Bulldozing Egypt

With the loss of much of Egypt's tourist trade comes a lack of resources to properly protect its countless monuments from encroaching buildings, the destruction of archaeological sites, as well as looting of artifacts. The destruction taking place at Dashur near the 12th Dynasty pyramid of Amenemhet III has been widely reported in the media, while the photo in the article of a garbage dump near the Obelisk of Senusret I is truly a sad sight to see.

X-Raying The Pharaohs

James E. Harris and Kent Weeks
Charles Scribner's Sons
New York
1973
ISBN 684-13016-5

It is hard to believe that 40 years have passed since this landmark study of Egypt's royal mummies. The studies answered many questions that had to that point remained impossible to answer without damaging the precious bodies of the ancient kings and queens in the collection of the Egyptian Museum, Cairo.


The book opens with a portfolio of color pictures which show the color of mummies through various periods of Ancient Egyptian history, and right on the first page is a fantastic picture of the extremely fragile 11th Dynasty mummy of the Lady Imenit. The mummy possesses no quality of life in the attitude of her remains, though she does possess vast quantities of jewelry around her neck.


These 4 pages of images are followed by many black and white pictures, which include many X-rays, including a wonderful one of the head of the aforementioned Lady Imenit, though her features are difficult to make out in the jumble of her necklaces. I guess at that time, one of the questions scholars most wanted to know was the position of the arms on the mummy of King Amenhotep I, who, because of his beautiful wrappings, has not been unwrapped in modern times.


The X-rays of this king showed that his broken arms were likely originally crossed in front of his body. They also showed a bead girdle on the king, just one of a number of unforeseen objects that would turn up on the mummies.


As nice as the artifacts are, they are merely a bonus to the intended study of the dentition and bones of the mummies. The reader is presented with an image of the mummy of the rarely seen 19th Dynasty King Siptah and an X-ray of his "club foot," which the author suggests may have been the result of poliomyelitis.


In chapter one, "The Mummy," the author puts forward misconceptions of mummies as frightening creatures waiting to strike and the misguided doctors and druggists who prescribed ground mummy for ailments in centuries past. We are introduced to the royal mummy caches and the two previous studies that had been done on the mummies in those caches by Gaston Maspero and Elliot Smith.


The impetus for the project to x-ray the royal mummies is set out, beginning around 1960 with the building of the Aswan High Dam. A call went out to rescue and excavate the sites in Nubia, including several large cemeteries at Gebel Adda, where thousands of bodies were excavated. James E. Harris, an orthodontist and geneticist, was hired to lead an expedition on the dentition of the occupants of the cemetery to judge the health of the ancient people.


The project, being a success, was carried over with permission of the Egyptian authorities to study upper-class mummies at Giza and Thebes. The project then turned to the mummies in the Egyptian Museum, including its collection of royal mummies.


In the first season, small details, including the leaded glass cases which held the mummies, produced less than desirable results, though still impressive enough that in the next season, the reluctant keepers allowed the mummies to be removed from their cases, to excellent results. Along with the royal mummies, the team x-rayed almost every mummy in the museum, but not for a couple.


"One member of the staff told us that the attic storeroom had been locked for as long as he could remember-thirty years or more, he said. Stepping over the threshold into two inches of choking dust, we felt like excavators entering a tomb that had been sealed for millennia."


The small attic room was filled with sarcophagi, stacked three deep along the walls, like some ancient embalmer's storeroom. There were forty mummies of the late New Kingdom, high priests, officials, and others, all named and in excellent condition."


The purposes of the mummy as the eternal home for the persons Ka and Ba are explained, including the development of burial practices from shallow sand burials to coffins with deep rock cut tombs, resulting in experimentation from the embalmers of individual periods coping with these evolving problems. Tomb robberies have been occurring since ancient times, and are not helped when the culture, particularly the upper class, takes their belongings with them, including much of their wealth.


The author puts forward the examinations of the royal mummies, previous and present, including a description of how the results of the X-rays reflect on the remains from the earlier mummies of the 17th Dynasty and early 18th Dynasty. The author tells us of their examination of the mummy of King Amenhotep I:


      "The X-rays taken by the Michigan Expedition provided the first glimpse of that pharaoh in over 3000 years. The beautiful wrappings were extremely fragile, and there were anxious moments as the workmen carefully placed the mummy under the X-ray unit."


       "When the body was removed from its museum case, the smell of delphiniums, which had been wrapped with the mummy, was a pungent reminder of how well Egypt's dry climate preserves organic remains."


We turn to the mummies, their histories, and the X-rays produced of the great Thutmoside kings up to the body found in the Valley of the Kings tomb KV55. We are told the history of the Rammesside kings and the condition of their mummies, and the X-ray results


We move next on to the mummies of the family of the High priests of Amun and a more sophisticated embalming ritual producing lifelike visages in the 21st Dynasty. The scale of this project, which has led to the examination of Cairo's royal mummy collection, has produced findings that will result in the study of ancient North Africans from the lowly cemeteries at Gebel Adda to the greatest of ancient Egypt's New Kingdom rulers.


Here we have one of those rare books which should appeal to people across a whole field of personal interests, including those readers 10 and up, but for those Egyptophiles, no important collection of Egyptian books could be complete without X-Raying the Pharaohs.

The Complete Tutankhamun

Nicholas Reeves
Thames and Hudson Ltd.
London
1990
ISBN-10: 0500278105

I must open with the truth, as I go through my Egyptian collection, all of the unread books about Tutankhamun (and Cleopatra) are becoming more and more dominant in the collection as books about mummies, the Valley of Kings, and pyramidiots are read and removed!


This book opens with a foreword by the current Earl of Carnarvon about his glamorous ancestor and his association with Howard Carter and the boy Tutankhamun. Mr. Reeves sets out the boy king's family chronology and a brief introduction to the discovery.


The known history of Tutankhamun's illustrious early 18th Dynasty ancestors is presented, including Thutmosis I, II, and III, leading up to the height of the Egyptian empire with the boy king's grandfather, "Amenhotep the magnificent". The Amarna period, with its heretic Pharaoh Akhenaten (Tutankhamun's father), deals with the various aspects, including the rise of the Aten, the art, and the conflict with the priests of Amun, including the erasure of the god's name from the monuments.


The reader is presented with Nefertiti and the succession of the king and the characters of the court during the period. A quarter century since the publication of the book, and yet we know little more of Tutankhamun's parentage and about the boy king himself.


I loved the rundown of the known monuments of Tutankhamun, including faience jewelry and seals bearing his name from sites in Egypt and collections around the world. Mr. Reeves is next on to the officials of Tut's reign, including Nakhtmin, who gave shabtis to Tutankhamun's burial.


"On a statue of the man probably carved during the reign of Ay, Nakhtmin is designated 'king's son'. If Ay had intended that Nakhtmin should succeed him, it was an ambition which Horemheb was destined to foil."


With the reign of Horemheb begins the erasure of the Amarna period kings, including Tutankhamun's name from history, so fortunately was the memory of his burial also forgotten. From here, 3000 years pass, and we are on to the search and discovery of the tomb, starting with the belief by Theodore Davis that the Valley of the Kings had now been exhausted of finds.


Several Mr. Davis' discoveries are noted especially those which were related to Tutankhamun including the mortuary deposit found in Valley of Kings pit KV54, which Mr. Davis believed was the tomb of Tutankhamun, the contents of Kv54 rescued from Davis' brutal treatment of the material by New York's Herbert Winlock who realized the importance of it and brought it back to the Metropolitan Museum of Art for study.


The author is on to the early career path of Howard Carter in Egypt as an artist and trainee archaeologist who left Flinders Petrie unimpressed. An amusing sketch from a low point in Howard Carter's career in 1909 by fellow Inspector of Antiquities Arthur Weigal shows Carter as down and out.


Lord Carnarvon arrives in Egypt for his health and decides to excavate to pass the time, finding little but a mummified cat. Lord Carnarvon receives an introduction to Carter to help the lord in his excavations. Mr. Reeves then presents the personal antiquities collection of Lord Carnarvon and writes about the early excavations among the royal tombs of the New Kingdom.


We are now on to the tombs discovery and the gathering of experts in different fields to aid in its cataloging, emptying, as well as restoration and decipherment of the sepulchers' contents. The death of Lord Carnarvon becomes a setback to the team as the lord was the team's public relations man and was very good at it, unlike Howard Carter, who, on top of everything else, had to now deal with the press, which now included Arthur Weigall, who had derided Carter years before.


As the situation worsens, Carter and his team are locked out of the tomb by Nationalists and Carter's own arrogance, during which time the sarcophagus lid was left suspended above the sarcophagus, and the pall was forgotten out in the open, becoming ruined.


"Mr. Carter's agitation on discovering the condition of the precious object was intense, but he contended himself with the remark, 'Well, anyway, it's your pall, not mine, and it's the only one in the world."'


Worse still, Carter is informed that the Nationalists found a wooden head of the king in a crate in the tomb of Ramsses XI, used as the team's dining room. Mr. Reeves writes about the tombs' architecture and decoration, and various elements, including objects found within these areas of the tomb.


Again, the photos are numerous, though I am impressed by the drawings of the various seals found in the tomb, including a list of where they were found. The evidence of robberies in ancient times is reviewed with the possibility that there were two robberies and that one of them occurred during the reign of Horemheb.


At this point, the author writes about the shrines, sarcophagi, coffins, mask, and mummy of the king with several Howard Carter's drawings of the mummy in various stages of unwrapping. Of the canopic shrine, Arthur Mace to his wife:


"One thing in particular...simply knocked us all of a heap...I think it is the most beautiful thing I've ever seen anywhere...Round [the canopic shrine] were four statues of goddesses, most un-Egyptian in attitude. and beautifully modeled."


Mr Reeves writes about the chest and its contents, including a notice that much of this material belonged to a recent ancestor. The fetuses found in the treasury are examined and said to be the unborn children of Tutankhamun and Ankhesenanum.


Chapter V, titled "Treasures of the Tomb," like the rest of the book, lists the treasures beginning with the guardian statues and moving through the tomb's mysterious ritual figures and objects of magic, including a list of the ritual figures and where they were found in the tomb.


I guess it is the nature of the subject that the pictures are pretty standard after all the countless publications on Tutankhamun; there cannot be much more to photograph as unseen, but I am a critic, and the images will guide a person, including children, into a clearer view of the find.


The author is on to the 413 various shabtis found with the king, including those donated by courtiers, including Maya and Nakhtmin. These servant figures appear in many materials and include some wonderful examples in gilded wood.


Among the king's funerary models were 35 boats of all kinds with amazingly much of the rigging and linen sails still present. Mr. Reeves is on to the three ritual couches, two of which were put together wrong, having their parts mixed up with each other.


With Tutankhamun's jewels, we find his fame, and little wonder, even though most of the best pieces were stolen thousands of years ago, along with many of the precious linens and cosmetics. It is not often the viewer is presented with an image of the broken mirror handle as well as the lid of a lost gold box or little game sticks.


Perhaps the greatest regret of the tomb was that it lacked documents of the kings time which were bureaucratic in nature and instead only dockets of contents of boxes, baskets, jars and creation dates of objects, including of course the magical texts needed in the king's journey through the underworld on much of the funerary equipment, but no bio of the boy king and even stranger no mention of his mother, a feature most common in pharaonic burials but not to KingTutankhamun's burial?


The author presents an effective breakdown of various classes of artifacts found within the sepulcher, including the condition when found and anything quirky, such as the black cloth covering the back of the golden throne, as if to hide it. In all the main ancestors mentioned in the burial are Akhenaten and the late immediate family of the heretic, including Neferneferuaten and Meritaten, though a scribal palette belonged to a deceased sister, Meketaten.


It cannot go unnoticed that among Tut's Heirlooms are a few objects dated to the time of the great ancestor Thutmosis III. I guess my problem with books about the tomb of the boy king is the descriptions of a large quantity of objects found, which to me feels like it keeps going on and on and on long after I have lost interest!


Thankfully, at this point, I have found myself at the end and must confess I enjoyed it and consumed it quickly. I have found for ages 10 and up that if you never read a book about Tutankhamun or if you have read too many, Nicholas Reeves brings to an over-exposed morbid theater a worthy composition in "The Complete Tutankhamun".

Egyptian Art

J.R. Harris
Spring Art Books
London
Paul Hamlyn Ltd.
1966
ISBN: 0198219121

In the introduction, J.R. Harris discusses the enthusiasm for Egyptian art sparked by the Napoleon expedition at the beginning of the nineteenth century. The shattering of the perception that Egyptian art was rigid and standardized, in contrast to the classical styles of Greek, Roman, and Renaissance art, pervaded the minds of the time.


      "Such detachment is indeed less difficult now than it was in 1821-2 when London flocked to see Belzoni's 'curious remains of antiquity' in the Egyptian Hall in Piccadilly, or when Mariette revealed the art of the Old Kingdom to an unsuspecting Parisian public at the great exhibition of 1867, for with the rise of the modern art movements and their deliberate rejection of traditional concepts the tyranny of 'photographic' representationalism  has been broken, and much of the prejudice attached to art which is formalized or intellectual has been dissipated."


The development of the art of ancient Egypt from the prehistoric to the Ptolemaic and on, including the trend to the most naturalistic style of the second half of the 14th century B.C. in the Amarna period. The author presents us with 4 pages of black and white pictures, interesting as about half of them are unfinished, including a part of a wall in the tomb of Horemheb in the Valley of the Kings.


The tools used and the set standards used by professional artists over time to create for the wealthy clients and kings of their day. The subjects chosen change, and the materials used are more or less based on the permanence of granite or the fine glow of alabaster, whether the client is decorating his tomb, should he have a good life and his worthy deeds recorded, or his service to the king.


Mr. Harris is on to a section of notes about the previous black and white pictures and drawings that accompanied the text. This section is immediately followed by descriptions of the color plates at the end of the book.


The off-color pictures occupying whole pages are pretty standard choices, though I did like the picture of the painted statue of Methethy and the relief of Hathor from the temple of Seti I at Abydos. In this book,  J.R. Harris has put forth a simple yet insightful read.


Considering that half of the book was just pictures, it made for a quick and easy read suitable for 10 years and up, the book, a worthy read about Egyptian Art.