From Eternity to Here

“The millennium says change, Egypt says permanence,” is how art historian Rita Freed summarizes our zeitgeist fascination with the art and culture of ancient Egypt. As museums inundate us with a flood of retrospectives and blockbusters while the calendar clicks toward 2000, two major exhibitions of ancient Egypt are attracting attention this fall on the East Coast, mounted by the two institutions with the greatest American collections of that period.

Coincidence or kismet?

Or maybe just smart programming. Egypt is a perennially popular subject that is, as Freed suggests, finding poignant allure in our shifting times.

“Egyptian Art in the Age of the Pyramids” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York opened in September and traces the development of the art, politics and religion of the Old Kingdom, 2649-2150 BC, five centuries during which Egyptian civilization reached a zenith and the great pyramids on the Giza plateau were built.

“Pharaohs of the Sun: Akhenaten, Nefertiti, Tutankhamen” opened last month at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and provides a close-up of the Age of Amarna (1353-1336 BC), an extraordinarily creative and distinctive era during which the multi-deity nature of Egyptian religion was nearly toppled. (The show will come to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in March.) Both exhibitions boast blockbuster proportions--each with some 250 objects from more than 30 museums and collections all over the world, including Cairo’s Egyptian Museum, London’s British Museum, Paris’ Louvre and Berlin’s Aegyptisches Museum. And of course the Met and the Boston museum have culled material from their own vast holdings and, indeed, from each other.

On the face of it, the two exhibitions seem competitive. But in fact they are complementary, for they are about macro and micro visions. “We tend to look at ancient Egyptian history by the span of centuries,” says Freed, Boston’s curator of ancient Egyptian, Nubian and Near Eastern Art, “so our focus on the Amarna Age, which lasted only 17 years, is really just a blink.”

Still, it is quite a blink.

While the New York show conveys the dynastic continuity of ancient Egypt, the Boston show presents the cultural and spiritual efflorescence that often results from schism with the moldy past, a schism usually fueled by the force of individual belief and personality. Continuity and change--the arc of history is created by those very dynamics.

Boston and the Met are two of the largest encyclopedic American museums under one roof, and they also happen to have the best collections of ancient Egyptian art in this country.

That is because they got into Egypt early--sending regular expeditions there in the early part of this century, at a time when Egyptians themselves lacked the technical expertise and facilities to preserve and store the treasures being unearthed in the desert. The Egyptians willingly cooperated with foreign institutions that funded digs and generously divvied up the finds--the Egyptians made the first selection, the rest was offered to their guest archeologists.

Things have changed. Today, when these two American institutions send expeditions to the field, it is for research, and the objects found are left in Egypt. “As they should be,” adds Dorothea Arnold, the Met’s curator of Egyptian art.

The Met exhibition came out of a series of international Egyptology conferences in the 1990s. Christiane Ziegler, chief curator of Egyptian antiquities at the Louvre, invited Arnold and Krzysztof Grzymski of the Royal Ontario Museum to collaborate. “This is the first time the Old Kingdom has been done in a major exhibition--anywhere in the world,” Arnold says. “A show of such magnitude can only be done through cooperation; it’s financial, it’s also the ability of these institutions to put such a thing together.”

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“Egyptian Art in the Age of the Pyramids” is presented chronologically, starting in the Third Dynasty (2649-2575 BC) and ending in the Sixth (2323-2150 BC); 29 pharaohs are recorded in this five-century span. While some of the objects come from daily use, such as jewelry or bowls, the most impressive stuff tends to come from tombs, temples and monuments--the exotica of canopic jars, wall decorations and reliefs, statues and sarcophagi. Like most ancients, the Egyptians were obsessed with life after death; they stand out because of the breadth of their imagination and their adeptness at expressing and codifying this obsession.

Early in their rule, pharaohs would begin planning how and where they were to be buried. Tremendous resources were given over to this preoccupation. “The essential activity of the funerary cult, the presentation of offerings for the dead,” writes Audran Labrousse, director of the French Archeological Mission in Saqqara, in the Met catalog, “testifies not only to the obligation of the living to remember, but also to the hope of survival in the beyond. Only the deceased are immortal, since they have been called to eternal life and cannot die again.”

During the Old Dynasty, the form of royal tombs evolved from the stepped pyramid of Djoser at Saqqara to the pure pyramidal forms on the Giza plateau. A grouping of three pyramids has become for us an emblem of ancient Egypt--the royal tombs of Khufu, Khafre and Menkaure.

Interestingly enough, perhaps the other most popular image of ancient Egypt is from a thousand years later--from the end of the Amarna Age, the rule of the boy king Tutankhamen, who reigned from 1332-1322 BC. The discovery of his resplendent tomb in 1922 captured the world’s imagination--and launched an Egyptian revival in design and architecture in the West--because it was so wonderfully preserved, having escaped grave robbers who had cleaned out most royal tombs. However, while the Boston show includes statuary and bas-reliefs from Tut’s reign, Freed did not attempt to obtain the famous golden mummy cases because they have been seen so often before.

Both exhibitions remind us how Egyptian art celebrates the human form. “Egyptians were probably the first to be aware of the nobility inherent in the human form and express it in art,” Arnold and Ziegler write in the the show’s catalog. Indeed, in gallery after gallery at the Met, bas-reliefs, busts and statues of soldiers, farmers, kings and queens strike one with their dignity and beauty. While we think of Egyptian art as highly stylized, even a bas-relief from a wall fragment may carefully replicate the musculature of a man’s calf or the liquid gesture of upraised arms.

The figures were of course idealized, and strict proportions were adhered to in describing the torso and limbs. They were icons, rather than portraiture--with a few exceptions. One object that has drawn interest in “Egyptian Art in the Age of the Pyramids” is the limestone statue of “Hemiunu Seated.” Hemiunu, high priest and royal overseer of construction under Khufu, is portrayed with a sloping nose, a fat torso and pendulous breasts. Clearly a man with a real presence in life.

Another statue, of King Menkaure (who reigned from 2490-2472 BC) and a queen standing shoulder to shoulder, her right arm wrapped around his waist, is also thought to be a real portrait of the pharaoh. “Here we have him with this lip, funny nose and the bulbous eyes,” Arnold says. “This is a person; it cannot be anything else.”

In this piece, borrowed from the Boston museum, we find traces of red paint on the king’s face and neck, and black paint on the queen’s hair. Our modern eyes may prefer the look of plain stone, but like the ancient Greeks, Egyptians painted their statues with color pigments--the women a yellow shade, the men red to suggest tanning. Eyes were occasionally inlaid with other materials to simulate the iris within a field of white.

The Boston show came about under more personal circumstances. Five years ago, Freed was asked by incoming director Malcolm Rogers to do an Egyptian show. “I had always wanted to do a show of Amarna art,” she said, “and it seemed appropriate to do a show about the god of the sun over this time. I think other people had the same idea--the turning of the millennium makes people think about the future, but also about the past.” She refers to the Met show, as well as to the large “Splendors of Ancient Egypt” that was at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond, Va. (through Nov. 28).

The Age of Amarna covers a mere 17-year period--what sounds like a blink of the eye of Pharaonic Egypt, but turns out to be a period bubbling with artistic and cultural breakthroughs. Amenhotep IV came to the throne about 1350 BC and redirected the state religion to the worship of one god--the sun god, Aten--and suppressed worship of others.

“The Great Hymn to Aten” found in the tomb of the Commander of the Chariotry reflects the pharaoh’s fervor: “You are majestic, awesome, bedazzling, exalted, overlord over all the earth,/Yet your rays, they touch lightly, compass the lands. . . .”

This devotion was more than lip service--Amenhotep IV changed his name to Akhenaten (“One Who Serves Aten”) and moved his capital from Thebes down the Nile to an area he named Akhetaten (“Horizon of the Sun-Disk”), today known as Amarna. It was previously unoccupied and thus a blank page on which to write his new history of the world. The exhibition attempts to re-create the city through a three-dimensional model, and more than a third of the show is composed of common everyday objects.

The city was one of his most astonishing achievements,eventually housing 20,000 inhabitants, and to this day tracery ruins of itstill remain. “When you walk over the sands of Amarna, you realize how much building went on over this short period of time,” Freed observes. In the art, there are also surprises. “You see how contemporary many of their concepts were--playing with perspective, new positions, use of empty space and the expression of emotions, which hadn’t happened before.”

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This reign also celebrated the human form, but now a marked naturalism had relaxed the contours. In fact, the form of Akhenaten himself diverged dramatically from previous kings--in the many bas-reliefs and statues in the show, his face is elongated, with slivered eyes and protruding lips, and he has a distended belly and spindly legs. Nefertiti, his queen, remained classically beautiful, although in later examples of her swan-necked head signs of aging are evident.

A certain emotional quality was also introduced, especially in the depictions of the royal couple with their children; they were said to have had six daughters. In one limestone stele Akhenaten and Nefertiti are seated, face to face. He tenderly holds up one infant, kissing her on the lips, while another daughter sits on Nefertiti’s lap and yet a third on her shoulder. The happy family is bathed in the sun’s stylized rays, which reach down in the form of small hands holding the ankh, the sign of life.

But all this was too much iconoclasm in too short a time. After the deaths of Akhenaten and Nefertiti, who may also have ruled briefly, Amarna was abandoned, and succeeding rulers tried to literally smash it out of existence. Shock troops were sent to knock down statues and other representations of the couple, to chisel out mention of their names from monuments and walls. Thus the deliberate damage done to some of the objects we see in the Boston show.

Still, the sublime beauty of Egyptian art is evident, even in its fragments. When we look at the paired figure of King Menkaure and his queen, staring fixedly ahead and striding forward with such calm confidence, we know these are leaders of a race, controllers of destiny. When we look at the pyramids of Giza--in New York represented by models and a sample block--we imagine them at the height of their glory, sheathed in smooth limestone and rising up to 500 feet above the desert sands. And the ubiquitous hieroglyphics, the Egyptian system of writing--even if we cannot read them, we sense their inherent structure and intelligence.

Both the Boston and the Met exhibitions emphasize that recent decades have brought new scholarship to light--re-dating works, in particular--but they also reflect how much remains unknown. Was Hemiunu the architect of the Great Pyramid of Giza? Why was it designed with such a complex system of passages and chambers? What propelled Akhenaten to turn to monotheism? And did his many representations actually capture the oddity of his profile, or were they somehow symbolic of a new ideal? There are many things we may never know about this ancient world. Though they left an abundance of artifacts, as Freed says, “The Egyptians weren’t telling history, but they were telling us a story as they wanted us to know it.”

We now know more than any king wanted to let on; we even know histories that were meant to be eradicated. But behind it all, perhaps it’s mystery and mysticism that most intrigue us, our own small hope for a glimpse of eternity.

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“Egyptian Art in the Age of the Pyramids” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, until Jan. 9. “Pharaohs of the Sun: Akhenaten, Nefertiti, Tutankhamen’ at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, until Feb. 6; then at Los Angeles County Museum of Art, March 19-June 6.