Ancient/Now - June 21st

The "neo-pharaonism" of Egypt's ultra-nationalists, beautifully illustrated birds at Amarna, matching headless torsos and torso-less heads of ancient Greek & Roman statues, and more…

“Neo-Pharaonism” and Egypt’s ultra-nationalists

Earlier this month an African Arguments article highlighted the ultra-nationalism and “neo-Pharaonism” promoted by the Sisi regime in Egypt. Journalist Dalia Ibraheem writes,

Instead of Nasser’s pan-Arab brand of nationalism, or Sadat’s self-proclamation as the “pious president”, Sisi, while never referring to contemporary Egyptians as the children of ancient Egyptians, has staged successive spectacles celebrating the ancients. They include the golden parade in April 2021, the Sphinx avenue ceremony in Luxor in November that same year, and the anticipated opening of the grand Egyptian museum later in 2023, all signaling a shift in the state’s brand of nationalism towards neo-pharaonism.

These grand nationalistic events, put on at great expense during a time of rampant inflation and economic crisis in Egypt, are meant to explicitly link modern Egypt to the imagined glories of ancient Egypt. This ultra-nationalism also comes with plenty of explicit racism, expressed through actions like canceling Kevin Hart’s show last year, canceling an academic conference in Aswan thought to be organized by Afrocentrists, and banning a Dutch archaeological team over an exhibition that connects ancient Egyptian art with Black culture. It plays out in the media and online in the form of racist backlash over issues like a Black actress being cast in Netflix’s Queen Cleopatra. While “pharaonism” played a role politically in Egypt throughout the 20th century, some scholars are alarmed at the uncritical popular reception of this new ultra-nationalistic populism. African Arguments continues,

What makes this wave of neo-pharaonism distinctive from earlier ones is the populist embrace of the ideology without the familiar critique of paganism being raised by Islamic scholars. “Pharaonism has always been a thin discourse,” observes Professor Elliott Colla, author of “Conflicted Antiquities: Egyptology, Egyptomania, Egyptian Modernity”. Speaking to African Arguments, Colla explained how his research, in which he traced the ebbs and flows of pharaonism throughout the 19th century and the first half of the 20th century, shows that the adoption of such an ideology always had little chance of nationwide uptake. Still, the author cautioned against the problematic facets of this ideology: “We have to be careful! Last time we saw such discourse was a century ago, with the Young Egypt movement – and it was fascism!”

This is another moment to pause and think about how antiquity is used and manipulated by present political actors on the left and the right. It is a moment to remind ourselves that no one can really own the past, though many will claim it. Some of us feel driven to piece together a full and nuanced antiquity from incomplete data, if only to find ourselves and our way forward in a very complicated world full of social inequality, economic insecurity, mass migration, institutional collapse, identity wars, and the disintegration of trusted systems. The imagined past is, in many ways, the only road to our future, for good or ill.

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3,300-year-old palace murals at Amarna feature beautifully illustrated birds

Detail of a hoopoo from one of Nina de Garis Davies’ painted copies of the Green Room mural. (Public domain, Metropolitan Museum of Art)

The New York Times recently reported on the work of two British researchers who analyzed the beautifully detailed illustrations of birds in a mural decorating the North Palace at Amarna, the site of Akhenaten’s capital city Akhetaten. The birds depicted in the mural are so skillfully rendered that it is possible to identify a variety of bird species, including kingfishers, pigeons, shrikes, and more. The 3,300-year-old mural was discovered by archaeologists a century ago when they excavated the North Palace, a royal retreat located a far from the crowds, smells, and noises at center of the city, maybe even a place for the royal women to relax and meet their king. Researchers have suggested that the so-called Green Room where the mural was found may have been intended as an immersive experience, a kind of ancient virtual reality:

The Green Room, so named because of its dominant color, may have been designed to create a feeling of tranquillity for Akhenaten’s eldest daughter (and one of his younger wives), Meritaten, who lived there. “The room may have been adorned with perfumed plants and filled with soothing music,” Dr. Stimpson [zoologist, Oxford University Museum of Natural History] said, adding that “a masterpiece of naturalistic art would have added to the immersive sensory experience.”

Unfortunately the early 20th century conservation efforts resulted in unintended damage to the mural, so researchers have had to rely largely on the excellent painted copies made in 1924 by Nina de Garis Davies, an artist from the Metropolitan Museum of Art. A well-known and prolific artist, her skilled artistic copies of ancient Egyptian paintings and reliefs have proved a valuable source over the last century as the inevitable damage of time and environment destroy the original ancient art. In short, always keep paper copies of your archaeological and historical work!

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Solving the Puzzles of Headless Greek & Roman Statues

Statue of a draped woman that was successfully reunited with its head, Roman, 3rd c. CE. (No copyright, J. Paul Getty Museum, 72.AA.153)

Fragmentary Classical statues are a familiar sight in museums, but few visitors are aware of the fact that experts are always on the lookout for possible matches to their bodiless heads and headless bodies, however rare a successful match may be. This month the New York Times featured a story on the challenges posed to art historians by the huge number of headless ancient Greek and Roman statues in museum collections across the world.

“Although I have no idea of the precise statistics,” Kenneth Lapatin, curator of antiquities at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, wrote in an email, “today we have many more parts (bodiless heads & headless bodies) than complete statues. This is clear in any gallery of Greek & Roman art.”

Separating the heads of ancient statues from their bodies was a common occurrence in both ancient and modern times for a variety of reasons, including the damage of time and deliberate removal by smugglers or ideological vandals. There’s also ideological reasoning; many people might willfully “kill” a statue thought to hold the spirit of a dead or godly figure, particularly if it didn’t match one’s current belief system. While successful matches (like the Getty example cited above) are so rare some curators don’t even attempt such searches and inevitably comically bad mistakes are made, matching a head and torso is perhaps somewhat more realistic than isolated body parts like noses, ear fragments or penises. Nonetheless, for some museums the complicated, seemingly impossible search for matches continues.

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What else were we reading and listening to this week?

Kara was a recent guest on the What'sHerName Podcast for a discussion about Hatshepsut. The episode made the week’s top 10 list of most popular history podcast episodes. If you want to learn more about Hatshepsut, check out Kara’s book The Woman Who Would be King: Hatshepsut’s Rise to Power in Ancient Egypt.

Kara was also a guest on Classical Wisdom Speaks, discussing power and politics in ancient Egypt. Check out Classical Wisdom’s Substack at classicalwisdom.substack.com. Haha she looks quizzical about her own ideas in this screenshot…

Here are a few of the others news stories we were reading this week:

Journey to the Center of the Mertz, Part 1 of 3

Walls along River Nile reveal ancient form of hydraulic engineering

Ancient Human Relatives Buried Their Dead in Caves, New Theory Claims

Archaeological Laborers of 20th-Century Palestine

Researchers discover 12,000-year-old flutes made from bird bones

I will strike from the grave! Ancient Egypt in heavy metal music

Who Invented Idolatry?

Scalpel, Forceps, Bone Drill: Modern Medicine in Ancient Rome

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One more thing…

A recent article by Helen Lewis in The Atlantic highlights “reactionary feminism,” a new avenue of feminist thought that focuses on the differences between male and female bodies, that female bodies are capable—and incapable—of certain things, shaping women’s abilities and power in society. Such materialist views are used by Kara in her course Women and Power in the Ancient World, particularly because ancient women could not escape their bodily differences the way some privileged women can today with birth control and machines. In her class, Kara holds that real feminism must account for sexual dimorphism—that on the binary women are weaker than men—as well as all the care-taking and emotional labor that the female body encourages or demands. This may sound like a duh moment to some of you, but please just read some hard-left American feminist literature, and you would think you could leave your female body behind. Such hard-left feminism espouses a denial of the existence of the body, something the rich or the young woman might be able to get away with, but that any woman who has been through the battles of pregnancy, labor, breastfeeding, childcare, caretaking, and emotional labor will roll her eyes at, and hard.

Unfortunately, reactionary feminism, as it is espoused by British researchers, has absolutely no nuance and pretty much forces an ancient-world mentality on modern women, including supporting a whole host of odious right-wing nonsense, including no-divorce, no-birth-control, submit-to-your-man kind of thinking. And thus, some aspects of this new kind of feminism appeal to conservative feminists while others appeal to more liberal feminists. As Lewis writes,

Reactionary feminism was coined half as a joke—turning an insult into a badge of honor—and half as a “signal scrambler.” If it isn’t provoking you, then it hasn’t worked.

British writer and reactionary feminist Mary Harrington’s book Feminism Against Progress argues that feminist progress has reached a point at which it only benefits wealthy women, but leaves the majority of women behind and vulnerable to having their bodies exploited. Kara would agree with the body part of this, but there must be a way of moving forward with a materialist, yes-we-have-bodies feminism without the stand-by-your-man bullshit. And there must be a way of working with bodily feminism in an increasingly non-binary space. Okay, we have touched the third rail: have at it.