As the excitement builds before the opening of the Grand Egyptian Museum (GEM) on the Pyramids Plateau outside Cairo, Egyptologists and ancient Egypt fans worldwide are eagerly looking forward to the opportunities the new museum will provide to regular visitors and those with special interests alike.
The GEM is the largest museum in the world dedicated to a single civilisation and the largest dedicated to the display and conservation of the vestiges of ancient Egypt. Some areas of the GEM including the grand entrance hall and commercial areas are already open to visitors, and work continues apace to finish work on the galleries for the institution’s formal opening.
While the GEM is set to overshadow the world’s other museum collections of Egyptology, it will doubtless want to draw upon their expertise and perhaps also on the ways in which these collections have been presented to the public. With this in mind, Al-AhramWeekly has been visiting some of the world’s other major collections of ancient Egyptian artefacts in the run-up to the inauguration of the GEM.
This week’s visit is to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, visited by the Weekly during a recent stop-over in the city that also took in the nearby Brooklyn Museum. Founded in 1870 and with its famous beaux arts façade dominating the so-called Museum Mile on New York’s Fifth Avenue for well over a century, the Metropolitan Museum, the Met for short, is one of the largest and best-known museums in the US containing encyclopaedic collections covering most of the world’s civilisations.
Among them is the ancient Egyptian civilisation that emerged with the unification of Upper and Lower Egypt by the Old Kingdom Pharaoh Menes in around 3100 BCE and lasted, with occasional interruptions and foreign invasions, until as late as the first centuries CE. The last known inscription in ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, the written characters designed to represent the ancient Egyptian language in special, notably religious, contexts, dates to around 394 CE.
Most of the Met’s collections of ancient Egyptian artefacts were put together in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, notably after the foundation of a Department of Egyptian Art at the museum in 1906. Comparable European museums had a headstart when putting together their collections, since they were able to take over not only former royal palaces to house them, but also to confiscate former royal and aristocratic collections, as was the case, for example, with the famous Louvre Museum in Paris.
In the US, by contrast, everything had to be done from scratch. Even so, the Met has an impressive collection of ancient Egyptian antiquities, many of them acquired between 1906 and 1935 within the framework of sponsored excavations in Egypt. The collection is displayed in rooms 100 to 135 on the ground floor of the museum — visitors turn right immediately on entry from the impressive Great Hall — and it begins with the Old Kingdom.
Though the arrangement of the collection does not differ much from standard presentations — divided into the accepted chronology of Pre-Dynastic and Old Kingdom, Middle Kingdom, New Kingdom, and Late Period, interspersed with various Intermediate Periods and finishing with Ptolemaic and Roman Egypt — it introduces some intriguing local emphases.
Perhaps in response to a new awareness among the public of the importance of the provenance of museum objects and a new sensitivity in many of the world’s museums of how the objects on display came to be where they are today, the Met gives detailed accounts of the provenance of objects, where available, when identifying and labelling the pieces on display.
All museums do this in their catalogue descriptions, but this information has not always been seen as important for the visiting public. They are interested to know what an object is and how one might understand its purpose from display case labels, but they are not always as interested in where it was found and under what circumstances it entered the collections.
According to the Met’s ancient Egyptian galleries, 65 per cent of its collection was acquired through excavation, the majority through the partage or sharing system in place in the early decades of the last century. Under this system, the mostly foreign archaeological teams that funded the excavations at the time could claim a share of any finds.
In the Old Kingdom section of the Met’s galleries, visitors can find the monumental Mastaba Tomb of Perneb, a purchase paid for by the Edward Harkness Fund in 1913, for example, together with some extraordinarily well-preserved models of activities from daily life from the 11th-Dynasty Tomb of Meketre— including miniature versions of a bakery and granary, a stable, a slaughterhouse, and a brewery — all found at Thebes in 1920 and shared with the Egyptian government under the find-sharing system.
There are massive falcon-headed name panels of the Middle Kingdom Pharaoh Senwosret I, excavated at Lisht by a Met expedition and acquired in 1934, and, on a much smaller scale, a famous blue ceramic model of a hippopotamus, affectionately called “William,” found at Meir south of Assiut during excavations in 1910 and gifted by Edward Harkness in 1917.
Wandering through the galleries, well-lit with the objects uncrowded and informatively displayed, visitors eventually come to one of the highlights of the collection — the reconstructed Temple of Dendur from Upper Egypt that now occupies a gallery of its own looking out across Manhattan’s Central Park. The builders of this Temple, labouring on it at the command of the Roman Emperor Augustus in around 10 CE, can have had no idea that it would one day end up some 6,000 miles from its original location south of Aswan to greet audiences in New York City.
A gift to the US by the Egyptian government in 1965 in recognition of help in rescuing the Nubian Monuments threatened by the waters of Lake Nasser after the construction of the Aswan High Dam, the temple was awarded to the Metropolitan Museum in 1967 and has stood in its specially constructed gallery since 1978.
Nearby is a collection of 18th-Dynasty New Kingdom statues of the goddess Sekhmet, which, found in Thebes in the early 19th century, once decorated the terrace of British Lord Amherst’s country house in England before being sold to the Metropolitan Museum in 1915.
DAMAGING REVELATIONS: Casual visitors to the Met willadmire the museum’s curatorship and presentation of its ancient Egyptian collection. Unfortunately, that admiration is likely to have been dealt a significant blow by revelations concerning the museum’s acquisition practices.
Despite the attention paid to provenance in the Met’s labelling of its collections, investigations have shown that things may not always have been as they should be. In September 2022, the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office ordered the seizure of 27 ancient artefacts from the Met suspected of being illegally trafficked from their countries of origin. Six of those objects, including painted linen fragments and a portrait of a woman on a panel called “Lady with a Blue Mantle”, were ordered to be returned to Egypt.
The seizures, carried out under three separate search warrants according to a report in TheNew York Times, followed another high-profile seizure in 2019, when the Met was forced to return a first-century BCE gold coffin belonging to Nedjemankh, a high-ranking priest of the ram-headed god Heryshef of Herakleopolis, to Egypt, following a Manhattan District Attorney’s Office investigation. The coffin had been bought from a Paris art dealer in 2017 who had supplied fake documentation, the newspaper said. It had probably been looted from Egypt in 2011.
According to a report by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) that appeared in the UK newspaper TheGuardian and other outlets last year, “reporters reviewed the museum’s catalog and found 1,300 pieces — of which fewer than half have records describing how they left they countries of origin — previously owned by people indicted or convicted of antiquities crimes… and 309 are currently on display.”
The pieces come from countries across the world, notably in Southwest and Southeast Asia, but also from countries in the Mediterranean including Egypt. The ICIJ’s conclusion is that despite former Met Director Thomas Hoving deciding in the early 1970s that the institution would need to “change [its] freewheeling methods of collecting,” there is “little evidence that the Met tightened its acquisitions standards in the years that followed… subjecting large parts of its catalog to questions today.”
There was no mention of the ongoing investigations at the Met when the Weekly visited, but there was an intriguing second aspect of the presentation of its ancient Egyptian collection that differentiates it from similar collections elsewhere.
An early room in the museum’s ancient Egyptian galleries contains objects from the Sub-Saharan African collections of former US vice-president Nelson Rockefeller, presented to the museum in 1969 and usually kept in the Michael C Rockefeller Wing on the other side of the museum that is currently closed for renovation.
Wall texts in this room inform visitors that while the museum has not yet been able to reorganise its ancient Egyptian galleries in a way different from the standard presentation adopted by almost all histories of ancient Egypt, it intends to do so in future. This is in order to emphasise not so much ancient Egypt’s relationships to the Mediterranean and Near East, the usual choice of historians, but its connections to the rest of the African continent drawing on the work of the late Senegalese historian Cheikh Anta Diop in so doing.
In works published between the 1950s and the 1970s, Diopreexamined the history of ancient Egyptian civilisation by emphasising what he said was its Sub-Saharan African origins and particularly its relationship to West Africa and his own country of Senegal. The reason this aspect of ancient Egypt had not been investigated by the mostly European Egyptologists who founded the academic study of ancient Egypt in the 19th century was racism, Diop argued, and an unwillingness to recognise the achievements of African civilisation.
Diop developed his ideas in Nations négres et culture and Antériorité des civilisationsnégresin the 1950s and 1960s, both published by the trailblazing Paris publisher PrésenceAfricaine, but they had to wait until the 1970s to be translated into English in an abbreviated edition.
“The history of Black Africa will remain suspended in air and cannot be written correctly until African historians dare to connect it with the history of Egypt,” Diop wrote, adding that “the interpretation according to which kemit [the ancient Egyptian name for Egypt] designates the black soil of Egypt, rather than the black man and, by extension, the black race of the country of the Blacks, stems from a gratuitous distortion by minds aware of what an exact interpretation of this word would imply.”
Whatever the truth of Diop’s ideas may be, also presented in summary form in his contribution to the General History of Africa put out by the UN cultural agency UNESCO in 1981, European historians of ancient Egypt seem to have ignored them. There is no mention either of Diop or his arguments in standard works such as the Oxford History of Ancient Egypt, for example,as its name suggests a recognised summary of current thinking.
Doubtless debates over the origins and character of ancient Egyptian civilisation and its links to Sub-Saharan Africa will continue. In the meantime, it will be intriguing to see whether the Met cashes out its promise to reorganise its collections in their light. Little seems to have been done thus far, and with damaging revelations hanging over the museum, perhaps greater efforts will be made to repairing its reputation.
BROOKLYN MUSEUM: Visitors to New York sometimes do not go further than Manhattan in their search for ancient Egyptian artefacts on US soil.
But it would be a pity if they did not do so, since the Brooklyn Museum, just across the East River in the borough of Brooklyn, also has extensive Egyptological collections. Unlike for the Met (now a whopping $30 admission to non-state residents), tickets to the Brooklyn Museum are free (though the Weekly paid the suggested price of $16).
The Brooklyn Museum, also built at the end of the 19th century, is a less grand affair than the Met, and it does not attract anywhere near the same number of visitors. On the day of the Weekly’s visit, most of the museum’s galleries were deserted aside from some local families, and while it was good to see the museum playing this community role, it also seemed a pity that its genuinely innovative displays, which include open storage and a thought-provoking exhibition of US art on the top floor, should not be more popular.
Recent years have seen a major redesign of the Brooklyn museum’s entrance spaces. These have always been problematic — the original design included an unlikely Hollywood-style flight of marble steps — and while the new awning announcing the museum has all the subtlety of a municipal bus shelter, it does at least open up the entrance areas, creating a double-volume space that serves as a marshalling area for the rest of the museum and removing the barrier between the public plaza outside and the areas within.
The Egyptological collections take up most of the second floor of the museum, third if one uses the American system, and here too there is an emphasis both on providing more about the provenance of the collections for contemporary visitors and on the ideas of Cheikh Anta Diop with regard to the Sub-Saharan African origin of ancient Egyptian civilisation.
Yet, despite this aspect of the galleries, the museum’s presentation of the collections is conventional, following the standard periodisation of Pre-Dynastic, Old, Middle, and New Kingdoms. There is much to enjoy, with the galleries being spacious, well-lit, and having a remarkably comprehensive collection. This was begun at the beginning of the 20th century, though unlike the Met the Brooklyn Museum was not a major sponsor of excavations. Most of the objects were purchased, often using funds made available through a legacy from US Egyptologist Charles Edwin Wilbour.
The provenance of excavated material is usually known for certain, assuming that the excavations were properly carried out. But this is by no means the case for purchased objects, whose extended provenance may be lost. Thus, some of the objects that may strike the visitor most in the Brooklyn Museum’s collection, such as an impressive granite statue of the Middle Kingdom Pharaoh Senwosret III (1836-1818 BCE), are described as having unknown provenance, in this case before it entered the art market in the early 1950s.
A special feature of the collection is the Mummy Chamber containing the elaborately decorated coffin of Pasebakhaienipet, a mayor of Thebes in the Third Intermediate Period, that was unearthed in Deir Al-Bahari near Luxor in 1893 and acquired by the Brooklyn Museum in 1908, wall reliefs from the tomb of Late Period vizier Nespeqashuty, and a New Kingdom copy of the ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead, nearly 25 feet long, made for “goldworker of Amun” Sobekmose in around 1500-1480 BCE.
As is so often the case with materials acquired in Egypt before proper controls were introduced at the beginning of the last century, the provenance of the latter is unknown. It can only be traced back to 1859 when it entered the art market before being sold to the Brooklyn Museum a century or so later.
* A version of this article appears in print in the 11 January, 2024 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly
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