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Notizie Archeologia Art of the Ancients
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An Australia-bound exhibition of Egyptian artefacts from the Louvre is about much more than pyramids and sphinxes, its curator tells Miriam Cosic Journey to the Afterlife: Egyptian Antiquities from the Louvre is at the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, from Friday to February 25, the Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, March 21 to July 1, and the Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth, July 20 to October28, 2007. November 11, 2006 IMAGES from ancient Egypt - the pyramids and the sphinxes, the mummies, headdresses and loin cloths, the sacred scarabs and priestly cats - are plentiful in popular culture, but they are almost cartoon-like in their superficiality. Our familiarity with them is misleading. The mind-set of these mysterious people is far less transparent to us than that of the ancient Greeks, whose classical civilisation flared comparatively briefly towards the end of the 3000-year reign of the pharaohs. To walk from the Egyptian rooms in the Louvre in Paris, one of the great repositories of this material, into those of the Greeks next door is to leave the seemingly modern - large-scaled, brightly coloured and smoothly textured, dominated by text and brand-like pictograms - for the rough-hewn simplicity of a much more distant world. Yet the Greeks gave us the foundations of our intellectual life: philosophy, science, literature. The everyday metaphysics of the Egyptians - mind-bending notions such as the interchangeability of the real and the symbolic, or belief in the coexistence of the living and the dead in the material and the immaterial worlds - strains the imagination. Plato spent time in Egypt and is said to have taken from there his metaphor of life being like shadows flickering on the walls of a cave. Shifting back from the mental world of the Greeks to that of the Egyptians, however, is a leap for us. "You could say the Egyptians created the virtual world," says Marc Etienne, curator of the department of Egyptian antiquities at the Louvre. "The world of ideas is a kind of mirror of the real world; when you see the thing, it brings back the ideal object of the world of ideas. And you can use the virtuality in the material world." It is quite different from our idea of an image merely symbolising the object in space: rather, the image could have a material effect, certainly in the afterlife. "An image was a true substitute of the real thing," Etienne says, "so there is always a kind of va et vient (coming and going) between the object itself and the reality that it conveyed." Pharaohs were buried with retinues of attendants carved from stone, up to 400 in later times, with household implements and real food, all of which they could use in the afterlife. To name an object or a concept was to give it existence, and the most catastrophic thing that could befall an Egyptian was for his name to fall from use when he died. If his memory died, he was not immortal. Etienne has curated an exhibition of 202 Egyptian artefacts from the Louvre, which opens at the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra on Thursday, then travels to Adelaide and Perth, remaining in Australia for almost 12 months. Journey to the Afterlife: Egyptian Antiquities from the Louvre is designed to lead people in with the familiar, then to surprise them. "So there are sarcophagi, mummies, sphinxes, royal statues, things people know through books and cinema, but I wanted to avoid the deja vu," Etienne says. "It's a bit of a challenge, with pieces taken from the collection that are, on aesthetic grounds, striking or sometimes that are a little bit provocative, to shake people's minds up with things that they would hardly consider Egyptian, or that they might not expect from this art." *** ETIENNE was studying science at university in 1982 when he visited an exhibition called The Birth of Writing at the Grand Palais. "It was a coup de foudre, as we say in France," he says, smiling. Love at first sight. He immediately switched to art history, specialising in Egyptology. "I find this kind of system very, very fascinating: the society and the place of script in it. And of course the peculiar writing is fascinating in itself ..." Extroverted and quick to joke, he is also nervy and distracted by what he has left to do when we meet for a coffee in the less than glamorous back rooms of the Louvre. He will be the first courier to accompany works coming to Canberra. It doesn't help that FIAC, the annual Paris art fair, has taken over part of the Louvre's courtyard this year and is getting in his way. Etienne occupies a position established 180 years ago by the founder of Egyptology. The French, and the Louvre in particular, have a long and close association with this particular strand ofscholarship. Although the famous Rosetta stone is housed in the British Museum, it was a Frenchman, Jean-Francois Champollion, who used it to crack the code of Egyptian hieroglyphics in 1822. Made only a few hundred years BC, the Rosetta stone has alternating bands of text in traditional hieroglyphics, in demotic, the cursive script developed from them, and in Greek, the international language of the region at the time of the stone's inscription. Champollion worked laboriously across the three forms of writing to translate the words contained in the pictograms. The first he deciphered, working with other scholars' transliterations in 1821, was the royal name, Ptolemy; the following year, he worked out the glyphs for the royal names, Ramses and Thutmose, and knew he was through the bottleneck. "It is a script that is at once pictorial, symbolic and phonetic within the same texts, the same sentence, I would almost say within the same word," he wrote. In the 1820s, Champollion established the Museo Egizio in Turin, the largest collection of ancient Egyptian artefacts outside Egypt at the time. It still has one of the six key holdings in the world; the others are the Cairo Museum, the British Museum, the Metropolitan in New York, the Berlin Museum and the Louvre. While in Italy, Champollion heard that 4000 objects collected by a British consul-general in Alexandria, Henry Salt, were for sale. He persuaded Charles X that they should be acquired for France and on May 15, 1826, the king signed an ordinance setting up the department of Egyptian monuments in the Louvre. Champollion was named its first curator. An interest in ancient Egypt already existed in France. When Napoleon invaded Egypt in 1798, he took 167 scientists, artists and scholars with him. They made the first systematic study of the ancient ruins: a 24-volume survey, Description de l'Egypte, was the result. Writer Dominique-Vivant Denon, after whom a wing of the Louvre is named, accompanied Napoleon and his account of his findings, Voyages in Upper and Lower Egypt, was a bestseller when it was published in 1802 and was translated into English the same year. Napoleon failed in Egypt, but Paris became the clearing house for things Egyptian in Europe. The Rosetta stone was discovered during the Napoleonic excursion but it and other artefacts collected ended up in London, the spoils of war. Etienne warns against the common error of conflating events. "What is very important is that the Egyptian collection of the Louvre owes nothing to Napoleon's campaign in Egypt," he says. That would come three decades later. *** IT was another French scholar, Auguste Mariette, who set up the Cairo Museum in Egypt. He had gone to Egypt in 1850 on the trail of Coptic manuscripts but he, too, had a coup de foudre. He abandoned his plan and began work on excavations at the Serapeum at Memphis (later renamed Saqqara, where there is still a strong French scientific presence, headed by the Louvre's director of Egyptian antiquities, Christiane Ziegler, and funded by the French ministry of culture). Among the many pieces Mariette sent back to the Louvre is the famous seated scribe, dated between 2300BC and 2500BC, the oldest object in the collection. Mariette befriended Ferdinand de Lesseps, who later built the Suez Canal. De Lesseps persuaded Egypt's ruler, Said Pasha, to build a museum of antiquities to encourage local scholarship and stem the flow of looted objects out of the country, and to appoint Mariette to head it. "It behoves us to preserve Egypt's monuments with care," Mariette wrote at the time. "Five hundred years hence Egypt should still be able to show to scholars who shall visit her the same monuments that we are describing today." Unauthorised excavations were nothing new. Tomb-robbing had been going on for millenniums, long before Europeans invented what post-colonial critic Edward Said would call, disparagingly, orientalism. In the time of the pharaohs, the overriding desires of people were to go safely into the afterlife and not to be forgotten: that they "remain present in the memory of men" as the hieroglyphics record. Tomb-robbing and the erasing of a name from the cartouche (the oblong band recording the name of the tomb owner) - a political act after succession, in some cases - were hostile acts of moral significance. Permanence, timelessness, immanence: ancient Egyptians sought these seemingly impossible things and, so far, have achieved them on a civilisational and individual level. The names of many of the kings and queens are known to us. Ramses, Hatshepsut, Thutmose, Amenhotep, Akhenaten, Nefertiti, Tutankhamen: they retain the resonance of power. The mysterious appeal of the great monuments of Egypt - the pyramids, the sphinxes - lies as much in their endurance as in their colossal size. And so for everyday artefacts: most of what we see today has come from the tombs in which they were sealed to accompany their owners into the afterlife, the dry desert climate preserving not only their forms but their brilliant colours, too. One of the astonishing things about roaming the Louvre's Egyptian rooms is the amount of colour displayed so long after we might have thought it would have faded. The paint on wood and stone, the brightly detailed texts that cover the Russian doll-like layers of shrouds and mummy casings, the gilt, even the glowing rose granite of the Tanis sphinx, part of the Salt collection, give Egyptian art a vividness that other ancient relics lack. The extreme formality of Egyptian art also confers a sense of timelessness. Statues and paintings of people show them muscular and straight-backed. The convention of showing the heads in profile, the torsos front-on and the feet side-on indicated three-dimensionality to Egyptians, something Picasso would revisit when he experimented with cubism in the early 20th century. Later, Egyptian artists began to depict the human form more naturalistically. Etienne says he is keen to show that the Egyptians didn't make "a kind of monolithic, immutable art". A statue designed for a particular purpose will show different costumes, a different placement of the hieroglyphics, at different times. "They seem to be very static, but they were evolving," he says. *** PRE-PHARAONIC Egypt developed along the Nile from about 5000BC. In the early fourth millennium BC, village life became more complex. Then, in about 3000BC, the separate states of Upper and Lower Egypt were unified under the first pharaohs, and writing was invented. The Old Kingdom, as it is called, marked the first of the three high points of ancient Egyptian civilisation. It arose about 2600BC and lasted for 500 years. The first stepped pyramid was built at the then capital, Memphis, in the beginning of this era, and later the Giza pyramids and Sphinx were raised. It is thought climate change caused a drought that led to civil unrest, which ushered in the First Intermediate Period, in which Egypt splintered. The country was reunited in about 2030BC by Mentuhotep II, marking the beginning of the Middle Kingdom, and his successors moved the capital to Thebes. In about 1650BC Hyksos invaders took Lower Egypt, using the new technology of horse-drawn chariots, and it remained in their hands for the century known as the Second Intermediate Period, until the dawn of the New Kingdom, when Ahmose I retook the Nile delta region. Within another hundred years, the Egyptians had built an empire that stretched 3000km, from Nubia in the south to Palestine and Syria. In earlier phases of Egyptian civilisation only the god-king travelled into the afterlife; later any citizen who had led a worthy life expected to join the god of the underworld, Osiris. Vignettes from the Book of the Dead show the jackal-headed god of embalming, Anubis, preparing the bodies of aristocrats and administrators for the afterlife, and Maat, the goddess of cosmic law, symbolised by the ostrich feather in her headdress, weighing the hearts of the dead, while the ibis-headed god Thoth (the rhythmic walk of ibises symbolised the passage of time) records the findings for the supreme judge, Osiris. Preoccupation with death, which the Egyptians feared, was not the only leitmotif running through their culture. Another was the ideal of order. In a room full of colossuses in the Louvre is what remains of the statue of a pharaoh: two giant feet on a plinth, which is carved with a frieze of hieroglyphics. In it, the people of the south, defeated in war, are drawn in chains: it is the image of a world delivered from troubles, where order is attained and enemies reduced to powerlessness by the god-king, who has maintained the structure of the universe. In accepting the Nobel prize for literature in 1988, Egyptian novelist Naguib Mahfouz spoke of the legacy of his forebears. "As for pharaonic civilisation, I will not talk of conquests and the building of empires. This has become a worn-out pride the mention of which, modern conscience, thank God, feels uneasy about," he said. "Nor will I talk about how it was guided for the first time to the existence of God and its ushering in the dawn of human conscience." Instead, Mahfouz related a historical incident recorded on papyrus, when a pharaoh, urged to execute some men and women who were said to have had sinful relations, instead called together learned men of law and asked them to investigate the allegations so that he could dispense justice in the light of truth. In her book Maat: L'ordre juste du monde, Egyptologist and jurist Bernadette Menu proposes how that desire for truth and justice entered the contemporary world. She suggests Aristotle, a founder of modern ethics, took his ideas of justice, via the intermediary efforts of earlier Greek thinkers, from the Egyptian concept of maat. Etienne says he wants Australians to understand what ancient Egyptians felt in their multiplicit world. It seems a tall order, until one spends time in his world. In the Louvre, multiple black granite statues of the goddess Sekhmet seated, her right hand holding the ankh of life, line a wall. With the body of a woman and the face of a lioness - the opposite of the sphinx - Sekhmet represented the havoc the sun god, Ra, could wreak. She could cause drought, epidemic and unrest. She could also heal, but her wrath had to be appeased by the rituals that kept Egypt in a perfect state of order. The statues, one of which will be seen in Australia, seem remote, yet they also have an implacable presence that seems to reach from the abstract idea of ancient Egypt right into this modern, material world. Journey to the Afterlife: Egyptian Antiquities from the Louvre is at the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, from Friday to February 25, the Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, March 21 to July 1, and the Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth, July 20 to October28, 2007. Miriam Cosic travelled to Paris as a guest of Arts Exhibitions Australia. |
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