Tombs of the Mamluks: The Mausoleum of Emir Qawsun and the Sultaniya, Cairo
Antonio Beato
Italian, born in Greece, after 1832–1906
Tombs of the Mamluks:
The Mausoleum of Emir Qawsun and the Sultaniya, Cairo, about 1860
Albumen print from wet collodion negative
25.8 x 36.2 cm (10 x 14 ¼ in.) Image
25.8 x 36.2 cm (10 x 14 ¼ in.) Sheet
Among the first Europeans to take their cameras to Eastern Europe and North Africa were the Beato brothers, who became true pioneers of photog raphic exploration. Felice Beato (Cat. no. 52) seems to have been born in the Marches of Italy, while his younger brother Antonio arrived after his family had moved to Corfu. For centuries this island in the Ionian Sea had been a Venetian possession, but during the Napoleonic Wars it fell under British rule. The brothers grew up in a colony of melding cultures, learning English along with Italian and Greek. They absorbed the British fascination with photographic technology, as well as the imperial impulse to explore, discover and record.
In 1854, the Beato brothers’ elder sister, Leonilda Maria Matilda, married James Robertson, an English engraver who for a decade had been working at the Ottoman imperial mint in Constantinople. He supplemented his income as a photographer, and engaged his brothers-in-law as assistants in his studio at Pera in Constantinople. When Robertson succeeded Roger Fenton (Cat. no. 34) as official English photographer of the Crimean War in 1855, all three joined British troops en route to the battlefields. They documented the ruined fortifications and dockyards of the peninsula and the fall of Sevastopol. Like Fenton’s, some of their images were reproduced as wood engravings published in the Illustrated London News. Their assignment ended in 1856 and they traveled to the Holy Land, recording their visit to the British Consulate in Jerusalem on March 3, 1857. Robertson carried the negatives they collected back to Constantinople to print and publish. Felice Beato traveled on to India, where he opened a studio in Calcutta, and his brother soon followed. It may have been health problems that prompted Antonio to leave India in December 1859; setting out to return to Europe, he traveled via Suez, Egypt. In Cairo he found a thriving English community and enough interest in his photographic portraits and local images from residents and tourists to build a business. He opened a studio and shop close to Shepherds’ Hotel in the tourist quarter. Like Maxime Du Camp and Felix Bonfils (Cat. nos. 13, 17) before him, Beato photographed ancient Egyptian ruins and the Islamic architecture of medieval Cairo, images that appealed to those interested in the history and romance of Islamic culture.
When selecting Egyptian subjects and planning their presentation, Beato looked to English travel images of the preceding generation. Among his favorite models were the drawings of David Roberts, reproduced as lithographs in The Holy Land, Syria, Idumea, Arabia, Egypt and Nubia, published in 1842. One of those was Roberts’s Tombs of the Mamelukes. “Another of those picturesque but nameless mosque-tombs . . . ,” states the legend "for just without the walls of Cairo and forms its necropolis, have not left a line for the historian’s. Raised at a great cost by the caliph, or the bey for his tomb. . . . His name was soon forgotten and his mosque-tomb left to fall into decay, like the dust of common inhabitants of earth around him.” Beato adopted Roberts’s viewpoint for the southern part of the Cairo necropolis, a complex now known to be the 14th-century mausoleum of the emir Qawsun. This powerful commander and charismatic ruler was born Sayf ad-Din Qawsun ibn Abdullah an-Nasiri as-Saqi, north of the Black Sea. He was an ethnic Mongol who traveled to Egypt in a merchant retinue of Özbeg Hān, leader of the Golden Horde. There he was purchased by the ninth Bahri Mamluk sultan of Egypt, Al-Nasir Muhammad, and brought into the court. It was unusual for a Mamluk to be taken into the court as an adult, for they were usually purchased as children to undergo long and arduous training to attain their high ranks and positions. It was said that Qawsun’s striking appearance and manner made him a favorite of an-Nasir Muhammad, who wished to build a new power base of outsiders to oppose existing Mamluk factions. Qawsun rose quickly through the military hierarchy, and within a decade he was among leading emirs in the court. He became a close friend and advisor to the sultan, and married one of the sultan’s daughters. Their families were bound even more closely together when the sultan took one of Qawsun’s sisters as a wife.
As one of the richest and most powerful emirs in Al-Nasir Muhammad’s court, Qawsun began construction of his tomb in 1335.5 It became the first major mausoleum for Bahri Mamluks in this quadrant of the Cairo necropolis. Al-Nasir died in 1341, and Qawsun became viceroy of Egypt, wielding power behind several of the sultan’s minor sons, until his political assassination in 1342. Al-Nasir had named Qawsun guardian of his young children, but after the sultan’s death Qawsun deposed Al-Nasir’s son and heir Abu Bakr, and installed the younger prince on the throne with himself as regent. This enraged Qawsun’s rivals among the Mamluk emirs; they arrested Qawsun, confiscated his riches, and exiled him to Alexandria. The Mausoleum of Qawsun was part of a larger khankah (or khanqah—a building for meditation and gatherings of Sufi monks) in 1335/36, and was intended for the prince’s burial. Plundered upon Qawsun’s arrest in 1341, the khankah suffered greatly, but it continued functioning until 1403 when his possessions and endowments (hikr) were confiscated and stolen by rival Mamluks.
Originally, the mausoleum had two matching domed chambers flanking a prayer hall that was attached to a large khankah—a building for meditation and Sufi gatherings. With its keel -arches, ribbed finials, and stalactite niches, the minaret typifies early Mamluk- style architecture. The intricate stucco decoration of the tomb’s surviving entrance suggests the participation of Persian craftsmen. Over the centuries, the mausoleum lost its walls and much of its outbuildings, which must have once looked like the princely funerary complexes of the Northern Cemetery. Today, the area previously enclosed by the mausoleum walls is occupied by hundreds of tombstones.
In Beato’s photograph, two drum-shaped towers to the right of Qawsun’s monument are the matching turrets of the Sultaniya complex; constructed around 1350–70, this may be the burial place of and monument to the mother of Sultan Hasan. The khankah of Qawsun may have inspired its form, but the two domed structures flanking its central iwan—a portal surrounded by a deep, tall vaulted space that faces away from the photographer—also has antecedents in Anatolian monuments.
Most of Antonio Beato’s Egyptian photographs of the 1860s represent architectural views and landscapes. Figures often appear, going about their daily business amid historical monuments, accustomed to the grandeur of their settings. Many of the early photographs bear the signature ‘A. Beato’ in black ink on the print; others have this signature handwritten on the negative, which produces the reversed text in white on the prints. In 1862, the photographer moved to Luxor, where he built a more specialized studio and continued his prolific production. This location gave him access to the great ancient pharaonic monuments of Thebes, Karnak and the West Bank necropolis, but it is likely that tourist traffic, and the surfeit of customers, drew him there. Beato’s business flourished through the decade, and he became successful enough to take French-born photographer Hippolyte Arnoux as his partner. Arnoux had come to Egypt to photograph the excavation the Suez Canal, and had his own studio in Port Said, where he often worked on a river launch fitted with a portable darkroom. By the time he joined Beato late in the 1860s, Arnoux had come to specialize in portraits of Egyptian types and genre studies.
In the summer of 1906, soon after Beato’s death, his Italian-born wife advertised the sale of his property, equipment, 1500 glass-plate negatives, and his remaining stock of prints and postcards. At the urging of Gaston Maspero, the government purchased Beato’s negatives, and today about 200 of them remain in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo.
