Westerners regard ancient Egypt with a mixture of wonder and morbid fascination: the stark monumentality of the pyramids; the awesome power of the pharaoh; the obsession with death and the afterlife; the hidden tombs and mummification practices. The picture is of culture that was dark, fanatical, even sinister.
It requires something of an adjustment, then, to get in the right frame of mind for “Egyptian Art in the Age of the Pyramids” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. For the art on display seems to have been produced by a people who had a confident, positive outlook on life; who had strong bodies and alert, satisfied expressions; who took pleasure in their work; who were tender and affectionate with one another, and who lived in a bountiful environment teeming with wildlife, birds, and fish.
This is the art of the Old Kingdom. And when you’re talking ancient Egypt, old is really old. As Met director Philippe de Montebello pointed out, the Met’s famed Temple of Dendur, which dates to the first century A.D., is closer in time to the present day than it is to the Old Kingdom, a period that lasted from 2650 to 2150 B.C. and covered Third through the Sixth dynasties.
This is not treasure like that of King Tut’s tomb, with gold thrones, mummy cases, and the like. Those things were likely looted thousands of years ago, and melted down or otherwise destroyed. But what the robbers left behind, the wall reliefs and statues in ordinary stone, are no less valuable as art.
All Egyptian art had a religious purpose: to create a parallel world for the deceased to inhabit in the afterlife. Statues of people, carvings of animals, weren’t made to be looked at and admired. Likenesses were meant as future dwelling places for a person’s “ka,” or life force, and, as such, were destined for the burial chambers, where they would never be seen by anyone.
The capital of the Old Kingdom was Memphis, a city south of Cairo on the west bank of the Nile. The pyramids that are the period’s best known accomplishment are evoked here in a huge photograph and in several models showing interior construction and burial chamber locations.
Although the Egyptians idealized faces and figures, many statues here are clearly likenesses of specific people, as, for example, in the seated figure of a Third Dynasty princess, whose wide, heavy mouth contrasts with the fine-featured faces of two flanking figures.
Egyptian stylization can look stiff, but the opposite is true in relief blocks from the Tomb Chapel of Metjen, showing delicately incised antelopes, which sniff, graze, and look anxiously behind.
From the Fourth Dynasty, the reign of King Snefru, comes an alabaster figure of a woman that probably represents an ideal of feminine beauty for that time. She is high-waisted and narrow-hipped. Her full wig encircles her head like an inverted U, and the forms of her legs within her tight skirt show as dark shadows in the translucent yellowish stone. She is detailed down to the cuticles on her fingernails.
Although she is sculpted in the round, she stands rigidly, shoulders squared, arms flat at her sides – demonstrating that the Egyptian preference for symmetry, frontality, and strong silhouettes – so common in the reliefs – was clearly an aesthetic decision and not the result of a weakness in drawing.
One of the strangest pieces in the show comes from the Fourth Dynasty reign of King Khufu: a lifesize sculpture of a seated man identified as “overseer of every construction project of the king,” no small job given that Khufu was responsible for the Great Pyramid at Giza. This man is neither handsome nor fit, though he does look confident. He is corpulent and wears only a short sarong, which makes him look like a contemporary businessman in a sauna, lacking only the cigar to make the picture complete.
A mystery of the show are the so-called “Reserve Heads.” These disembodied heads – hairless and somewhat androgynous – were once thought to serve as burial chamber spares, for the deceased to use in case his mummified head was damaged. More likely, they were made for people who couldn’t afford a full body sculpture.
King Khafre was the builder of the second, smaller pyramid at Giza, and also initiated the carving from natural rock of the imposing Sphinx, which, judging by a sculpture of him, was also a likeness. Both king and lion-bodied man have the same squarish face, wide mouth, and broad cheekbones, not to mention the flared, cobra-like headdress.
Images of marital contentment can be seen in sculptures of husbands and wives – sometimes king and queen – in which the two stand side by side as if posing for a photograph. In a typical gesture, the wife entwines one arm around her husband’s waist, and in one of the more ribald, a husband’s hand rests on his wife’s breast.
From the Fifth Dynasty come small, charming figures of ordinary people doing everyday things, like the animated little butcher bent over the trussed carcass of an ox. Or the nursing woman under siege from two hungry babies.
Were the Egyptians so content and well adjusted, despite their death-oriented culture, as their art makes them seem? Perhaps not. It would be a mistake to see their art as a faithful reflection of reality. If you were populating an afterlife for yourself, as well as the form that your soul would inhabit, certainly you would choose the most ideal vessels.
And yet, art tells us about a culture’s values. The art of the ancient Assyrians with its ferociously aggressive figures reflected that society’s warlike nature. From their art, it’s clear that the Egyptians were far from dark and sinister. They were a people who knew and valued the good life, in the best sense.
Metropolitan Museum of Art
1999
