Egypt in the Western imagination
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Egypt in the Western imagination has loomed large from the very first written texts in the Greek and Hebrew traditions. Egypt was already immemorially ancient to outsiders, and the idea of Egypt as a figment of the Western imagination has continued to be at least as influential in the history of ideas as the actual historical Egypt itself. All Egyptian culture was transmitted through the lens of Hellenistic conceptions of it, until the decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphics by Champollion in the 1820s. After Late Antiquity, the biblical image of Egypt as the land of enslavement for the Hebrews predominated, and "Pharaoh" became a synonym for despotism and oppression. However, Enlightenment thinking and colonialist explorations in the late 18th century renewed interest in ancient Egypt as both a model for and the exotic other to Western culture.
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[edit] In Classical antiquity
Herodotus, in his Histories, Book II, gives a detailed but over-romantic and risibly imaginative description of ancient Egypt. He praises the recording of history by corn farmers through oral tradition, and the devoutness of Egyptians in general. He assumes that Egypt is the birthplace of religion and that the Greek religion is directly descended from it. He lists the many animals that Egypt is home to, including the mythical phoenix and winged serpent, and gives very inaccurate descriptions of the hippopotamus and horned viper.
[edit] In the Renaissance and after
Athanasius Kircher gave a fanciful allegorical "decipherment" of hieroglyphs, and Egypt was thought of as a source of ancient mystic or occult wisdom.
[edit] 18th century
The 18th century witnessed the rise of a first authentically historicist imagination, one that attempted to picture the cultures of the distant past as truly different in kind, not merely in curious detail and superstitious idolatry. In an atmosphere of antiquarian interest, a sense arose that ancient knowledge was somehow embodied in Egyptian monuments and lore, an Egyptian imagery pervaded the European Freemasonry of the time, and its imagery, such as the eye on the pyramid — still depicted, with the masonic "Novus Ordo Seclorum", on the Great Seal of the United States (1782), represented on the American dollar bill — and the solemn Egyptianizing flimflam of Mozart's Die Zauberflöte (The Magic Flute, 1791).
The revival of curiosity about the Antique world, seen through written documents, spurred the publication of a collection of Greek texts that had been assembled in Late Antiquity, which were published as the corpus of works of Hermes Trismegistus. But the broken ruins that appeared in settings of the newly prominent iconic episode of the "Rest on the Flight into Egypt" were always of Roman character.
With historicism came the first fictions set in the Egypt of the imagination. Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra had been set partly in Alexandria, but its protagonists were noble and universal, and Shakespeare had not been concerned to evoke local color.
The culture of Romanticism embraced every exotic locale, and its rise in the popular imagination happened to coincide with Napoleon's failed Egyptian campaign. A modern "Battle of the Nile" could hardly fail to stir renewed curiosity about Egypt beyond the figure of Cleopatra. At virtually the same moment, tarot captured the imagination of the Frenchman Antoine Court de Gebelin, who brought it to European attention, giving it occult and mystical qualities, which could best be expressed by attributing to it the keys to the occult knowledge of Egypt.
[edit] 19th century
- Further information: Egyptomania
On the most popular 19th-century level, all of ancient Egypt was reduced in the European imagination to the Nile, the Pyramids and the Great Sphinx in a setting of sand, characterized on a more literary level in the English poet Shelley's "Ozymandias" (1818):
- round the decay
- Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
- The lone and level sands stretch far away.
Egyptian Revival architecture extended the repertory of classical design explored by the Neoclassical movement and widened the decorative vocabulary that coulkd be drawn upon. The well-known Egyptian cult of the dead inspired the Egyptian Reveival themes first employed in Highgrove Cemetery, near London, which was opened in 1839 by a company founded by the designer-entrepreneurr Stephen Geary ((1797-1854); its architectural features, which included a 'Gothic Catacomb' as well as an 'Egyptian Avenue', were brought to public attention once more by James Stevens Curl[1] Ancient Egypt provided the setting for the Italian composer Verdi's stately tragedy Aida, commissioned by the Europeanized Khedive for premiere in Cairo.
In 1895 the Polish writer Bolesław Prus completed his only historical novel, Pharaoh, a study of mechanisms of political power, described against the backdrop of the fall of the Twentieth Dynasty and the New Kingdom. It is, at the same time, one of the most compelling literary reconstructions of life at every level of ancient Egyptian society. In 1966 the novel was adapted as a Polish feature film.
[edit] 20th century
- Further information: Egyptomania
In 1912, the discovery of an exquisite painted limestone bust of Nefertiti, unearthed from its sculptor's workshop near the royal retreat of Amarna, added the first new celebrity of Egypt. The bust, now in Berlin's Egyptian Museum became so famous through the medium of photography that it became the most familiar, most copied work of ancient Egyptian sculpture; Nefertiti's strong-featured profile was a major influence on the new ideals of feminine beauty of the 20th century.
The discovery of the unlooted tomb of Tutankhamun in 1922 introduced a new Ancient Egyptian celebrity to join Nefertiti, as "King Tut". Aside from its spectacular treasures, which influenced the design vocabulary of Art Deco, for many years, popular rumors of a "curse", probably fueled by tabloid newspapers at the time of the discovery, have persisted, selecting the early death of some of those who had first entered the tomb. However, a recent study of journals and death records indicates no statistical difference between the age of death of those who entered the tomb and those on the expedition who did not. Indeed, most lived past 70.
Hollywood's Egypt is America's second contribution to the Egypt of the imagination (see the Book of Abraham); the spectacle of Egypt climaxed in sequences of Cecil B. deMille's The Ten Commandments (1956) and Jeanne Crain as Nefertiti in the Cinecittà 1961 Italian motion picture production of Queen of the Nile but collapsed with the failure of Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor in Cleopatra (1963), the last serious cinematic Egyptian extravaganza.
In 1978, Tutankhamun was commemorated in the whimsical song "King Tut" by the American comedian Steve Martin.
A best-selling series of novels by the French author and Egyptologist Christian Jacq is inspired by the life of Pharaoh Ramses II ("the Great").
[edit] 21st century
[edit] Notes
- ^ Curl, The Victorian Celebration of Death, 1972, pp 86-102.
[edit] See also
[edit] References and further reading
- Assmann, Jan. Moses the Egyptian: The Memory of Egypt in Western Monotheism. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997. ISBN 0-674-58738-3
- Curl, James Stevens. The Egyptian Revival. Rev. and enl. ed. New York: Routledge, 2005. ISBN 0-415-36119-2 (pbk. alk. paper) ISBN 0-415-36118-4 (hardback alk. paper)
