Curator’s Diary 19/04/13: Fragments of a Shattered Image

One of the most exciting aspects of working in a Museum is the occasional discovery of long-forgotten gems that lie in storage and which are often only brought to light by the chance enquiry of an inquisitive researcher. Such was the case this week when Anna Garnett, our British Museum ‘Future Curator’ trainee and I went in search of objects bearing ancient Egyptian plaster, to take samples for a researcher. Lists of object numbers, provenances and dates gave some indication of the sort of objects we were looking for but – because many of the items in the collection have still not been photographed – the physical identification of items often yields a surprise.

I was pretty sure that I knew all the “key” pieces in the collection. These tend to be the ones that are mentioned in publications, because of their own significance or their relationship to other objects of note. These connections are not often obvious, and usually require book-based research. Yet, sometimes you open a drawer, register the form or decoration of something and immediately recognise it as part of a larger whole. Thus it was with genuine amazment that I opened a drawer to discover a piece of one of the most famous paintings to survive from ancient Egypt. I don’t mind admitting that I let out an audible gasp of surprise. How could I not have read that THIS was here?!

Princesses in the Ashmolean. Note the size of the adult heel!

The colours were a clue but the patterning was unmistakable. A small-ish piece (20 x 15cm) of mud brick, with thin painted plaster coating from Petrie’s excavations at Amarna. Number 8740. It is part of the much larger scene featuring two small princesses – daughters of Akhenaten – from a palace wall now in the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. Petrie (Tell el-Amarna, 1894, p. 15) describes “the patronising air of the elder sister chucking the little one under the chin” and speculated that the paintings of the two figures is “perhaps the only use of light and shade by the Egyptians.” The princesses sit beside the much larger-scale foot of an adult – Akhenaten or Nefertiti - showing how large the original wall scene must have been. Petrie records many smaller fragments of painted plaster belonging to the wall – and that is what we must have in Manchester.  Our fragment seems to represent part of a patterned fabric – a cushion? – in the reds and yellows distinctive of this scene.

Other bits are doubtless scattered in collections around the world. But the thrill of recognising just one small part compares with Petrie’s joy at first sight of the whole.

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Real royal portraits in ancient Egypt…?

The strong opinions expressed about the first official portrait of the Duchess of Cambridge, unveiled this week, highlight the continuing interest in depictions of royalty. But how do modern experiences and expectations of a royal image compare to those in ancient Egypt? Catherine’s portrait – completed, the artist stated, mainly from photographs – captures a highly recognisable face, without any setting or regalia to imply status. It is, clearly, an ‘art work’.

Quite in contrast, Pharaonic scenes are functional rather than purely aesthetic. Many focus on the king: he is recognisable by his scale, insignia, and position in a scene. Viewers are left in no doubt about who he is. Royal family members are identifiable for the same reasons. But was any attempt made to make these individuals look like themselves?

In this relief (Acc. no. 3303), Ahmose I and Osiris are indistinguishable apart from their insignia.

In ancient Egypt, the pharaoh was at all periods, in some sense, the image of a god. A finely carved scene from the temple of Ahmose I at Abydos in the Manchester Museum highlights this. The king embraces Osiris – the god’s facial features are indistinguishable from his own. These are not recognisable ‘portraits’ in the modern sense. We may speak of a particular portrait ‘type’ or ‘types’ – promulgated at the start of a reign (and perhaps again at other key moments), and applied to royal family members and even the elite. Yet these are not intended as reflections of reality. Egyptian visual culture was essentially idealising. This was because it was created for an eternal audience, not to capture a fleeting moment – unless that moment was something that might impress the gods.

It didn’t matter what the king, or his family, looked like in scenes or statues. It is doubtful that very many people would have got close enough to the pharaoh to even register his facial features and ‘recognise’ them in a temple wall scene or statue. We are today very familiar with famous faces: the new portrait of Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge, has already been replicated millions of times around the world. Most people, in Britain at least, would know her if they met her. In ancient Egypt, such recognition was simply not important, nor was it to be expected: the content of a scene or statue make clear which VIP was who. For those with some familiarity with the meaning of hieroglyphic signs, or even their general arrangement, a cartouche captioning the image would provide additional information.

Cast of a bust of Akhenaten from Amarna. A genuine attempt at royal portraiture?

A modern eye may see what it perceives as portraiture in the ‘careworn’ features of some Middle Kingdom kings, or at other times when representations of the human face deviated from the idealising. Yet, we must be aware that there is a difference between a face being ‘life-like’ (resembling an unknown living person) and ‘true-to-life’ (an image of a specific individual). If nothing else, a life-like face is more arresting, more inviting than an idealised one – and a chief purpose of sculpture was to attract attention from the living, but also from the dead and the gods.

The claims of sculptors during the reign of Akhenaten to have been instructed by the king himself indicate no more than a desire to express closeness to the pharaoh. The issue of what Akhenaten looked like, behind all the ideological filtering of his wide range of images, is a vexed one. It is, however, likely that – whatever others may have thought – Akhenaten approved of his images. What the Duchess of Cambridge really thought of her own portrait we may never know.

 

I will discuss the existence of royal portraiture, amongst other issues, in a ‘Museum Meets’ study day next Saturday, the 19th of January: ‘How Did Statues Work in Ancient Egypt?’

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Object Biography #11: Fragment from an offering table of Akhenaten (Acc. No. 1938)

Acc. no. 1938, showing cartouche of Akhenaten

This mottled red granite fragment (16.5 cm in lenth) is part of smaller-than-life-size statue of Akhenaten, shown supporting a rectangular offering table. It comes from Flinders Petrie’s excavations at Amarna between 1891 and 1892, supported by Jesse Haworth. Like most Amarna sculptural material, this statue is badly broken – the result of the intense persecution of the memory of Akhenaten after his death and the abandonment of his city at Amarna. It bears the name of Akhenaten (lit. ‘he who is effective or beneficial for the Aten’) and the remains of epithets ‘Lord of Appearances’ and ‘Living in Truth (Ma’at)’, making it likely that this image represented the king himself and not Nefertiti or one of the couple’s daughters.

Acc. no. 1938, seen from the front

This statue-type is known from the early 18th Dynasty, and some scholars have suggested Akhenaten’s apparent fondness for the pose – traditionally associated with the fat, fecund Hapy, personification of the Nile inundation – was related to the theme of the king’s own exaggerated corpulence in many of his representations. Interestingly, rather than the products of the Nile which are usually shown on such representations of Hapy, Akhenaten’s offering statues are also shown as loaded with meat and incense. These statues make concrete Akhenaten’s self-proclaimed role as ‘beneficient for the Aten’: he was the main provider for the Aten – all religious contact with the deity was to be directed through the king.

Scene from the east wall of the tomb chapel of Huya at Amarna, showing statues with offering tables at the Great Aten Temple

Scenes of the Great Aten Temple, such as those from the tomb of the official Huya at Amarna, show such royal statues in position – with both king and queen bearing such offering tables. As appropriate for the solar cult at Amarna, there were no roofs on temple buildings so the statues are seen to be offering goods directly to the sun. Contact between the sunlight and the offerings was perhaps deemed sufficient divine sustenance to allow the food to be redistributed to the priests serving in the temples, in the traditional method of priestly payment.

New studies of the distribution of finds are revealing new evidence of how fragments are being pieced together, little by little. Though most of our Amarna sculpture fragments are in storage, we hope soon to have them all photographed and uploaded onto our on-line database.

For more on the ongoing excavations at Amarna, in particular the fascinating work on piecing together sculptural fragments, visit the Amarna Trust website.

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Living in nature at Amarna

Acc. no. 7220 – a painted scene from a palace floor, now conserved and soon to be on display

In the last week before we open the Ancient Worlds galleries, we have been making final preparations to put objects – many unexhibited before – on display. A good proportion come from famous sites and it is interesting to consider how they might originally have been used in their original settings.

Manchester holds an important collection of material from the excavations of archaeologist Flinders Petrie and others at Amarna. This site is well-known as the royal residence – what would call a ‘capital’ city today – chosen anew by King Akhenaten (c. 1352 -1336 BC). Akhenaten has been described as “the first individual in history” and is viewed variously as a revolutionary, a heretic, the first true monotheist, and a megalomaniac. Certainly, the theology of the king and his new capital centred on one deity: the sun disk, called the Aten. This deity was praised in hymns recorded on rock-cut stelae and on the walls of elite tombs at Amarna. A particular connection is made in these texts between the life-giving rays of the sun and prosperity of plants, animals and human beings.

One of the themes we explore in the new galleries at Manchester is the experience of living in a royal city, using our rich collection of objects from Amarna. Surviving decoration from the complex of palaces and elite villas at the site shows a delight in representing the natural world, with plants and animals featuring prominently. Part of the royal palace, for example, had a painted floor showing pin-tale ducks flying out of the marshes beside the River Nile, as they would at dawn. Yet here, in a palace, before the king’s throne, the motifs of the painted floor can also be interpreted as heralding the presence of the divine living ruler and his sole god, the sun disc, who – together – dispel darkness each day. Akhenaten and his courtiers clearly wished to emphasise through decoration their desire to be “living in nature”.

Faience inlays and amulets from Amarna

There is extensive archaeological evidence at Amarna of kilns and workshops, which supplied palaces with a range of glazed inlays and appliqués for palace interiors and other decorative objects. Remains show that this was a thriving centre for the manufacture of luxury materials such as glass, and the typically-Egyptian glazed ceramic known as faience. In the new galleries we explore the technology behind faience-making, after conducting our own firing experiments with colleagues from Daresbury laboratory.

I have been particularly struck by the rich array of colours and shapes used. We hold a mixture of decorative elements including tiles and the inlays once attached to them, in addition to separately modelled flowers and fruit such as bunches of grapes and pomegranates. The explosion of colour may seem gaudy to us now, yet it is important to remember that these elaborate decorations were an outward sign of divine bounty, the natural world created by the Aten and ruled over by his only prophet – Akhenaten (whose name literally means ‘Effective for the Aten’). In their own way, these palace decorations created an effect no more ostentatious than the state rooms of Buckingham Palace or Versailles.

These decorations were made for the residence of the living ruler, a transient place compared to the stone-built tomb, or ‘House of Eternity’. This philosophy makes many details of palace decoration seem even more whimsical, illustrating a love of life in ancient Egypt that is often overshadowed by a perceived obsession with death. Manchester Museum is in a fortunate position to have a wealth of material from ‘living’ sites, such as Amarna. In contrast to the previous, 1970s-designed galleries, which were dark and sepulchral (the ‘Daily Life’ section even more than the ‘Afterlife’ one!) our new galleries celebrate the life of ancient Egypt. I hope it would be a celebration Akhenaten – and other Pharaonic Egyptians – would recognise.

This post is an adapted version of one which appeared on the blog of Andante Tours.

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