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Immortal longings
‘Treasures of Ancient Egypt’ comes to the Museum of Science
BY LLOYD SCHWARTZ

" The Quest for Immortality: Treasures of Ancient Egypt "
At the Museum of Science through March 30.


My romance with Egypt began on a visit there almost a decade ago, and I still haven’t gotten over it. Back home, I wrote a poem — " Cairo Traffic " — that ended: " My brief Egypt! Graphic close-up of my own dissolution. In this carnival of souls, half marketplace, half theater, in this un-holy land where the spirit sleeps and nothing is not for sale, the spirit wakes, struggling to remain in this world while the beautiful body falls away. "

That conflict between body and spirit has been reawakened in me at every Egyptian exhibit I’ve seen since, especially in two extraordinary traveling shows in 1999: ÒThe Age of the PyramidsÓ at the Metropolitan, with some 250 pieces from collections all over the world, and the remarkable ÒPharaohs of the SunÓ exhibit of art and artifacts from the time of Akhenaten at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts. Now, Boston’s Museum of Science, through March 30, is hosting the latest blockbuster show of Egyptiana — its first stop after the National Gallery in Washington, and its only stop in the Northeast (other tour cities are Fort Worth, Milwaukee, and New Orleans). ÒThe Quest for Immortality: Treasures of Ancient EgyptÓ includes 115 items, all but four from the incomparable Cairo Museum. According to the press release, this is Òthe largest selection of ancient artifacts ever lent by Egypt for exhibition in North America.Ó

Why Boston? And why the Science Museum? The MFA has one of the world’s most important Egyptian collections — which is probably why the Akhenaten show found a home there. That year Boston erupted in Egypt fever, with Boston Lyric Opera staging three ÒEgyptianÓ operas (Verdi’s Aida, Philip Glass’s Akhnaten, and Mozart’s Die Zauberflšte) and Boston Ballet putting on a forgettable Cleopatra. Back in 1988, the Museum of Science had already established an Egyptian connection with ÒRamesses the Great.Ó

At the press reception last week, Museum of Science president/director David Ellis argued for the appropriateness of this venue, stressing that this is a Òscientific studyÓ offering Òlearning opportunitiesÓ about arch¾ology and ancient religion. The museum is bringing back Mysteries of Egypt, the enjoyably silly Imax film with Omar Sharif debunking the myth of curses falling upon Egyptian arch¾ologists, and it’s added Stars of the Pharaohs, the Hayden Planetarium’s re-creation of ancient Egyptian skies, plus a short film, ÒThe Quest for Immortality in Ancient Egypt,Ó that’s running continuously within the installation. Staffers are demonstrating mummification and the making of papyrus, and Johns Hopkins has lent an actual 2500-year-old mummy that has recently undergone CT scans at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center.

So the Science Museum. Why not?

In fact, this is an extremely attractive and impressive exhibit, with a lot more breathing space than it had at the National Gallery (which had neither an Imax film nor a real mummy, though the impressive lifesize re-creation of Thutmose III’s burial chamber, with its images of the 12 ÒHours of the NightÓ and its midnight-sky ceiling covered with hundreds of stick-figure star homunculi, is a fixture of the traveling show). The objects are certainly displayed more vividly here than they ever were in the desolate, dimly lit rooms of the Cairo Museum itself, though Dr. Zahi Hawass, director general of the Supreme Council of Antiquities in Egypt, and familiar to Americans from numerous PBS and Discovery Channel documentaries, announced that on December 9 the Cairo Museum is opening a new exhibit of major pieces discovered just this past decade — artifacts from among the 60,000 currently in its basement — and that the century-old museum has had a facelift, including new lighting, AC, a children’s wing, and a new gift shop. So this new show is also promoting Egyptian tourism. A mere 115 objects, however grand, probably won’t be missed. ÒSeventy percent of Egyptian monuments are still buried,Ó Dr. Hawass drily added.

Whereas previous touring shows have been devoted to single periods of Egyptian culture, this one covers millennia but concentrates on one central theme, the desire to ensure life after death. As John Hopkins’s Betsy Bryan — the show’s curator, and co-author of the superb and helpful catalogue — pointed out, ÒIn their religious life, the ancient Egyptians left little to chance.Ó

What first meets our eyes is a 3400-year-old wooden model of a royal funeral boat, seven and a half feet long and vibrantly painted (the color that survives from ancient paint jobs is breathtaking in its radiance); it was designed to be buried along with the deceased ruler to guarantee his passage to the next world. There are also little statuettes, ushebtis, servants for the afterlife, and the strikingly modernist boxes they come in. Gilded mummy cases (several of the most magnificent you’ve ever seen). A dazzling eight-inch gold funerary mask of the courtier Wenudjebauendjed. And a bewitching 3080-year-old gilded wooden canopic chest (to hold the remains of internal organs after mummification), with the god Anubis — guardian of the body and protector of souls, here depicted as a black jackal — affixed to the lid, alertly guarding the contents. Not to mention the two relatively recent (only 2300 years old) exquisite little jackals made of black glass, probably the inlays for a coffin.

Since practically everything that survives from ancient Egypt has to do with the Òquest for immortality,Ó almost any available object could have been included in this show: jewelry and even more beautiful jewelry boxes, musical instruments, a board game with the heads of jackals and hounds for pegs, tools (an elegant triangle level), furniture. The painted sandstone head of Thutmose I with its inscrutable smile, the colossal red-granite head of Ramesses II; the confidently striding Thutmose III — they loom over their respective rooms. More touching is a seated scribe, Amenhotep, son of Hapu, at over four feet high considerably larger than any other scribal statue I can remember, his folds of well-fed flesh rippling down his chest, a scroll unrolled across his knees. The final words read: ÒMy lord did something useful for me, placing my image in the house of Amun, knowing it would remain for eternity.Ó

Dr. Hawass’s own favorite piece in the show is one of the smallest, a tiny lapis lazuli pendant of the goddess Maat, keeper of the natural order, with her gold feather headdress almost doubling her height to two-and-three-quarter inches.

I’m a sucker for all the ancient Egyptian animals: a tiny ivory frog with a movable jaw; twin crocodiles (from the museum at Luxor), fat and self-satisfied, resting their chins on little granodiorite mounds, their leathery tails hanging down behind. And speaking of tails: who could resist the prowling leopard, an almost 3500-year-old piece of carved wood, slouching (toward Bethlehem?) with its long tail dragging, or the self-satisfied bronze kitty with its wrap-around tail circling to its paws? A dog-headed baboon (the god Thoth, guardian of the deceased) sits hollow-eyed with its hands on its knees and its genitals generously — and graphically — exposed.

Literally creepier are the twin human-headed cobras stretched out and wriggling atop a narrow double-snake coffin. And the weird, ferociously protective creature that’s half falcon, half crocodile. And from the Roman period (unusually well represented in this show) a sinuous high relief with two coiling snakes that look as if they were about to slide off the limestone they’re attached to.

One of the most sinister yet seductive images is the one on the cover of the catalogue, which is called Osiris Resurrecting. Wound in mummy cloth, this figure of perennial rebirth has rolled over onto his stomach, but his head faces up and he’s smiling. Look at him head on so you can get the full effect of his headdress, with its two erect ostrich plumes made of the thinnest electrum and gold.

Some of the pieces are so drop-dead beautiful, you don’t really care what they signify. Like the bead net and gold mask of Hekamsaef, which is woven of countless gold, lapis, and amazonite beads — it’s right out of a Cecil B. DeMille costume shop. Among the oldest objects in the exhibit are mysteriously glamorous pair of disconnected eyes and eyebrows — ÒwedjatÓ eyes, a term that refers to the restored good eye of the falcon god Horus after his battle with Seth, the principle of chaos. Are they staring at us from behind an invisible veil? What are they looking for? A stunning limestone bas relief from the time of Ramesses depicts a celebration: two rows of women in diaphanous gowns, dancing and playing instruments, meet rows of oncoming men (soldiers? priests? noblemen?) with their arms uplifted in jubilation. This ecstatic scene was probably on the side of a tomb; it was evidently removed and later reused at another location.

Three of the most ravishing objects are chunks of 3400-year-old painted limestone from Deir el-Bahari on the on the western bank of Thebes, the temple area of Mentuhotep and the woman pharaoh Hatshepsut (probably the most powerful woman ruler before Elizabeth I) and Thutmose III. These were found by a Polish expedition in the early 1960s. One shows a smiling, sunburnt Thutmose III nose to nose with an unpainted, obliterated face of the god Amun-Re (probably defaced during the monotheistic reign of Akhenaten). A larger piece shows Thutmose III as Amun-Re, with double-plumed headdress in almost Day-Glo yellow over his black face and columns in a rainbow of pastel hieroglyphics. Most thrilling is a two-foot-wide image of Thutmose’s royal barque, which looks just like the model boat at the entrance to the exhibit. Eleven dark-skinned rowers are poling their oars from the high deck while on the side of the aqua hull Thutmose as a sphinx attacks his Nubian enemies. These saturated ancient colors positively glow from within.

Most of the objects are in cases, but some of them are left unprotected — like the poignant statue of Hatshepsut’s chief architect, Senenmut, holding Hatshepsut’s young daughter in his lap, her index finger, like Shirley Temple’s, pressed against her lips. Not everything Egyptian is hieratic or larger than life. We can get near enough to touch (DON’T!), to take in the texture of the surfaces without interference.

If these fragments of an ancient civilization weren’t so gorgeous, so haunting, and so moving, we could just leave them to the scientists. But don’t let anyone convince you this show is not primarily about great works of art and the struggle of the spirit to remain in the world while the beautiful body falls away.

Issue Date: November 21 - 28, 2002
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