change that. Enthralled by the intellectual achievements of Prussia’s Frederick the Great, Frederick v eagerly responded to an expeditionary proposal put to him by Johann David Michaelis, distinguished theologian and orientialist of the University of Göttingen in central Germany.
Michaelis outlined five goals that won the king’s favor. First, the expedition was to explore the geography of Arabia; second, it would record the plants and animals en route; third, it was to describe the habits, customs and architecture of the people; fourth, it would seek to learn about diseases and remedies peculiar to the region; and finally, it was to collect as many antique books and manuscripts as possible.
Michaelis also posed a list of specific questions. He wanted to know, for example, if tides could have parted the Red Sea; whether a land bridge had once linked the Horn of Africa with Arabia; and if stars really shone more brightly in Europe than in the tropics. The project was truly scientific in scope, and in keeping with the spirit of the Age, the king requested that the expedition be conducted with “an open-mindedness towards everything that was new, along with a respect for other ways of seeing.”
Selecting candidates for this project was no easy task. Michaelis eventually chose six men for the expedition. The linguistic expert was Friedrich Christian von Haven of Denmark; the biologist was Peter Forsskål of Sweden, a student of Carl Linnaeus, “the father of taxonomy”; the artist was George Wilhelm Baurenfeind, a German; the physician was Christian Carl Kramer of Denmark; Lars Berggren, also from Sweden, was the servant; as cartographer and—most importantly—treasurer, he named Carsten Niebuhr, a military surveyor who held the rank of lieutenant.
For the first stage of their journey to Constantinople, the expedition was given the man-o’-war Greenland, which departed Copenhagen on January 4, 1761, with all aboard but von Haven, who was still in Europe and had arranged to embark in Marseilles. It took four attempts for the ship to break out of the harbor’s ice into the North Sea. To compound their early difficulties, the explorers had set off in the middle of the Seven Years’ War, and England’s Royal Navy waylaid the ship in the Mediterranean in search of contraband. While on board, Niebuhr was stricken by dysentery.
Seven months later the expedition debarked on the northeastern Aegean island of Tenedos. From there, the members took a small Turkish boat to the mainland and on July 30 entered Constantinople. In the Ottoman capital they were greeted by turbans, veils and the shady balconies of the East. There they began their work, collecting specimens and purchasing books and manuscripts in the backstreets of the city. Most importantly, they received permission from the Ottoman authorities to continue their voyage toward Arabia. A few weeks later they sailed south for Alexandria.
According to Niebuhr’s diary entries, the expedition spent a year in Egypt.
After a brief stay on the Mediterranean coast they traveled inland to Cairo, where they found comfortable lodgings in the French Quarter. Niebuhr’s son Barthold Georg, a diplomat and historian who wrote an appendix to Michaelis’s memoirs, explained that although not having traveled “any higher up than Cairo,” the crew immediately set about collecting scientific evidence. Biologist Forsskål recorded some 120 species of plants. He also studied the caravans unloading their wares in the busy markets: cotton, silk, pearls, emeralds and diamonds came from Makkah; and dyes, ivory, parrots, ostrich feathers and slaves, he noted, came in from Sudan.
Niebuhr mapped Cairo and explored its elaborate irrigation system. In addition, he studied clothing, customs, musical instruments and games, noting in his diary that “[i]f the Mahometans [sic] show any degree of passion for any one game, it is for chess, at which they spend, sometimes, whole days without interruption.” The Pyramids particularly fascinated Niebuhr. There, he not only used his surveyor’s octant to calculate the height of the Great Pyramid with great accuracy, he also recorded the hieroglyphs, particularly those glyphs that appeared repeatedly, hoping “[t]his fact may be of some use in helping to [understand] the meaning which they were intended to convey.” He also mapped dozens of villages along the Nile Delta.
Proving his mettle as a resourceful individual with an appetite for hard work, the young German surveyor’s qualities would soon be put to harder tests.
The following year the expedition made its way east to Suez, where its real desert journey began. Now attired in Arab clothing, and outfitted with tents, beds, pots, flour, rice biscuits, butter, coffee beans and their array of scientific instruments, the team arrived at the small town on August 31, 1762. While Forsskål remained in Suez with his companions to study Red Sea tides, marine life and boatbuilding techniques, von Haven journeyed south to the Sinai Peninsula’s mountains, in particular to Jebel el-Mokateb (“Mountain of Inscriptions”), to examine its epigraphy. The artist Baurenfeind was to accompany him, but he had fallen ill, so Niebuhr had to go in his place.
Niebuhr was not happy. Part of the problem was that von Haven, the eminent Danish philologist, was condescending not only to Niebuhr—the low-born farm boy—but also to everyone else on the expedition. His ill treatment of the group’s Arab guides made matters even worse. Niebuhr, by contrast, proved more accommodating toward his colleagues, and he quickly learned how to interact as an equal with the Arabs, confessing, “I fought to gain the confidence and friendship of one of the [guides], by making him some presents, and causing him to ride sometimes behind me on my camel. From him I received honest and distinct answers.”
After traveling through the desert for five days, von Haven and Niebuhr reached Jebel el-Mokateb, known today as Serabit el-Khadim (“Heights of the Servant”), crowned with a small temple dedicated to the goddess Hathor. Long ago, Egyptians had smelted copper and mined turquoise there, but the primary task of the Danish expedition was to determine if there were any inscriptions in Hebrew that might link the mountain to Moses. But all they found were inscrutable hieroglyphs. Von Haven showed little interest and left Niebuhr to copy them.
The pair spent the next few days on Jebel Musa (Mount Sinai; literally “Mount Moses”). At its foot lay St. Catherine’s Monastery, whose library von Haven looked forward to examining. The monks, however, refused to recognize his letter of introduction from Constantinople. The vast collection of ancient manuscripts, including the Codex Sinaiticus (one of the oldest Bibles in the world), could not be studied. It was a devastating humiliation for von Haven, but Niebuhr once again set to work: He sketched the monastery, scaled the mountain and diligently copied its inscriptions. On his return journey to Suez, Niebuhr even recorded a mirage, noting in his diary “how greatly objects are magnified, when seen through mist.”
On September 25, 1762, they rejoined the rest of the group in Suez. It must have been a relief for Niebuhr. They sent home Forsskål’s specimens, Baurenfeind’s drawings and Niebuhr’s maps, and then purchased berths on a ship sailing down the Red Sea coast and across the mouth of the Gulf of Aqaba to Jiddah, a three-week journey. A few days into the voyage a curious event occurred: The expedition predicted an eclipse. Arabs who witnessed this, many of them pilgrims on their way to Makkah, were so impressed that they begged the scientists to also cure their chronic ailments, believing that the foreigners possessed magic powers. The expedition spent six weeks in Jiddah. Niebuhr mapped the town, and Forsskål set to work collecting seeds. But there was little to interest von Haven, who was exhibiting signs of a serious illness.
On December 29, 1762, the crew disembarked at the Yemeni port of al- Luhayyah. The Danish explorers had finally reached the country that was, to them, a mystery, and which they hoped would be the highlight of their journey—Arabia Felix. Initial impressions were indeed felicitous: the governor generously offered to pay for their journey from Jiddah; Berggren cured the amir’s horse; and, while Niebuhr mapped the town, Forsskål collected hundreds of botanical specimens and recorded details of the country’s history, trade, currency and legal system.
In the months that followed, the expedition traveled throughout western Yemen. On February 25, 1763, they arrived in Bayt al-Faqih, four days from al-Luhayyah; there the expedition set up base, and each member carried out his own explorations. In the months that followed, Niebuhr trekked solo to the nearby coastal villages of Chalefca, al-Hudayah, Zabid and Kahme. In late March, Forrskål accompanied Niebuhr on a trip to Ta’iz, via Djobla.
Upon their return, Niebuhr once again became feverish, and von Haven’s condition grew serious. The expedition together decided to move south along the coast to Mokha before heading inland toward the capital, Sana’a. It proved to be a challenging journey. The coast was hot and humid, and as the men moved deeper inland, they encountered scorching heat. Along the way, the monsoon arrived, and to escape the torrential rains they slept on the mud floors of coffee huts.
It was too much for von Haven. Although Michaelis considered him a “diligent pupil,” he was, as Barthold (Niebuhr’s son) later described him, “lazy by nature” and prone to despair and revolts that weakened him physically. “It seemed to me,” wrote Michaelis, “that his physical constitution would not sustain the fatigues and hardships of such a journey.” The linguist succumbed to his fever in Mokha on May 25, 1763. A few weeks later, en route to Sana’a, Forsskål suffered a similar fate in Jerim. Barthold attributed Forsskål’s demise to “a bilious disorder … partly augmented by his capriciousness.” Niebuhr, convinced the biologist was stricken with a bout of dysentery, was shaken by his death, and he described Forsskål as a brilliant scientist, extolling his fluency in Arabic: “We all greatly mourned Herr Forsskål.… He devoted himself with tremendous industry to our expedition, the successful pursuance of which lay very close to his heart.” Despair began to overcome Niebuhr. “This is the only period in all his travels,” wrote his son, “when he gave way to melancholy and sunk under it.”
Now reduced to four—Niebuhr, Kramer, Baurenfeind and Berggren—the expedition continued to push deeper into the Yemeni interior. As they reached the mountains, they found relief from the heat, and when they at last rode into Sana’a on July 16, 1763, they were surprised to discover running water and shady streets—it was paradise. They secured a comfortable residence in one of the town’s picturesque buildings and were given a private audience with His Royal Highness the Imam, who sat on cushions beneath an arched roof, surrounded by fountains. He was astonished when the expedition displayed its scientific equipment, which included Niebuhr’s prized octant, a compass, a magnifying glass and a thermometer. Niebuhr wasted no time in mapping the town, and he carefully recorded details of its trade with Turkey, Persia and India.
Their sojourn in Sana’a, however, was brief. A nagging fear of disease prompted them to depart back to Mokha, where they planned on sailing to the Danish mission in Bombay (now Mumbai)—their travels in Arabia at last complete. Unfortunately, their timing was poor. As summer temperatures soared above 40 degrees Celsius, the journey across Tihamah (a coastal area of the Red Sea so named for its heat), was a brutal one. By the time they boarded an English ship for India on August 21, 1763, the only man left who could stand was Niebuhr.
On the voyage to Bombay, Niebuhr gradually recovered strength. He continued to take sightings with his octant, and he pondered several of the questions posed by Michaelis in his original instructions to the expedition. While on board he also spent time putting the finishing touches to his maps of Yemen, which proved to be so accurate that a century later the English explorer Gifford Palgrave dedicated his book to Niebuhr, praising the German surveyor as “one who first opened up Arabia for Europe.”
Unfortunately, his companions only grew weaker. Barthold described how all were “attacked by fever of this climate”—malaria. Baurenfeind, the German artist, died eight days into the voyage. Berggren, the Swedish servant, passed away the next day. Both were buried at sea. In his diary, Niebuhr recalled the irony that Arabia Felix meant “Happy Arabia,” but not for his expedition. “Our diseases were our own fault,” Niebuhr reflected, and “[w]hile my companions yet lived, I was myself several times very ill because like them I chose to live in the European manner.” This prompted Niebuhr to make changes.
Niebuhr arrived in Bombay with physician Kramer on September 11. Though still suffering from his own illness, Kramer had exhorted Niebuhr to adhere to what Barthold described as a “strict regimen of only bread, rice and tea,” abstaining from meat and other heavy foods. Niebuhr’s self-discipline and subsequent return to full strength astonished the doctor, who spent his last days in Bombay, before passing away soon after his arrival.
Yet Niebuhr was not entirely alone. For the first time since leaving Cairo he found himself in the company of Europeans. Niebuhr took off his Arab attire and learned the English language. He befriended English officers, benefited from their hospitality and gained access to their “engraved charts of the Indian seas … roads and harbours, of the south-eastern coast of Arabia.” Characteristically, the surveyor also set to work mapping Bombay for the Danish crown and studying its history and trade. He commented in his diary on its alphabet, as well as the calendar, the caste system and the Parsees, demonstrating once again the breadth of his interests and the keenness of his observational skills.
A year later, after witnessing the colorful festivities 250 kilometers north at Surat, including its enormous elephants, he left Bombay for Oman. He was accompanied by another Danish servant whom he had chanced upon in the city.
Watching the porpoises darting across the azure waters of the Arabian Sea along the southeastern coast of the Arabian Peninsula, Niebuhr must have pondered the wisdom of continuing his journey alone, but his loyalty to the Danish crown and the completion of the expedition was never in jeopardy. Feeling much better after experimenting with his diet of rice, water and fruit, Niebuhr eagerly mapped Muscat, Oman’s capital, and documented the pearling activities in Bahrain along the peninsula’s western coast, before disembarking in Persia on February 4, 1765.
The ruins of Persepolis, Persia’s ancient summer capital, were in some ways the highlight of Niebuhr’s journey. Although alone, he felt both physically fit and safe. The cooler temperatures were a welcome relief, and his only complaint was that his European clothing was uncomfortable. He spent 24 days in the ruins of the Achaemenid city, mapping the site, sketching stone figures and copying its inscriptions. Some people there even asked him to write on paper, believing it would protect them from illness if they would press the words against their body. Ironically, copying the cuneiform tablets in the harsh sunlight damaged Niebuhr’s eyes, and he had to rest. But the inscriptions he sent back to Denmark were priceless. Within a few years European scholars had deciphered most of the Babylonian, Elamite and Old Persian scripts. A child of the early Enlightenment, his work proved to be an important catalyst.
Niebuhr’s journey was still not over, however. Several weeks after leaving Persepolis, a brief reference to his whereabouts surfaced in Europe in the French Gazette d’Utrecht, which reported that the “Danish [sic] scholar … who plans to travel on to Baghdad … and Aleppo … is [now] the only survivor [of the Danish expedition].” But from this moment on Niebuhr decided to travel incognito. “He lived and talked and ate as if he were an Arab among Arabs … [and] avoided everything that might draw attention to his presence,” wrote Thorkild Hansen in his 1962 biographical novel, Arabia Felix: The Danish Expedition 1761–1767. Niebuhr once again adopted Arab attire, and he ate a diet of rice, sun-dried meat, prunes, apricots, coffee beans and water laced with brandy (to purify it). He replaced his Danish servant with a Muslim guide. He even changed his name to Abdullah, believing that “the true observer is always a person who has lost his own identity.”
Niebuhr sailed up the Tigris on a riverboat, stopping at Basra and staying in Baghdad before setting off for Aleppo via Mosul. He was particularly impressed with Baghdad, admiring its libraries, observatories and splendid quays. Farther upstream he approached the ruins of Nineveh, the ancient capital of the Assyrians, and he encountered the Yazidis, a religious sect that worshiped the Peacock Angel. Niebuhr diligently mapped the small towns and villages all along the river, and he continued to record vivid experiences in his diary. On June 6, 1766, after visiting the Crusader city of Urfa, Niebuhr rode—triumphantly—into Aleppo.
He spent the next two weeks in Syria. After changing back into European attire, Niebuhr devoted most of his time to investigating the Druze. On June 24, 1766, he decided to leave for Antioch (now Antakya, Turkey), 100 kilometers west. He went via Cyprus, where he examined rock inscriptions Michaelis suspected to be of Phoenician origin but that proved to be Armenian. Niebuhr then sailed back to the Levant where he stopped briefly in Jerusalem to map the city and make a sketch from the Mount of Olives. After a short detour to Bethlehem, Niebuhr set off for Damascus. From there he traveled north along the coast via Sidon to Latakia before returning to Aleppo. Finally, on November 20, 1766, he began his long journey home.
The ride across Anatolia proved a harrowing ordeal with heavy snow, which caused his camel to slip on the icy mountain roads. It took the caravan four months to reach Constantinople. After a few weeks of rest, he continued into Europe through plague-ridden Bucharest, and then he made his way across Central Europe through Warsaw, Breslau and Hanover. It was not until November 20, 1767, that he rode into Copenhagen.
At first, his solo arrival on horseback was not cause for celebration: The city had almost completely forgotten about the expedition to Arabia. In the days that followed, however, Lieutenant Niebuhr was invited to the Royal Court and promoted to captain. Over the next few years he compiled an exhaustive account of the expedition’s work and then, to everybody’s surprise, Niebuhr married and took a post as clerk in Dithmarschen, a remote little district less than 60 kilometers from where he was born, along the shore of the North Sea at the mouth of the Elbe in today’s northern Germany.
Nevertheless, his achievements were gradually recognized more widely. In 1801 the farm boy—who had never even mastered High German—was honored in Paris as a corresponding Fellow of the French Academy. Although he continued to enjoy good health, his “curious cold” never fully disappeared, and toward the end of his life Niebuhr’s eyesight began to fail. He died a few days before the Battle of Waterloo, aged 82, on April 26, 1815. On that day, the sole survivor of Europe’s first truly scientific expedition to the Arabian Peninsula, the man who had conducted himself with “an open-mindedness towards everything that was new, along with a respect for other ways of seeing,” took his well-deserved place in history.
Among the visitors to his stall was a middle-aged German photography enthusiast who introduced himself as Norman. He would come by to talk about their shared passion for photography, says Ayari.
“Norman was surprised I could take so many pictures with such a small camera,” Ayari explains. Then one day about 10 years ago, Norman showed up with a present: a Nikon D80 camera. Ayari recalls the moment as one of great surprise, happiness and a sense of profound luck: He could now take his hobby toward a professional level.
He taught himself to use the camera by experimenting with every setting and button. Each day he brought it to the market, wrapped in a cloth for want of a camera case. He carried it with him everywhere. “I was crazy for taking pictures,” he says.
He worked seven days a week, and although this afforded few opportunities to explore beyond the market, the city came to him. In the market, he says, he could find the heart of Tunis in the faces of pensioners, professors and bankers; singers, seamstresses and mechanics; cooks, homemakers and children on errands. He captured them all.
As word spread, people began coming to the market not for produce at all, but for a portrait. Younger photographers began to hang around, too, and they would pepper him with questions. He always made the portraits requested, and he answered every question.
Two years later Norman was back. “He asked if he could use the camera for a few days,” Ayari recalls. “When he returned, he said he was impressed with how well I had taken care of it and how much I had used it.” Norman, it turned out, had brought another gift. This time it was Nikon’s professional D700 camera with a pair of high-quality lenses. “It was another joy and a surprise,” Ayari says, deeply aware of his continuing fortune. “I know a lot of photographers, and no one gives you a gift like that.” As with his other cameras, he keeps it under the counter of his stall, and every day he uses it to make photos of people.
In the 1995 movie Smoke, a character named Auggie Wren, played by actor Harvey Keitel, works in a Brooklyn tobacco shop and each day takes photos from the same spot. Not “just some guy who pushes coins across the counter,” says Wren, photography is “my project—what you’d call my life’s work.” In the film, Wren points to 4,000 photos stuck into 14 albums.
Unlike the fictional Auggie Wren, Ayari does not shut away his prints in albums. Before he received his first Nikon, he had begun printing the portraits using money earned by selling mint and giving them to the people he photographed, often during the three days of ‘Id al-Fitr that mark the end of Ramadan. “At least 500 a year,” he says. He adds that when he was young, receiving a photo of himself gave him a warm and contented feeling. Now giving them to others is a similar pleasure.
Perhaps also it is a subconscious way of passing on Norman’s generosity. Ayari never even learned Norman’s surname, he says. He has not seen him for several years.
On a Saturday morning in October, Ayari was in his usual place, bantering with familiar faces, weighing lemons, selling brilliant green mint by the handful and dropping Tunisian dinar coins into a wooden box of change.
A couple approached, their 10-year-old daughter somewhat reluctantly in tow. Ayari smiled and spoke a few words to her, and the girl’s apprehension seemed to evaporate. He moved some lemons aside to make a space on the mound for her to sit. He then lifted her up, smoothed out her white dress, adjusted her pink feather hairband and gave her some directions on turning before clicking off a couple of frames.
After he showed the girl and her parents the results on the camera’s back screen, he slipped the camera back under the counter. They would have their pictures soon enough, he assured them, as a lemon-buying customer was waiting. He started to gather up her order.
Ayari’s aspiration, he says, is to help promote awareness of photography as art in Tunisia. “I want to spread it around the country. This is my dream,” he says.
And it is a dream he will pursue from his produce stand in a corner of the Marché Central. “I love the market,” he says. “And it is my source of livelihood.”
She knew that in 1841, Yale had appointed the pioneering scholar Edward E. Salisbury as Professor of Arabic and Sanskrit Languages and Literature, the first such full-time appointment in the us. Inspired by the Leiden celebration, Dougherty dug into the Yale archives and began to plan for the 175th anniversary of his appointment.
In September 2016, an exhibition and six-month-long series of lectures reinvigorated the dusty legacy of one of the leading American Orientalists of his time. It also opened a window onto the history of Arabic in colonial and early America that predates Salisbury by almost 200 years.
The Christian Reformation in Europe in the 16th century stimulated scholarship of the Bible, including the study of ancient Hebrew, Aramaic, Chaldaic, Syriac and Arabic, all to better understand original texts. Harvard was the first to introduce this theologically driven study of Semitic languages in 1640, and it added Arabic while Charles Chauncy served as the university’s president between 1654 and 1672. Yale introduced Arabic in 1700; Columbia University in 1784; and the University of Pennsylvania in 1788.
“The earliest colleges founded in the us were intended to produce an educated ministry who were supposed to be able to read the Bible, and preferably early translations in Aramaic,” explains Benjamin R. Foster, Laffan Professor of Assyriology and Babylonian Literature at Yale.
“However, the practicality of life in colonial America was such that very few students were actually interested,” he adds.
Ezra Stiles, an ordained minister who studied Hebrew, Aramaic and Arabic, encountered this reluctance after he became president of Yale amid the American Revolution in 1778. “I have obliged all the freshmen to study Hebrew,” wrote Stiles in 1790. “This has proved very disagreeable to a number of the students.”
Semitic studies were a specialization at the graduate level in Europe and later spread through the us, explains Roger Allen, Emeritus Professor of Arabic Language and Literature at the University of Pennsylvania. Graduate studies in America, he notes, were influenced by the rigors of German scholarship and based on the German model, led in large part by the immigration of German scholars to the newly formed United States. Almost all the dictionaries and teaching anthologies at that time had been translated from the original Sumerian, Arcadian, Aramaic and Arabic into German. The old adage, jokes Allen, was that “the most important Semitic language then was German!”
Among these German scholars of Semitic languages was Johann Christoph Kunze, whose courses in Hebrew, Syriac, Aramaic and Arabic at Columbia University, beginning in 1784, failed to attract any students. Nevertheless, Arabic was introduced both at Dartmouth College and Andover Theological Seminary in 1807, Princeton Theological Seminary in 1822, New York University in 1833 and, in 1841, Yale not only offered courses but also made its historic appointment of Salisbury as the country’s first full professor in the field.
Unfortunately, to his lasting dismay, Yale students showed little more enthusiasm for Salisbury’s offerings than Columbia’s had for Kunze’s. He had only two graduate students prior to his resignation in 1856.
Twenty-seven years later, at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Paul Haupt, a German Assyriologist from the University of Göettingen, found more success than either of them. In 1883, Haupt’s program in comparative Semitic philology became the model for other American universities at the time when interest in Arabic was shifting from a basis in theology to the language itself, “in order to learn about premodern history, culture, religion and society,” says Allen.
By the mid-19th to the early 20th century, more universities and theological seminaries began to offer Arabic. In 1900 Yale Professor Charles Cutler Torrey picked up where Salisbury left off, reinvigorating interest in Arabic-language studies and founding the first American center for Oriental research in Jerusalem, which continues to this day. At the same time, the growth in archeology triggered further interest in learning not just written Arabic, but spoken Arabic as well, including dialects. By 1937, 10 universities in the us offered Arabic, although only at the graduate level.
The aftermath of World War ii precipitated a new and urgent shift as the emergence of the us as one of two superpowers called for new international skills. “It was abundantly evident that America was falling very short on any kind of expertise about what was actually going on post-Ottoman Empire,” says Allen.
The us government enlisted renowned linguists to prepare textbooks and to create language training for military personnel. In 1947 classes in Modern Standard Arabic (literary Arabic) and dialects began at the Foreign Service Institute School of Languages in Washington, D.C., as well as at the Army Language School in Monterey, California. By the early 1950s, other government agencies such as the National Security Agency and the Central Intelligence Agency had established Arabic programs.
When the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, the world’s first artificial satellite, in 1957, the Soviet educational system’s emphasis on science, mathematics and foreign languages was seen as the leading factor in its edge in space technology. In response, the 1958 National Defense Education Act (ndea) supported the study of these subjects in schools, and it identified five languages for priority funding: Russian, Chinese, Hindustani, Portuguese and Arabic. Title vi of the ndea supported new fellowships, instructional materials, summer programs, teacher-training workshops, research and more—many of which continue, in various forms, today.
From the private sector, a 1957 Ford Foundation grant of $176,500 funded an inter-university summer program in Near Eastern languages shared among Columbia, Harvard, Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, Michigan and Princeton, with each university teaching Arabic on a rotating basis in the summers from 1957-1961. Extension of the grant from 1962 to 1968 added the University of California at Los Angeles, Georgetown University and the University of Texas at Austin. These grants not only helped to establish the increasingly widespread model of intensive Arabic-language summer programs (see sidebar below) but also generated new teaching methods.
“This was really the beginning of area studies with the idea being that Arabic should be taught as a language, not only in its classical but also in its contemporary idiom,” says William Granara, director of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. “This was the new generation,” he adds. Thanks also in part to new vinyl and magnetic-tape recording technology, the audio-lingual method emerged at this time, and “it wasn’t just reading a dead text, it was interacting with a language.”
The 1960s brought further changes. In 1963 the American Association of Teachers of Arabic formed and began to professionalize the teaching of Arabic. A series of teacher workshops from 1965 to 1967 led to the publication of the textbook Elementary Modern Standard Arabic as well as a college-level Arabic proficiency exam. In 1968 a consortium of eight American universities founded the Center for Arabic Study Abroad.
The 1979 Carter Commission on International Studies and Foreign Languages marked the beginning of the proficiency movement when it concluded: “America’s incompetence in foreign languages is nothing short of scandalous and it is becoming worse.” This introduced an element of radical new classroom strategies. “It’s not texts anymore, its communications,” explains Allen, who became the national proficiency trainer in Arabic for the American Council for the Teaching of Foreign Languages from 1986-2002.
When Allen held his first workshop in Arabic proficiency methods at The Ohio State University in 1986, many of the leading Arabic scholars showed up, including Peter Abboud, Ernest McCarus and R. J. Rumunny. “Those guys immediately realized that what they had done in the 1960s and 1970s modernized the study of Arabic, but what they hadn’t done was to get entirely away from the grammar-based approach. What proficiency did was turn this whole thing on its head. They now had to figure out how to teach Arabic for communication purposes,” says Allen.
“Today, you want to prepare a student to deal with the realities of Arabic as it is used in the 21st century,” explains Professor Munther Younes of Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. In contrast to Al-Kitaab, the most successful contemporary Arabic-language textbook, Younes fully integrates formal, written Modern Standard Arabic (fussha) with spoken Egyptian and Levantine dialects (ammiya). “This is what best serves the modern generation of students,” he says.
Arabic studies today are a far cry from their mid-16th- century beginnings as a tool to interpret Biblical texts. According to the Modern Language Association, Arabic is now the fastest-growing language studied at us colleges and universities. More than 35,000 students are enrolled in courses, a number that grew 126 percent from 2002 to 2006, and another 46 percent by 2009. Arabic is now the eighth most-studied language in the us and, as of 2013, 84 primary and secondary schools across the country offered Arabic-language classes.
“I was never really aware of the history of Arabic-language instruction in the us,” confesses Lizz Huntley, a lecturer at Cornell and former director of the Charlestown High School Arabic Summer Academy in Charlestown, Massachusetts. She recalls when she and the program’s founder, Steven Berbeco, were teaching a group of college students at the Harvard University campus. “When he told them that the first classes in Arabic began at Harvard, it was funny to see how the students all suddenly sat up a bit straighter, as though they realized that they were part of something much bigger than themselves,” explains Huntley. “It was wonderful to see them take pride in that history.”
]]>A few hours by car from Tamchy, along what was once part of the Silk Roads that connected East Asia with the Middle East and Europe, signs and statues depicting snow leopards are easy to spot. There is even a café named Ak Ilbirs.
In the capital, Bishkek, faces of snow leopards peer out from billboards, largely unnoticed by drivers and pedestrians navigating traffic that seems to flow as wild as whitewater mountain rivers. A few people find a calm escape near the city’s Philharmonic Hall, where on its spacious square, the glow of the evening sun sparkles the fountains and washes in gold a monument to the national epic hero Manas. Nearby is a series of contemporary public artworks, set on a small park strip called Youth Alley.
One sculpture draws attention—it’s new. It depicts a life-sized snow leopard, not much taller than a Labrador retriever, and compared to other members of the “big cats” family such as lions, it seems rather small. Constructed of welded hexagonal screw nuts, it invites stroking, selfies and toddlers climbing onto its back.
“People are supposed to touch it. That’s why it is on the ground,” says Nikolai Cherkasov, the 29-year-old local artist. “We did not want to build a monument for a dying animal,” he explains. Rather, he adds, he wanted something that encourages a relationship—and action. Under his statue, a metal tag reads, in Kyrgyz, Russian and English, “Slowly the snow leopard is disappearing from our mountains. We must all do the best to conserve it.”
Cherkasov’s sculpture, like the billboards along the city streets, was part of the Kyrgyz government’s hosting of the Second International Snow Leopard and Ecosystem Forum at the Ala Archa State Residence, a park-like venue for state receptions on the outskirts of the capital. The national flags of each of the forum’s 12 officially participating countries flew at Enesai Reception House, designed after the traditional Central Asian yurt: Canvas-white and circular with a shallow conical roof, it is an unmistakable symbol of the country’s nomadic roots.
On opening day, August 25, men and women from Afghanistan, Bhutan, China, India, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Mongolia, Nepal, Pakistan, Russia, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan all chatted and greeted each other outside the hall. Amid the gray suits and business dresses, the occasional Indian sari could be glimpsed, or the robe of a Buddhist Lama, or the orange-, red- and green-striped gho—the men’s national dress of Bhutan. Inside, the 250 delegates listened as Kyrgyz President Almazbek Atambayev welcomed them and congratulated them for their efforts to make common cause. “Today, the conservation and increase of the snow leopard population is the main task for all of us,” he said.
Stretching in and through each of these 12 nations run seven major mountain ranges and numerous smaller ones, covering a total area greater than India. All are habitat for the snow leopard, Panthera uncia, whose only borders are altitude, for it lives mostly between about 3,000 and 5,400 meters.
In almost every culture in the 12 nations, the snow leopard carries deep cultural meanings. For the Kyrgyz people, ak ilbirs is a national icon and talisman, an animal that is even sacred. “The snow leopard is a heritage of our fathers,” Atambayev said. For its strength, it became also a symbol of heroism. Almost 1,200 years ago, the leader of the tribal association that became the first Kyrgyz khaganate was called Barsbek (“Sir Snow Leopard”). Atambayev appealed to his people to respect their ancestors: “The snow leopard,” he stated, “is one of us.”
Other cultures of the region, too, have long regarded the big cat as a mountain spirit, as archeological finds and petroglyphs show. “According to the views of the Mongols, Khakas, Tuvinians and Altaians, the leopard is the representative of the higher heavenly forces on earth. It became a totem, an ancestor and the protector of the family,” explains ethnographer Yuri Loginov in an interview with the Kyrgyz youth magazine New Faces. Living side by side with the snow leopard was a sign of distinction.
In Mongolia, calling the “guardian of the mountains” by its actual name is viewed as disrespectful even today, says Mongol shaman Buyanbad-rakh, adding that people there instead use descriptive names such as “spotted fur coat.” Lama Danzan-Norbu, from the Siberian Russian Republic of Buriatia, says, “The snow leopard is a symbol of justice, an embodiment of everything pure in our mountains.”
The snow leopard’s elusiveness has done much to earn it this mystical reputation. Inhabiting some of the most remote mountains on earth, much covered by ice and snow, its gray-white coat spotted with black open rosettes provides camouflage so perfect that even at close range it can be virtually invisible. Like a ghost, it seems to appear and disappear from and into nowhere.
Kyrgyz field biologist Kubanych Zhumabai Uulu knows this well. Only after a decade of studying snow leopards in the wild did he see one. “I was waiting for this a long time,” he says, bright-eyed, recalling the moment like a reward for hard work.
As head of the nongovernmental organization (ngo) Snow Leopard Foundation Kyrgyzstan, Zhumabai Uulu’s tasks include tracking and counting snow leopards in the central Tien Shan mountains. His team of trackers undertakes month-long expeditions with strenuous hikes in thin air and freezing cold nights that make high demands on both people and equipment. September, he says, is usually the best time to go. “When it starts snowing in the high mountains, [the snow leopards] descend to lower, more accessible mountain regions together with their prey animals,” he explains.
During each trip, the team covers around 1,000 square kilometers, setting up around 40 camera traps with weather-resistant photo and video recorders that react on motion-triggers. Finding the right spot can be tricky. “We look for overhanging rocks. Snow leopards use them for urine markings,” the scientist explains. It is easy to tell if a snow leopard has been to a particular spot, he adds, because the scent is detectable even to humans for several months afterward.
To find the best position for a camera, one of the trackers may scramble on all fours past the motion sensor until the angle is just right—a sight that has baffled more than one mountain herder watching them from afar. When set, the camera stays in place all winter. In spring the team returns to read out the memory cards.
“Each snow leopard has a unique coat pattern, like our fingerprints,” Zhumabai Uulu explains. This is why, at each location, the trackers usually set up two cameras opposite each other. With pictures from both sides, he explains, they can identify individuals better. This is not difficult: In the Snow Leopard Foundation’s office in Bishkek, on a wall of framed portraits of snow leopards, each has a name.
“This one we call Fighter,” says Zhumabai Uulu, pointing to a picture of a snow leopard with numerous scars on its face. Another is Hunter, for in every photo it carries a dead marmot in its fangs. James Bond “behaved like a spy,” not showing his face to the camera, while Jessica Alba appeared to relish the attention like a celebrity.
According to Zhumabai Uulu, camera trapping is one of the best methods to estimate snow leopard populations. With it, biologists learn about the range of individuals, as well as how they share territory with fellow snow leopards and other predators such as wolves and bears. By counting cubs the biologists learn about population dynamics. Other monitoring methods include dna analysis of feces and interviews with herders living in the small villages and yurts scattered on the high plateaus. The herders “are the only ones who really know how frequently certain animals occur in a region,” says Zhumabai Uluu.
Still, it is not easy to take stock of mountain ghosts. To date, snow leopard populations have been assessed in less than two percent of its estimated 2.8 million square kilometers of total habitat. Population estimates by individual countries, published in 2016 in the book Snow Leopards by Tom McCarty and David Mallon, add up to 7,000 to 8,000 individuals left throughout the mountains of Central Asia.
With diverse methods and limited data, it is thus no surprise that scientists may disagree over both the numbers and their significance. On September 14 the International Union for Conservation of Nature (iucn) upgraded the snow leopard’s conservation status from “endangered” to “vulnerable,” which means that instead of facing “very high risk” of extinction in the wild, it faces “high risk.” Some organizations such as the Snow Leopard Trust regard the move as premature due to insufficient data; others see it as a signal that conservation efforts may be working. In either case, it is no cause for rest.
Back in the classroom in Tamchy, environmental educator Iskakova tells the kids about Kyrgyzstan’s national “Red Book” of endangered species, which lists not only the snow leopard but also the maral, a large stag, and the red wolf, which has not been spotted for 50 years.
The word “extinction” comes up, and Iskakova explains that yes, animals can be lost forever. “Many years ago, there were more than a thousand snow leopards in Kyrgyzstan. Now only a few hundred are left,” Iskakova says. Then, raising her voice with encouragement, she asks, “Should we protect the snow leopards?”
In unison the kids shout back, “Yes!”
“How can we protect them?” Iskakova asks them.
Dozens of fingers shoot up. She smiles and points to a boy not more than five years old. In a soft voice, he says, “We must not shoot them.”
The boy cut right to the chase. Over the past decades, poaching and fur trading were the leading threats to the snow leopard. Well-heeled people, it turns out, are willing to spend large amounts of money in the black market to buy a physical piece of the big cat’s mystical power. Its skin has become a status symbol, and its claws and bones are used for ointments and tools in traditional medicines.
According to the World Wide Fund for Nature (wwf), a skin can fetch us $2,200 to $5,000, and a skeleton can command $10,000—amounts many times greater than the monthly salaries of civil servants charged with enforcing anti-poaching regulations. As a result, struggling families can find themselves faced with choosing among economics, ethics and long-held beliefs.
In a 2016 report, the wildlife trade monitoring network Trade Records Analysis of Flora and Fauna in Commerce (traffic) estimated that since 2008 between 221 and 450 snow leopards have been poached annually across the range countries—an average of at least four kills a week. The authors added that the actual number might be substantially higher since kills in remote areas cannot be detected.
“Who kills a snow leopard, kills their own people. Who sells a snow leopard skin, sells their own land,” said President Atambayev, making clear his government’s position and articulating the important role the snow leopard plays in national identity.
Officially, all 12 range countries have protected the big cat for many years, but enforcement has been weak and, at times, nil, as economic and social issues have kept governments from being effective in this policy area. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, for example, former Soviet states had much to do to find their own identities and develop their own systems amid newly gained independence.
Others, including Afghanistan and Pakistan, have worked amid war and conflict to establish the concept of environmental protection. Abdul Wali Modaqiq, deputy director general of the National Environmental Protection Agency of Afghanistan, explains that when his agency started in 2002, “People looked at environmental protection like it was a fashion. It took us eight years to convince them that taking care of the environment is not impeding development. It takes time to rebuild our country. If we wait until there is a hundred percent peace, it will be too late.”
Modaqiq is proud of his country’s accomplishments. For example, in 2002 Afghanistan was a member of only one international environmental convention. Now, it is a signatory to 15 multilateral environmental agreements and protocols. Recognizing the important role of the snow leopard in high-mountain ecosystems, Afghanistan put the big cat on its national protected list and in 2014 declared the country’s entire northeastern Wakhan district a national park—an area four times larger than Yellowstone National Park in the us.
The first multinational step toward saving the snow leopard across all the range countries was taken four years ago, in October 2013 in Bishkek, at the First Snow Leopard and Ecosystem Forum. A much smaller gathering than the one this year, representatives of the 12 Asian countries there signed the Bishkek Declaration, in which they agreed that “the snow leopard is an irreplaceable symbol of our nations’ natural and cultural heritage.” They also agreed on the Global Snow Leopard and Ecosystem Protection (gslep) program’s goal of “20 by 20”: identify 20 habitat areas by the year 2020, each with a “secure, healthy population” of at least 100 breeding-age snow leopards, sufficient and reliable populations of wild prey and the interconnection of their habitat to others.
In the four years between forums, what has happened? “We are midway as far as the implementation is concerned,” says Koustubh Sharma, international coordinator at the gslep-Secretariat, which was formed after the 2013 forum. Its five staff members consult periodically with the signatory countries, as well as with implementation partners, donors and academics, to track progress toward “20 by 20” and other gslep goals.
“We started from scratch. We started with few resources,” Sharma says. Consequently he finds it encouraging that of the gslep’s total budget commitment of us $182 million, the countries have to date acquired some $50 million from both national sources and the international Global Environment Facility.
The funds so far have enabled, for example, the establishment of new protected areas such as Afghanistan’s Wakhan National Park, Tost-Tosunbumba in southern Mongolia and Khan-Tengri in Kyrgyzstan. Existing protected areas, such as China’s 160,000-square-kilometer Sanjiangyuan National Nature Reserve, are receiving more intensive monitoring. Kyrgyzstan and Bhutan have increased penalties for poaching and illegal trafficking. Across each country, more than 250 people have received training in environmental protection work, in some places with the help of the international police organization Interpol. To strengthen incentives for conservation enforcement, for example, Kyrgyzstan raised the salaries of state rangers from around 4,000 som (about us $60) per month to 15,000 som. To discourage poaching, Pakistan, India, Kyrgyzstan and Mongolia have all established dozens of community-based protection programs. National governments have entered into cooperative relations with international organizations including the Snow Leopard Trust, Snow Leopard Conservancy, Wildlife Conservation Society, Panthera, wwf, and nabu.
One goal, Sharma adds, already has been exceeded: The range countries have identified not just 20, but 23 snow leopard habitats with potentially healthy populations—depending on the implementation of wildlife-management plans by 2020. To date, six of the 12 countries—Afghanistan, Pakistan, Kyrgyzstan, Mongolia, Bhutan and Nepal—have completed “blueprints of how snow leopard populations can be secured while at the same time ensuring the development of the local communities,” Sharma explains.
One of the most critical challenges is what conservationists call “human-wildlife conflict” and what 38-year-old herdswoman Mahabat Isalieva calls the threat to her family’s livelihood. Isalieva lives with her husband and five children in the Pamir Mountains of Tajikistan, in the Akhtam Valley, where the high plateau reaches as far as the eye can see and income for everyone depends on livestock: sheep, goats and yaks.
Isalieva takes care of the family’s small farmhouse while her husband spends his days with the herds in the mountain pastures. In the evening, when the sunset illuminates mountains and sky in all shades of red, pink and purple, he returns the livestock to the corrals. There, behind the high clay walls, the animals spend their nights, safe from wolves, jackals and bears—but not from snow leopards, which are strong jumpers. Isalieva points to the scratch marks on one of the top corners of the corral.
“Here it got in,” she says, furrowing her brow. Just thinking about it seems to make her angry. Last winter, she says, a snow leopard came almost weekly to raid the corral. One time she saw it, and for Isalieva it is no mystical memory: Altogether her family lost seven sheep and goats worth about a month’s income. The family worried that the snow leopard would return the next winter.
“Without the conservation efforts, the only solution for us would be to kill the snow leopard,” says the herdswoman. The family got help when it reported the incident to Burgut (Golden Eagle), a local ngo that helped the family with a simple, effective solution: a wire mesh over the top of the corral.
Across all range countries, snow leopards often prey on slow-moving domestic livestock due to both ease and, in some places, a shortage of wild prey. While predator-proofing corrals is one way to address human-wildlife conflicts, another is livestock insurance, through which owners can insure individual animals or proportions of herds.
Alternative sources of income are also part of conservation models. These include tourism services such as sustainable hunting, guided hiking and game viewing or wildlife photography expeditions. Burgut, founded in 2013, applies all of these concepts in Tajikistan. Sixteen herders from three villages work not only as rangers to prevent poaching but also as tour and hunting guides. Burgut uses the revenues to pay them for their services and invests the surplus in the communities by buying new books for schools and appliances or medication for hospitals, for example.
“Our big dream is it to supply the communities with electricity. We are saving to build a 100-kilometer-long power supply line,” says Makhan Atambaev, the ngo’s chairman and head of the rangers. In the past four years, he says, conservation has become a significant part of local livelihoods, and this is reflected in wildlife numbers.
“In 2012 we counted around 300 wild ungulates in the area. Now it’s close to 1,500,” Atambaev reports. This helps snow leopards, he explains, because wild ungulates such as Siberian ibex and Marco Polo sheep are the cat’s most important prey in the region. And indeed, the predator is returning. “A few years ago, there were no snow leopards in our mountains. Now there are at least six,” Atambaev says with visible pride.
Another alternative-income model for mountain communities comes from the us-based Snow Leopard Trust (slt), which in 1997 launched Snow Leopard Enterprises. Participating communities agree not to hunt snow leopards or their prey animals, or to support poachers. In return for compliance, slt buys local handicrafts and distributes them globally via its online trade platform and its wholesale partners. Snow Leopard Enterprises currently operates with more than 400 women from 40 communities in Mongolia, Kyrgyzstan, Pakistan and India. The largest percentage is in Mongolia, where participating communities currently protect about one-fourth of the known snow leopard habitat.
Although poaching has been the single gravest threat to the snow leopard, the forum countries acknowledge that the 21st century is rapidly becoming an era of more numerous issues connected to global integration and its ever-growing hunger for natural resources and infrastructure development—roads, railroads and pipelines that can block the movements of wildlife. Add to that the degradation and loss of habitats through overgrazing, climate change, environmental pollution and mining, and it easy to see that the challenges will continue.
Someone who worried deeply about the relationship of environment and economic development was the award-winning Kyrgyz writer Chingiz Aitmatov, who in the 1950s won international recognition for his novella Jamila. During the following half century, Aitmatov both pursued a career as a diplomat and wrote almost 20 novels and novellas. In his last book, When Mountains Fall, written in 2006, Aitmatov used the snow leopard as a symbol for the natural heritage of his people.
When villagers plan to take a group of wealthy foreigners hunting for snow leopards, the main character, journalist Arsen Samantshin, criticizes them: “How often have we put our heads together for the protection of the environment? Whole epics were written about it, but when it comes to money, the ecological oaths are over, for money people are willing to do anything.”
When the villagers scout the mountains in preparation for the hunt, Aitmatov puts a powerful warning into the voice of an elder snow leopard he names Dschaa-Bars: “Don’t disturb us! Soon the mountains will fall and you, too, will fare badly.”
The message was clear, and although Samantshin dies alongside Dschaa-Bars, Aitmatov did not want to let it end like this. As Samantshin’s body is carried to the village to be buried, the body of the snow leopard mysteriously disappears, implying supernatural power. Aitmatov sends the reader home with the picture of Dschaa-Bars, now a ghost, forever roaming Kyrgyzstan’s mountains—much as the snow leopard does today in the cultural imagination of the region and beyond. The snow leopard has become a representative of Central Asia’s ecosystems, a global keystone species, a banner under which nations can gather not only for its conservation, but also for the conservation of dozens of other animal and plant species together with human economies and lifeways.
And while in the yurt-shaped conference hall in Bishkek adults agree on new protected areas and strategies to fight wildlife crime, in the beach-side classroom in Tamchy, kids do some brainstorming of their own.
“Let’s think about what we can do to protect the snow leopard!” Iskakova says, and together they build a “life raft” of ideas. The children write their thoughts on pieces of paper, and those who cannot yet write have the grown-ups help them.
One by one, they pin their ideas on a whiteboard. One of the notes says, “Whoever kills a snow leopard must go to jail.”
Others say, “We always have to pick up our garbage”; “We have to conserve our lakes and rivers”; and “We have to love the nature with all our heart.”
Seven-year-old Adelya Saparbekova, with long dark hair and lively brown eyes, tells how proud she is to share her home country with such a great animal. She rhapsodizes: “The snow leopard has a beautiful skin. It shines in the sunlight.” So far, she has seen snow leopards only on television and in pictures. She hopes that soon there will be more of them. Perhaps then she, too, will be able to see one.
Called a sheneb in the language of the pharaohs, I am a royal trumpet. I was invented to cut through useless noise and let it be known that something important should be heeded. In full-throated blare, I announced to his people the god-king’s arrival on state occasions; I summoned worshipers to religious observances; I even commanded armies on the battlefield. Whereas your modern trumpets play, we sheneb worked for our livings. Our mission was never to make idle toes tap, but to bring order to the world around pharaoh. We were the ultimate communication technology of our day—megaphones, microphones and mass media all in one.
Our usefulness made us the mainstays of war and religion throughout the Middle East. My ancestors spread across North Africa and then into Spain and far beyond. In many places, the sheneb-like nafir still trumpets during Ramadan, and some say your English word “fanfare” actually derives from al-nafir. Many diverse believers expect us to make the final sounds of this world on Judgment Day. This expectation reminds me of the Egyptian legend that it was Osiris, lord and judge of the underworld, who invented the very first sheneb.
Sadly, only two of my family members survive from the long age of the pharaohs. Both of us were buried together in the legendary tomb of Tutankhamun. For years, my brother and I had given voice to the boy-king’s every command. Our different pitches allowed the right people to respond appropriately to our distinct calls, much as you program your cell phones with personal ringtones. Do not doubt, however, that I commanded the greater respect, as established by my fancier uniform. I, glistening in silver and gold, am the general; my little brother is my adjutant. I stand 58.2 centimeters tall, whereas he is shorter and made of copper alloy. My shape resembles, quite deliberately, a tall lotus in bloom. In fact, the unmistakable design of Nymphae caerulea Savigny has been pressed indelibly into my bell. There, too, a pair of my pharaoh’s many names may be read, recorded in two sets of cartouches that spell out Nebkheperuretutankhamun, followed by one of his royal titles. These hieroglyphs have been oriented so as always to be read from the vantage point of the trumpeter, meaning that no matter who might sound me on his behalf, I am the voice of Tut himself.
As a sheneb, I lack the separate, cupped mouthpiece found on modern trumpets, nor do I have those three valves to vary my length and, thereby, my pitch. This means that I cannot hum a tune, not even something as simple as a bugle’s “Taps” or “Reveille.” My natural voice is limited to a single harsh note (Greek writer Plutarch later likened me to “a braying ass”), but in my day a sheneb’s bold intonation could not be ignored: “Heed Pharaoh, Lord of the two lands,” say I! My voice carried across the Nile Valley, resonated with conviction and communicated in limited pitch, but with long or staccato bursts, rather like your simple Morse code.
Producing this sound was hard on the trumpeter. The trumpeter gripped me tightly by the throat, usually with both hands, and with a firm kiss issued the requisite number of blasts to convey pharaoh’s bidding. This took skill and stamina; in fact, the Greeks later made trumpeting an Olympic sport.
Because I needed to be with Tut wherever he traveled, in peace and in war, I required a wooden insert to protect me from dents and other damage. This body double, called a core or stopper, preserved my shape during the busy nine years of my pharaoh’s reign, and for the 33 centuries since. Painted red, blue and green to appear also as a lotus, this core is removed only when I am called upon to speak for pharaoh. In some Egyptian artwork, the trumpeter can be seen cradling the stopper under his arm while blowing the horn itself. Given my long tubular construction, I am ironically a fragile thing of power—as one of your bumbling modern musicians can personally attest. You will soon learn that after what he did to me, I am lucky to be alive.
Many of you would shudder at all I have seen and signaled. Imagine pharaoh’s palace, filled with people, all answering to my every call. Picture grand processions marshaling under my orders. Contemplate the thunderous ranks of the god-king’s army as it wheeled at my whim. I sounded off at the center of it all, at a time when Egypt was the envy of the world. With me at his side, Tutankhamun restored to pre-eminence the ancestral gods of the Nile after the experiment of his predecessor Akhenaten, who had embraced monotheism. Egypt’s priests and generals found fresh hope in the reign of the boy-pharaoh whose potent voice I was. All seemed well.
Then, in a year now called 1323 BCE, I fell silent alongside my pharaoh. No one knows to this day exactly what illness or injury transformed Tut from living Horus to resurrected Osiris. The news that winter came as a terrible shock, since he had been idolized as the very image of youthful vitality in spite of his limp. Tutankhamun stood 1.7 meters tall, less than three times my own height, but he towered in the minds of his people. He smiled with unusually healthy teeth (a sheneb notices), and he enjoyed an adventurous if abbreviated life. Tut had a great fondness for chariots, and it is still rumored that a violent crash may have injured his left thigh and contributed to his death. No royal tomb was ready to receive him so young, thus attendants piled into a borrowed grave the treasures of this fallen teenager: six of his favorite chariots, eight fine shields, four swords and daggers, 50 bows and other weaponry. They also stacked boxes, beds and model boats. Clothing and cosmetics vied for space next to jewelry and jugs of wine. Even the two tiny mummies of Tut’s stillborn children were stowed inside the tomb. I, along with my brother, joined pharaoh in these cramped quarters—he in the antechamber, but I more prestigiously in the burial chamber, my mouthpiece oriented toward Tut.
Before taking my place beside the royal sarcophagus, I let skilled artists attire me for the occasion. They added to my gilded bell a design showing the triad of Egyptian deities: Amun-Ra, Ptah, and Ra-Horakhty. These particular gods embodied all the worthies of the vast Egyptian pantheon, perhaps as a final repudiation of Akhenaten’s heresy. They also represented three divisions of pharaoh’s army. Thus, the decoration that altered me from active sheneb to funerary offering had the added benefit of pleasing both the priests and the generals of Tutankhamun’s entourage. This must have been the brilliant idea of old Aye, who buried my pharaoh and soon became the next god-king of Egypt.
Do not imagine, in your modern way, that in that dark abyss I despaired. Along the Nile, the buried stay busy. Tut the eternal teenager lived on; I could hear his bird-like ba (soul/ personality) come and go as it pleased, its flight unhindered by the eight meters of rock above us. Sometimes, I sensed tremors as workmen nearby chiseled out more tombs, followed by the faint trudge of feet as funeral followed funeral in the Valley of the Kings. I now know that a tomb begun by Ramses v crossed directly over Tut’s and continued 116 meters into the rock, angling over the tomb of Horemheb (whom I knew as one of Tut’s generals) and eventually crashing into the tunnels of yet another grave! It was like a gigantic ant farm.
Yet, not every sound was welcomed. Three times impious tomb robbers disturbed the king and me. The first came early in Tut’s afterlife. Brutes broke through the outer doorways of the tomb and rifled through the pharaoh’s personal effects. Their unclean hands pawed at Tut’s jewelry, perfumes, oils, linens and even the chest that contained my copper brother in the antechamber. Thankfully, local authorities swooped in and restored order to the violated sepulcher. The heavy doors were resealed, only to be breached a short time later by more determined thieves. They prowled the entire tomb, passing right by me on their way to the so-called treasury.
Much was taken, but so were some of the robbers. I suppose these captives were tortured and then impaled according to custom. A great deal is known about the tomb robbers of ancient Thebes thanks to the survival of their case files. Papyrus records immortalize their misdeeds. I am ashamed to say that a sheneb player named Perpethewemōpe was among the worst of these thieves. He dared supplement his wages by plunder and even falsely accused a fellow trumpeter named Amenkhau, with whom he had a grudge.
In Tutankhamun’s tomb the mess was heartbreaking. The royal scribe Djehutymose inventoried the disheveled tomb and hastily repacked its contents, leaving me beside the king’s burial shrine, wrapped in reeds beneath a beautiful alabaster lamp. There I lay contented until the third— and worst—of the plunderings.
Knowing something of tomb robbery, I was not surprised by what transpired next. Late one night, three of the band—Carter, Carnarvon and Lady Evelyn—tunneled into the burial chamber looking for the body of Pharaoh. I bristled as they stepped past me, taking note of their faces in the pale but painful flicker of their candles. Light of any kind had long been banished from my world. I wanted to sound an alarm but could not myself remove the protective core inside my throat.
Muted, I watched the robbers creep away. They painstakingly concealed the breach they had made in the door as if to deceive the necropolis police. Many months would pass before two of them came back; the third had apparently died in the meantime from the infected bite of an insect, and his demise was immediately blamed on Tut, just as I would eventually be accused of killing Howard Carter—along with 60 million other of his fellow humans.
On February 16, 1923, Carter and his crew “officially” opened the burial chamber in the presence of a small audience seated comfortably in the antechamber. Few of these spectators knew anything about the secret intrusion made some weeks earlier, so the robbers feigned surprise at everything they found, including me. I was scooped from the floor and studied, as recorded in Carter’s notes. I was given an unpleasant cleansing in ammonia and water; my wooden core was treated with something called celluloid. In a letter he later wrote, Carter let slip another of his little secrets involving me: “Though I am no expert with such musical instruments, I managed to get a good blast out of it which broke the silence of the Valley.” Yet the alarm I finally sounded (in Tut’s name, you recall) brought no one—no necropolis police, no royal troops, no one at all. Where had they all gone? Incensed at such insubordination, I soon was posted to the Egyptian Museum at Cairo, 600 kilometers away from the crypt and king to whom I still belonged.
Six years later, I spoke up again, but in a strange new way. A radio pioneer named Rex Keating arranged for me to broadcast a message from the Cairo Museum that would be heard all around the world. Keating, of course, knew that I could only issue a single note, and this he deemed unworthy of the event. So, he allowed a military trumpeter stationed in Egypt to stuff a modern mouthpiece down my throat in order to play some sort of tune. During the second rehearsal, the strain was too much, and I cracked. Then and there, in the presence of a latter-day pharaoh named Farouk, I fell to pieces. The horrified king, trumpeter and museum staffers dropped to their knees and scrambled to recover my broken remains. All witnesses to this disaster were sworn to secrecy, lest the world be outraged at my mistreatment. While experts labored feverishly to restore me to life, much as Isis had done for Osiris, Keating searched for a more reliable musician. He chose a British bandsman named James Tappern, who treated me with greater respect according to my superior rank.
At the appointed hour on an April evening in 1939, Keating and Carter’s old associate Alfred Lucas introduced me to millions of rapt listeners. A BBC announcer with a sonorous voice intoned with all the gravity he could muster: “The Trumpets of Pharaoh Tutankhamun! Lord of the Crowns, King of the South and North, Son of Ra!” On cue, trumpeter Tappern, using a modern mouthpiece now held safely in place by cotton batting, teased from me notes I had never heard in my life. I was quite shrill, climbing in flourishes well above my native C, all to Keating’s great satisfaction. Tappern made me perform something called the “Post-horn Gallup,” a lively tune unknown to the sheneb of ancient Egypt. I suppose this exploit was therefore historic, if not quite historical. I am told that my performance can still be heard by anyone at any time simply by searching through a communications maze called Internet. On that day my adjutant brother played a little, too, but no one paid him much heed. I, on the other hand, apparently killed.
Many frightened listeners insisted that my voice unleashed a curse, one that murdered, at that very moment, my abductor, Howard Carter. This was nonsense, of course: He had already expired several weeks earlier. No less surprising, many people even claim that I caused the carnage you call the Second World War. My mighty voice allegedly summoned to battle a host of nations wielding weapons no pharaoh imagined. I vow I gave no such order! As I said, Tappern’s mouthpiece gave me a modern voice, not an authentic mandate from either my pharoah or ancient Egypt. Keating had apparently been warned that listeners might misunderstand me, especially given the infamous “Curse of King Tut’s Tomb” that allegedly began with the death of Lord Carnarvon. I must say such talk of murderous mummies reflects poorly on your civilization. Statistics actually show that Carter’s gang lived full lives that generally exceeded the norms of the time: Carnarvon died at 57, Carter at 65, Lucas at 78, and Lady Evelyn at 79.
I have only performed twice more since that day. In 1941 I sounded a few notes as part of an acoustic experiment conducted at the Cairo Museum. Later, in January 1975, I blared another brief solo. The trumpeter, famed musician Philip Jones, said of me: “Its sound was not exactly melodious ... but it was probably the most thrilling experience I shall have as a trumpet player.”
Probably? Can you think of anything grander than touching your lips to the sheneb of Tutankhamun? I am sure he spoke in jest—after all, I am the horn of Africa. Those present were among the last ever to hear a sound from an ancient civilization.
Now, given my advancing age and recent misadventures, I may never sound again, although, in the fashion of your civilization, I have been on tour for some time now. I have been traveling first class again, learning along the way that beyond my native Nile, many lands exist. Your towns are of course much harder to pronounce than my Tjeb-nut-jer, Hut-Tahery-Ibt, and Taya-Dja-yet. Go ahead, try to say them: Fort Lauderdale, Chicago, Dallas, London, Melbourne. I find the fan-frenzied exhibitions in these exotic places fascinating from my side of the glass. Children no older than Tut when he ruled an empire crowd around my case, their mouths blowing into their little fists as if to make me speak. Kids naturally appreciate anything meant to make a noise. They jostle and joke about mummies and curses, while their elders hum a trumpet-laden parody linked to a certain Steve Martin and his band, the “Toot Uncommons.” Apparently, Tut was once celebrated in a festival called Saturday Night Live. I watch these antics indulgently, mindful that you honor Nebkheperure Tutankhamun in your outlandish way even as I, still dressed for his funeral, cherish for eternity his memory in my traditional fashion.
At first impression, the Sahara appears to be lifeless, with golden sand dunes stretching out as far as the eye can see. Yet it is one of the places where I have felt closest to the past of humanity.
We were fortunate during this part of a journey in southeast Algeria to have a helicopter made available by the Algerian army for some 12 hours over Tassili n’Ajjer National Park, a UNESCO World Heritage Site of outstanding scenic, historical and geological interest. It has one of the largest and best-preserved groupings of prehistoric cave art in the world, more than 15,000 drawings and engravings that record climatic changes, animal migrations and the evolution of human life on the edge of the Sahara from 8,000 to about 1,500 years ago. It is also, in parts, an island of life that harbors the endemic Saharan cypress, one of the rarest trees in the world.
From on high, it was possible to see how this vast plateau ends abruptly in what resembles a cliff face that in turn is slowly being eaten away by erosion. As compacted sand disintegrates, it adds to the desert. In other areas, deep ravines have been cut through the plateau by rivers that flowed thousands of years ago.
—Sebastião Salgado
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