Guano - I of II

In 1857, the United States began annexing small islands throughout the Caribbean and the Pacific. By the end of the century, it would claim almost a hundred of them. The islands had no indigenous populations and, at the time, no strategic value. They tended to be remote, rocky, and rainless but they had the one thing that everyone in the nineteenth century badly wanted. They had “white gold,” - guano - better known as bird shit.

In the nineteenth century, land fertility started suffering because of the lack of nitrogen. Nitrogen makes up nearly four-fifths of the earth’s atmosphere by volume but it is almost exclusively  dinitrogen (N2) which is unreactive and thus inaccessible to plants. The bacteria that inhabit the nodules of the roots of some legumes can convert it into a form usable by plants. It took chemists until the nineteenth century to piece all that together. 

But farmers, in their own way, had comprehended it for millennia. All agricultural traditions require methods for managing nitrogen flows. Nitrogen-rich manures are spread, crops rotated, forests burned, fields left fallow, or lentils planted. These complex systems faltered, however, in the nineteenth century. Farms that used to grow a rotating variety of crops for local consumption started focusing on the most profitable crops and grew them for distant markets. Single-crop farms yielded diminishing returns due to what was called “Soil exhaustion”.  

Farmers used various items for organic material that could be spread on their fields to replenish them like rapeseed cake, linseed cake, malt dust, straw, spoiled hay, oats, putrefied animal remains etc. What did work was guano. That term can refer to any bird or bat feces used as fertilizer, but the guano on everyone’s minds was the nitrogen-rich droppings of cormorants, boobies, and pelicans on the Chincha Islands off the coast of Peru. The guano piled hundreds of feet high and baked in the sun, so that the very rock of the islands was centuries’ worth of calcified bird droppings.

Guano's sharp, ammoniacal smell was notorious, perceptible from miles off. And yet, sprinkled in small quantities over the farms of North America that were nitrogen-starved, the stuff worked miracles. Huge demand drove up the cost. So did the tight control of the supply by British firms that monopolized guano exports from the Chinchas and kept prices high. The “guano question” came up again and again in the US Congress.

Guano entrepreneurs hastily formed the American Guano Company, with a capitalization of $10 million (all federal expenditures in 1850 totaled less than $45 million). The US passed the Guano Islands Act in 1856. Under its terms, whenever a U.S. citizen discovered guano on an unclaimed, uninhabited island, that island would, “at the discretion of the President, be considered as appertaining to the United States.” This meant that those islands would, in some way, belong to the country. This Act is the reason why the USA has so many territories in the Pacific today. 

Ian Fleming' novel, Doctor No is set on a guano island. When James Bond first arrives in Jamaica, the colonial secretary sits him down for a lecture on guano’s history (“Bond prepared to be bored”) which lasts an entire chapter. The secretary starts with the British-Peruvian monopoly and works his way up to Fritz Haber’s invention of ammonia synthesis. The point, as he comes to it, is that there are small, uninhabited islands scattered around the Caribbean. And one has been purchased by a mysterious international figure, Doctor Julius No.

At the end of the novel, Bond defeats Doctor No by burying him in a guano pit, the villain’s “screaming lungs stuffing with the filthy dust” until he dies. In the 1962 film version, however, there is no trace of guano. Doctor No’s base is powered by a nuclear reactor, and Bond triumphs in the end by triggering a meltdown, drowning Doctor No in the pool containing the overheating reactor and wrecking the island. 

Hatshepsut - II of II

The story of Hatshepsut finally started being pieced together in the 1920s. Archaeologists from the Metropolitan Museum of Art found two pits near Luxor filled with many broken bits of statues. The statues had been installed in a magnificent temple that Hatshepsut had built. Workmen of yore had toppled them and dragged them to the edge of a pit. There they attacked the statues with sledgehammers and rocks. Then they dumped the broken fragments into the pit.

The archaeologists found that numerous inscriptions and carvings had been destroyed chiseling out Hatshepsut’s name and image. The workers seemed to have removed Hatshepsut’s name and face, and not the inscriptions that described the events of her reign. She doesn’t appear on any of the kings’ lists, which are the ancient records of all the pharaohs and their dynasties. Cleopatra would never have heard of her. Hatshepsut had literally been defaced. 

But in a society where the illiteracy rate was between 95 and 99 percent, it was inevitable that some mentions of Hatshepsut would be missed. Many of the guys who were sent into the temple to remove Hatshepsut’s name seemed not to have tried hard enough. The surviving inscriptions told a remarkable story. 

Hatshepsut took the throne in around 1478 BC, in a period that historians call the Eighteenth Dynasty. (The same dynasty would later include some of the best-known names in Egyptian history, including Akhenaten, the “heretic king,” and his son Tutankhamun.) Hatshepsut was the daughter of a pharaoh and then the principal wife of that pharaoh’s son (who was her own half brother). Then her husband died, leaving a young son by a secondary wife. Hatshepsut served as co-regent with the toddler for a short time. Then she took the throne in her own name.

She reigned for nearly two decades. She thrived, and Egypt thrived. She built monuments across the length of Egypt, most notably in Thebes. There she commissioned obelisks and statues and her masterpiece, the immense temple that Champollion explored. 

How to explain the violence directed against her images? The order to remove all evidence of Hatshepsut’s existence came from her stepson, Tuthmosis III, who succeeded her on the throne. It was his name — or sometimes the name of Hatshepsut’s father, Tuthmosis I — that replaced Hatshepsut’s in her cartouches. There are two different views that have been advanced to explain the motive. 

One view is that Hatshepsut had to be eradicated because the very notion of a female pharaoh violated the natural order. Such an aberration had to be denied as if it had never been. Other scholars insist that the explanation had more to do with dynastic politics than with revulsion. They point out that Tuthmosis III reigned for twenty years before he issued his anti-Hatshepsut decree. That seems a long time to put a vendetta on hold. The real issue, according to these skeptics, was who would rule next. Some historians believe that there were rival candidates. One was Tuthmosis’s son; the others were more closely related to Hatshepsut and therefore boasted better bloodlines. What better way for Tuthmosis to smooth the way for his own son to succeed him than by ensuring that no rival could stake a claim of his own?

Even if all Hatshepsut’s statues had survived intact, we would not know what she looked like. This is because, in Ancient Egypt rulers were depicted as idealized types rather than individuals. Kings who had grown old and feeble were portrayed as young and imposing; so were little boys who happened to have inherited the throne. Archaeologists have devoted endless hours to piecing together Hatshepsut’s vandalized statues. Hatshepsut is depicted sometimes as male, sometimes as female, and sometimes as a female with the traditional trappings of male authority, including a royal goatee. 

The best of the statues are treasures of world art. The most striking of all is an eleven-foot-long, seven-ton granite sphinx with Hatshepsut’s face (and royal headdress and beard) and a lion’s body which is kept at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. It was created more than three and a half millennia ago, at a site six thousand miles from its present home. Much of its story remains a mystery. But what we do know, we owe to Champollion noticing a tiny letter T, in a place where it did not belong.

Hatshepsut - I of II

In George Orwell's novel, 1984, the memory hole is a system used by the Party to destroy documents and alter history, ensuring that the only reality is what the Party dictates. The protagonist Winston Smith's job involves receiving original documents that he is required to alter according to strict instructions. Once he has rewritten history according to the Party's requirements, the original documents are shoved into the memory hole and incinerated. It's as if the past never happened. It symbolizes the control of information and the past, erasing any evidence that contradicts the Party's current narrative.

During the political purges of Joseph Stalin, he attempted to erase some figures from Soviet history by altering images and destroying film. Trotsky was a founder of the Soviet state, the first commander of the Red Army, playing a major role in the Russian Civil War, and he was a long-standing member of the Politburo. Stalin viewed him as a leading competitor for power, and once he came to power, ordered Trotsky's name and image to be thoroughly erased from Soviet history.

On May 5, 1920, Lenin gave a famous speech to a crowd of Soviet troops in Sverdlov Square, Moscow. In the foreground were Leon Trotsky and Lev Kamenev another person who had fallen from favor. The photo was later altered and both were removed by censors. Stalin had written glowingly in 1918 about the revolutionary contributions by Trotsky but he denied their special value by 1924. The Trotsky that  Stalin had written about glowingly in 1918 ceased to exist.

Hannah Arendt states that the “chances of factual truth surviving the onslaught of power are very slim indeed; it is always in danger of being maneuvered out of the world not only for a time but, potentially, forever.” Attempts to rewrite history for political ends are not merely a product of the last couple of centuries. There was an ancient precursor of the Stalinist technique of rewriting history by cropping political figures from photos when they fell from favor the Egyptian Pharaoh, Hatshepsut. 

Since his boyhood, Champollion had dreamed of seeing Egypt with his own eyes but had never been able to afford an Egyptian trip. (His enemies delighted in mocking him for posing as an expert on a land where he had never set foot.) Finally, in 1828, he made it. He was thirty-seven years old. At every juncture along the way he had read inscriptions carved into temples, tombs, and monuments. (It should be noted that he was the only person in the world who could have done so.) Then, in June 1829, while reading inscriptions at the site called Deir el-Bahri, near the Valley of the Kings, he found himself bewildered. He found mentions of a king he had never heard of. 

This bearded king was in the usual dress of the Pharaohs but the nouns and verbs were in the feminine, as though a queen were in question. For example, a message carved into a temple wall carried a warning: “He who shall do her homage shall live, he who shall speak evil in blasphemy of Her Majesty shall die.” The warning itself wasn’t a surprise. The surprise was the forthright declaration of just who was issuing the warning — Her Majesty.

Egypt had had female rulers — Cleopatra would be the most famous — but nearly all of them had been married to a pharaoh or ruled in the name of a royal prince too young to take the throne. Who was this unknown ruler? The mystery would not be solved until a century after Champollion’s death. For nearly twenty years, Egypt had been ruled by a female pharaoh — not just the wife of a ruler but a pharaoh in her own right — whose existence later rulers had tried to delete from history. This was Hatshepsut. 

The clues that Champollion had spotted were so subtle that others may have missed it but by this point he had come to a deep understanding of Egyptian grammar. He found that Egyptian took great pains with gender distinctions. In Hatshepsut’s temple, Champollion had seen that the word for king was followed by a feminine marker, the bread loaf hieroglyph that stood for the sound t. That tiny change transformed the familiar word "king" to something bizarre which startled Champollion.