Egypt Reborn: Art for Eternity

• The Egyptian, Classical, and Ancient Middle Eastern Art Galleries
  These galleries contain more than one thousand works of art made in Egypt and the ancient Near East between approximately 4000 B.C. and the third century A.D. Many of these objects were either donated or lent to the Museum by generous supporters. Some entered the Museum as gifts from the countries where they were excavated by trained archaeologists. Still others were purchased by the Museum on the art market.
  
  The Hagop Kevorkian Gallery of Ancient Middle Eastern Art, at the bottom of the stairs, was named for an art dealer and collector who provided funds for the gallery in 1957. Twelve monumental relief slabs from the Northwest Palace of the Assyrian king Ashur-nasir-pal II (circa 883–859 B.C.) at Nimrud (in modern Iraq) line the walls. Smaller objects from the major centers of ancient Near Eastern civilization are installed in cases throughout the gallery. At the east end of the floor is the Charles Edwin Wilbour Library, named for a nineteenth-century American Egyptologist whose collection of antiquities and books came to the Museum in 1916. Entrance to the library is by appointment only.
  
  For more than sixty years, the Egyptian Department’s curators have sought to acquire and display objects of “Brooklyn Quality”—extraordinary works of ancient art reflecting only the highest level of artistic and technical achievement. The result is a renowned collection exhibited in nine galleries, five of which opened in 1993. In 2003 four more were installed. Both installations celebrate the innovations and long-standing traditions of the ancient world and help us understand how ancient people lived.

• Egypt Reborn Art for Eternity
  Egypt was the birthplace of the oldest known civilization in Africa and one of the most sophisticated societies in history. Ancient Egyptian culture flourished from approximately 4400 B.C., when people first established permanent homes along the banks of the Nile River, until Egypt was absorbed into the Roman Empire in 30 B.C.
  
  Throughout the centuries, from ancient times until today, countless travelers have marveled at the pyramids of Giza, the Great Sphinx, the Valley of the Kings, and hundreds of other monuments and sites. These places are truly impressive, but understanding how the Egyptians lived and what they believed requires a look at the exquisite works of art produced by generations of superbly talented artists. These creations were inextricably linked to all aspects of Egyptian life and belief.
  
  The Egyptians did not accept death as final. Taking their inspiration from the sun, which “died” each night at dusk only to be “reborn” at dawn, they believed that all humans could be reborn after death and exist throughout eternity. Most of the works of art in these galleries were created to aid the Egyptians in this quest for everlasting life. Although the importance of the eternal led artists to emphasize continuity, new ideas in the religious, social, and political spheres frequently led to innovative artistic expressions.
  
  The first section of this installation, where you are now, investigates how aspects of ancient Egyptian civilization—such as the environment, technology, and language—affected artistic creation. A second section—called Temples, Tombs, and the Egyptian Universe—explores the religious basis of Egyptian art.
  
  The remaining galleries contain approximately 800 objects arranged chronologically. The galleries of Early Egypt, to your left, contain objects from the Predynastic Period to early Dynasty 18. Later Egypt is shown in the Martha A. and Robert S. Rubin Gallery to your right. Together these displays vividly demonstrate ancient Egypt’s rich and varied artistic tradition.

• Egypt in Africa What Was the Relationship between the Egyptians and Other Africans?
  Many European and American universities and museums separate Egypt from the rest of Africa, presenting it either in relation to the European cultures of Greece and Rome or as an isolated phenomenon with no connections to the peoples of central and southern Africa. These “Eurocentric” or “isolationist” approaches are modern. The Greek historian Herodotus—the so-called father of history—fully acknowledged the African aspects of Egyptian civilization when he visited the Nile Valley in the fifth century B.C.
  
  It was not until the 1840s that a group of American authors, writing to justify the Atlantic slave trade, argued that the Egyptians were a separate population with no relation to other Africans. They did not believe that Africans could have produced one of the world’s most sophisticated civilizations. Although prominent African-American intellectuals—including David Walker, Frederick Douglass, and W. E. B. DuBois—challenged these notions, such ideas continued to dominate how Egypt was presented to the American public throughout the nineteenth and much of the twentieth centuries.
  
  Since the 1960s, western-trained Egyptologists have begun to rethink many of their assumptions about ancient Egypt. This trend is due partly to changes in American society and partly to the efforts of African and African-American scholars who continue to challenge outdated ideas. These modern scholars use the same name the ancient Egyptians used for their kingdom: “Kemet,” or “Black Land.” Linguists have identified similarities in grammar and vocabulary between the language of the ancient Egyptians and several contemporary African languages. Important aspects of Egyptian culture, including divine kingship and devotion to dead ancestors, are now seen as examples of traditional African approaches to social organization.
  
  The debate over whether or when ancient Egyptian influence reached central and western Africa remains open. Some may question the very assumptions underlying a search for cultural traits specific to Africa. In any case, we continue to explore how much of Egyptian thought and behavior survives among today’s African populations.
  

• Early Life along the Nile What Was the Environment of Ancient Egypt?
  As farmers, herders, fishermen, and hunters, ancient Egyptians had to pay close attention to the sky, the weather, animals, and plants. The earliest Egyptians were so aware of their dependence on nature that they attributed divine powers to many of these elements. They understood that the sun was the most important of all natural forces, thus they considered the sun god, Re, to be the most powerful of the gods.
  
  The second most important natural element in ancient Egyptian life was the Nile River. Every year from about August until October, the river flooded all but the highest parts of the valley. This inundation provided a reliable source of water for crops and also fertilized the fields with the rich black silt the river carried northward. The Egyptians did not consider the Nile to be a god but rather a semidivine spirit, whom they represented in reliefs and paintings as a very fat man holding a tray heaped with food.
  
  The Nile was also the major highway for travel, communication, and transport. Even the gods were believed to travel by water: designs on some Predynastic pots show boats carrying religious symbols and a female passenger who may be a goddess. The river was not entirely beneficent. While it provided fish for food, it also sheltered lurking mud dwellers such as turtles and dangerous beasts such as crocodiles and hippopotami.
  
  Though there were dangers, Egypt’s valley seemed safe and orderly compared with the neighboring deserts, where lions, wolves, and other predators prowled. Egyptians did go to the desert to hunt game and some even ventured farther into the wilderness to mine for gold and semiprecious stones.
  

• Life and Belief How Did Egyptians’ Religious Beliefs Affect Their Daily Lives?
  Religious beliefs and practices dominated ancient Egyptian daily life. Although American society attempts to separate the sacred and the profane, no such distinction existed in ancient Egypt. Even purely utilitarian objects were designed to express religious ideas. Cosmetic dishes, for example, were often made in the form of lotus flowers or fish, both symbols of rebirth and resurrection. In order to achieve life after death, Egyptians had to fulfill specific responsibilities: making sacrifices to Osiris, god of the dead; preparing a tomb; and arranging to be mummified. Probably because of the unity between their daily lives and beliefs, the Egyptians envisioned an afterlife much like this world, only better. They would still have to plow fields, for example, but they would do so while wearing fancy robes and jewelry.
  
  The Egyptians often included objects from their daily lives in burials, believing that they would be necessary in the afterlife. Thus many of the cosmetic items and jewelry seen here were buried in tombs after a lifetime of use. Other objects, however—such as canopic jars, model food offerings, and tomb stelae (inscribed slabs)—were manufactured strictly as funerary goods.
  
  Because so many classes of objects served both utilitarian and religious functions, craftsmen were reluctant to introduce dramatic alterations in design and decoration. Changes did occur, but underlying religious associations remained constant. For example, although its shape slowly evolved from elliptical to round, the disk of a mirror still represented the sun as creator. When an Egyptian picked up a mirror, he or she was reminded of solar creation.
  

• Art and Communication How did art express the way the Egyptians thought about their world?
  The ancient Egyptians had no word for art. Most of the objects seen in these galleries were meant to be used rather than admired. They were created as part of an intricate religious system explaining the Egyptian view of this world and the afterlife. On a very basic level, Egyptian art functioned like writing: statues, reliefs, and paintings were all produced to communicate information. In fact, the formal rules followed by scribes also influenced how a sculptor carved a statue or a painter decorated a tomb wall. Artists and viewers alike understood statues and two-dimensional images as hieroglyphs. The use of statue bases and baselines derived from writing, and the tendency of most two-dimensional figures to face right rather than left can be traced to the fact that the Egyptians usually wrote from right to left.
  
  Because Egyptian art sought to communicate ideas rather than reproduce reality, artists had no need for techniques such as perspective or foreshortening. They did experiment with perspective about 1800 B.C. but quickly dismissed it. Instead, artists isolated each element of a complete figure, depicting each one in the most recognizable way. Thus the individual aspects of a figure were assembled into an image that conveyed the original subject without actually reproducing it. Such a didactic approach first engaged the viewer’s mind; only secondarily did it appeal to the aesthetic sense. Although the Egyptians mastered this technique, it was not uniquely their own. The same method appears in the art of most non- or pre-Classical cultures, including those of the ancient Near East, Minoan Crete, and the Yoruba people of Nigeria.

• The Mid -Eighteenth Dynasty (circa 1479–1390 B.C.) Queen Hatshepsut and King Thutmose III to King Thutmose IV
  HISTORY When Thutmose II died around 1479 B.C., Thutmose III, his son by a minor wife, became king. Queen Hatshepsut, the chief wife of Thutmose II, acted as regent for her young stepson, emulating earlier queens who ruled until their sons were old enough to exercise authority.
  
  However, at some point between the second and seventh years of the reign of Thutmose III, Hatshepsut ceased to be an “assistant” and declared herself co-king, exercising the same prerogatives as any male ruler. One of her most impressive accomplishments was the funerary temple she commissioned at Deir el Bahri on the west bank of the Nile at Thebes.
  
  Following Hatshepsut’s death, Thutmose III (circa 1479–1425 B.C.) assumed sole control of the throne and extended Egypt’s power as far north as the Euphrates River (in modern Iraq) and south to the Fourth Cataract in Sudan. Thutmose III described himself as “a king who fights by himself, to whom a multitude [of enemies] is no concern; for he is abler than a million men in a vast army. No equal to him has been found, a fighter aggressive on the battlefield.”
  
  Agents of Thutmose III eventually sought to erase any memory of Hatshepsut by destroying inscriptions that mentioned her, thus reestablishing royal succession through the male line. His son Amunhotep II (circa 1426–1400 B.C.) and grandson Thutmose IV (circa 1400–1390 B.C.) ruled during Egypt’s transition from a militaristic society to the more peaceful nationalism of Amunhotep III (circa 1390–1352 B.C.).
  
  THE VISUAL TRADITION Throughout the New Kingdom, Egyptian artists developed new styles, forms, and iconography, but still applied them in ways that conformed to the accepted limits of artistic convention.
  
  Within the less than ninety years between the accession of Thutmose III (circa 1479 B.C.) and the death of Thutmose IV (circa 1390 B.C.), Egyptian aesthetics changed dramatically. At the beginning of their joint reign, Hatshepsut and Thutmose III tried to emphasize political and social stability. One way to do this was through artistic continuity; their sculptors combined placid elegance and archaizing trends in a style very similar to that known under the dynasty’s first four kings.
  
  A somewhat different artistic spirit emerged late in the reign of Thutmose III and throughout that of Amunhotep II. The art of these two great warrior-pharaohs conveys a new sense of monumentality and strength: bodies are heavier and faces are dominated by straight lines, creating a sense of stability and aloofness. Centuries later, particularly during Dynasties 19 to 24 (circa 1292–712 B.C.), royal sculptors tried to link their kings with Egypt’s glorious past by imitating earlier styles. These artists selected the style of the final years of Thutmose III and the reign of Amunhotep II as the Egyptian “ideal.”

• Technology and Materials How Were Objects Made in Ancient Egypt and What Materials Were Used?
  Ancient Egyptians tended to adapt and refine imported technologies rather than invent new ones themselves. Many developments— wheeled vehicles, for example—resulted from foreign contact. In the Old Kingdom (circa 2675–2170 B.C.), the Egyptians attached wheels to cumbersome objects like ladders to help move them. However, they only began to use wheels for transportation after they saw the chariots driven by invaders from western Asia in the Second Intermediate Period, nearly a thousand years later. They then started making carts, wagons, and chariots of their own.
  
  This conservatism grew, in part, from the way the Egyptians worked. Laboring in teams rather than individually, each person had a very specific job. New tools or techniques might have disrupted the work pattern of the other team members. Also, skilled craftsmen were usually attached to royal or temple workshops or to large private estates, where there was little need to speed up production or lower cost. The quality of the finished product mattered more than time and expense.
  
  In manufacturing, the Egyptians did make inventive use of natural resources, especially the rich stone quarries in the deserts flanking the Nile Valley. They also imported many of the materials used to make the objects in these galleries—copper and turquoise from Sinai, gold from Nubia, and fine wood from Syria and Lebanon.

• Amunhotep III (circa 1390–1352 B.C.) A Case Study in Permanence and Change in Dynasty 18
  Artists working for King Amunhotep III were simultaneously conservative and innovative: they looked to the past to learn the ways of their predecessors, but they also broke new ground, especially in the development of fresh sculptural styles.
  
  An interest in earlier art was only one part of a comprehensive concern for the past that arose during the reign. Amunhotep’s antiquarian fascination may have been ideologically motivated. By associating himself with the remote past, he broke with the political and military policies of his immediate predecessors.
  
  Under Amunhotep III, priests searched through ancient archives to learn how traditional rites such as the royal jubilee (sed-festival) had been performed in the earliest dynasties. Artists borrowed details from Old Kingdom tomb and temple decoration that had been carved a thousand years earlier. Perhaps the most significant development was the new king’s devotion to solar worship, which had dominated Egyptian Old Kingdom religion throughout Dynasties 5 and 6 (circa 2500–2170 B.C.). This renewed movement came at the expense of the god Amun—the favorite of all previous Eighteenth Dynasty kings—whose importance diminished under Amunhotep III.
  
  New ideas developed and coexisted with the old. Egypt became a truly cosmopolitan country with ties to kingdoms throughout Africa, western Asia, and Europe. Treaties linked Egypt to major centers of power, including Babylon, Assyria, and Mittani (all in modern Iraq) and Arzawa (modern western Turkey). In addition to his powerful wife, Queen Tiye, the king married several foreign princesses who brought non-Egyptian art, clothing, and ideas to his court.
  
  Perhaps inspired by the style of ancient Near Eastern art, artists under Amunhotep III depicted humans in an elegant, stylized manner with slanted, almond-shaped eyes, short noses, and long, dainty fingers. Women’s bodies were rendered as sensuous, with physically impossible hourglass figures. At the same time, some depictions of the king show him in a highly naturalistic form with swollen cheeks and a noticeable paunch. These representations contrast with images of earlier kings that always depict the pharaoh with a youthful face and body.
  
  New trends in royal iconography also reflect the innovative nature of art under Amunhotep III. Since before the First Dynasty, Egyptian rulers were depicted as valiant warrior kings—executing enemies or leading their armies into battle. Such traditional images essentially vanished under Amunhotep III and the king appeared as a god incarnate, peacefully receiving his subjects’ worship.
  

• Provenance How Do Museums Obtain the Antiquities They Exhibit?
  Museums most often acquire antiquities as loans or gifts from generous individuals and foundations, through archaeological excavations, or by purchasing them.
  
  Official archaeological excavations were a major source of antiquities for the Brooklyn Museum of Art in the first four decades of the last century. In the early years of Brooklyn’s fieldwork in Egypt (1906–8), the Museum retained most of what it found. In the 1920s, the Egyptian government began exercising its right to keep most excavated material. Some antiquities, however, came to Brooklyn during the 1920s and 1930s through “archaeological division,” a process that allowed the excavating institution to retain objects not claimed by the Egyptians. Current antiquities law permits only official gifts from the Egyptian government or objects lent temporarily for scientific study to be released to other countries or museums. Museums and universities continue to excavate in Egypt; today the goal is to obtain knowledge rather than treasures to remove and display.
  
  Before a museum buys an object or accepts it as a loan or gift, curators must check its history. Sometimes antiquities stolen from archaeological excavations or unearthed by tomb robbers appear on the art market. Purchasing stolen antiquities contributes to the destruction of archaeological sites and the loss of knowledge. The Brooklyn Museum of Art’s Egyptian Department will not buy an object that left Egypt after 1983, when current antiquities law went into effect.
  

• Dates: On view since April 12, 2003
• Location: On view in Egyptian Galleries, 3rd Floor