Unwrapping Ancient Egypt

Christina Riggs

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780857856777
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Archaeology
• Index: Social Sciences

First runner-up for the British-Kuwait Friendship Society Book Prize in Middle Eastern Studies 2015. In ancient Egypt, wrapping sacred objects, including mummified bodies, in layers of cloth was a ritual that lay at the core of Egyptian society. Yet in the modern world, attention has focused instead on unwrapping all the careful arrangements of linen textiles the Egyptians had put in place. This book breaks new ground by looking at the significance of textile wrappings in ancient Egypt, and at how their unwrapping has shaped the way we think about the Egyptian past. Wrapping mummified bodies and divine statues in linen reflected the cultural values attached to this textile, with implications for understanding gender, materiality and hierarchy in Egyptian society. Unwrapping mummies and statues similarly reflects the values attached to Egyptian antiquities in the West, where the colonial legacies of archaeology, Egyptology and racial science still influence how Egypt appears in museums and the press. From the tomb of Tutankhamun to the Arab Spring, Unwrapping Ancient Egypt raises critical questions about the deep-seated fascination with this culture – and what that fascination says about our own.

1

Desecration

Body broken from its legs, tail snapped clean, and shards of resin-coated wood scattered on the floor around its plinth, the leopard lay near the broken glass of a display case in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo while the Arab Spring of 2011 gathered pace outside in Tahrir (Liberation) Square. The gilded feet of Tutankhamun were nearby, splintered at the ankle and stuck fast to a smaller plinth, which had supported a standing figure of the king on top of the leopard’s back. Now the king was nowhere to be seen.

After four days of peaceful protests against the Mubarak regime, leopard and king had been split into pieces, hurled, by unseen hands, out of the glazed case. Two other statues, apparently in the same vitrine, were also damaged, and Al Jazeera television footage of the smashed glass and fragmented statues seemed to confirm reports of theft or vandalism on the night of January 28, the “Friday of Anger,” when protests throughout Egypt escalated. Grainy screen grabs circulated on the Internet, including an image of two mummified heads jumbled on the floor elsewhere in the Egyptian Museum. Suddenly Egyptology blogs and discussion lists outside Egypt began to pay attention to the revolution that was taking place in Egypt, and cultural heritage organizations based in Europe and America followed suit. The International Council of Museums (ICOM), the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), the International Committee of the Blue Shield (ICBS), and, jointly, the Archaeological Institute of America (AIA), the American Anthropological Association (AAA), and the World Archaeological Congress (WAC), issued statements or appeals in the ensuing days, calling for the protection of cultural heritage in Egypt.¹ According to the ICOM statement, no less than the “collective memory of mankind” was at stake in safeguarding the collections of Egyptian museums and archaeological storerooms. A handful of academics took issue with such an emphasis on objects over people, as violent clashes erupted between protestors and the police, but most commentators insisted that politics and heritage were separate, that the protection of ancient Egyptian sites, monuments, and artifacts transcended such concerns.² If the treasures of Tutankhamun were not sacred, what was?

A photograph from the archives of the Tutankhamun excavation shows leopard and king united, the cat’s spine curving under the level support for the royal figure dowelled into its back (Fig. 1.1). Although often described as a panther—that is, a leopard whose spotted coat is obscured by a recessive mutation that darkens the fur—the black surface does not represent the “true” color of the animal, since the same resin coating was applied to many statues of guardian animals and spirits found in royal tombs of the time. In the photograph, the light source picks out the modeled musculature of the feline legs and the mottled coat of resin on its body and both plinths. Gilding highlights the eyes, inner ears, and muzzle. Above the leopard, and entirely covered in gold leaf, stands the king, who wears a tall crown, a softly draped and pleated skirt, and sandals. He carries a walking stick and a herding flail, the latter associated with kingship and certain chthonic gods. The combination of black and gold, darkness and light, night and day, recurred throughout the tomb, as did the association of leopard and king. In ancient Egyptian cosmology, leopards were associated with the night sky; their spots were the stars. Certain priests and ritual performers wore leopard-skin robes, some made of animal hide, others of linen woven or embroidered with five-pointed stars, and fragments of three such robes were found in Tutankhamun’s tomb. As news of the vandalism first broke, archive photographs provided the before shot to the screen grabs’ after, documenting the significance of the statue. That significance lay not in its connections to kingship, cosmology, or materials—aspects of the ancient Egyptian worldview—but in its connections to the modern world, its place in our archive.

Public defacement, writes the anthropologist Michael Taussig, renders a “wound of sacrilege,” an act of negation that can make the damaged, defaced object appear more powerful than it was when whole.³ The attack on the Tutankhamun statues was one such act of defacement, and hence a focal point for preservationist calls to action. The attention paid to the statues, the unidentified mummies, and an assortment of other, less eye-catching antiquities feared stolen, masked what was arguably the more drastic aspect of the sacrilege—the violation of the museum itself. This defacing act represented the collapse of civic order, a breach of security and society so unspeakable that no clear explanation emerged for how the alleged break-in (or break-ins) took place. Through glass skylights, according to the first account by Egyptian antiquities officials, but the old skylights looked intact when the museum reopened. Through the gift shop, the on-site police office, the back doors, the front doors? No one could say. The glass in the smashed display cases was quickly and quietly replaced, and within a month of the incident, Egyptian Museum restorers had put the damaged Tutankhamun statues back together. The swift response downplayed the ignominy of the attack and signaled reassurance, ostensibly about the fate of Egypt’s antiquities, but surely about the fate of a country that had just thrown a modern ruler out of his protected enclave, too.

The defacement of the statues unleashed an unsuspected power in these figures, which had hitherto been rather minor players in the drama of Tutankhamun’s tomb, rarely discussed in scholarship and chiefly noted for the delicate features of the gilded king. In their vandalized state, however, it became evident that Egyptology held them sacred. Unlike the formal statements about the preservation of sites and objects, less formal communiques on the Internet and in email exchanges adopted an emotive tone. Images of the damaged leopard were “sad,” one UK blogger wrote, “devastating” said another.⁴ An accusatory air swept into the debate as well, backed by the ideological strength of the museum concept: since the Egyptians weren’t taking care of the world’s heritage, it was just as well that museums in Britain and Germany had fended off recent inquiries about returning the Rosetta Stone and the bust of Nefertiti to Egypt, where they might meet the same fate as the statues. The “developed” world could keep its museums secure, its powers hidden in plain sight. “Developing” nations had failed on both counts. Against such a backdrop, the blandishments of heritage professionals and discussion list moderators, with their insistence on a strict separation between antiquities and politics, rang hollow.

FIGURE 1.1 Statue of Tutankhamun on a leopard, with the wrapping removed; Carter no. 289b. Photograph by Harry Burton. Copyright: Griffith Institute, University of Oxford

Some of the interlocutors seemed to feel that their opinions were apolitical, but it is difficult to imagine an institution more steeped in political symbolism than the antiquities museum in Cairo, or an archaeological find in Egypt more shaped by regime changes than the tomb of Tutankhamun. Designed in 1895 by a French architect, for the French-run antiquities service, the Egyptian Museum opened its doors in 1902 at the height of the British “veiled protectorate” overseen by Lord Cromer.⁵ Egyptians were not the museum’s target audience. On the façade, plaques in monumental Latin identify the founding fathers of Egyptology, all European men, and the first Arabic guidebook appeared in the 1910s, at the instigation of one of the few Egyptians trained in Egyptology.⁶ As for Tutankhamun, the discovery of his tomb in 1922 came in the same year the Wafd party won nominal independence from Britain, and the fledgling Egyptian government seized on the find as a Pharaonist symbol and enforced its right to keep everything from the tomb in Egypt, rather than dividing it with Howard Carter and his sponsor, the fifth earl of Carnarvon.⁷ The political repercussions of the Tutankhamun find charted the postcolonial trajectory of Egypt. In the 1970s, a blockbuster European and North American tour of the treasures marked President Sadat’s realignment to Western governments and embrace of controversial free market reforms, while a highly touted tour in the 2000s, although organized by an American commercial outfit, made pointed public statements that the Egyptian government would keep the bulk of the profits this time around. Ownership not just of the revenue but of the objects from the tomb remains a point of contention. In November 2010 the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York signed over to Egypt the ownership of nineteen objects it had received from Carter’s estate that were possibly associated with the tomb, while just days before the Egyptian uprising began, antiquities officials announced that they had contacted the current earl of Carnarvon to inquire about the provenance of certain objects in the family’s private collection.⁸ The boy-king has been more involved in diplomacy in the modern era than he was in his own lifetime.

Only sacred objects inspire such devotion and require such exacting control, manipulation, and care. This is their defense against the “wound of sacrilege” that would reveal where power lies—not in the statue, which is, after all, a thing made of wood, resin, and gold leaf, and not even in the divine spirit that takes the statue as a body, but in the unseen hands that tend (or rend) it. In this mystery play, a museum is both sanctuary to the object and a sacred site itself. Its potency as an abstract, idealized entity and as a concrete, tangible building is proven by the seeming conundrum that its collections garner more attention and generate the loudest outcry at the instance of violation. Lamenting the defacement of an individual object—the Tutankhamun statues, the Warka vase in Baghdad, the Rokeby Venus slashed by a suffragette in London—is somehow easier than acknowledging the desecration of one of the fundamental institutions of the modern age. In other words, a museum may be a more powerful target than the objects within it, but it is the objects that bear the brunt of society’s projected values and, of course, the damage.

FIGURE 1.2 View inside the Treasury of the tomb of Tutankhamun, with the doors of chest 289 open and statues 289a and b inside. Photograph by Harry Burton. Copyright: Griffith Institute, University of Oxford

The statue of the leopard bearing a figure of Tutankhamun on its back was part of a matching pair, only one of which was on display in the Egyptian Museum that January. They had been found together in a room that excavator Howard Carter dubbed the Treasury, which was the most inaccessible part of the compact tomb. Reached only through the burial chamber, the Treasury must have been one of the first rooms filled and sealed in antiquity, and it was the last room cleared in the 1920s. When Carter entered this room, he found it jammed with boxes, boat models, the chest for the king’s mummified organs, and more than two dozen wooden shrines, most with their doors bolted shut. The shrine that contained the pair of leopard statues stood against the wall, under a jumble of model boats (Fig. 1.2). As with every other statue found inside the shrines, finely woven linen wrapped the figures, in this instance draped and knotted around the body of the king like an enveloping robe. Ancient Egyptian religion operated around the care of statues, which provided the gods with a body on earth. The cult statue belonged in a shrine, kept in the most secluded part of a temple, and it was dressed in fresh linen at least once a day. With their wrapped statues neatly tucked away, the shrines in the tomb Treasury are the only physical evidence ever found in Egypt for this practice, otherwise known only from depictions on temple walls and written versions of the rite, which was conducted in seclusion by certain priests. The sealed chamber, the locking shrine, the linen covers, all marked the statues as sacred images—made them so, in fact. Shrine opened and linen lost, the leopard-borne kings and their companion statues were undone, incomplete.

In other words, lying broken on the floor of the museum was not the first desecration of the leopard and its king. They had been desanctified by the time they reached Cairo, to be resanctified when they entered the Egyptian Museum. Logged in the Museum’s Journal d’Entrée and variously prepared for storage or display, the finds from Tutankhamun’s tomb were party to a different set of rites. But being stripped of one set of meanings made it possible for them to acquire others, right up to the moment Al Jazeera filmed the fragmented leopard on the gallery floor and beyond. The resin-coated leopard and the gilded king are just one example of how the past is always created in the present. This is as true for academic scholarship in Egyptology as it is for the popular and esoteric permutations that contribute to the mainstream appeal of ancient Egypt; both embrace the narratives of discovery and preservation. Generating knowledge about the past relies on the survival of objects, monuments, buildings, even bodies, and on a culturally specific way of seeing and thinking about these survivals. Nor are the lives of all these things, which so often outlast people, fixed at the moment of creation, use, deposit, or discovery. Things are made and remade over time, both physically, like the splintered wood, and in the imagination, which is how a single thing can be, sometimes simultaneously, the body of a god-king, the focus of archaeological recording, the property of the Egyptian nation, the admired work of art in a vitrine, and the sign of a postcolonial fault line. Behind these modes of being lie hidden histories—the stories that haven’t been told (and the powers that haven’t been revealed) but that can be glimpsed in between those that were. Why were the statues in Tutankhamun’s tomb wrapped in linen and contained in shrines or niches? Why were they unwrapped, and the linen discounted, when Carter and his expert team excavated the tomb and recorded it in minute detail? And why has it been so easy to forget that either of these events—the wrapping and the unwrapping—ever took place?

Archaeology, Museums, and the Material World

Forgetfulness is a proof of the materiality of objects. Objects are proofs: the proof of history and the mark of others, of disparate origin and of manufacture. And a proof in both senses: proof as verification and testimony to material history, and proof as a first draft or first impr...