1 - Treasures of Tutankhamun

Treasures of Tutankhamun
By Hugh T. Kerr

THE museum exhibit known as "Treasures of Tutankhamun" must be one of the most fascinating and exquisite artistic treats of our time. Happily, this is a traveling exhibit, available during the next two and a half years in six strategic locations, and therefore accessible to a potentially enormous viewing public. The exhibit is of firstrate importance from several angles of critical appreciation, but it solicits special attention from our readership, we think, because it is so pre-Christian and yet so clearly religious.*

I

This exhibit of Egyptian antiquities is not large, as museum exhibits go, consisting of only some 55 items, but it is of breathtaking beauty capable of stirring the imagination and lifting the human spirit. The narrative of the discovery of King Tutankhamun's tomb in 1922 casts a romantic aura on the recovered treasure trove. Exploring for more than ten years, and mostly in vain, in the Valley of the Kings, the two moving spirits, Howard Carter, the amateur archeologist, and Lord Carnarvon, the financial sponsor, suddenly stumbled on their unique find just at the point of abandoning their whole project.

What they discovered was an almost intact depository of hundreds of funerary objects associated with a young pharaoh who died at the early ago of nineteen and was buried in a relatively modest tomb about 1325 B.C. "King Tut," as the newspaper dispatches at the time familiarly referred to him, was by no means an outstanding Egyptian pharaoh, yet he could claim some distinction. For one thing, he was directly related to that superlative beauty, Queen Nefertiti, and also to Akhenaton who not only consolidated upper and lower Egypt in an age

*National Gallery of Art, Washington, Nov. 17, 1976 to Mar. 15, 1977; Field Museum, Chicago, April 15 to Aug. 15; New Orleans Museum of Art, Sept. 15 to Jan. 15, 1978; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Feb. 15, 1978 to June 15, 1978; Seattle Art Museum, July 15, 1978 to Nov. 15, 1978; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Dec. 15, 1978 to April 15, 1979. Organized by the Metropolitan Museum's Director, Thomas Hoving, the exhibit is made possible by grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Robert Wood Johnson, Jr. Charitable Trust, and the Exxon Corporation.

2 - Treasures of Tutankhamun

of national unity and peace but initiated religious reforms in the direction of a kind of monotheism. The young king's name was composed of "Tut," his personal identification, plus "ankh," the symbol of life, plus "Amun," a divine title.

The "Treasures of Tutankhamun" makes an intriguing reflective exercise on the relation of religion and art. We now look upon these magnificient objects of gold, gems, ebony, and alabaster as singular examples of artistic skill, illustrating the highest standards of aesthetic achievement. And modern museum technology enhances the viewing of these ancient artifacts, for they are ingeniously displayed in walkaround plexiglass cabinets with hidden electric spotlights that make the long-ago treasures sparkle and glisten in dazzling brilliance.

But we must remember that all these treasures were never intended to be seen again. They were buried with the dead king in the dark of the tomb, and they were placed there not as artistic objects of great beauty to be admired. They were intended as necessary and practical accoutrements for the pharaoh's long and mysterious voyage through the dark netherworld into the realm of eternal light and life. Almost everything retrieved from the ancient burial chambers symbolized the pervasive Egyptian passion for immortality in the midst of corruptibility. The art was not merely decorative addenda, but neither was it the main attraction, as if the ancient Egyptians were putting on a royal art show. The reliquary was religious. The art was the medium of the eschatological message. What for us may seem simply secular and beautiful was for Tutankhamun's contemporaries sacred and theological.

II

Writing some years ago about Egyptian art (in Hastings' Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics), Sir Flinders Petrie noted that "the religious aspect of art in Egypt includes almost all that is known of it." Two interlocking themes, light-darkness and life-death, dominated the religious and artistic world of the ancient Egyptians. But it would be a mistake to put such interacting pairs into some sort of existential formula, as if Tutankhamun and his sages were intellectually anxious about the paradox of meaning and meaninglessness.

What emerges clearly and unmistakably from the "treasures" is a sense of confidence, buoyancy of the human spirit, and vitality of form and expression. It is not so much a theology of hope that we witness as it is a religious and artistic style of life expressing vivacity, energy, assurance, and expectation. There is little evidence of gloom, depression, brooding, grief, skepticism, or nihilism. (The current theological fad that seeks to analyze and psychologize death and dying, with the help of biomedical ethics, must surely have seemed to Tutankhamun a lugubrious, detached, and mournful exercise.)

3 - Treasures of Tutankhamun

As the brillant sun rises at dawn, marches majestically across the heavens, ominously dies and disappears at night, to be reborn mysteriously the next day, so life comes and goes but keeps renewing itself-like the sun itself, the Nile River, the grain in the field, and the progressive stages of human life. This is not really a doctrine or creed, as if spelled out in theological propositions. It is what the art objects, the "treasures," tell us.

The small (twelve inch) "sun god on a lotus" (fig. 1) says it all. A symbolic expression of the original creation, the infant emerges from a blue lotus on the river's edge and is reborn every day as the sun rises, hence immortal and eternal. But the figure is also a likeness of Tutankhamun himself, with the characteristic elongated head and the pierced ear lobes. Carved in wood and overlaid with painted gesso, the eyes and eyebrows are blue, matching the fecund lotus blossom.

Many different kinds of oil lamps and candles were found in Tutankhamun's burial chambers. Here again the message is the same. Although the tomb is dark as death, there is a lamp to light the way through the darkness, flickering and delicate, but eerily translucent as a single piece of carved alabaster (fig. 2).

"The King upon a leopard" (fig. 3) symbolizes the light-dark theme. The leopard is painted black, the shade of night, death, and the underworld. But the pharaoh is clothed in gilded light and rides regally on the leopard's back. As the sun god brought a brief ray of light to the underworld, as he passed through, so too will Tutankhamun traverse the darkness of death, emerging into the brightness of a new day.

The mirror case found in Tutankhamun's tomb (fig. 4) suggests that even high and holy things can be treated lightly, even with a touch of frivolity. The design for the case, the "ankh," is the common hieroglyph for "life," but there is also a similar sign in Egyptian for mirror ("that which sees the face"). The artist presumably was making a play on words. But in the midst of the levity, there is a subtler implication. When we see ourselves as we are, as in a mirror, we are

4 - Treasures of Tutankhamun

confronted with life. And if our mirror case is covered with thin sheets of gold and studded with gems, we may even think about the glories of eternal life. (The temptation to reflect on the parallel between the Egyptian "ankh" and the later Christian crux ansata, as well as on what Paul says about seeing through a glass-that is, a mirror-darkly, is almost irresistible.)

III

The individual items among the "Treasures of Tutankhamun," delightful and suggestive as they are, pale to virtual insignificance when compared with the reason for the existence of the exhibit-the mummified and decorated bodily remains of the pharaoh himself. The ancient Egyptians, thousands of years prior to modern chemical embalming processes, developed a rare skill in preserving mortal human flesh. Perhaps the dry, microbe-free climate had something to

5 - Treasures of Tutankhamun

do with it. But even so, the most skilled practitioners of the art must have known that their best efforts were less than perfect. In any case, artisans covered the human face and head of Tutankhamun with an elaborately crafted gold mask (fig. 5), certainly much more durable and handsome than the mummified corpse.

But the intent behind the process is perhaps more important, both religiously and artistically, than the actual results. All funerary customs, whether simple or contrived, no matter how sentimental or extravagant, are touching, poignant, and universal expressions of loving care for the deceased. More than that, they remind us that, in the midst of death and decay, human hope never quite dies. Artists through all the ages, in all the artistic media, have been preoccupied with this unquenchable flame of the human spirit. (As this is being written, a best-seller title on all current book lists is Raymond A. Moody's Life after Life, a physician's account of the "post-mortem" experiences of persons declared clinically dead but who later survived.)

6 - Treasures of Tutankhamun

It has been widely assumed that belief in the resuscitation of the body is a distinctively Christian doctrine, based upon the resurrection of Jesus. But the religion of the ancient Egyptians, while knowing nothing of the Christ who was yet to appear, nevertheless approached the same faith and was at least as physical and literal minded about personal survival. Unlike ancient Greece and Rome, and for that matter much Christian piety, the Egyptians did not think of a radical division between soul and body, so that while the body dies at death, the soul continues its immortal existence.

A peculiar, if somewhat grisly, aspect of the "Treasures of Tutankhamun," giving special emphasis to the Egyptian care for the very mortal remains of the dead, is the so-called "canopic" chest. This large, imposing structure contained the carefully preserved internal organs, including the intestines, of the king. Could anything be more corporeal, physical, or ephermal? Yet this canopic chest is as ornamented and scrupulously crafted as Tutankhamun's golden headdress. In addition, the chest is guarded by four goddesses, facing toward the four walls with outstretched protecting arms. The figures are among the most striking of the "treasures," and the graceful form of "Selket"

7 - Treasures of Tutankhamun

is surely the incomparable guardian of the four (fig. 6). Standing about five feet tall and carved of wood laid over with gesso and gilt paint, Selket is an artistic masterpiece. With her heavily blackened eye shadow and her golden garb, Selket has achieved artistic immortality.

But Selket is not a beauty queen, standing royally aloof, blasé, disdainful. Remember, she stands guard over Tutankhamun's entrails,

8 - Treasures of Tutankhamun

separated from his mummified body but nevertheless retained, preserved, and respected.

Selket's special signet, a scorpion, perches on the top of her head, for she was not only a canopic guardian but possessed magical powers to cure the dreaded, death-dealing scorpion sting. Selket, so solemn, so imperishably beautiful, has stood sentry for more than three thousand years over Tutankhamun's vital organs, as if to say in her own way, and for her own time, "O death, where is thy sting? Ograve, where is thy victory?"