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Al-Ahram Weekly 24 Feb. - 1 March 2000 Issue No. 470 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 24 Feb. - 1 March 2000 Issue No. 470
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Features Focus Heritage Profile Travel Living Sports People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters Present imperfect
By Roger Owen *
The new exhibition called "Pharaohs of the Sun" at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts demonstrates many of the features common to the hugely popular exhibitions now being organised in museums around the world. It is small and manageable, concentrated into the same set of four of five rooms which housed many of its immediate predecessors. It focuses on a single theme, the revolutionary introduction of monotheism after Akhenaton's move of the royal capital from Karnak to Amarna. It is accompanied by a great deal of corporate sponsorship and by a whole range of tie-ins from T-shirts, mugs, paper-weights and other modern memorabilia on sale in the museum shop to the revival of an opera by Philip Glass on the Akhenaton theme.
There is much that can be said in favour of such a concept, profits apart. Traditional exhibitions used to be vast, overwhelming and exhausting. But concentration on a single theme -- Monet's Water-lily Paintings or its predecessor, Monet's Discovery of Mediterranean Light -- allows the audience to focus on one particular aspect of a much more complex whole. The same is certainly true of the Akhenaton exhibition. Visiting it offers a completely different experience from having to plough your way through the huge galleries of somewhere like the Egyptian Museum in Cairo in which, after a while, the art of one dynasty begins to look very much like that of every other.
There is also something to be said for the way such exhibitions bring together just a few of the most beautiful, the most striking, the most significant works of art of a particular person or a particular period. Here we have the Nefertiti head from Berlin, the sandstone statue of Akhenaton as Amenhotep IV from Cairo and the Boston Museum's own Tutankhamun head presented to it in 1911. They are all well-known from countless books on Egyptian history and Egyptian art. But here they are together, the real things, to be seen freshly as if for the first time.
The Berlin Nefertiti
It is only when the visitor knows a bit more about the subject than the exhibition itself can tell that doubts begin. Modern museum curators seem to have a very clear idea of what their visitors want to know and learn. They assume, probably correctly, that the majority of them have had some previous introduction to the subject from watching arts programmes on television. They know they must not appear to be talking down to such people. But they also know that they have been prepared for a particular type of presentation in which they expect that the pictures and artefacts they see will have some kind of coherence and will be used to tell some kind of a story.
The way in which the Akhenaton material is presented at the Boston Fine Arts Museum is no exception. To begin with, there is a statement justifying the exhibition itself in terms of the fact that most ancient Egyptian material is presented without the presumption of change. The point is easily made that in the majority of such presentations object simply follows object in a way that stresses their sheer monumentality at the expense of any obvious developments in style. It is against this background that the art from Amarna can then be shown to be just the opposite, as constituting something of a revolution compared with what had come before. According to the exhibition brochure, it is more "naturalistic", it has a "striking energy and elegance", it expressed "vitality and spirituality".
Knowing that the first question any intelligent visitor will then want to ask is why did this suddenly happen, we are also given something of the historical context. Signs of change were already apparent under Akhenaton's father, Amenhotep III, at Karnak. Next, and given what is known of the lay-out of the new capital, Amarna, we are led to imagine a special artists' quarter where Akhenaton himself gathered together a group of talented men who were encouraged under royal patronage to express themselves in quite a new way.
It is here that all kinds of modern readings begin to assert themselves. The organisers of the exhibition have provided an attractive model of what Amarna might have looked like which, to contemporary eyes, appears like an extremely attractive exercise in town planning. We also learn that the royal family, though obviously wielding absolute power, could be seen daily riding along the royal road that linked their palaces in one part of the city with another. This modernist reading, then, culminates in the suggestion that there was a kind of early feminism about the place, to be seen, for example, in the famous Berlin stela of the royal family which not only shows the royal couple playing with their children but also portrays Nefertiti with her head almost as large as Akhenaton's himself, a proportion, we are told, previously unknown in Egyptian dynastic art.
Finally, with our attention firmly engaged on the notion of religious and artistic revolution, we have the romance of failure. First we are shown the flowering of something completely new, then its complete erasure by the familiar type of obscurantist persons in the guise of later Pharaohs and priests, who simply decided, like Stalin, that nothing of the heretical Amarnan period should be allowed to remain. To underline the point we see it all disfigured and then replaced.
But is this any more than an attractive fiction? It is one thing to make the perfectly accurate point that all we have are a few remarkable artefacts coming out of what is largely a historical void. It is another to begin to fill in that void with a story which sounds so familiar, and hence so beguiling, to modern ears. There is no challenge to the imagination here, just a confirmation of things which we feel we must already know. It is all too easy, too voyeuristic, with the strangeness and peculiarity of the past being diminished by making it all immediately accessible, like the way the camera in the exhibition film can glide in and out of the model houses and palaces of Amarna taking us with it as it spies and observes all.
After such a well-organised experience, questions may seem quite unnecessary. Nevertheless, anyone with even a little knowledge of ancient Egyptian history can't help asking why, for instance, Akhenaton wanted to be buried on the eastern side of the Nile as opposed to the western side favoured by almost all his royal predecessors? And what about the stories we may have heard of Pharaonic inbreeding which might have accounted for the strange physical shape he was given by his sculptors? And how, if at all, did his version of monotheism affect other peoples in the lands around Egypt? Such questions are neither raised nor answered.
To be fair, perhaps it was possible to have such questions addressed at one of the lectures arranged by the museum in association with this particular exhibition. But this still wouldn't do much to change the general air of knowingness which seems to accompany the presentation of objects from a past so different, and so far from present imaginings. If only these wonderful objects could be left to try to speak to us on their own, by the same system of signs and the depiction of wonders with which they strove to communicate with their Egyptian contemporaries so many centuries ago.
The writer is professor of history at the Centre for Middle Eastern Studies, Harvard
