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11/02/03 - Cairo (Museum)
It's our 9-month anniversary today (75% of a year) and I feel dreadful - there's no connection, I'm sure, but my stomach's playing up badly: oh, woe is me and, considering the amazing extended farting, woe is anyone standing near me. This notwithstanding we get up at 07.50 and are out at 09.5 - today is the first day of Eid al-Adha (or "bayram", as the guy at the desk calls it), the Hajj festival, and all the shops are shut. Downtown Cairo is all but deserted except for the normal legions of traffic police and other, armed police - they're all the more obvious since no-one else is around: the city buses are running, but they're barely occupied (rather than having people leaning out the doors). We're actually a little worried that the Egyptian Museum might be closed, since everything else is, but it's open.
We're in the door just before 10.00, which is early but not early enough to beat the first tour groups - they're swarming round the "Old Kingdom Masterpieces" rooms just left of the entrance, which was where we wanted to start. Instead, we do what we did last visit and make a beeline for the back: on the ground floor, the room at the very back is given over to Akhenaten. Akhenaten was the whacko one (still haven't found a better adjective) who rejected all the gods except Aten and moved the capital (to Amarna): he was Tutankhamun's father-in-law and possibly close blood relative (it's a bit unclear, especially since later generations tried to wipe out all traces of him). He favoured a new realism/super-realism in art, which was also abandoned after his reign: his statues/busts are quite unlike those of the other, virtually interchangeable pharaohs - hollow cheeks, high cheekbones, flared nostrils and pouting lips: that's Akhenaten. The (hopefully) super-realist bits are the incredibly large bellies and thighs of all the statues from his time.
Other unusual items from his reign include reliefs of him and Nefertiti playing with their kids (three daughters are shown, no Tutankhamun), and his family during joint worship, lying prostrate before the sun. On other panels they're shown raising their arms to the sun - the sun's rays end in little hands holding ankhs and so on. True sun-worshippers. There are a number of remarkable representations of Nefertiti as well, though the famous profile portrait turns out to be in Berlin. One last curiosity is the production of composite pieces, where different parts of sculptures were made from different materials and then joined together.
Occupying the middle of the ground floor is the (slightly sunken) "Atrium", which contains the Museum's largest pieces from all periods: apart from a large section of the floor from a palace in Akhenaten's brief capital, it's pretty much exclusively sarcophagi and statuary. New facts scoured from here are that the carved capstones which used to top all the pyramids are called "pyramidions", and that the Egyptians continued carving the traditional likenesses of their ancient pantheon at least into the 2nd century AD. The dominant feature of this room, though, is the way Ramses II appropriated earlier pharaohs' statues, replacing their names with his and sometimes having a little work done on the likeness. This seems to have been pretty much de rigeur for pharaohs (they also extensively re-used sarcophagi), but Ramses II did it more than most (which may have helped with his later comparative fame).
We break from 11.15 to 11.30 (I'm really not feeling well, and have already had one unexpected and smelly trip to the toilet), and then head back in: the rest of the ground floor is laid out chronologically, clockwise from the door (eg. half the west side is Old Kingdom), so that's the way we're going to tackle it. The "Old Kingdom Masterpieces" rooms are less mobbed now, and some of the pieces (particularly little triple statues and some sarcophagi) are excellently preserved after 4,500-odd years. They have one room of "archaic" stuff (ie. the first three Dynasties, plus pre-Dynastic, ie. neolithic Egypt), which is most interesting (like the equivalent rooms upstairs) for the half-developed forms both of hieroglyphs and the representations of various gods - some of the stuff we immediately associate with Pharaonic Egypt turns out to go back much further. There are a lot of statues and basically dull "stelae" (false doors carved, inscribed and painted inside tombs, removed en masse to the Museum - much of the 4,000-5,000 year old paint is still there, and bright). Highlights, on the other hand, include a good statue of Chephren (not looking too much like the Sphinx, if that is him), and a statue group of a dwarf and his family - there seem to have been a lot of dwarves around in Pharaonic Egypt: this one was "Head of all the Dwarves of the Clothing". Oh, and there's a great, still-vivid frieze of geese painted on plastered wood.
It took two sessions to finish the Old Kingdom (and First Intermediate Period), after which we break from 13.50 to 15.00 for ice-cream (both), a shwarma (Milla) and another extended toilet stop (me). After that, the Middle Kingdom thankfully doesn't take too long: the 12th and 13th Dynasties allowed a bit more realism into their statues/portraits but frankly, despite the play that the museum makes of this, it's hardly noticeable - the variations in detail are still heavily bounded by the traditional type-styles. With the focus moving south to the new capital at Thebes, there are a lot more funerary stele from Abydos: these are all much of a muchness - a couple of pictures of the deceased, and an injunction to pray for them. It's interesting that a lot of people had these little pseudo-gravestones in Abydos (cult centre of Osiris) even if they lived, died and were buried elsewhere.
By 16.30 we're on the New Kingdom stuff - the apparent explosion of energy that kicked out the foreign invaders in the north and gave us all the most memorable figures and stories (though that could just be a result of the records being much more recent and more complete). There are the great warrior Pharaohs Tuthmosis III, Seti I and Ramses II; the female Pharaoh Hatshepsut, normally shown with a false beard (after working together fine as co-rulers, Tuthmosis III had most of her monuments defaced after her death); and a little more on Akhenaten (older stuff which he had effaced, and his own effaced stuff - particularly by Seti I). After that first rush, though, they just seemed to run out of energy - there's a tired, sloppy feel to much of the sculpture and monuments; the political empire began to contract; and a number of foreign rulers start to appear. Simultaneously (or, at least, over the same four hundred years), the priests' statues and relics and tombs are of better quality than those of the pharaohs, so I guess there was a severe dilution of both wealth and power. What they call the "Late Period" (from the 22nd Dynasty onwards) is pretty drab and depressing, marked only by the sudden arrival of surviving iron implements (what on earth did they use to cut and build the pyramids? Or perhaps the earlier iron stuff was re-forged and re-used).
And then, of course, Alexander and his Greeks turned up in then Persian-controlled Egypt and established the Ptolemies, who reigned for 300 years. There's a lot of talk in both the museum literature and general tourist literatures about the "fusion" of Egyptian and Greek/Roman styles: I was expecting something like the magnificent anthropoid sarcophagi we saw in the museum in Beirut. In fact there seems to have been virtually no fusion, but instead almost total replacement with Greek styles - there are a couple of Pharaonic statues with Classical Greeks sculpted faces: frankly they just look bloody silly, especially the one of Alexander II. Even the Greco-Egyptian cult God Serapis is represented exclusively in Classical styles.
The staff come round and chuck us out at 18.29 (our last break was 17.55-18.05) as, having finished the ground floor, we're quickly going through those few rooms on the first floor which we missed on our first visit. Other observations from today's trip are that they had lucky blue eyes back in the early centuries BC (so it predates Islam and Christianity); and they used boomerangs as a weapon (they have an Australian one on display, above a case of Ancient Egyptian ones); and some of the statues have huge skulls, particularly from the Akhenaten period (this was presumably so it was easier to fit separate crowns on them, rather than some kind of genetic peculiarity). A last observation is that they had clay golems, buried in the tombs to serve in the afterlife, and activated by the sixth spell from the Book of the Dead painted on them: they were called Shawabti(s), but are surprisingly similar to the (I thought) medieval Jewish concept.
We walked round that Museum for just under seven hours (I'm excluding our breaks), and afterwards head back to the hotel and (in my case at least) go straight to bed with the intention of sleeping for as many hours as possible. Needless to say, Milla wakes me up two hours later. She's been out to buy more toilet roll (I've gone through most of our supply), and mint tea which she pretty much forces me to drink.
Once awake I have difficulty going back to sleep and, although Milla crashes out a little after midnight, I stay up reading and don't get to sleep again until after 02.00.
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