Big, needle-like sculptures, based on Egyptian prototypes, are dotted all over America. The most famous, obviously, is the Washington Monument. Another, in Boston, commemorates the battle of Bunker Hill. There’s even an authentic, 3,000-year-old Egyptian one in New York’s Central Park, known as “Cleopatra’s Needle.” All are ‘obelisks’. The word comes from the ancient Greek word for ‘little skewers’.

Why Greek, rather than Egyptian? Because that is what early Greek visitors to Egypt called these strange stone pillars, which they hadn’t previously encountered. Similarly, when the Greeks saw what the Egyptians had built at Giza, they were reminded of the little wheat cakes back home they called ‘pyramis’. The nickname stuck. We still call them pyramids.

The ongoing show, Beyond the Nile: Egypt and the Classical World, at the Getty Centre, is a deep dive into how encounters with ancient Egypt shaped the civilisations of Greece and Rome. The exhibit vibrates with charismatic objects — among them, portrait busts of Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar and Cleopatra, and several famous sculpted heads depicting Egyptian priests.

The show culminates in a kind of tropical cocktail party, featuring hippos, palm trees and a nude acrobat balancing upside down on an Egyptian crocodile.

The show underlines an obvious but oft-overlooked fact for Greeks and Romans, Egypt was — as curators Jeffrey Spier, Timothy Potts and Sara Cole write — “the cultural and political behemoth of the Mediterranean.” It was “the most ancient, monumental, and powerful kingdom of their world and a land of incomparable wonder and mystery.”

Part of what’s thrilling about the story of Julius Caesar and Queen Cleopatra is the image it conjures of a meeting not just between two historical figures of unrivalled glamour but also between two great civilisations.

Such a coming together was bound to be momentous. What Beyond the Nile demonstrates is that, by the time of Cleopatra, encounters between Egypt and the Greco-Roman world had been taking place for at least two millennia, with consequences that had already proved momentous.

The story begins with contact between Egypt and Minoans from Crete as early as 3,000 BC. Evidence comes in the form of Egyptian scarabs — made from hippopotamus ivory — found in Minoan collective burial mounds.

There was later contact with Mycenaean Greece. A papyrus from 1,400 BC, for instance, shows that Mycenaean mercenaries fought on Egypt’s side against Libyan invaders. And in the 7th century BC, after a long hiatus, Greek soldiers were back in southern Egypt fighting for the pharaoh against the Nubians. We know this because they left graffiti on monuments to the pharaoh Ramses II.

It was at this point that Greek sculpture started coming into its own.

The show’s first really stunning display demonstrates the drama of this moment in the simplest way possible. A large Greek kouros — a sculpture of a boy — carved from marble in about 520 BC appears alongside an Egyptian sculpture of a priest, carved from limestone maybe a century earlier. Both are frontal. Both show the figure with one leg advancing, as if mid-stride, arms stiffly by their sides.

The Greek kouros, on loan from the National Archaeological Museum in Athens, is not only bigger but also slightly fuller and curvier. The figure’s stomach muscles are more exactly defined. And he is nude, unlike the Egyptian priest, who wears a shendyt, or kilt.

A little further into the show comes an even more compelling sculptural pairing. ‘The Boston Green Head’ — a small, intensely naturalistic depiction (owned by Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts) of an Egyptian priest from Memphis, in Lower Egypt — has a counterpart, almost as famous, in Berlin. Both are displayed here in Los Angeles in what amounts to a coup for the organisers.

The two lifelike heads may reflect a reversal in the flow of influence between Egypt and Greece. Because scholars can’t agree on when they were made — at the end of ancient Egypt’s Late Period (circa 664-332 BC) or at the beginning of the Ptolemaic period, which began after Egypt’s conquest by Alexander the Great — there is lively debate about whether they were directly influenced by Greek naturalism.

The final section of the show traces the ways in which Rome, after Caesar, succumbed to a rage for all things Egyptian. Cults to Isis were established. Painters decorated Roman villas with Nilotic scenes featuring crocodiles and hippos.

Proud, pharaonic Egypt was reduced from its daunting, imperious status to a cheap excuse for exotica, thereby establishing for Europeans a way of picturing North Africa that would prove remarkably enduring.

“Beyond the Nile: Egypt and the Classical World” is being displayed at the Getty Museum, Getty Centre, Los Angeles from March 27 to September 27, 2018

By arrangement with The Washington Post

Published in Dawn, EOS, August 19th, 2018