For the gods' eyes only
Sydney Morning Herald
Saturday September 12, 2009
The Australian Museum's new exhibition follows the artisans of the Nile, writes Steve Meacham. The scene is ancient Egypt, about 2400 years ago. A young boy, Ramose, is about to have a life-changing conversation with Neferho, one of the Pharaoh's master craftsmen and a friend of the boy's dead father.Neferho explains that he is a sixth-generation inhabitant of Athri- bis, a specialist village of artists and artisans whose lifework is to create the beautiful tomb decorations that will one day secure the Pharaoh's mummified passage into the afterlife."You are a blessed one, Ramose," the older man says. "Few men are offered a place in the sacred artists' village. Art is our window to the gods. It moves us; it transports us. It takes over the moment of death in the twinkling of an eye."So begins the introduction to the Australian Museum's new exhibition, Egyptian Treasures: Art of the Pharaohs €“ a rare opportunity to see exquisite and priceless objects from one of the world's greatest collections of Egyptian culture, Vienna's Kunsthistorisches Museum.Like London and Paris, the capital of the Austro-Hungarian empire became home to a vast array of antiquities gathered by the explorers and tomb robbers of the 19th century, supplemented in the 20th century by authorised Austrian archaeologists.Usually they take pride of place in the Kunsthistorisches galleries on Maria Theresien-Platz but the Austrian museum has let about 230 pieces (many of which are very heavy) to be sent off to Sydney as part of a three-country tour.The show has already proved popular in South Korea and will also visit Singapore after its Sydney season. And yet its Australian Museum incarnation will be different, thanks to Ramose and Neferho.Exhibition curator Elizabeth Cowell explains that, although the exhibits have been selected to illustrate the broadness of the Austrian institution's collection, she and her colleagues felt a human storyline would help modern visitors gain a deeper understanding. "We've already looked at Egyptian religious and funerary beliefs in previous exhibitions," Cowell says."This time we wanted to look at the artists and craftsmen who made these beautiful things."Ramose and his mentor are fictitious characters. And yet, Cowell says, they are based on real workers who lived on the banks of the Nile around 350BC. Their lives, language and training are drawn from documented sources."The apprentice is looking at all the crafts he could do," Cowell says."Is he going to become a scribe? A sculptor? A painter? Or is he going to become a maker of jewellery?"The exhibition begins with Neferho taking his young charge through the common marketplace, showing him the mass-produced pots, pans, baskets, beer flasks, amulets and shabtis (small funerary statuettes) that were intended for the less rich or exalted.But then Ramose is shown the secrets of the master craftsmen specialising in the tomb arts: sculpture, painting, hieroglyphics.Dead given a new lease of lifeMedical science is shedding fresh light on ancient cultures. MUMMIES have excited the human imagination for many centuries. In medieval times, they were ground into a powder for their supposed medicinal properties. And in 19th-century Europe, after Napoleon's forays along the Nile made ancient Egypt fashionable, rich patrons would organise parties to watch mummies being unwrapped.But today, experts such as Australian archaeologist Dr Karin Sowada are taking the mystery out of mummies, using a wide range of non-destructive medical techniques to examine corpses that are thousands of years old."It was really only in the early 1970s that we were able to move beyond unwrapping mummies or looking at X-ray studies," says Sowada, who is a former assistant curator at the University of Sydney's Nicholson Museum and the author of several books on Egyptology.As medical technologies were developed to diagnose diseases in the living, people such as Sowada adapted them for use on mummies that had been in public collections for generations €“ in effect giving a new lease of life to the dead."The development of endoscopy allowed us to do keyhole surgery on mummies," Sowada says. "Then the advent of CT scanning meant we could do non-destructive testing. Plus carbon dating ..."Such techniques allowed Sowada and her colleagues to discover that one of the Nicholson Museum's three mummies was male, rather than female as had been supposed because of the name inscribed on the coffin.Presumably, like many 19th-century collectors, Sir Charles Nicholson €“ the man who donated the mummy to the university €“ had been duped by a cavalier antiquities dealer who had put the mummy in an appropriate-sized casket thinking no one would ever be the wiser."People can come to this exhibition at the Australian Museum and see examples of the modern technologies we use in the study of Egyptian mummies," Sowada says. "DNA testing can now be done to establish family relationships. And scholars are doing research on ancient diseases in order to understand changes which have taken place in diseases over time."Because the Egyptian Government no longer allows the export of mummies, there is only a finite supply of them in the West, making it vital that any research is non-invasive."There's also the ethical question about dealing with the remains of a human being," Sowada says. "People are much more conscious of that now."In a way, though, researchers such as Sowada are delivering a kind of immortality to the long-dead, bringing them alive again in the imagination."People are fascinated by mummies because they can come face-to-face with ancient Egypt in a way they can't do with many other ancient cultures," she says."The Egyptian mummy repres-ents the Egyptians trying to come to grips with their own mortality. They had a highly developed theology, a highly developed belief in the afterlife."These are questions we grapple with today as individuals. What happens after death? And how do we prepare for it? When we see a mummy, we are engaging in a spiritual attempt to understand the metaphysical. That is an eternal question."
© 2009 Sydney Morning Herald
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