WHEN Howard Carter came upon the tomb of the young pharaoh Tutankhamun in 1922, he made one of the most extraordinary discoveries in modern archaeology.
The state of the tomb (KV 62 to experts) gave it a special resonance for the public too, especially as the revelation of its contents took place over several years. Egyptology, which had fascinated the West from Herodotus to Jean-Francois Champollion, was given a new lease on life in popular culture, as something at once profound and arcane.
Herge's Tintin adventure Les Cigares du pharaon (1934), with its eccentric Egyptologist, as well as the myth of a curse pursuing those who had opened the grave, were direct expressions of this renewed passion for Egypt. But why had this tomb been missed by centuries of rapacious grave-robbers? The explanation was that the very name of Tutankhamun had been forgotten or expunged from the record and with it any memory of his burial. And the reason for this, though not entirely clear, is certainly related to the dramatic events of the previous generation.
Herodotus, the founder of historiography in the 5th century BC, who left us the earliest witness account of life in ancient Egypt - including extensive discussion of its physical geography, history and social customs - was well aware that the country's civilisation was incomparably ancient. In fact, we now know that the south (Upper Egypt) and the north (Lower Egypt) were unified before 3000BC.
The first great historical period of Egypt, known as the Old Kingdom, dates from about 2686BC to 2181BC; this was the period of the great pyramids and ended perhaps as the result of some climatic catastrophe that brought about a breakdown of central government.
Order was restored in the Middle Kingdom, which lasted from about 2030BC to 1640BC, when a weakened kingdom lost territory to the Mitanni in the north, while Nubians invaded territories in the south of the country. At last a vigorous new dynasty arose, crushing the Nubians and driving out the Asian invaders in the north, and founding the New Kingdom, which lasted from 1539BC to 1075BC, followed by a third intermediate phase and then a late period until the conquest of Alexander the Great in 332BC and the beginning of the Hellenistic or Greco-Egyptian age.
The New Kingdom is contemporary with the other great Western bronze age civilisations of Minoan Crete (which was almost as old as Egypt) and Mycenaean Greece (c1600BC-1100BC), as well as the Semitic ones of Mesopotamia.
Its kings pursued the policy of maintaining their southern neighbours in subjection and pressing the west Asians in the north; they extended the empire as far as the Euphrates River and cemented their relations with some of these northern rivals through intermarriage.
And then one of these successful monarchs, in the 14th century BC, did something astonishing in any circumstances, but almost unbelievable in the ultra-conservative culture of Egypt: he replaced the worship of the traditional gods with the cult of a single deity, the Aten, the disk of the sun.
This pharaoh, originally known as Amenhotep IV, changed his name to Akhenaten. He, or more exactly artists under his direction, also revolutionised the immemorially ancient and unvarying Egyptian canon of human proportions, having himself represented in a way that was unflatteringly naturalistic or exaggerated for cult purposes, or perhaps a bit of both.
Akhenaten's wife was the beautiful Nefertiti, but he seems to have fathered Tutankhamun by another woman, probably one of his sisters. At any rate, Tutankhamun, though he came to the throne at nine and died at 19, is credited with reversing his father's radical reform and restoring the traditional gods.
His early death, once thought to have been murder, now looks more like the result of an infection following a fractured knee, perhaps in a riding accident or a fall in battle; recent CT scans and DNA testing also have established that he suffered from malaria and several congenital conditions, although curiously had no dental cavities. It is also suspected that some of his inherited disabilities were the result of inbreeding.
Treasures from the burial first became widely known around the world during a enormously successful tour of Europe, the US and Japan in the 1970s, which renewed the mystique of Tutankhamun in the popular imagination.
The next exhibition was not until 2004, and a modified version of that show, now co-sponsored by the National Geographic Society, has been touring the world since 2005; its visit to Melbourne -- the first to Australia -- is the final stop before returning to Egypt.
The exhibition is titled Tutankhamun and the Golden Age of the Pharaohs, mainly because the word gold is almost obligatory in the marketing of any archeological exhibition to the public.
There are a few worryingly populist touches as you enter, including a photo opportunity with a sarcophagus, and then being herded into an antechamber to watch a short video before the gates of the exhibition open. At this point, you can be forgiven for feeling apprehensive about what is to follow -- which is that the gates open to reveal a darkened room, and then the lights come up on a statue at the end.
The effect is corny, but the statue - a standing effigy of the king in granite - is so impressive that you cannot really think of anything else. You find yourself immediately in the presence of what is most intriguing about Egypt, the paradox of vivid, if stylised, realism and painstaking execution in the most durable materials, and all in the service of another world.
A figure carved to last forever deserves more than a passing moment of attention; but unfortunately the crowds move away, prompted by their audio guide, and the room goes dark before the next group comes in and the theatrical lights go up again.
Fortunately, as you pass into the next room, the gimmicks cease, everything is properly lit and you can take your time walking to and fro between the exhibits. And mercifully there are no voices, no cheapjack sound effects, only soft ambient music in the background.
This is, in fact, an outstanding exhibition, and one well worth a trip to Melbourne. It's also one that demands a few hours of attention to appreciate properly, and the best way to engage with some of the most extraordinary objects, particularly the magnificent sculpted heads, is by sketching them, so it's worth bringing a notebook and pencil.
Whether a sculpture is interesting to draw, incidentally, is a good index of its formal strength and resolution as an artificial object.
After the initial encounter with the pharaoh, we are introduced to his ancestors, including Tuthmosis IV, sculpted in black granite in the serene style of the time and displaying a perpetual youthfulness that is not flattery but magically associated with eternal life after death.
The most extraordinary example of this youthfulness is on the sarcophagus of Tutankhamun's great-grandmother Tjuya, which itself is a climactic point in the exhibition. The sarcophagus is enormous, in wood covered in gold leaf, while the face is painted and inlaid with precious materials; the features are smooth and unblemished and the eyes are open, staring into timelessness.
In contrast to this serene confidence, we enter a room devoted to the iconoclastic Akhenaten, with a huge and almost shocking portrait head raised to the level it would have occupied as part of a seated statue.
The pharaoh is fascinatingly ugly, with a thin, peaked face, long nose, slit eyes and lips that protrude like the bill of a duck. A relief on the wall shows him again, his features even more radically distorted, with a weedy body and pot belly, adoring the Aten in the company of his wife Nefertiti and their daughter Meritaten; the sun's rays end in hands, which offer the ankh, symbol of life, to the royal family.
Meritaten is said to be the subject of an exquisite yet bizarre portrait head, in which the grotesquely elongated skull may reflect some real family trait that was deliberately exaggerated because it was thought a sign of holiness. Nefertiti's own features are attested to in several pieces, including an unfinished or fragmentary head for a composite statue, with deep hollows for the eyes and grooves for the eyebrows, where these would be filled in with other materials.
These two beautiful works are executed in a light brown quartzite (a metamorphically hardened form of sandstone), which closely resembles a natural skin colour and no doubt reflects the greater interest in naturalism of this period. Earlier figures are often in black granite, while some are carved in the much softer alabaster (calcite), but only in cases where, as in canopic jars, they were not going to be exposed to the elements or wear and tear.
The hardest material of all adopted by the Egyptians in their quest for durability is no doubt the obsidian used in another face for a composite statue; obsidian is a natural volcanic form of glass not found in Egypt and imported from foreign lands such as Anatolia (another famous source was the island of Lipari north of Sicily). The work, possibly an effigy of Amenhotep III, has been polished to an opaque surface, but the broken side reveals its natural glass-like transparency.
The most perishable material represented, on the other hand, is wood, and there is a beautiful painted sculpture of Tutankhamun as a boy. Its use is unclear; it may have served as anything from a kind of mannequin for ceremonial robes to a cult statue for some unknown purpose.
Unfortunately, this is as close to a portrait as we get, for the extremely fine gilded mini-coffin that appears on the cover of the exhibition book, while it did enclose one of the king's mummified inner organs, was originally intended for another burial.
In effect this miniature stands in for Tutankhamun's funerary mask, which was the centrepiece of the 70s exhibition but is no longer allowed to travel. And so the itinerary inevitably ends in something of an anticlimax, with a final room built around a void where we have to imagine the sarcophagus.
It helps to be forewarned of this because the exhibition inevitably builds towards something that is not quite there; but by then we have already had ample opportunity to commune with this intriguing and perpetually enigmatic ancient civilisation.
Click here to see photos from the exhibition
Author: Christopher Allen | Source: The Australian [October 01, 2011]