page_title: Auguste Mariette
section_title: First trip to Egypt
hierarchical_section_title: Auguste Mariette / First trip to Egypt
caption_attribution_description: English: Seated in chairs, from left to right: Auguste Mariette, Dona Josefina da Fonseca Costa, lady-in-waiting of the Empress, Luís Pedreira do Couto Ferraz, Baron and later Vicount of Bom Retiro, Empress Teresa Cristina, an unidentified man and Emperor Dom Pedro II of Brazil, surrounded by local Egyptians during the Emperor's trip to Egypt in the end of 1871. Behind them can be seem the Great Sphinx of Giza and the Giza Necropolis.
context_page_description: François Auguste Ferdinand Mariette was a French scholar, archaeologist and Egyptologist, and founder of the Egyptian Department of Antiquities.
context_section_description: Entrusted with a government mission for the purpose of seeking and purchasing the best Coptic, Syriac, Arabic and Ethiopic manuscripts for the Louvre collection so that it retained its then-supremacy over other national collections, he set out for Egypt in 1850.
  After little success in acquiring manuscripts due to inexperience, to avoid an embarrassing return empty-handed to France and wasting what might be his only trip to Egypt, he visited temples and befriended a Bedouin tribe, who led him to Saqqara.  The site initially looked "a spectacle of desolation...[and] mounds of sand" (his words), but on noticing one sphinx from the reputed avenue of sphinxes, that led to the ruins of the Serapeum at Saqqara near the step-pyramid, with its head above the sands, he gathered 30 workmen.  Thus, in 1851, he made his celebrated discovery of this avenue and eventually the subterranean tomb-temple complex of catacombs with their spectacular sarcophagi of the Apis bulls. Breaking through the rubble at the tomb entrance on November 12, he entered the complex, finding thousands of  statues, bronze tablets and other treasures, but only one intact sarcophagus. He also found the virtually intact tomb of Prince Khaemweset, Ramesses II's son.
  Accused of theft and destruction by rival diggers and by the Egyptian authorities, Mariette began to rebury his finds in the desert to keep them from these competitors. Instead of manuscripts, official French funds were now advanced for the prosecution of his researches, and he remained in Egypt for four years, excavating, discovering and despatching archaeological treasures to the Louvre, following the accepted Eurocentric convention. However, the French government and the Louvre set up an arrangement to divide the finds 50:50, so that upon his return to Paris 230 crates went to the Louvre (and he was raised to an assistant conservator), but an equal amount remained in Egypt.
caption: Auguste Mariette (seated, far left) and Emperor Pedro II of Brazil (seated, far right) with others during the monarch's visit to the Giza Necropolis at the end of 1871.
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