Metropolitan Museum curator of Egyptian Art Adela Oppenheim argues that it’s important to distinguish the archaicising tendency of Egyptian culture from the real or apparent continuity of Egyptian civilisation. Which is to say, the statue of Mentuhotep II doesn’t look old by Egyptian standards because no new ideas had intervened between the third and the 11th dynasties, but because it was deliberately created to look old, a bit of propaganda meant to establish legitimacy and connection to the Old Kingdom.
And yet, for all of the self-conscious efforts of Middle Kingdom artisans to reference the revered Old Kingdom, the exhibition is focused more on change, some of it radical. By the late 12th dynasty, Middle Kingdom rulers were depicted with faces that show signs of aging, care and unrest. Their bodies are still young and athletic, but figures such as Senwosret III no longer have the smooth, rounded faces of indeterminate youth, and the benign half-smiles of the idealised depictions of earlier rulers.
There is a gentle sag to the flesh around his mouth, a hollowness under the eyes, which droop slightly, and a small crease in the skin of his forehead. This is, as Met curator emeritus Dorothea Arnold argues in a catalogue essay, a truly astonishing development, resulting in “royal images among the most significant representations of human beings ever created”.
And yet, what does it mean? Is it a genuine portrait of an aging ruler? Or are these markers of age merely symbols of some newly cherished aspect of royal power, such as wisdom, or attentiveness or introspection? In any case, it’s remarkable to see the emergence of something new so clearly manifest, and to see it emerge from within what was presumably a tightly controlled practice of depicting the pharaoh, with a long tradition devoted to idealised depictions of power.
Among the other remarkable cultural shifts is a trend that appears to our eyes, in the 21st century, like a democratisation of culture. Non-royal figures began to be buried with objects, texts and images that were once exclusive to the king, though this may reflect particular changes in religious practice — perhaps a centralisation of customs — more than a fundamental shift in how different classes were enfranchised in the elaborate culture of death and rebirth that governed Egyptian life.
The exhibition nevertheless provides a rich sense of quotidian life, within and beyond the inner circle of the king. It includes musical instruments and games, models of boats and houses, and military ration tokens, presumably shown by a soldier to gain his allotment of bread. It also includes tools, a hand-held chisel and wooden mallet of the sort that would have been used to carve the finished pieces seen in the exhibition. Among the most striking works on view is an unfinished statuette, with the tracing line of a standing, crowned figure still clearly visible on the small limestone block.
This last piece can’t compare with the beauty on display in finished work, jewellery and cosmetic jars, wooden figurines and ornately finished reliefs and stelae. But it does capture the process of life — the fluid uncertainty of it — with remarkable power.
The Middle Kingdom is a 19th-century idea, imposed on a dynamic period of Egyptian culture more for scholarly convenience than explanatory power. But Ancient Egypt Transformed manages the difficult process of capturing a culture in flux, without bookends, and without the convenient fiction that ancient Egypt was any more enslaved to its past than any other culture that seeks stability through precedent and the aggrandisement of history.
—By arrangement with The Washington Post
Published in Dawn, January 12th, 2016