An art of drawing

A trail-blazing exhibition at the Louvre in Paris focuses on ancient Egyptian drawing, writes David Tresilian

Now in its final days at the Louvre museum in Paris, but due to reopen at the Musées royaux d’art et d’histoire in Brussels in September, L’Art du contour, le dessin dans l’Egypte ancienne focuses on one of the foundations of art in ancient Egypt, the art of drawing.
Presented in a small temporary exhibition space in the Richelieu wing of the Louvre, the exhibition could almost be overlooked by visitors hurrying through to the museum’s main collections. However, the exhibition’s small size belies its importance, since this is apparently the first time that the subject has been dealt with in a dedicated exhibition, and it has benefitted from the kind of scholarly treatment that perhaps the Louvre almost alone of all international museums is still able to devote to it.

There is an impressive catalogue containing specially commissioned essays on various aspects of ancient Egyptian drawing by recognised specialists. These consider topics such as the formal and technical aspects of ancient Egyptian drawing, as well as the material conditions of its production, including the training, remuneration and professional status of ancient Egyptian artists. The aim has been to explore how western-trained art historians might make sense of ancient Egyptian drawing, the curator, Guillemette Andreu-Lanoe, says in her introduction to the catalogue, before going on to quote the opinion of Giorgio Vasari, the Italian Renaissance artist, for whom drawing was “the father of the arts of architecture, painting and sculpture.”

Lost Tombs - In search of history's greatest rulers

By JARRETT A. LOBELL and ERIC A. POWELL
Tuesday, July 16, 2013

The improbable discovery last year of Richard III’s skeleton under a parking lot in Leicester, England, is a reminder that while some burials of great historical figures are lost to posterity, careful archaeological sleuthing could still bring them to light. The debate over where to rebury the notorious English king illustrates how important finding the physical remains of these lost rulers can be. And study of Richard III’s remains promises to add to our understanding of both the man himself and the time he lived in. Finding a ruler’s lost tomb may be the most romantic discovery possible in archaeology, but it can also be an opportunity to create a richer picture of ancient life.

Here are the stories behind the lost final resting places of seven great royal figures, which, if found, could give us exciting insights into our collective past.

Nefertiti, Great Royal Wife and Queen of Egypt

Ruled ca. 1348-1330 B.C.

In the 1880s, residents living near the ancient Egyptian city of Amarna discovered a large multichambered rock-cut tomb. It was one of many such tombs at Amarna, but its impressive size distinguished it from the others. Unfortunately, the tomb, called Amarna 26, has been badly damaged by looters, weather, and time, and many of the most significant artifacts were removed at some point, either in antiquity or more recently. Relatively little of the tomb’s fragile decoration is intact. Nevertheless, enough inscribed artifacts do survive—including more than 200 shabti figurines, an alabaster chest, and two large granite sarcophagi—that archaeologists are reasonably certain the tomb, also called the Royal Tomb, belonged to the 18th Dynasty pharaoh Akhenaten and his daughter Meketaten.

Museum Pieces - Fragment of the beard of the Great Sphinx

Length: 78.700 cm - Gift of Giovanni Battista Caviglia - EA 58

Fragment of the beard of the Great Sphinx

From Giza, Egypt

Perhaps New Kingdom, 14th century BC

Together with the nearby pyramids, the Great Sphinx at Giza is one of the great symbols of ancient Egypt. It is generally attributed to Khafre, the king who built the second pyramid. It was carved out of local limestone, which was probably left over from rock used for construction of the 'Great Pyramid' of Khufu (Greek: Kheops), Khafre's father.

The British Museum has this small fragment - about one-thirtieth in total - of the Great Sphinx's beard. It was presented by Giovanni Battista Caviglia, who excavated at Giza in 1817 and cleared parts of the Sphinx, which was then buried in sand up to the neck. His expenses were covered by Henry Salt (British Consul-General) and other British businessmen, with an agreement that finds be presented to The British Museum. This was done according to a directive of Mohammed Ali Pasha, who was at that time virtually the ruler of Egypt.

Caviglia found a number of fragments of the beard and the tip of the uraeus between the paws of the Sphinx, and left other parts of the beard in the sand. When the Sphinx was cleared in 1925-26 some other fragments were removed to the Cairo Museum.

The sphinx takes the form of a lion's body with a royal head, symbolizing the immense power of the king. The fragment shows the beard to have been of the plaited, 'divine' type, depicted on gods and the dead, rather than kings and the living (see an example on the sarcophagus of Sasobek, also in The British Museum). However, it is doubtful whether it would have had a beard when first carved in about 2550 BC; it was probably added during restoration work in the Eighteenth Dynasty (about 1550-1295 BC), and fell off in antiquity. It has sometimes been suggested that damage to the face was caused during the late eighteenth century by Napoleon's troops. In fact an early fifteenth-century Arab historian reported that the face had been disfigured in his time. Seventeenth- and mid-eighteenth-century drawings, made before the French expedition to Egypt, appear to support his report.

M. Lehner, The complete pyramids (London, Thames and Hudson, 1998)

Z. Hawas, The secrets of the Sphinx (Cairo, 1998)

G. Hart, Pharaohs and pyramids (London, Dorling Kindersley in association with the British Museum, 1991)

Source: http://www.britishmuseum.org/

Polish archaeologists in Egypt uncovered the remains of a 4.5 thousand years old settlement

Remains of a settlements from the period of the builders of the great pyramids (Dynasty III-VI) have been uncovered at Tell el-Murra in the Nile Delta by archaeologists from the Institute of Archaeology of the Jagiellonian University.

Polish archaeologists have been working at Tell el-Murra since 2008. The settlement is located in the north-eastern part of the Nile Delta, in the vicinity of another site from the same period - Tell el-Farkha, studied by archaeologists from Poznań and Kraków.

Tell el-Murra is a small hill, covering the remains of an ancient settlement, founded more than 5500 years ago. As a result of the settlement ongoing here for over 1,300 years, as a consequence of constructing buildings made of dried bricks on the same site, an elevation (tell) formed, which now reaches a few meters above the level of fields.

Excavations at Tell el-Murra in April and May of this year were conducted mainly in the north-eastern part of the site, occupied by the settlement. The objective was to confirm the hypothesis based on earlier work, relating to the period in which the settlement had been inhabited.

Its Reign Was Long, With Nine Lives to Start

‘Divine Felines: Cats of Ancient Egypt’ at the Brooklyn Museum

By HOLLAND COTTER
Published: July 25, 2013

(Photocredit: Suzanne DeChillo/The New York Times)
At left, “Face of Sakhmet,’ from around 1390-1292 B.C.; right, “Recumbent Lion,” in limestone, from 305-30 B.C.

If your dream of heaven is eternity spent with the pets you love, “Divine Felines: Cats of Ancient Egypt” at the Brooklyn Museum is your exhibition. All of its 30 objects, sifted from the museum’s Egyptian collection, are of cats, big and little, feral and tame, celestial and not. Whether cast in bronze or carved in stone, their forms were to outlast time, and so they have.

Although it’s often assumed that the domestication of cats began in Egypt, archaeology suggests that Mesopotamia was the place. And despite the feline presence in religious contexts, Egyptians didn’t worship cats per se, but created gods that had their physical features, their expressive moods and their near-supernatural intelligence.

Ancient Egyptians took the supernatural seriously.

It was, for them, reality. The path between life on earth and life in an earthlike place beyond was continuous. The sun traveled it every day, moving across the sky from east to west, dropping from sight to continue its circuit through the netherworld, then turning up on earth again.

Grisly Egyptian mummy mysteries unraveled

by Dan Vergano USA TODAY

Mummy myths and modern science battle it out in today's studies of the ancient dead of the Kingdom on the Nile.

Mummies and myths go together, with a touch of ghoulish interest in ancient tombs for added interest, but modern science is shedding a little light on some of our more musty ideas about ancient Egypt's dead.

Even as modern-day Egypt seethes with political turmoil, scholarship into the mortuary practices of that ancient land is enjoying a renaissance.

"Mummification went on in Egypt for more than 3,000 years, and the practice changed at different times and places," says anthropologist Andrew Wade of Canada's University of Western Ontario. "In the past, we would look at one or two mummies and make conclusions, but now we have a lot more non-destructive technology and medical information we can bring to bear on them."

In an upcoming Journal of Archaeological Science analysis, Wade and his colleague Andrew Nelson look at radiological scans of 84 ancient mummies from museums worldwide. Their goal: seeking to prove or disprove some of the hoariest (and creepiest), accounts of ancient mummification. Among those ideas was the notion that embalmers removed the brains of dead rulers through the nose and that the practice was limited to royalty and their loyal followers. Another is that the internal organs of the wealthy were removed from mummies. The study and a series of related reports show all of those ideas, long staples of scary mummy stories good for grossing out schoolkids and adults, look a little more complicated when viewed under the X-ray.

When Lettuce Was a Sacred Sex Symbol

Lettuce has been harvested for millenia—it was depicted by ancient Egyptians on the walls of tombs dating back to at least 2,700 B.C. The earliest version of the greens resembled two modern lettuces: romaine, from the French word “romaine” (from Rome), and cos lettuce, believed to have been found on the island of Kos, located along the coast of modern day Turkey.  

But in Ancient Egypt around 2,000 B.C., lettuce was not a popular appetizer, it was an aphrodisiac, a phallic symbol that represented the celebrated food of the Egyptian god of fertility, Min. (It is unclear whether the lettuce’s development in Egypt predates its appearance on the island of Kos.) The god, often pictured with an erect penis in wall paintings and reliefs was also known as the “great of love” as he is called in a text from Edfu Temple. The plant was believed to help the god “perform the sexual act untiringly.”

Salima Ikram, Professor of Egyptology at the American University in Cairo who specializes in Ancient Egyptian food explains Min’s part in lettuce history. “Over 3,000 years, [Min's] role did change, but he was constantly associated with lettuce,” she says.

The first of these depictions appeared around 1970-80 B.C. in the The White Chapel of Senusret I, though there may be earlier examples, Ikram says.