Reviving the Past: Egyptian Portraits from a Period of Conquest

[00:00:05]Good afternoon everyone. Few more people are coming in but we'll get started. Uh my name is Yens Dana. I'm curator of antiquities at the J. Paul Getty Museum specifically at the Getty Villa where we are right now and I'm saying this um not for you in the house but for our virtual audience on Zoom who are joining us for the lecture.

[00:00:29]Um so welcome and uh I'm glad you're here to um enjoy uh today's program reviving the past Egyptian portraits from a period of conquest presented by Dr. Lawrence Berman. Now today's lecture uh is presented in connection with the exhibition sculpted portraits from ancient Egypt in our galleries and it gives me the greatest pleasure to introduce uh Dr. Larry Berman. Uh Lawrence M. Berman is the John F. Kogan Jr. and Marielle Cornel chair art of ancient Egypt, Nubia, and the Near East at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.

[00:01:15]He received his PhD in Egyptology from Yale University before joining the staff of the MFA in 1999. He was curator of Egyptian and ancient Neareastern art at the Cleveland Museum of Art.

[00:01:29]at the MFA. Uh Burman has curated the special exhibitions Art and Empire, Treasures from Assyria and the British Museum in 2008 and co-curated Secrets of Tomb 10A in 2010 as well as ancient Nubia now in 2019. He has overseen numerous gallery installations from large to small. Most recently, masterpieces of uh Egyptian sculpture of the pyramid age and faces of ancient Egypt, both in 2021.

[00:02:04]Dr. Burman has taught ancient Egyptian art and language at Yale University, Case Western Reserve University, and Harvard University. He's a frequent lecturer and is author of numerous scholarly articles. His many books include The Priest, The Prince, and the Pasha, 2019, and Unearthing Ancient Nubia: Photographs from the Harvard University Boston Museum of Fine Arts Expedition in 2018.

[00:02:32]His most recent book is Faces of Ancient Egypt: Portraits from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, published in 2022.

[00:02:43]Dr. Burman has traveled extensively in Egypt and northern Sudan, visiting all of the most important sites excavated by the Harvard University Museum of Fine Arts expedition from 2005 to 2009. He was a member of the Pacific Lutheran University Valley of the Kings project, working in six tombs in the Royal Valley.

[00:03:06]Among his many areas of research are Middle Kingdom Egyptian art, history and literature, art of Amoteep III, the late period portraiture in Egyptian art and in general history of Egyptology, early Western travelers in Egypt and the Near East, and the display and interpretations of ancient Egypt in museums. Please join me in welcoming Dr. Lawrence Berman to the [applause] Thank you Yans. Thank you all for coming and uh for the people on Zoom, thank you all for watching. It's a real pleasure to be here.

[00:03:59]I'm going to talk to you today about Egyptian art, portraits mainly from the 7th century BC to the 3rd century CE.

[00:04:08]Now, for most civilizations, this would be early, but not for Egypt. In Egypt, we call it the late period. Remember that the pyramids were older to Cleopatra than Cleopatra is to us today.

[00:04:22]Now the late period saw Egypt successive successfully invaded by the Kushites, Assyrians, Persians and Greeks with intermittent periods of native rule ending with the Roman conquest of 30 BC.

[00:04:37]Amid all the turmoil, it may seem miraculous that Egyptian art survived at all. But not only did it survive, it flourished.

[00:04:47]Changes in art, however, did not necessarily coincide with changes of regime. In fact, it was often in the new ruler's best interest to perpetuate the iconography of the rulers they replaced.

[00:05:00]In that sense, the art of the late period did not just look back, but looked forward as well.

[00:05:06]The consciousness of a long history, the presence of so many great monuments of former times, and the desire to maintain cultural identity amid so many foreigners led artists and those who commissioned them to turn to the past for inspiration. This phenomenon called archaism is considered the defining hallmark of late Egyptian art. Three late period statues in Boston dating to roughly the same period illustrate the sophistication and learned eclecticism of late period archaism. I present them as case studies. The late period piece will always be on the right.

[00:05:46]In its cool elegance, the head of Ank Consu, a priest of the god Montu, looks back to the 15th century BC, the early New Kingdom, the time of Hot Sheps, the female pharaoh. And the kneeling statue on the left represents Senmoot, her closest official. The face is youthful and serene. Here we've got a detail without line or blemish with beautifully shaped eyebrows outlined in relief. The nose, for once unbroken, is fine and straight. It is a beautiful work, the polish of the stone matte and velvety smooth. Some find the style cold and impersonal, and especially in its late period manifestation, academic, as though that were a fault. For the Egyptians, however, it was, to quote Anne Rusman, an Egyptologist I greatly admire. This style was the most satisfactory and successful idealism ever created for the Egyptians. The most perfect expression of what they considered essential and important in the human image. And here's another com comparison. On the right, a uh a head in the exhibition sculpted portraits that is here made of quartzite. and on the left uh head from the Middle Kingdom centuries earlier that's in Boston. And here we see an even closer an even closer comparison. As a matter of fact, in the exhibition, the head on the on the on the left is is on the label of this very statue showing its closeness.

[00:07:23]Meaning the this one is the late period head is positively expressionistic. The statue of Kansu Yera, a priest of the Gamin, harkcs back to the pyramid age or old kingdom. The figural proportions show a return to the ideal male form seen [snorts] in the statues of the fourth dynasty. Old kingdom pharaoh man who built the third pyramid at Giza.

[00:07:51]Kuya has what we might call a swimmer's build with broad shoulders, long arms, a V-shaped torso, slim waist, and narrow hips like Manara, but sleeker. The head is small in relation to the body, and the outline of the hair remembers a close- fitting cap. Although the facial features are not individualized, the work workmanship is superb. a hard dark dark stone polished to a glossy sheen.

[00:08:22]It's hard to believe nowadays, but even such iconic pyramid age masterpieces like the Manaras statues when first discovered were thought to date to the Stayite period, the 26th dynasty, the period from which the portraits in the your exhibition come were thought to date to the Seite period because their style looked familiar from late period statuary and comparatively few old kingdom sites had yet been systematically excavated. Thus, even experienced archaeologists, dated them to the 26th dynasty. Now, take a look at this. This is what they already knew. The statues on the right were discovered in 1863 by Marriott Bay, who was the first head of antiquities in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo.

[00:09:18]And the style is very very closely based on the Old Kingdom masterpieces. And when they discovered the Old Kingdom masterpieces, they didn't think they were Old Kingdom because no Old Kingdom masterpieces had yet been discovered or relatively few. So you've got to compare things to what you know already. Here's an even closer comparison. If you look at the figure of the goddess Hathor in this case in the middle of the triad and then compare it to the later one, the statue of Isis from the the late period, you see how close it is. The later one is almost like a rationalization, a distillation, an abstraction, you know, of the of of of the earlier of the of the earlier one.

[00:10:04]And here we have the young Egyptologist soon to be very very famous working together and an old palace in Cairo when the Egyptians were getting ready to move the collection from the palace in which it was then housed to the Egyptian museum in in the middle of Cairo. Not the gem but the one in the middle of Cairo. They were there. They were there making a catalog of all of the objects in the museum before they moved. And and and they only knew what had been discovered at that time. And like every field, our knowledge grows with the successive discoveries made year after year, adding to our knowledge, which we still continue to do. So even these archaeologists dated the old kingdom masterpieces to the late period.

[00:11:03]Although although George Ryner who is the second from the left seated on the ballastrade who was at that time working on the Cairo catalog who eventually became a very famous archaeologist working for the Museum of Fine Arts Boston.

[00:11:20]He believed them to be fourth you know fourth dynasty.

[00:11:25]Now the ancient cemeteries like Giza and Sakara experienced a revival in the late period.

[00:11:35]The pyramid of Manara was restored and the king's mummy provided with a new coffin and the old kingdom necropolis once again became a burial place of choice for people of means. huge hard stone sarcophagi not used for hundreds of years or not made for hundreds of years were in vogue again.

[00:11:57]Other places people investigated the ancient monuments and copied what they found there.

[00:12:09]So, here we have a sarcophagus made of gray wacky, a stone we've already seen several times before, which they loved.

[00:12:18]Here we have the tomb showing what it looked like when it was found. Here we have the coffin lid standing up. And you can see the box of the coffin. This is the second one from the front with very very thick walls and there is a similar one made of granite not gray wacky in the exhibition here.

[00:12:49]So this period the 26th dynast this period the 26th dynasty was uh a very prosperous one but it came to an end in 525 BC when the Persians under their king Kambises defeated the last seat ruler and Egypt became a province of the Persian Empire the largest the world had yet seen.

[00:13:18]Now what do we have here? The Persians have received a very bad press. This uh the Egyptians [laughter] were were responsible for this. And here we have a 19th century orientalist take on this bad reputation in which Kambisces, the Persian ruler, is catapulting cats across the walls of Peruium. Palusium, the fortress that guarded the entrance to Egypt to terrorize the Egyptians inside who everybody knows worshiped cats. So this is the tradition that has come down. But it really was not all that it really was not all that bad. Heroditus visited Egypt in during the Persian period around 450 BC and doesn't report this order.

[00:14:11]So this is really a a later regime making things look making what came before them look bad so that they look better something everybody does. So there's not much statuary securely dated to this Persian period but that probably reflects the state of our knowledge as there must be many. After over a hundred years after the Persian period sculptures pick up right where they left off. So statue production and the training of artists continued right on through.

[00:14:43]So it's easy to see what the Persians got from Egypt. And on the left we see Pipilus the and well one of the buildings of Pipilus, the palace of Das I with Egyptian style gateways. And then on the right we see a statue made of Egyptian grey wacky now in Tehran. And that represents an Egyptian ruler and a Persian ruler. A Persian ruler who was king of Egypt. A Persian ruler who was Pharaoh of Egypt like many pharaohs of Egypt without a head.

[00:15:14]And and and and this was clearly carved in the Egyptian style made of Egyptian stone. This stone was found in the desert road, desert wi between the Nile and the Red Sea. Expeditions had to go there. The expedition commanders left inscriptions. We can read the inscriptions. They date back to very ancient times. As if the Persians weren't ancient enough. And the Persians left copious inscriptions, Egyptian inscriptions in in the Wadi Hamamat, the name of that Wii where the quaries are are located. This torso in in in in Boston represents King Aorus, one of the very very few statues representing him that come from the period after the Persian period. So you can see it's extremely proficient and the fact that not very many Egyptian sculptures are dated to the Persian period must reflect an absence of criteria, you know, in order to do that. But they had to have been doing things. You just don't three generations of artists don't stop working and then produce a refined and beautifully polished and carved and modeled and executed statue such as this. And if you're wondering what kind of a head a chorus might have had, this is an example. This is slightly later, but not too much later. And this is uh represents Nectton II who was the last native pharaoh of Egypt before the Persians came back and then the Persians were kicked out by Alexander the Great.

[00:16:56]This late portrait is so refined and it shows such a mastery of dealing with hard stone and the detail is so subtle that if it's not correctly lit, you don't even notice anything. It's the distillation of 3,000 years of experience working in hard stone. And you can see it's wonderful aerodynamic looking side view with the king wearing his helmet-like crown.

[00:17:32]The pharaohs of this period which should be better known that it is were were great great builders and they built temples of a hard stone like granite. You can see here in relief in Egyptian carving in two dimensions the very I'm behind the very fleshy figures of the gods and the kings.

[00:17:58]And this is also a type of uh carving that perpetuates itself or is perpetuated in Egyptian art all the way down to Roman times. Here we have a Roman period from the reign of Augustus relief from the temple of Dendura in which the stone looks positively boiling with uh with with with with with the way the the flesh is rendered. Notice in particular what we call the donut-shaped navl of the [laughter] goddess Isis characteristic.

[00:18:33]And you see it has its anticedants a couple of hundred years earlier than that.

[00:18:43]Now, one great portrait of the late period, the 30th dynasty, with which I'm fascinated, the one of my books that Yens kindly mentioned at the beginning, the priest, the prince, and the Pasha is all about this head. Some of you may have seen this piece when it was here in 2018. Was it really so long ago? It doesn't seem so. But for the wonderful special exhibition Beyond the Nile, Egypt and the classical world. Although it's only 4 and 1/8 in tall, it makes a monumental impression. When complete, the figure was probably standing or kneeling, most likely holding an attribute. I'll show you examples later. But meanwhile, just to concentrate on what is so wonderful about this portrait, you have the sculptor showing off his virtuosity.

[00:19:39]You can look at the bony structure of the skull. You can see that you can see the fleshiness of the jowls. You can see the fine lines on the forehead and on the on on the sides of the mouth.

[00:20:04]In the past, scholars have tried to link the green head to Roman Republican portraiture that flourished in the first century BC, but which began to appear in the 2n century and consequently dated to the tameic dynasty to make it closer to the Romans.

[00:20:22]Nowadays, the green head is mostly dated to the 4th century BC. Now, some people looking at this head, you see the Roman example on the left, don't see it as a portrait at all. They see it as a very accomplished but still generic type of sculpture representing an older man. But I believe I prefer to look at it as the latest flowering of a naturalistic impulse in Egyptian art that goes back as far as the pyramid age. And on the left you see the statue of Prince Angha from 2500 BC.

[00:21:04]He was a half brother of Kufu who built the great pyramid. So there is this tradition of naturalistic portraiture in Egyptian art practically from the very beginning. And the artists, as you've seen, were very, very conscious of the monuments of the past, and they were surrounded by them.

[00:21:31]Now, here's an example of what the green head body might have looked like, standing and uh holding a shrine containing an image of a deity.

[00:21:44]And if you look at the head and you look at the body, you can see something that scholars found very disconcerting. We have a very individualized naturalistic head on top of what they considered a very stiff undifferentiated lump of a body that's totally wrapped up.

[00:22:08]And the green head appealed to people who in general didn't like Egyptian art. It didn't look Egyptian, so they liked it better than things that were commonly in the Egyptian style.

[00:22:26]And Anne Rusman, who I quoted before, makes the point that classically oriented collectors of the 19th and 20th centuries prized Egyptian portrait heads because they looked so Roman. And these eurosentric collectors considered the bodies of the Egyptian statues to detract from the classical quality of the heads with the consequence that today the great majority of these portrait heads lack their bodies. And you see if it lacks its body, it lacks its inscription because that's usually inscribed on the back or on the bottom.

[00:23:00]Now, some of these heads are broken off in modern times to make them more marketable.

[00:23:05]This cultural vandalism is responsible for much of the difficulty of dating these late period statues. And of course, even worse, it undermines our understanding and appreciation of one of the most intriguing genres in ancient Egyptian sculpture. I don't think that's what happened with the green head. So, uh, this is a head that was the MFA acquired in 1965.

[00:23:29]And, uh, it's very characterful.

[00:23:33]And we have in our correspondence a letter from uh a very well-known Egyptian um Scottish actually uh Egyptologist who specialized in Egyptian art and he wrote back to Boston, I must congratulate you on acquiring the very late head of a man. This is a particularly impressive specimen and probably all the better for lacking a body.

[00:24:00]So fortunately, we don't do this much anymore. Take the part that we like and [laughter] and and forget about the rest of it and and and and forget about the rest of it. And that's not what we do in Boston where we have the green head next to this wooden sculpture which even in its present state the it was wonderfully painted but the paint is mostly gone and full of incrustations is uh is very characterful.

[00:24:35]Now as this statue was uninscribed we don't know the man's identity. The piece is said to come from a city in Middle Egypt, Hermopoulos Magna or modern Elashmunane, a center of priestly learning since 2000 BC, but we have no evidence to substantiate that. Probably on account of the supposed Persian origin of the garment. The statue was previously dated to the Persian period.

[00:25:02]However, the high high-waisted wraparound skirt already occurs in Egyptian art before the Persian period and continues to be represented well into the 4th century BC.

[00:25:14]And the developmental sequence of these statues, shrine bearing statues, our example would date anywhere from late dynasty 26 to dynasty 30.

[00:25:25]So, it could be contemporary with the green head or close to it.

[00:25:29]Now the statue of a man, what does this mean? What is the significance of this iconography? The statue of a of a man holding a shrine is not just to be taken literally as a representation of a priest as his duty. It also operates on a higher plane showing the officient in the role of Shu, the god of air who separated the earth from the sky.

[00:25:54][sighs] And I should point out these shrines containing the image of a deity were heavy. You don't just pick one up like this and carry it.

[00:26:08]representations in relief such as this one you see on [snorts] the left from the temple of Dendra show you the priests carrying them and they have straps like movers do today to carry up a refrigerator up the stairs or something big. So it's it's it's it's very very heavy. A statue was not quite so naturalistic.

[00:26:34]It's uh symbolic.

[00:26:39]So Egyptian papyrie and other representations show the god Shu, the god of air, separating the earth from the sky. So the sky is that goddess, the naked goddess arching on the top. The god shoe is in this whoops is in is in the center. And the earth god is reclining on the bottom. So this act of separating the sky from the earth created the world as the Egyptians pictured it. A bubble of air in the primeval ocean around which the sun god circled across the sky by day and through the underworld by night. And those of you who are here, I encourage you also to visit the lovely exhibition, the very informative exhibition on the book of the dead where this same process is explained and occurs. You've got the solar cycle.

[00:27:42]Now, the image of the god shoe standing with his uplifted hands holding up the sky with the sun god sailing across it.

[00:27:50]This you don't see here, but you see it elsewhere.

[00:27:55]was a fixture in book of the dead papyrie too. So priests who carried shrines or standards and were emulating the god of air on a smaller scale.

[00:28:11]Now we get to a phenomenon that was extremely important in late period Egypt and was the stimulus for a lot of impressive art production. the sacred animal cults. This is the Romans made fun of the Egyptians for the attention that they paid for animals. Of course, they didn't really worship the animals.

[00:28:33]The animals were incarnations. They were they were they were passageways so that they excess certain deities who manifested themselves in animal form.

[00:28:42]But here is what Juvenile, the Roman poet from the second century of the common era, says, "One district adores the crocodile." You see the crocodile mummy on the bottom. Another venerates the ibis. You see the ibis mummy on the upper left. And another a riverfish. And another a whole town venerates a dog as though to make fun. But there was nothing really funny about it.

[00:29:09]Of all the animal deities, one them one stands apart because this was a god in its own right. And this was the sacred apis bull. On the left we see well not quite lifesize but a quite large statue of a a bull in the louv.

[00:29:29]And on the right we see a tiny little mosaic glass fragment showing you how the apis bull was identified. He had certain black and white markings such as you see here. And when the apis bull died, the priests conducted a search and they found a calf with markings that approximated this and he became the new apist bull and his mother became the Isis cow. And the bull lived in wonderfully appointed stables. And when he died, he was buried in a huge complex in the cemetery of ancient Memphis in the cemetery of Sakara, which is excavated in the 1850s by August Marriott, who became the first director of antiquities. And here we see the drawings from the time of the excavation showing you how far under the ground this this this uh comp complex was. And you can even see this very same statue of a ball that's today in the Lou which no longer has any pigment on it at all being dragged out of the temple in which it is housed. And you can see even though this is a black and white engraving that at that time it had its markings.

[00:30:53]The kings of the 26 dynasties were avid patrons of this apis bowl.

[00:31:00]Here we have King Amasus who was uh famous for being Phil Hellenic. He was very very friendly you know towards the to the Greeks and donated statues at Greeks you know sanctuaries but of course was an Egyptian pharaoh and uh he and here is an epitap a tombstone for an apis ball in which he tell he worships the ball at the very top and in his own words he'll tell you what he did I'm going to read you some of this so that you can get the flavor of it so it's dated to his 23rd regal year dre dragging the god in peace to the beautiful west, laying him to rest in his place in the necropolis, in the place his majesty had made for him, the like of which had never been done before, after all had been done for him, that is the ball, in the place of inbalming, because his majesty remembered how Horus had acted for his father Osiris, making a granite sarcophagus, for his majesty found that it had not been made in treasure stone by any king of any time, granting him all his amulets and ornaments of gold and every precious stone more beautiful than that had been made before. For his majesty loved the apis more than any king. And then just like on a tombstone, they'll give you his life his life dates. The majesty of this god went forth to heaven in regal year 23, the third month of winter, day six. He was born in regal year five, the first month of inundation. Day seven, he was inducted into the house in the temple. In the second month of summer, day 18, the beautiful lifetime of this god was 18 years, 1 month and six days.

[00:32:47]Amasus the pharaoh given life and dominion forever made it for him. So here we also have 19th century photographs of the cereapmium which had been closed for many many years but I it's been reopened again. It's quite a place to see. The balls are buried in enormous hardstone sarcophagi weighing 7065 tons some of them. When the excavator staged he staged labor dinner receptions in the catacombs and he found that an apis bull sarcophagus could comfortably seat 10.

[00:33:25]It wasn't only in Egypt that these hardstone saravagi were made. The kings in northern Sudan and Nubia contemporary were making hardstone sarcophagi or not so you know for their kings. Here we have to give you another sense of stale not quite so big as you see MFA curator of Egyptian art da Dunham inside the sarcophagus of king espelter who ruled in the 6th century BC in Boston. I don't think this one would seek 10 but it's still quite capacious.

[00:33:56]Extracting the stone and carving the sarcophagus is only one part of what was required in the manufacturer and installation of colossal statuary. Just moving them from was a big job in itself. Here on the left we see the workmen pulling the lid of the sarcophagus. Well, actually that was the sarcophagus of one king. This is the sarcophagus of his brother Anlammani pulling it up up the stairs of the tomb in northern Sudan. And on the right here you see the box of the sarcophagus on rollers transporting it much as they must have done in ancient times.

[00:34:43]And the worship of the animal gods continues through the last dynasty. Here we have King Nectinbu II offering to him. And here we have the good portrait type of Nectel II, which we'll come down to. He's got his fleshy cheeks and golf ball chin. That's that's a diagnostic for this period. On the right, he's offering to the apist bull who doesn't appear as a bull, but as a bull-headed man because he needs the Egyptians would give their figures animal heads, but human bodies when they needed to interact in a scene with another human in a way that an animal with an animal body couldn't. After the 30th dynasty, Alexander the Great conquers Egypt and drives out the Persians. Alexander the Persians and Alexander was driving the Persians out of everywhere.

[00:35:35]And and and and he and he he doesn't stay very long in Egypt, just long enough to found the city of Alexandria, which he never saw. And but he and his successors wanted to regard themselves as legitimate pharaohs.

[00:35:53]We've got a head of Alexander on the right here that's scarred of Egyptian granite. So this is procured in Egypt and they do this by building and rebuilding monuments at the very heart of the most sacred places in ancient Egypt at the temple of Carne.

[00:36:13]So here we have a relief of Alexander the Great in the sanctuary of Thutmos III at Carneck which would be here.

[00:36:29]And here in this rather picturesque view, we have the sanctuary in which the boat in which the statue of the god was carried on the shoulders of priests were kept.

[00:36:44]We have Philip Erdus the brother of Alexander the Great who succeeded him built this and we see the boat being carried on the shoulders of priests on poles and you don't see the statue because the statue is in a shrine and you hardly even see the shrine because the shrine is covered with a veil because in ancient Egypt sacred objects are wrapped and You wrap things, you take care of them, you protect [snorts] them. [sighs] And on the right, you see a fragment of this shrine that was collected in the 1830s and is now in Boston, though not on view, and it's got on the top three priests with the pole on his shoulder. On the bottom, we uh have the head of Philip Arda, the brother of Alexander the Great. And look how closely this follows the real the the Egyptian statue that preceded it. Here was the hab the head of Nectton II with its aerodynamic crown. And you see that same thing featured in the Tmic period or what soon to be Tameic period. And here you see too the way that uh the gods are represented with their fleshy bodies which is very close to what the Egyptians did because they wanted to be recognized as the legitimate successors of the last pharaohs. As a matter of fact, there are many stories about Alexander the Great, but according to one of them, when Nectton II was driven out of EIT by the Persians, he was a great magician apparently and he escaped and he went to Macedonia and he appeared to Olympias, the mother of Alexander the Great, in a dream and then Alexander was conceived. He was the son, you know, a direct link or so they said.

[00:38:52]Now the successors go on with this very very same style. As I said, changes in regime don't necessarily they can but don't necessarily produce a sudden change in art.

[00:39:05]And so we have the earliest Talmies.

[00:39:07]Tommy the first was a general of Alexander the Great who eventually succeeded to his part of Alexander's empire which became the richest part of uh of of of the Mediterranean kingdoms that succeeded Alexander and we see the same type of face you see the golf ball chin we have Tommy offering to Hatheror and this occurs over and over again and these facial features are disseminated people copied them here. We we don't exactly know what these are. They're called sculptures models, but they may not be that. But there are many many of them. They represent usually the the same types of features and there are deliberately left unfinished. You can see that.

[00:39:55]Some are made of stone and some are made of plaster. And so this continues the traditional Egyptian style well into the tameic period and eventually things change and uh here we have this slide will show you the extent of this TMIC dynasty. There again there's a tendency to look at these late periods of Egyptian history as times of decadence and weakness but they weren't. This was one of the most powerful kingdoms in the whole Mediterranean and you know at at this time. But there becomes a bigger change in style in the second century BCE represented by this colossal statue.

[00:40:40]One of the many that were recently or in the in the recent decades salvaged from the harbor of Alexandria.

[00:40:49]This one is on standing you know in Alexandria.

[00:40:53]But we have to stop now because we could keep on going for a long long time. So I thank you for indulging me as I skipped around this vast topic. But I hope you'll agree that far from being a period of stagnation and introspection. This was a period of greatness in its own right. After all, it was through late period Egypt which the Greeks saw firsthand that Egyptian art was transmitted to Western civilization.

[00:41:25]Thank you.

[00:41:28][applause] Thank you very much, Larry. Um you've agreed to take questions from the audience both uh real and virtual. Let's start maybe with the house. Uh raise your hand if you have a question and wait for a microphone to be brought to you.

[00:42:04]>> Yes, please.

[00:42:10]Um, so, uh, yeah, like I guess like the late period is sort of like mimics the earlier Egyptian period. When does it end? And like what causes it to end?

[00:42:20]Like the conquerors of Egypt like sort of copying the pre-existing style.

[00:42:27]It's really up to us. The Egyptians didn't call it the late period and and and and a lot of the historical divisions in to which historians divide ancient Egyptian history are somewhat flexible.

[00:42:43]The division into dynasties come from ancient Egypt and they're recorded in a history of Egypt that survives only in excerpts but was compiled at the behest of the Talmies. It's a and and and The division into old kingdom, middle kingdom, and new kingdom is not an invention, but it's an organization. It's a structure that's conceived by Egyptologists to make it easier to handle this vast expanse of time.

[00:43:22]And old kingdom, middle kingdom, new kingdom are periods of central authority and considered to be periods of greatness.

[00:43:34]And in between them we have very unfortunately named periods like first intermediate period, second intermediate period, third intermediate period which were really not so bad at all. They just, you know, the country was just not so tightly controlled. And actually in in some ways these intermediate periods are more inventive because there's more latitude for regional styles. The late period according to some people are very strict about the late period and they call it only dynasty 26 to dynasty 30. I like to be a little looser and so I'll call I'll include the end of the third intermediate period which becomes the early late period and [laughter] it is you know and I like to extend the late period into well into the third into the second century as I've showed you today because I see a lot of the same tendencies at least in art and architecture as lasting longer than the specific dynasties.

[00:44:41]So, so depending on what you read, you'll you might see the late period defined as dynasties 26 through 30, which is like the 664 BC to 30 BC. And then all of a sudden, you've got Alexander the Great.

[00:44:58]But as you saw, Alexander the Great and his successors continue the same artistic traditions because the art is it's art. But it art is very important. It shows continuity.

[00:45:11]It shows where your program is what your program is aligned to. It shows how you want to be perceived. You don't want they didn't want to be perceived right away by their enormous population because Egypt had an enormous population as foreigners. They had themselves represented in the Henistic style too for their Henistic subjects. But in Egypt they want to be pharaohs and they liked being pharaohs.

[00:45:39]Who wouldn't?

[00:45:45]>> There's a question.

[00:45:47]>> I just want to know how tall that thing is. Oh, they're like two stories tall.

[00:45:54]>> Two stories.

[00:45:55]>> It's real. They're huge.

[00:45:58]They're huge. And they were discovered in in in in in the harbor. And uh this one actually has traveled quite a bit.

[00:46:05]It was in it was taken to Paris for a exhibition of the art of the Telmic period. It was would have been in the ' 90s. I I I was a courier, you know, you know, for it. There was a traveling exhibition that traveled around the United States and there was not this one, but there were more. There are many like it and I saw it in Minneapolis and they couldn't put it in their galleries.

[00:46:32]They had to put it in their central atrium which spans two stories which was kind of fun because you could walk up the stairs to the balcony and be practically on the head level, you know, with it.

[00:46:48]And it's granite. It's heavy.

[00:46:52]>> All right, there I suggest we take a couple questions from the uh from our Zoom audience.

[00:46:57]>> Sure.

[00:46:57]>> If you don't mind. So I go for them for everyone who posted a question there. H just go by in in the sequence in which they in which they arrived >> on my screen. So there are many actually. Let's start uh with one um listener and and and viewer wanted to know are the names carved on the portrait? How do we know the names for many of the >> Well, you showed us today.

[00:47:21]>> I wish we did. So, when you just have a head, you generally don't know the name.

[00:47:26]So, an Egyptian statue, you've got the head on its body. He's looking straight ahead. He's standing straight. On the back of the statue, there's normally a supporting plinth we call the back pillar. And that's inscribed. And it starts in the back of the head and it continues down to the base. The base of the statue is quite tall. So, the statue is elevated from the floor. And that's also an excellent place for inscriptions. The inscriptions will start with with generic opening lines and and and prayers for the benefit of the individual whose name would be at the bottom of the prayer. So, if you don't have the bottom of the statue, you're not likely to have the name of the person, nor what he did, nor do you have any of the clues that might be provided by the grammar of the inscriptions, the form of the signs. You only have the the the be the the part that everybody can appreciate even if you, you know, can't read Egyptian hieroglyphs. But and the head alone is much worthy of this kind of admiration. But you we've taken it out of context. And as we've seen, sometimes this is done deliberately because the collectors of earlier periods didn't care. They they they they wanted things that corresponded to an idea of beauty that was inculcated in them through their education. And the education of that time was very heavily founded on a study of classical civilization and and and every other civilization was judged by values that were not appropriate to it.

[00:49:11]All right, one more. You're going to be next. Okay, one more question from the Zoom audience. Um, could you talk a bit more about what you think is the practical effect of araism in this context? Does it always serve basically the same goal of reminding people of a more glorious time and align with past heroes?

[00:49:36]Well, that's a very good question. I don't think it always does. I think it does lots of things. I think it shows it shows choice is what it does. It shows that the Egyptians that in the late period were aware of their past and they were aware of different styles and artists and patrons could work together.

[00:50:01]We don't know very much about this, but this eclecticism shows knowledge and you're deciding on emulating a specific period of the past shows shows more invention, more agency, more individuality for the artists and patrons themselves than is often granted to the to the ancient Egyptian civilization.

[00:50:31]I mean, I didn't wouldn't mean to say that the ancient Egyptians had the same concept of history as we do. They absolutely did not, but they did know what was old and and and often what came before that. And throughout Egyptian history, there are times in which we know from graffiti left at ancient sites that they were visited by people who admired them. And then from the late period, we have in certain monuments they would put grid lines like graphs on scenes and temples so that they could accurately copy them.

[00:51:16]There was a question up there.

[00:51:19]>> Hi, thank you. Um, I guess my question is you mentioned uh how the value was with the head um or whatever. But were there no records? Are there any was there any is there any way to um connect the fragments together or even with advancement in technologies where you could see are you able to learn any about like uh the connection between the body and who it is and the head >> actually yes I mean we can't connect everyone and I'd love to find the bodies to of lots of our heads but there are [laughter] and the heads to lots of our bodies but however you know however you want to see it you've got the very you know expressive head and you have the body that's full of other information and of course you need the two together for the survival of the statue which wasn't just a statue it was a place where a spirit the spirit of the person represented could inhabit and you and could interact with the living. So it's really a terrible thing for a head to be separated from its body. But through the efforts of Egyptologists over the generations, it has been possible to make a lot of these connections. What often stands in the way is that the early archaeologists did not leave such detailed records as uh later ones did and as we do today. And probably we don't leave as detailed records as the archaeologists of coming of you know future generations you know would think too the early archaeologists some didn't care at all of course but some did care but their idea of what was necessary to write down and transmit is not the same as the way it is today they were just the old archaeological reports are so fun to read sometimes they I mean the they wrote in beautiful pros you know telling you I went here and I found this and they did this. Nowadays, the reports are more scientific and more factual, but actually maybe more informative that way. So, it it's it's the ancient culture and the modern culture interacting and it's it's very hard often and I did this in my work for the greenhead because I can't prove what uh when it was. However, if you take us archaeologically the place where it was found, these are the excavations around 1850 and and it was [snorts] preserved the way I said as very fun narratives but not, you know, in a scientific way. And if you look at modern excavations going on at that same site, you can compare the way they're described and get some idea of what he was talking about, what the 19th, you know, century archaeologist or collector was trying to describe. When you have a similar site having been excavated more recently and and you can say, "Oh, no. This is this this looks like what he happened. He didn't understand it because it was totally new and who could.

[00:54:26]So this is a process that goes on and on and on and you can make you can you can you can make these joins and when you do join one piece to another piece it's a it's a wonderful feeling.

[00:54:40]>> Another question from the auditorium >> up there please. Yes.

[00:54:48]>> Wait for the microphone please.

[00:54:54]Hello. Thank you for your presentation.

[00:54:56]Um, have you seen The Mummy? And what did you think of it?

[00:55:01]>> The movie?

[00:55:02]>> Yes.

[00:55:03]>> Well, there have been so many Mummy movies. So, uh, >> Brendan Frasier, Rachel.

[00:55:09]>> Which which one?

[00:55:10]>> 1999. Brendan Frasier, Rachel Wise. I think it's a great movie, but it's a movie, you know, so so it takes it takes things that people know and it and and it it plays with it. I mean, my favorite Mummy movie is the 1930s one with Boris Carlo, [applause] >> which in some ways is more accurate than the Brendan Frasier ones.

[00:55:32]>> Pardon me.

[00:55:33]>> Can you repeat it so I can write it down and then watch it later?

[00:55:37]>> The Your favorite movie, The Mummy, which >> Well, my favorite Mummy movie. I wouldn't say it's my favorite movie.

[00:55:44][laughter] >> Although it's up there.

[00:55:48]>> You said it was 19 1930.

[00:55:50]>> Yeah.

[00:55:51]>> Okay.

[00:55:51]>> Yeah. It says called The Mummy.

[00:55:54]>> Oh, watch it if you never have it. It's It's the origin of so many tropes copied by later movies.

[00:56:05]>> Okay.

[00:56:06]>> It's a love story. I hate to bring it back to I hate to bring it back to the more scholarly discussion before [snorts] we go back to the more >> I'm just answering the question.

[00:56:15]>> Absolutely. [laughter] >> This comment was not meant for you but for the audience. Um so one um virtual viewer asked can you clarify or elaborate on your statement that priests carrying a shrine were emulating shoes separating the earth and sky?

[00:56:35]It's not my idea. It's the idea of another Egyptologist, David Klots, who wrote an article on it. And uh and and and and what the priest is doing is carrying the God and and and and lifting him up and which is a form of of worship. It's the idea of holding holding up the god like the god's shoe is supporting the the sky holding the sky up from the earth because the way the Egyptians well one of the several ways the ancient the ancient Egyptians discussed the creation of the world is uh that in order to create the atmosphere an atmosphere and shoe is the atmosphere, you know, he separates the sky, you know, from the earth and and this enables [snorts] life to form.

[00:57:33]And so the priest lifting up the god is imitating the god shoe, lifting up the earth from the sky from the earth, creating the space which in which life could flourish.

[00:57:52]That's how I understand it.

[00:57:56]>> There was Was there another question earlier? Oh, yes. Down here. Maybe you go first. No, hang on. Here in the middle of the auditorium.

[00:58:04]>> Okay. So, then you first, you next, and then you Okay, good.

[00:58:09]>> Thank you for your research and your presentation. Um, I would love to know, and this is not scholarly, but I would love to know what attracted you to this field of study originally.

[00:58:22]What attracted me to to the study of ancient Egypt?

[00:58:28]>> Oh, ever since I was a boy, I liked old things and uh and but but but not caveman old, you know. I you know, I I liked old civilizations. So, an ancient civilization that was removed from me in time, which produced great art and architecture and literature. And I've always loved learning languages. And it didn't have to be Egypt. I liked you know other civilizations as well but it was a combination of various factors but it's it's it's it's a it's a study that enables me to do the kind of research that I enjoy more than enjoy it gives intellectual meaning.

[00:59:11]I thought you were going to say it was Boris Carlos the mummy [laughter] >> and it was Boris Carlos the M.

[00:59:22]Thank you.

[00:59:27]>> Hi. Um, uh, one of the things that you referenced a few times throughout the lecture that I thought were was very interesting, um, was these late period sculptures being a, uh, a conscious backwards look, uh, towards older styles and a choice um, in terms of of how they styled uh, these images. uh uninformed as I am, that had never occurred to me because when I think of quote unquote Egyptian art, what comes to mind for me basically adheres to these same visual motifs. Can you speak a little bit to what the choice was between? What other styles might have been out there or what what came right before this conscious look back into a more uh injured past.

[01:00:22]>> Well, I attempted to address that at the very beginning of my lecture when I gave the three case studies and I compared late period examples of uh that looked back to the New Kingdom period and I and I showed you late period examples that looked back to the Middle Kingdom period and I showed you late period examples that went back to the old kingdom period or pyramid age. Those that's the choice.

[01:00:49]>> Thank you.

[01:00:51]I I want to jump in. I understand I understood your question a little differently. So like if your choice is going to looking what is the alternative to looking back?

[01:01:00]>> Thank you. [sighs and snorts] >> Oh doing something new [laughter] [snorts] and I don't know what that is because they didn't do it. [laughter] Doing something that hadn't been done question. Yes, please.

[01:01:20]>> Um, you mentioned several different kingdoms that had come through and taken over Egypt or interacted with them with the Assyrians and Persians before that Greeks. Um, and had mentioned some of the ways the Egyptian artwork was going out to those other countries. How much assimulation from those countries was coming into Egypt during these time periods in addition to them looking back to their previous cultures?

[01:01:46]>> That's a very, very good question. If we go back to some of the [snorts] each case is different. So if we start with the Kushites who come from northern Sudan, they worshiped Amanra like the Egyptians did. They they were more comfortable with uh Egyptian culture in many ways. They saw themselves as being more pious Egyptians, you know, practitioners of Egyptian religion than the Egyptians were at that time.

[01:02:29]and they built monuments in Egypt and in northern Sudan which uh use a lot of the same vocabulary, a lot of the same visual language that the Egyptians did, although they had their own aesthetic and they used it in some in in in ways that suited them.

[01:02:50][sighs] That was a close connection.

[01:02:55]The Egyptians had uh controlled northern Sudan in earlier periods and there were lots of Egyptian temples and statues that they would have known.

[01:03:10]The Kushites were driven out of Egypt by the Assyrians. The Assyrians never occupied Egypt. They kind of came and left. And it's they of course all of these you know they would have taken back a lot of loot and the inscriptions of the Assyrian kings tell you they took back obelisks and all sorts of things although I don't know and so but they didn't stay they left uh Egypt in the hands of uh of a local ruler that they felt they could trust.

[01:03:50]actually couldn't because they ended up being the successor dynasty. The the the Persians, as we've said, they valued Egypt. They controlled a vast empire.

[01:04:02]And from every part of that empire, whether it was Anatolia or whether it was Mesopotamia or whether it was Egypt, they took artists and skills and really forged a wonderful international style a new from those component from those component parts. Which is why you see what I showed you from Procepilus with Egyptian style gateways. And you see the statue I showed you which is made of an Egyptian stone carved in in in in an Egyptian in the Egyptian style and where they actually developed the country. The Persians actually excavated a predecessor of of of what was revived in the 19th century, what became Suez Canal. They very actively exploited the resources of their provinces. I don't know the exact mechanism. It may not always have been so gentle, but but they they they they had a relationship with them.

[01:05:08]It's very hard to see what the Egyptians got from the Persians specifically. I mean there are certain articles of costume, certain gestures that are are linked to to the Persians and the Greeks. Well, first Alexander of Macedon and the Greeks as I've tried to show at the end tremendously value Egypt. I mean actually the the even earlier I mean Egypt was ancient to the ancient times. When I said in the beginning that that that the pyramids were older to Cleopatra than Cleopatra is to us should make you think Cleopatra was the last of the TMIC rulers. the rulers of Greek and Macedonian descent that that that that that rule that ruled Egypt and the society at that time is still Egypt was mostly populated by Egyptians and we had and but also we had urban centers like Alexandria which is right on you know right by the Mediterranean and which interacted more with the Greek world and you have um a dialogue between the two cultures.

[01:06:24]I mean ancient Egypt it's it's when you think of ancient Egypt as unchanging which is you you you it's the Egyptians themselves that are partly to blame for it because they like to give the idea of continuity and even it's amazing the Greek philosopher Plato who never visit well maybe he visited Egypt but you know he he he talks about Egyptian art and he says that the Egyptian had Egyptian art all looked alike and they had laws about what was good and what was bad. And you can't tell the difference between something made now, now being Plato's time, and something made thousands of years before because they adhered so strictly to these laws, which he thought was a good thing because it guaranteed quality.

[01:07:08]But, you know, other people might think it's less of a good thing because it stifled creativity.

[01:07:15]>> All right. So, I take the last question from the virtual audience if you agree.

[01:07:21]>> Sure.

[01:07:21]>> All right. So, live Were all of these sculpted portraits painted or only certain ones? Did the medium stone wood matter for the type of portrait or was a medium chosen based on personal preference or access? Yes. Yes.

[01:07:36]And yes.

[01:07:39]So many many were painted but some were not. Some were painted entirely and uh some were painted only selectively and the medium made a great difference. So yes, yes and yes.

[01:07:52]But until you actually see traces, it's hard to say what was done. So I wouldn't, you know, always assume this would have been painted. And the traces are sometimes very hard to find. I get surprised all the time when I see, oh, look, this is the same as the one we have, but it's all painted. I had no idea. Ours might have been painted, too.

[01:08:10]Or not if it's finished because sometimes, you know, things were left unfinished. But there there is a all of these are possibilities.

[01:08:21]So then this leaves me to say thank you again and asking you to say thank [applause] you again.

[01:08:28]Well, you're very welcome. Thank you for having me. [cheering]