I saw Antony and Cleopatra pass, Alexander, Caesar, and Napoleon paused at my feet.
I saw the ambitious dreams of conquerors whirling like dead leaves.
As my motto I chose an adab saying, the world fears time, but time fears the pyramids.
Majesty, mystery, and a mystique unequaled. Words spoken through the ages as the world has trekked to the great pyramids of Giza.
These colossal tombs have captured our imagination.
The kings buried within have been silent for years, but tales of their opulent reign continue to be retold.
Egyptians did not see pyramids as a final resting spot, but a house on the journey to the hereafter.
Hidden within was everything the king needed as he traveled into eternity.
From a 150 foot long cedar boat to the tiniest bronze weight by which to measure.
From this treasure trove, a magnificent collection has emerged. The splendors of ancient Egypt on tour from Germany's Roma Un Polisius Museum.
The exhibition's curator, Dr. Robert Bianchi.
The story we are telling is the art that we are looking at is the manifestation that it is the visible material that was made by and for an elite 10% of the Egyptian population.
All of this art has a coded message. By coded message I don't mean something cryptographic or you have to be initiated or symbolic.
What I'm saying is color has meaning, forms have meaning.
These meanings and these forms were known and appreciated by the ancient Egyptian members of the elite.
What we are trying to do is educate our audience about what these coded messages are so as they walk through the exhibition they can appreciate the objects not only for their formal qualities,
not only for their workmanship, but can gain an insight, a deeper insight into the significance and symbolism that is behind it.
So although the pieces are beautiful, the craftsmanship is exquisite and people are going to be breathtaking,
ooh isn't that wonderful, ah ooh ooh, let's get beyond that kind of immediate visual approach and let's try to understand what these art objects meant.
Because in Egyptian culture there was no art for art's sake.
They just didn't put it on the wall and say isn't that a pretty picture or put it in a case and say isn't that a nice vase or a little bric-a-brac to look at.
All of these pieces, almost all of them, had a function and it is our desire that the audience coming to this exhibition realizes that there is a theme, that there is a text, that these objects have meaning
and we're going to try to give you some of the keys so that you yourself, visiting our exhibition, can decode these messages on your own.
Our journey begins more than 4,000 years ago at the door of Princess Winshet.
There is no need to unlock it. Because the ancient Egyptian tombs were replicas of houses, the tombs had imitation or false doors through which the spirit of the deceased was magically thought to be able to come and go,
to partake of the offerings left by pious heirs and funerary priests.
This is one of the earliest false doors known.
One of the earliest examples of a coffin is the sarcophagus of Ammonemopet.
It is black, more than six feet long.
People think of Egyptian art as all gold and glistening, but this coffin has symbolic, coded meaning.
Let's explore one step at a time.
First, the black probably represents the night sky.
Egyptians knew that the sun set at dusk and rose in the morning.
What happened between those two events is a little bit nebulous.
So they thought that the sun made some sort of mysterious journey at night and then it was resurrected or rolled in the next day.
The Egyptians thought if they could become the sun, they too could die or sat and could be resurrected the next morning by rising.
So the gold on the sarcophagus on one level links the dead person with the sun.
On another level, the Egyptians believed that the flesh of their gods was made of gold.
This sarcophagus has a lot of gold or gilding on it.
So the deceased, in this case, Ammonemopet, hopes that when he becomes resurrected in the morning on the new day, that he will be a divine being.
He hopes, like a divine being, he will have the same flesh that the gods of Egypt have.
Gold does not mean what it means to an American audience, that it is rich and opulent.
Gold is there for a specific function.
It tells a story and it contributes to the theme of the sarcophagus.
That theme is the resurrection of the deceased and the hereafter.
Egypt's earliest history dates to more than 5000 years ago, in the time before the dynasties of the pharaohs.
These beautifully crafted pots came from this era.
They were handmade. Remember, the pottery wheel had not yet been invented.
The invention of the telephone was still thousands of years off.
But scholars affectionately call this terracotta vase the telephone receiver.
Many of these vessels were interred with the deceased because the ancient Egyptians believed that the durability of stone would ensure the eternal life of the deceased and the hereafter.
The comb and hairpin were placed in the tomb to protect the dead from evil forces during the perilous transition from this world into the next.
Many of these earliest works from the very dawn of ancient Egyptian art have survived because of Egypt's brutal climate.
The searing sun and desert sands protected the artifacts, preserving them through time.
As the pre-dynastic period made way for the Old Kingdom, we see the first pyramids.
The steppe pyramids, as they were called, were built at Saqqara.
Legend says that when the Greeks first saw the Egyptian pyramids, they left and called them a word meaning little cakes.
The name pyramids came from that Greek word.
Hieroglyphs were also introduced at this time.
Hety, as a cross-legged, seated scribe, commemorates that very small percentage of the Egyptian elite whose members were illiterate.
At the time of its introduction, scholars estimated that fewer than two people per mile's length of the River Nile could read and write.
Hieroglyphs used more than 750 symbols representing letters, sounds, and ideas.
They could be read in any direction, from left to right, top to bottom, or vice versa.
Let's look at this alabasta head from all directions to get its full effect.
It represents the pharaoh, Kephri.
This was excavated by Wilhelm Palatseis by his team, actually, in Giza.
Now what's interesting about this head is that at some subsequent point, after this statue was made, the Egyptians were apparently too lazy to go to a quarry.
So they decided, well, let's just reuse some of the stone that we already have here. It's a lot easier.
So they got this statue of Kephri, and like we peel an orange or peel an apple, they peel the nose and the eyebrows off and the head cloth off.
What they were left with was the core of the face that has been suggested was used for a vase, but they left all the peels on the floor.
And when the German mission came, they swept all these fragments up, and 50 years after the excavation, they went into the tomb.
They swept these up. They went into the museum 50 years later, and they created a jigsaw puzzle, and they put together this wonderful head.
And we know it's Kephri because among the fragments was his cartouche, that is the hieroglyphs that were enclosed in the royal ring that spell his name.
As in life, the pharaohs would need servants preparing food in the afterlife.
This is a painted limestone statue of a miller or cereal and bread maker.
She was buried in an official's tomb 4,300 years ago to supply him with food.
The other staple of ancient Egyptian life, beer, is represented in this statue of a brewer.
Egyptian beer was made from malt, honey, and date juice.
One of the more popular subjects during the Old Kingdom for tombs of the elite was an individual seated before an offering table piled high with food.
On this false door, you see a deceased seated in front of a table with loaves of bread.
And again on the false door of Haneni, the table is piled high with bread.
A wonderful head and limestone of the princess Jabtet is in this gallery.
She lived during the 4th dynasty. The head is the complete work.
It was just a stone head, not attached to a body.
If you look very carefully, you will see one of the ears has been knocked off.
You will see some gouges in the head. This is intentional.
It is believed that when the funeral of Princess Jabtet took place, this head was part of the funerary ceremony.
The priest reenacted on the head a mutilation.
Some may ask, why would anybody want to mutilate a statue?
If the Egyptians are trying to associate themselves with their gods and goddess,
and if you realize the body of the god Osiris was mutilated by his evil brother and then put together when he was resurrected,
this intentional mutilation of a statue representing Jabtet might be a ritual, a reenactment of that mutilation.
This may more closely associate Jabtet with the god who symbolized resurrections.
There is another dimension as well.
In ancient Egyptian society, the embalmers, the people practicing the craft of mummification,
violated the human body during the mummification process.
Some people suggest that these intentional mutilations and damages on the head of Jabtet
may be a ritual reenactment of what the mummifiers, the embalmers, did to the body in order to prepare it for resurrection.
The Rose Granite Sarcophagus of Khayyam Naufret weighs more than three tons.
The coffin is an extraordinary example of sculpture when you consider that the stone was quarried from Aswan
and transported on a ship to the
Aswan Sea, and the tomb of the late King of the Aegean,
The coffin is an extraordinary example of sculpture when you consider that the stone was quarried from Aswan and transported on the river Nile over a distance of several hundred miles to Giza.
This alabaster headrest also came from Giza.
Instead of using pillows like we do, ancient Egyptians used headrests to support their heads while sleeping.
Such objects may not have been utilitarian because the ancient Egyptians were fearful that in death their heads might become separated from their bodies.
A variety of statues, in rose granite,
limestone,
and painted limestone complete our journey through the Old Kingdom.
Let us journey back in time in our imaginations.
The sun is setting on the sands of the Giza Plateau.
A pharaoh has died.
In a temple, the priests recite prayers in a final attempt to revive the deceased.
The body is washed and purified.
After 70 days in which the mummification process took place, the mummy is placed in a coffin.
Look closely at this Sycamore Sarcophagus.
It shows the progression of the mummification ritual in detail.
The depiction of the deceased, resurrection and purification with water rituals,
are almost without parallel in the entire history of ancient Egyptian art.
Here, the god of the tombs and embalming, Anubis, is the jackal-headed figure striding atop a pedestal.
The two kneeling goddesses are Isis, goddess of creation,
and her twin sister Nephthys, goddess of the underworld.
In the embalming process, a god was assigned a specific organ to protect in the afterlife.
The human-headed canopic jar holds the liver.
The jackal-headed jar guards the stomach.
They were placed in the burial chambers along with the other treasures.
The heart, as the seat of a person's soul was left in the body, the brain was thrown away.
This mummy mask of a nobleman served as a kind of envelope, encasing the mummy.
The gilding on the face associates the deceased with the gods of Egypt,
whose flesh, according to legend, was made of gold.
The sacred eye, worn as an amulet on the headband, symbolically protects the deceased.
Amulets are considered good luck charms in ancient Egypt.
The Egyptians relied heavily on superstition much more than we do today.
They wore earrings, bracelets, and anklets, which were supposed to protect them from illness, injury, and evil.
Mothers would even put bracelets with bells attached around their infants' wrists to ward off evil.
The color and form of the amulets contribute to their efficacious powers.
For instance, the blue-green hues imitate the color of plants,
meaning the deceased will be resurrected in the hereafter.
Almost no other object from ancient Egypt has so captured the imagination of everyone
as has this scroll commonly called the Book of the Dead.
It is more than 18 feet long.
Experts consider the Book of the Dead gorgeous because there is a scene of the wane of the heart.
There you can see the heart adjusted against the feather of truth.
This is very important because if the deceased really has his heart pure,
that means he has confessed that during his life he has lived a moral, upright life.
He has not oppressed the widow.
He did not take advantage of an orphan.
He did not deprive the hungry of food, the thirsty of water, the naked of clothing.
We have to understand that all this glitter, all the magnificent treasures buried in the tombs of the Egyptians
would be of no avail if they were not genuine human beings.
Please remember that the heart is being weighed against the feather of truth
because the individual professes that he maintains those correct social values.
If the deceased in Egypt was not a decent human being,
no matter how well appointed his tomb or how big the tomb was,
he would not be able to have an afterlife.
That is the very important message this papyrus has.
In the Book of the Dead, it says certain tasks are so odious
that these funerary figures are placed in the tomb as foremen
to make sure that jobs are done in a timely manner.
There were so many tasks and things needed in the afterlife
that in one tomb more than 40,000 items were buried with one pharaoh.
The Middle Kingdom is a time in Egypt's history best described as one of chaos and anarchy.
Certain members of the elite families rose. Others were plunged into obscurity.
It is also regarded as the classical period of the ancient Egyptian language.
The hieroglyphs are masterfully drawn and the grammar and syntax of the language
so eloquently composed that teachers today use the text from the Middle Kingdom
as the model to teach this fascinating system of writing.
Besides writing, the Egyptians left us a remarkably accurate bit of astronomy.
This coffin lid from a town in Middle Egypt, as yet, was made in about 2000 B.C.
This is the underside. It is an ancient Egyptian star chart
possibly used to help guide the mummy in the eternal hereafter.
From the far reaches of antiquity, their solar year was composed of 365 days and 6 hours,
just as ours continues today.
Only a fragment remains today of an almost forgotten treasure, a head.
Preserved from about the crown to about the nose, it represents Sinwesrit III,
a wonderful pharaoh of the Middle Kingdom, the 12th dynasty.
Many people look at it and see heavy lids and little lines around the eyes.
This evocative image makes the king look vulnerable.
When the king was first made, this sign of an aging king was made for the nobles
who were of a different persuasion, of a different political philosophy from the king.
They wanted to choose a visual image that distinguished them from their kings.
So these signs were first made by nobles to show they were separate from the idolizing images
of the king that were made in that era.
As the Middle Kingdom progressed, the kings, in order to close the gap between differences of opinion,
appropriated the signs of age from the noble statues.
There were many people who maintained that this image of Sinwesrit is probably the most evocative that was made.
It doesn't represent the king as vulnerable.
It says he has adapted and used for his own political purposes an ideological statement
developed by the opposition party earlier on.
Also from the 12th dynasty are two cartonnages, one of them a man and one of them a woman.
Cartonnage can be compared to our modern day paper mache.
They are 4,000 years old.
They represent the earliest examples of this type.
If you look at the woman, you will see some brown linen bandages on the bottom.
These linen bandages are almost as brittle as potato chips.
Open up a bag of potato chips and see how many crumbs you have produced.
But this was removed without any damage.
The remarkable thing is, those are the original bandages or robes by which the mummy mask was tied to the mummy.
The mummy has not survived, but the bandages have.
The Nile River has been called the backbone, the spine, the marrow of Egypt.
Even today you can see it cuts a 10 to 15 mile wide strip of lush greenery in a vast desert.
The world's longest river begins its 4,000 mile journey north in central Africa near the equator
and ends in a swampy delta at the Mediterranean Sea.
In ancient Egypt, its annual summer flooding of the fields brought life to the barren desert.
This plowing farmer, made of wood, is a 4,000 year old representation of an everyday activity in ancient Egypt.
Models like these of a milking scene and a granary,
according to ancient Egyptian religious beliefs would magically come to life in the tomb to benefit the deceased in the hereafter.
The appearance of the official Anteph enthroned is the first time this limestone statue has been presented to the general public anywhere in the world.
Anteph was a high official of the Middle Kingdom.
The signs of age characterized in the face of Anteph revealed that he associated himself with those members of the elite
whose sentiments differed from those of their pharaohs.
One of the most important men in Egypt was a portly man named Hemiyunnu.
He's in a gallery all by himself for a very, very important reason. Hemiyunnu was the nephew of Khufu or Kephrin,
the guy that built the Great Pyramid, the guy for whom the Great Pyramid was built.
We're going to have a lot of people that are going to be symbolists and aliens built the pyramids and that's great.
It's good for business, I suppose.
But when these people come to our galleries and they see Hemiyunnu,
the inscriptions from his tomb on the Giza Plateau indicate that he was the man responsible day in and day out on the Giza Plateau
for getting these more than two million stones, some of which weigh 15 tons, in place so that his uncle's pyramid as a tomb could be built.
Hemiyunnu was represented as a very, very portly, opulent, corpulent young man.
The situation is that he doesn't have a glandular problem. He's not a eunuch.
This corpulence is a sign of right, just as the way the gold was on that coffin or the black was on the other sarcophagus.
It symbolizes that Hemiyunnu is this great, great individual who carries a lot of power, he has a lot of status in society.
In fighting among the ruling families, an attack from beyond its borders turned Egypt's New Kingdom into an era of unrest.
One ruler emerged during the 19th dynasty of the New Kingdom, who wanted to restore the glory of Egypt when she was being invaded and her power was starting to fade.
Ramses II was one of the longest living pharaohs in Egypt's history.
He reigned 66 years and is said to have fathered more than 100 children.
Look at the cobra rearing up from his brow.
Egyptians believed that snakes had no eyelids, so they saw everything and guarded the pharaohs and queens against danger and evil.
As part of court regalia, pharaohs wore false goat hair beards.
It represented virility and symbolized the continuation of Egyptian society under the pharaoh's rule.
Sokmet means the powerful one.
This lion goddess is also known as the Mistress of Dread.
So potentially destructive might Sokmet become that an elaborate ritual was set up to appease her.
The pharaoh Amenhotep ordered 730 statues installed in a temple at Karnak in Thebes.
730 is twice the number of days in a year.
To appease Sokmet, priests at the Theban temple performed rituals each morning and afternoon for the protection of the pharaoh and all of Egypt.
During the course of the late New Kingdom, members of the elite elected to be buried in rock-cut tombs topped by small pyramids.
Ancient Egyptians believed the spirit of the deceased might metaphorically rest on the apex to behold the rising sun.
Baboons were thought to welcome the rising sun with their screeching.
The moon has often been associated with the precious metal silver in Egyptian works.
Its monthly waxing and waning was regarded as a metaphor for birth, death, and rebirth.
This Egyptian nobleman's mummy mask was solid silver.
It is interesting to note that during certain periods of ancient Egyptian history, silver was considered more valuable than gold.
The ancient Egyptians used jewelry as magical charms for both the living and the dead.
The treasury gallery is filled with dazzling jewelry in gold, silver, carnelian, faience and ancient Egyptian glazed material and bronze.
One bracelet has a spectacular chunk of raw turquoise.
It was made for the high priest Hedehor.
The Egyptians believed that stones in their natural state had certain properties that were beneficial.
The turquoise in particular was associated with resurrection.
When this particular bracelet was made, Hedehor was held in the hands of the king of Egypt.
When this particular bracelet was made, Hedehor was high priest of Amun.
According to some legends, Amun is the creator god, the one that engineered the universe.
If you are the priest of this god, it would be appropriate that you would wear an emblem that symbolized this creative power.
The silver and the raw piece of turquoise was probably regarded as holding in the wave of those forces of creation that Amun was going to let loose.
In this same case, there is a wonderful pectoral of the boy god, Shed.
He is standing on a crocodile, holding snakes, but notice he is not hurt.
The message here is, if you believe in Shed, worship him and pray to him, he will protect you from harm, the same way he is protected from these beasts.
And on top of this wonderful case are two snake bracelets.
They date from the Roman imperial period.
They were always worn in pairs.
They were always worn by women professing their allegiance and faith to the cult of the goddess Isis.
So, more than just a pretty bracelet, more than the snakes that Cleopatra used to commit suicide,
those women who wore these bracelets in antiquity were proclaiming their devotion to the goddess Isis.
In her period, she was probably the most popular goddess in the entire Greco-Roman world and certainly in the Mediterranean basin.
When the ancient Egyptian workmen were cutting tombs into the cliffs at Thebes during the New Kingdom,
they removed an inestimable amount of limestone in the form of chips and flakes called astrakha.
So plentiful was this material that it became common practice for outlined scribes who composed the scene
destined to decorate the walls of those tombs to use some of those astrakha the way a modern artist might use a sketch pad.
One of the great works of art in the exhibition is the relief of Thut Moses I, one of the earliest kings.
When you look at this relief, you can see some of the paint is preserved.
He has a rather elaborate crown.
He has this finely carved profile and wonderfully rendered, slightly protruding chin.
The false beard is shown.
The hieroglyphs contain a prayer granting the pharaoh all life like the sun god Ra.
This represents a very high water mark of ancient Egyptian stone carving in two dimensional work.
It is this kind of line and quality that has captured the fascination of the experts today.
Inscribed stone slabs or commemorative stones called stellas depict various scenes in this gallery.
The stella of an Egyptian army officer, Moses, is a funerary monument.
Officers prayed to images of their divine king who in this depiction was Pharaoh Ramses II.
A military trumpeter, Hesse, is painted on this limestone stella.
As we look at the many other stellas from the New Kingdom, we realize that despite the wars marring this era,
Egyptians attained extraordinary achievements during this period.
The technological advances in mummification and metalwork were never surpassed by subsequent epochs.
Its culture is characterized by the colossal, superhuman scale of its temples and statues.
Generally speaking, the walls and temples and tombs were decorated with two dimensional representations like these.
Egyptian temple architecture had specific characteristics.
The rooms became progressively smaller in size as one moves from the entrance to the inner sanctum.
This shrinking was designed for two reasons.
First, it restricts the number of priests permitted to face the image of the deity.
Reinforcing the hierarchy of the elite society.
Second, this is symbolic.
This reminds worshippers of the first moments of creation when the sun's rays came down and gave birth to the world.
One relief in this gallery deserves particular note, the Isis temple relief.
It came from an enormous granite temple built near the Nile Delta around 350 BC.
The granite block was carried from Aswan, more than 500 miles south.
This piece alone weighs almost a ton.
This granite carving was completed in what some called the Twilight of Ancient Egyptian Sculpture.
In later years, the Egyptians began to sculpt in sandstone, a substance easily eroded by time.
So, little remained for future generations.
Alexander the Great entered Egypt in the winter of 332 BC without firing a shot.
He was greeted by the Egyptians as a hero who liberated them from the oppressive administration of the Persians,
occupying the land as conquerors for decades.
One of Alexander's most trusted generals, Ptolemy, administered Egypt and declared himself pharaoh in 305 BC,
inaugurating the dynasty named in his honor Ptolemaic.
This relief from Tuna El-Jabal in Middle Egypt was dedicated by Ptolemy.
It was built during the reign of Ptolemy II.
It represents Ptolemy offering to the god Thoth, the god of wisdom.
Thoth is represented as a baboon some of the time and as an ibis on other occasions.
What makes this an architectural treasure is the paint.
It is very well preserved, but if you look very carefully,
you will be able to see very faint, thin red lines that run horizontal and vertical.
They form a checkered pattern on the blocks of limestone that the Egyptian craftsmen used to lay out or compose the scene.
So, here we have a wonderful work of art that leaves behind so-called footprints or traces of the pattern
used in the work that the Egyptians were doing.
One of the religious practices of the ancient Egyptians, which appalled early Christian church fathers,
was their insistence on raising animals on farms which were ritually killed, mummified,
and offered as either please or thank you offerings to the gods and goddesses of the land.
A mummified ibis was placed into the sarcophagus as a way of thanking Thoth in anticipation of some future good fortune.
This coffin, in the shape of a baboon, shows another animal raised to please the gods.
The lion deity, represented in the statue of the god Bess, is an ancient boogeyman.
His grimacing face is meant to scare bad people away.
He is a good demon, protecting good people against evildoers.
Dr. Robert Bianchi, curator of Splendors of Ancient Egypt, explains the story behind this mummy with a portrait.
There's a wonderful, wonderful cartonnage. That is a woman.
Her mummy was originally wrapped in layers of linen and or papyrus that had been covered with plaster or gesso.
And then painted and gilded.
Now, there's an interesting problem with this sarcophagus.
The Egyptologists have been reading texts for many, many years.
And contemporary with this object, which is Roman, second century AD, probably,
we have a text where a man says that he always took his evening meal at home and rolled out his mummified wife.
And we kind of like read that text and said, man, this guy had to be some kind of an ancient Egyptian psycho or something like that.
Who would possibly have dinner day in and day out with a dead stiff?
We also know from this period that there are sarcophagi coffins that the lid can slide back and forth,
kind of like you can play peek-a-boo with the dead person inside of it.
So when you start to look at all of this evidence and then you start to read the ancient Egyptian texts themselves,
you find out that during the Roman imperial period, the ancient Egyptians were using these mummies, their dead,
as media by which they were able to channel the world beyond, the spirit world beyond.
It's kind of like real spooky, spooky stuff.
But it is not unique to the Roman period because all of this channeling, all of this reaching out to the world beyond,
to the gods, to the dead, is a component of ancient Egyptian funerary beliefs from the very beginning, from the Middle Kingdom, for example.
We have letters to the dead, where they're living right to the dead to intercede on their behalf.
So the belief that the Egyptians could somehow communicate to the dead and then use the dead to communicate to the world beyond,
whether it's to another spirit or whether it's to the divine, is part and parcel of the Egyptian tradition.
And this demonstrates in this particular woman from the Roman period that as late as the twilight of Egyptian civilization,
the members of the Egyptian elite were still being faithful to their hundreds and hundreds of year old beliefs.
And I think that's what this show also demonstrates, the staying power of the ancient Egyptians.
The descendants of those ancient Egyptians who built the magnificent pyramids managed to remain powerful for more than 4,000 years.
Previous conquerors wanted to enjoy the privileges of the elite,
so they became more Egyptian than the Egyptians themselves.
But that all changed when the Romans wrestled power from the last pharaoh in 31 AD.
Ancient Egypt fell.
Egypt's shining moment may have come thousands of years ago, but its splendors have never dimmed through time.