December 28 -- Cairo: King Tut and Assorted Shopping (by Roger)

After a lifetime of hoopla and having caught bits and pieces of it at small shows in different places, Lou and I finally got to see the superhero of pharaonic museum displays: the King Tut collection.  It is not overrated.

We saw the tomb itself in the Valley of the Kings and found it underwhelming.  It was small, and the main room had little decoration.  Pharaohs generally started work on their tombs from the time they ascended the throne, but Tutankhamen apparently died shortly after he became king, and the 18-year-old had apparently not done much to prepare for his afterlife.  His reign was so short, in fact, that his tomb was mostly forgotten, and when Ramses VI was later excavating his tomb, his workmen dumped the debris from that excavation over the entrance to Tut’s tomb.  On the up side, that debris hid the young pharaoh’s tomb, which is the main reason it remained undisturbed for so long.

But a young pharaoh is still a pharaoh, and the Tut artifacts that we saw at the Egyptian Museum showed the power and respect that post commanded despite the person in it.   My favorite piece (by no means unique to me): the throne.  And my favorite part of the throne is the back panel that shows the queen anointing the pharaoh’s shoulder with an ointment.  Seeing the ointment took me back to Temple of Horus at Edfu, where we’d seen a room covered in recipes for scented unguents, but the real appeal hear was the style of the art.  The face and limbs of the royal couple are elongated and stylized, lacking the crisp abbreviation of form in most Egyptian art, and the two of them have a languid posture rather than the stiffness we’d seen in most art.  Also, instead of the usual assortment of gods validating the pharaoh’s rule, the panel portrays only Atun, a giant sun in the background with rays that end in hands.  It’s an unusual way to portray an Egyptian pharaoh.

I was drawn to this piece because it so clearly shows the unique historical moment that Tut lived in.  Tut was a member of the 18th dynasty, one that became something of a black sheep in Egyptian history.  Tut’s father, Akhenaten, had banned the worship of the traditional gods in favor of worshipping the father of all of them – the sun, Atun.  In practical terms, this meant disruption for the giant temples throughout the empire that were run by an entire class of citizens, the priests.  And this religious revolution was accompanied by an artistic one with the characteristics that I saw right there on Tut’s throne.

Isis Protecting Canopic Jars

But Akhenaten’s revolution didn’t last, and in Tut’s short reign, worship of the pantheon of gods was restored.  It’s not clear if Tut initiated this reversion himself or was just the figurehead for a quiet revolt by the priest class, but the style of most of the art from his tomb reflects the return to traditional worship and to an artistic style more in the line of Egyptian history.  For example, a large, gold gilt sledge features four goddesses with arms stretched out to protect the precious contents inside, four canopic jars with the organs of the pharaoh.  It wasn’t hard to recognize the figure of Isis here, as we’d seen her represented many times.  Even the style of the canopic jars themselves is a return to traditional art representation.

After spending the morning well into the afternoon with Tut, we left the museum to find the bookstore of the American University in Cairo.  They publish tremendous books, and we’d read they had a coffee shop.  The book part was right – we stocked up – but the coffee shop part wasn’t.  So we headed back toward the hotel, stopping in one of the tree-lined side streets for a huge al fresco snack that included a troop of Abyssian cats and Turkish coffee from the back of the grocery next door to the terrace we ate on.  Stops on the way home included a place to buy sheets (Egyptian cotton!), underwear (Egyptian cotton!) and belts.  And I got a sweater.

We were both worn out when we got back to the hotel, so we stayed in during the evening.  Except that Lou graciously offered to go out to our favorite fast food falafel place and bring some of that yumminess back to the room.  With French fries.

Canopic Jars from Tut's Tomb