NINE STILL LOOKING

Death and renewal: with its massive stone ruins, time-capsule tombs and the mythology of Osiris and Isis, which turned the human drama of jealousy and revenge into a divine promise of redemption and rebirth, ancient Egypt has long seemed uniquely placed to speak to this theme. There is something suitably sombre in the way contemporary artists like Fred Wilson, Khaled Hafez or the South African artist William Kentridge deploy ancient Egyptian motifs in their work to address questions of identity and memory. Kentridge’s Carnets d’Égypte series and his engagements with Mozart’s Masonic opera The Magic Flute subvert the usual narrative of the European Enlightenment by drawing attention to its colonial roots.¹ Wilson and Kentridge have both explored racial tropes and ancient Egypt as well, Wilson in Grey Area and Kentridge in a video work that compares his own nose (Kentridge is Jewish) to the nose of a pharaonic image. All these artists are well versed in history, science and philosophy. In fact, Hafez cites the French philosopher Jean Baudrillard as one inspiration for his Tomb Sonata, with its critique of militarism set inside a simulated tomb. Baudrillard’s best-known work addressed the simulacrum as a characteristic of consumer society, which he suggested had come to value the ‘hyperreal’ over the real. The simulacrum is not a replica of something that does exist or has existed. Instead, it is a copy of something that never existed but feels as though it should have, like Disneyland’s pirate ships and all-American Main Streets.

In contrast to the serious mood of such contemporary artworks, popular culture seems to remember and replicate ancient Egypt just for fun: adventure movie franchises, Halloween costumes, children’s toys and bookshelves shaped like coffins, perhaps to hold your collection of Agatha Christie or Wilbur Smith novels. What would Baudrillard make of the Luxor Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas, which is based on the great pyramid and sphinx at Giza, with an obelisk thrown in for good measure? The Luxor complex may well prove Baudrillard’s point, that the authentic, like the past itself, is well beyond our reach, replaced instead by the fantasy on which late capitalism thrives. When it opened in 1993 the hotel embraced an ancient Egyptian theme in all its public spaces, including a replica version of Tutankhamun’s tomb in the casino and a Nile tour that snaked throughout the complex, past ‘ancient’ works of art. Although a 2007 renovation swept away these mock-Egyptian entertainments, the Luxor still amounts to a pyramid in the desert that replaces, and may even improve on, the real thing. For most of its visitors Las Vegas is more accessible than Giza, in more ways than one.

Even the most harmless-seeming fun marks a sign of the times, though. Throughout this book we have seen how different societies at different times and places have responded to what they knew or believed about ancient Egypt. Many Greek and Roman writers admired Egyptian religion and wisdom, although some satirized it as well, poking fun at sacred animals and images of animal-headed gods. In the Islamic world of the Middle Ages, some legends of buried treasure and secret chambers were as outlandish as an Indiana Jones movie, while medieval Christianity tried to map biblical stories onto the scarce travellers’ accounts that reached western Europeans at the time. The Renaissance saw European scholars embark on fresh studies of ancient Egypt alongside ancient Greece and Rome, as all three ‘lost civilizations’ were rediscovered through a trade in ancient manuscripts and circulated through the new medium of print. The wisdom of Hermes Trismegistus, preserved in Greek, bridged ancient Egyptian and Christian philosophy, while ideas about the secrecy of his teachings shaped secular orders like the Freemasons and Rosicrucians, which brought elite men together outside the confines of the old aristocracy.

Replicas of the Great Sphinx, a row of ram-headed sphinxes, and two statues of pharoahs, outside the Luxor Hotel and Casino, Las Vegas.

In the social and political turmoil, and colonial expansionism, of the late eighteenth century, it was only a matter of time before some European state invaded Egypt; Napoleon did so in spectacular form. The cultural fad for Egypt-inspired decor that followed has often been called Egyptomania, but again this book has suggested that there was method to the madness for Egyptian-style furnishings and architecture. Imagining the Orient as an exotic land ripe for European pickings (and, for male travellers, pleasures) fit into the pattern of European domination that shaped the nineteenth century. A story like Gautier’s fantasy of the princess’s mummified foot is entertaining, but it is also an indication of which way power flowed between Europe and the Middle East, not to mention men and women. There were always alternatives to the white male imagination of ancient Egypt, too. Egyptian culture provided a rich seam of symbolism among African Americans, Afro-Caribbeans and in West Africa, while Egyptian academics, officials and artists have promoted their country’s ancient past as a plank of modernization and national pride.

Much of what Egyptologists today cite as reliable scholarship on ancient Egypt goes back to the late nineteenth century, when the academic discipline of archaeology emerged in European, and later American, universities. The excavations that foreign institutions sponsored in Egypt, overseen by the Service des antiquités, filled museums in Cairo and overseas alike with Egyptian antiquities. This was also the era when routes to formal study and standards of academic publication began to separate self-consciously ‘scientific’ approaches from earlier efforts, which now seemed dilettantish in comparison. British, French, German, American and Italian scholars dominated the field, a picture largely unchanged today. Under the British ‘veiled protectorate’ (up to the First World War) and continued military occupation, the influence of British archaeologists and patrons was especially noticeable in Egypt, but no less controversial for that, as diplomatic clashes surrounding the excavation of Tutankhamun’s tomb made clear. For Egyptians who wanted to learn more about their ancient history, knowledge of European languages was a must; a university-level programme for the subject was first introduced in Egypt in 1925. Only after the revolution of 1952 was an Egyptian archaeologist made head of the antiquities service, and only in the 1990s were foreign excavations required to submit reports of their work to the government in Arabic. Like other countries rich in archaeological sites and antiquities museums, Egypt has to deal with its ancient past in quite practical terms (administration, upkeep, security, tourism) as well as in symbolic terms that embrace the past for a sense of belonging and identity, or, in equally valid viewpoints, may treat it with indifference or reject it altogether. Not everyone wants a Tutankhamun T-shirt or a Nefertiti tattoo – or, for that matter, a revolution.

There is no definitive ancient Egypt, because the material remains that survive from the past are always interpreted through the concerns of the present day and filtered through layers of cultural memory. Ancient Egyptian art, language and religion all came to some kind of end almost two thousand years ago. In that sense, they were indeed lost – but they were never forgotten, being buried in our social psyche rather than the sand of an archaeological site. Excavating our own stratigraphy – how do we know what we think we know? why does someone care about this ancient Egypt at that point in time? – is as important as delving into the monuments and mythologies that any conventional survey of ancient Egypt can provide. That is what this book has tried to do. As an Egyptologist, I always encourage people to go to museums with ancient Egyptian collections, visit Egypt, read widely on the subject or watch films like Raiders of the Lost Ark and al-Mumiya, and television documentaries, if you like that kind of thing. But do so with a critical eye, and remember: wherever we look for the lost civilization of the Egyptians, we cannot help but find ourselves.