The Egyptian afterlife
2002-06-30 20:23
Washington - The idea was to live well after death.
So the ancient Egyptians sheathed mummies in gold and packed tombs with jewellery, games and other every day objects to ensure their bodies arrived prepared for a happy afterlife.
The elaborate preparations for eternity come alive in The Quest for Immortality: Treasures of Ancient Egypt, an exhibit that begins on Sunday at the Smithsonian's National Gallery of Art in Washington.
The exhibition, the largest selection of antiquities ever loaned by Egypt for a North American exhibition, includes some objects that have never been publicly displayed and others not seen outside the Arab state.
"It's a wonderful historical, religious theme that is punctuated with fascinating and very, very diverse kinds of artefacts and works of art," National Gallery Director Earl Powell said.
The Washington exhibition will last until October 14, when it then travels throughout the United States and Canada. Venues so far include Chicago, New Orleans, Los Angeles, Seattle, New York and San Francisco.
The 115 artifacts include enormous statues of pharaohs and miniatures of the boat used for transport into the afterlife. The items loaned by the Egyptian government are from the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, the Luxor Museum and the site of Deir el-Bahari.
The final section of the exhibit is a replica of pharaoh Thutmose III's burial chamber, the walls adorned with copies of the Amduat. The illustrated text describes the sun god Re's daily odyssey through the netherworld to defeat his enemies and rise in triumph the next day.
Past Egyptian exhibitions in the United States, such as the memorable 1976 exhibit Treasures of Tutankhamun, popularly known as the "King Tut" exhibit, travelled for four years across the country and drew millions of Americans fascinated by the ancient civilisation.
The new Immortality collection, based on the Amduat, a royal book of the dead, is equally captivating but much different than previous American exhibitions on Egypt, the National Gallery's Powell said.
"[The Amduat] is articulated through works of art which illustrate aspects of the journey to the afterlife," he said.
Land of colossal wheat
Betsy Bryan, the exhibition's guest curator, said the "hope for immortality was as real to the ancient Egyptians as their hope for their children's success."
"The exhibition seeks to explain both how and why the ancient Egyptians lavished their resources on provisions for the next world, by particularly emphasising what they expected to find after death," she said at a media preview of the exhibit.
Their idea of the afterlife was of an actual physical existence that required sustenance, and a place where heaven was a better version of life and hell an eternity of torment.
Illustrations from the book of the dead, as seen in the burial chamber of the exhibit, depicted heaven as a place where wounds were made whole and colossal wheat grew taller than people.
"[In heaven] they tended their fields wearing their banquet clothes, and no one was ever dirty," Bryan said.
The unfortunate in hell were pictured upside down and headless, or had their bodies and hands roasted in cauldrons.
What determined life in the afterworld was living right according to the concept of "maat", which translates to truth, justice or the natural order.
But in order to make it to there one needed to preserve the body so it could reunited with its soul, said Bryan, an Egyptian art and archeology professor who chairs John Hopkins University's Near East Department in Baltimore.
Once bodies were mummified, they were placed in elaborate coffins and surrounded by objects that would carry with them into the next life. In one room of the exhibit, a small, ornate chair from an unidentified princess was found in the tomb of Yuya and Tuya, parents of Queen Tiye, Amenhotep III's wife.
The wood and gold chair (circa 1390-1352 BC) was probably a cherished object from childhood that the princess wanted to take with her into the afterlife, Bryan said.
Others had figurines of themselves made to spare the actual body the perilous work of crossing over.
The ancient Egyptians started to build tombs as soon as they could afford them, said Bryan, who has uncovered receipts that show a book of the dead would cost an artist about six month's salary, valued in copper.
The exhibit includes artefacts from both royal and noble tombs, from elaborate objects like intricate gold and lapis jewellery to a more mundane wood bed dating back 1300 BC.
Noblemen also had gold toe and finger stalls that protected the delicate bones of the appendage during the journey.
Across from the toe stalls in the exhibit sit four canopic jars (circa 874-850 BC) that protected the liver, lungs, stomach and intestines. The alabaster jars' tops were modelled after the Four Sons of Horus to look like the heads of a human, baboon, jackal and hawk.
Gold was considered the flesh of the gods because it neither tarnished nor decayed, Bryan said. But wood games, like one on display with hound-and-jackal-carved pegs mounted on a turtle-shaped playing board (1580-1550 BC), have also survived the centuries.
Heritage of mankind
In learning about immortality and death, we learn more about life, said Zahi Hawass, the head of Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities.
Archeologist Hawass, who a few weeks ago unearthed what he said was the oldest intact stone coffin ever found, helped coordinate the North American exhibition.
Egypt's ambassador to the United States, Nabil Fahmy, said he hoped the exhibition will serve as bridge for relations between the United States and the Middle East.
"Ultimately relations are based on people to people understanding and context. It's not about day to day events although they can overwhelm things," he said at a preview of the exhibition.
Egypt's heritage is ultimately the heritage of mankind as whole, Fahmy said.
"With the nature of our culture and the intensity of our heritage we cannot keep it to ourselves," he said.