Beyond Babylon: Art, Trade, Diplomacy
Opening November 18 at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the landmark exhibition Beyond Babylon: Art, Trade, and Diplomacy in the Second Millennium B.C. will focus on the extraordinary art created as a result of a sophisticated network of interaction that developed among kings, diplomats, and merchants in the Near East during the second millennium B.C. Approximately 350 objects of the highest artistry from royal palaces, temples, and tombs – as well as from a unique shipwreck – will provide the visitor with an overview of artistic exchange and international connections throughout the period.
Exhibition Overview
Beyond Babylon will begin with the Middle Bronze Age (ca. 2000 - 1600 B.C.), when a rising elite class sought precious materials and objects fashioned in styles that reflected contacts with foreign lands.
Next, the exhibition explores the movement of both people and ideas. Trade, booty, and diplomatic gift exchange provided the means for the circulation of precious goods. The emphasis in this section will be on the complexity of interaction, addressing the individuals who traveled – traders, diplomats, soldiers, craftsmen, and other specialists – and the ideas, techniques, and traditions that intermingled.
The transition to the Late Bronze Age coincides with the arrival in the middle of the 17th century B.C. of the Hyksos, a nomadic Semitic people who invaded Egypt and ruled briefly before the beginning of the New Kingdom. During their 100-year rule, new ideas were introduced into Egyptian art.
The great palatial centers of the Late Bronze Age (ca. 1600 – 1200 B.C.), catalysts for the movement of people and ideas, are the focus of the next portion of the exhibition. The sites of Qatna and Ugarit in Syria are of exceptional importance, and finds from these two centers will be highlighted in order to show how they interacted with the greater Late Bronze Age world.
Much of what we know about the international relations of the Late Bronze Age comes from the site of Amarna in Egypt, where an important archive of royal correspondence from the 14th century B.C. was found. The so-called Amarna letters describe the diplomatic relationships between the Egyptian court and its counterparts throughout the Near East and eastern Mediterranean.
These far-flung connections and their artistic impact are most dramatically visible in the goods recovered from a shipwreck found near Uluburun off the southern coast of Turkey, which will form the core of the second half of the exhibition. Because all of the ship’s contents sank to the seabed, the remains of the wreck are a veritable time capsule of late second millennium B.C. trade relations. The cargo included hippopotamus ivory canines and incisors, along with copper and glass ingots, golden jewelry elements, and seals from Mesopotamia, Mycenaean Greece, and Egypt – one a rare golden scarab of Nefertiti.
The exhibition will conclude with a presentation of precious vessels of gold, glass, faience, and stone as well as elaborately carved ivories that were prized as royal gifts. In their style and imagery, these objects display the artistic impact of the complex exchanges that took place across the region during the 14th and 13th centuries B.C.
The intensity and sophistication of these interactions resulted in a true “international age,” in which the exchange of luxury objects played a key role and influenced greatly the artistic legacy that would continue into the following millennium. — www.metmuseum.org
4th Century Bible goes online
One of the world’s oldest Bibles, the Codex Sinaiticus, discovered in Egypt in the 19th century, is to be made available online this week, the Leipzig University library said Monday.
The Codex Sinaiticus, which dates from the fourth century, is one of the two most ancient copies of the entire Bible in Greek. The other is the Codex Vaticanus.
The manuscript was uncovered by a German scholar in St Catherine’s monastery in the Sinai desert. Much of it, written on some 350 pages of vellum, ended up in St. Petersburg. In the 1930s, most of this treasure trove was then sold to the British Museum in London. Some 40 pages also ended up going to Leipzig University, while yet more pages were found in the 1970s in a walled-up room at St Catherine’s monastery.
The project, sponsored by the British Museum and Leipzig University, aims to put the bible back together in digitalized form — scanning all the pages held in Britain, Germany, Russia, and Egypt — and making it available on the Internet.
The splendor of Islam: Book Reviews
Islam: Art and Architecture is a big book, but not cumbersome. Its cover is particularly striking, with the title and credits fitting comfortably into the spectacular façade of Sheikh Lutfallah’s mosque in Isfahan. One cannot resist picking it up and opening it, and then what a feast!
The book is a comprehensive study, written by 20 scholars from around the world specialised in the Islamic art of different regions. The book is comprehensive, beautifully illustrated with sharp and well-placed photographs, simplified maps, and ground plans of the various structures. It is an important academic resource and also an eye-opener for the many people who have yet to appreciate the artistic range and cultural development of Islam.
Islam: Art and Architecture is neither too large nor too small. It is comprehensive and scholarly but not dense — a top quality publication for the scholar and lay person alike, both a reference book for the former and armchair travel for the latter.
To quote Markus Hattstein, “Between Maghreb in the west, parts of China and Southeast Asia in the east, the entire Arab and Persian area, and parts of northern Africa in the south as well as an increasingly strong presence in Europe, Islamic culture is a combination of unity and variety, which keeps it dynamic and alive, giving it a prominent position among the religions and cultures of the world.”
Cairo of the Mamluks: A History of the Architecture and Its Culture, is a comprehensive work by Islamic art historian Doris Behrens-Abouseif in which she highlights the most important factors in the evolution of urban architecture. Drawing on Arabic chronicles as well as the latest in contemporary scholarship, she provides a complete history of Cairo’s justly-famous Mamluk mosques, schools, hospitals and mausolea, and outlines the social and political reasons for Mamluk patronage.
This publication, which arrives on the market when many of Cairo’s historic buildings are being restored, will provide a valuable reference work for scholars and students of the art and architecture of the Islamic world as well as for historians of late mediaeval Islamic history. It provides a comprehensive survey of monuments in the period under review, highlighting the most important buildings (including the mausoleum built by Shagaret Al-Durr in honour of her late husband, the last Ayyubid ruler), the madrasa of Sultan Hassan, and the funerary complex of Al-Ghuri, the last powerful Mamluk sultan).
Illustrated with colour photographs and architectural plans, this hefty book, as Behrens-Abouseif writes, focuses on religious architecture because “of its greater social and political significance… and also due to the scarcity of extant secular architecture from this period.”
Reviews by Jill Kamil for Al-Ahram
“Queens of Egypt” - Power behind the throne
A vivid description by Nevine El-Aref of the current exhibition at the Grimaldi Forum in Monte Carlo.
“Queens of Egypt” focuses on the role of the female members of the royal families, and most generally on women in antiquity. Among the most impressive objects provided by Egypt are a painted limestone bust of Queen Hatshepsut, a statue of Queen Ayshet of the Middle Kingdom, a monumental statue of Queen Tiye, a head of King Ramses II and a collection of queens’ jewellery.
The exhibition, which consists of seven sections, is displayed theme by theme. It starts with the most stunning ancient Egyptian queen, Cleopatra VII, well-known among foreigners and who for a long time has stirred the imaginations of novelists, and inspired artists and filmmakers. The queen is at first represented as shown in myth, arts, films and novels through a display of a collection of 19th-century objects. These include a life-size bronze statue featuring Queen Cleopatra lying semi-naked, carved by Henri Du Commven Du Locle in 1852, and a 1863 painting by French artist Eugène- Ernest Hillemacher showing the corpse of Mark Anthony brought back to Cleopatra. Golden and silver jewellery used by actor Elizabeth Taylor in the film by Joseph L Mankiweicz is also on display. Scenes from the film showing Cleopatra in various settings are also projected on a fringed curtain which is used as a screen.
The exhibition takes visitors in a magical voyage back three millennium in history on the deck of an ancient Egyptian barge where a magnificent black basalt statue of Queen Cleopatra stands in the centre gazing at a limestone bust of Julius Caesar who is seen in profile. Coins stamped with the faces of Cleopatra and her son Caesarean are also exhibited.
The exhibition follows a clear pattern, with the explanation that an Egyptian queen ranked above the king’s mother. The second section, therefore, is about the status of Egypt’s queens where replicas of queen mothers’ rooms are arranged as a succession of three alcoves representing the interior of a queen’s apartment, with stone walls painted in red ochre and some niches painted turquoise. Each of these rooms has a window looking onto the landscape of Giza and the Pyramids. A dazzling reconstruction of Hetepheres’s room is on display, along with other objects alluding to motherhood such as the alabaster statue of King Pepi II as a child seated on his mother’s knee. The wives’ room represents an exterior with, in the background, the frontage of a large temple with imposing corner stones and an entrance portico. In front of this lie blocks of stone, drenched in the fierce light of the Egyptian sun, on which are displayed a variety of items of jewellery, ushabtis, silver vases, mirrors and colossi.
Entering the daughters’ room visitors are immediately stunned by the pattern of a series of light wells. The rays fall on tulle drapery that the light caresses and illuminates from the top down to the floor. These falling rays seem to flood the display cases with their light, while the half-pyramid bases appear to rise out of the floor and reach towards the sky. The room of the secondary wives, the harem and the concubines is then followed and prolongs visitors’ astonishment by plunging them into the dense, cocooned atmosphere of a room in a palace. Visitors find themselves among Champaign tall columns arranged in a peristyle. The impression is heavy and powerful, the space between the columns seems compressed and the columns’ dimensions seem to have something supernatural about them.
The objects exhibited set out in the centre of this composition are like intense points of light that focus all attention, jewellery, statuettes, scribes’ stelae, papyri, crafted items. Many other aspects of life are also shown, such as the education of princes, diplomatic weddings, court intrigues and, in a tulle-draped alcove, discreet love scenes such as Akhenaten and Nefertiti kissing in the presence of their daughters and a relief showing King Montuhotep II with a queen in his arms. The femininity and beauty of the queens are also represented, as well as their religious role and political power. The exhibition ends with a reconstruction of Queen Tausert’s burial chamber lit by the flickering light of torches. The atmosphere and the presentation of the burial chamber take visitors into the magic world of French novelist Théophile Gautier’s novel Romance of the Mummy. Visitors are then taken into Gautier’s own library, where several of his books and paintings are on display.
Al-Muizz Street becomes a pedestrian zone
Visitors to Al-Muizz Street in Fatimid Cairo will encounter an unfamiliar scene next October. They will be able to stroll along the street without having to worry about traffic. Nor will they have to negotiate the huge pumps that for years blocked the routes of pedestrians as they pumped out subterranean water. These, like the drainage pipes over which visitors once tripped, are no more. A majority of the monuments that line the street have now been restored and the handful that have not are nearing completion.
Now, between 6am and 12 midnight Al-Muizz Street will be a pedestrian zone, allowing people to enjoy the magnificent Islamic monuments within their original environment and experience the traditions and customs of the area’s inhabitants over several centuries. Though access to emergency vehicles will be allowed at all times, shop keepers will only be able to take deliveries in the small hours of the night.
Over the centuries the kilometre-long street became Cairo’s spine, the iconic heart of the city, adorned with monumental buildings embellished with fine mashrabiya, mosaics and decorative domes. Among the most notable buildings are the Sultan Qalawun complex, which consists of a palace, madrasa (school) and hospital, the school of Ibn Barquq and Beit Al-Qadi, the dome of Sultan Al-Saleh Negmeddin, the sabil- kuttab of Khesru Pasha, and the Mohamed Ali Pasha sabil.
Time, though, exacted a heavy toll on these historic buildings. Encroachment and misuse by residents harmed the monuments, environmental pollution undermined foundations and the 1992 earthquake left visible scars across the historic zone.
Transforming Al-Muizz Street into a pedestrian zone is a dream come true, turning the street into the most important attraction in Cairo, the embodiment of Egypt’s tangible and intangible Islamic heritage.
In Egypt, Wikipedia is more than hobby
Excerpt from Noah Cohem’s article on “Wikimania”, the Wikipedia Convention held in the new Library of Alexandria.
The Arabic Wikipedia has fewer than 65,000 articles, and ranks 29th among the various Wikipedias, just behind Slovenian, and well behind the artificial tongue Esperanto.
Among the problems, less than 10 percent of the 80 million Egyptians are thought to have Internet access. And those with access tend to know English and prefer to communicate that way.
Elsewhere, writing articles for Wikipedia can appear to be a quirky obsession or mere hobby. In Egypt, writing for Wikipedia is something more like a national priority.
“It is more important to spread free knowledge here,” said Mohamed Ibrahim, 22, who was born and raised in Alexandria, and just completed a degree in architecture. He said one of his fellow organizers had made a good point: “The gap between the Arab world and the Western world is not about money or politics. It is about knowledge. There are many examples of Egyptians who travel to Europe or the U.S. and become successful. If people had access to the same knowledge …, ” he said, trailing off.
Ahmed Tantawy, the technical director of IBM in the Middle East, spoke in the convention center of the new Alexandria Library and said, “Arabic content today is nothing,” holding his fingers close together. “Do kids chat with each other in English or Arabic? Most likely Arabic, I think.”
Into that vacuum enters Wikipedia. Ismail Serageldin, the director of the library, which is built on the site of the ancient treasury of manuscripts, said that Wikipedia could make up for the absence of a reliable, regularly updated encyclopedia, along the lines of Brittannica.
Material on Wikipedia is something that may be quickly ignored in the West, he said, but in Egypt, “it brings knowledge to the poor.”
Scholars to reconstruct ancient wooden boat entombed beside Egypt’s Great Pyramid
Archaeologists and scholars will excavate around 600 pieces of timber of an ancient Egyptian wooden boat entombed in an underground chamber next to Giza’s Great Pyramid and try to reassemble the craft.
The 4,500-year-old vessel is the sister ship of a similar boat removed in pieces from another pit in 1954 and painstakingly reconstructed. They are the oldest vessels to have survived from antiquity. Experts believe the boats were meant to ferry the pharaoh who built the Great Pyramid in the afterlife. Starting Saturday, tourists were allowed to view images of the inside of the second boat pit from a camera inserted through the a hole in the chamber’s limestone ceiling. The video image, transmitted onto a small TV monitor at the site, showed layers of crisscrossing beams and planks on the floor of the dark pit.
The unexcavated boat is thought to be of similar design to the one on display, but smaller. Its wood — Lebanese cedar and acacia from Egypt — is less well preserved. A small hole cut into the pit at the time of its discovery allowed insects and air inside, contributing to the decay.
Conserving the wood and reassembling the craft could take a decade, Egyptologist Zahi Hawass said. Work on the first boat, by comparison, took 25 years, in part because there was little information on Egyptian boat building other than carvings and small models found in tombs. But the first effort should make it easier to piece together the second boat.
See Video from National Geographic
Study reveals state of sexual harrasment of women in Egypt
Sexual harassment of women in Egypt is on the increase and observing Islamic dress code is no deterrent, according to a survey published this week.
The Egyptian Centre for Women’s Rights (ECWR) describes the problem as a social cancer and calls on the government to introduce legislation to curb it. The findings contradict the widely held belief in Egypt that unveiled women are more likely to suffer harassment than veiled ones. Even veiled women who were victims of harassment blamed themselves.
SEXUAL HARASSMENT IN EGYPT
Experienced by 98% of foreign women visitors
Experienced by 83% of Egyptian women
62% of Egyptian men admitted harassing women
53% of Egyptian men blame women for ‘bringing it on’
Source: Egyptian Centre for Women’s Rights
Western women who took part in the study demonstrated a strong belief in their entitlement to personal safety and freedom of movement, but this was totally absent among Egyptian respondents. No-one spoke about freedom of choice, freedom of movement or the right to legal protection. No-one showed any awareness that the harasser was a criminal, regardless of what clothes the victim was wearing.
The British foreign office says Egypt is one of the countries with the highest number of cases reported to embassy staff regarding sexual offences against visiting women. It warns them to be extra cautious in public places especially when alone because of the risks.
Female Rights in Ancient Egypt
Brooklyn Museum Collection goes online
The Brooklyn Museum collection is going online early next week, as announced in the museum’s blog.
The project started over a year ago and involves implementing a Digital Asset Management System (DAMS) to store, catalogue, retrieve and publish the entire museum collection.
There are three goals to accomplish in this round of development. First, provide the collection online for researchers and scholars. Second, provide a way a casual user could just jump in and start to visually navigate throughout. Third, putting the collection online would be in keeping with the Brooklyn Museum’s mission and its community-oriented goals.
The online collection incorporates a social component where visitors can create accounts and then anything they favorite, tag or comment on will be attributed to them both in the collection area and on their profiles. Visitors who want to tag can do so without logging in.
There are currently 5,168 records online and this will continue to grow over time. Browse through a preview of the Egyptian collection.
Tourists to see buried Egyptian solar boat via camera
Egypt’s top archeologist said Wednesday that tourists will be able to see for the first time Cheops’ second solar boat through a camera put inside the boat pit.
Zahi Hawas, head of the Supreme Council of Antiquities (SCA), said that a huge screen will be put in the solar boat museum, which is on the southern side of the great pyramid. The screen will show the boat which lies 10 metres below the surface.
The boat, built to take King Cheops to the underworld, was first discovered in 1957. Archaeologists covered the boat again so that it would not be damaged. Hawas said that SCA, in cooperation with Japanese Egyptologist Sakuji Yoshimura from the University of Waseda in Japan will place the camera inside the boat.
Tourists will be able to see the boat starting next Saturday without the pit having to be uncovered again. In the mid-90s, a team of the Waseda University worked on getting rid of insects that entered the pit when it was opened the first time. The team has also proposed a project for the restoration of the boat that would cost around two million dollars. SCA is still studying the project.
