Sunken Cities is an exhibition of Egyptian artifacts, some of them retrieved from the bottom of the Mediterranean Sea. The objects on display were made relatively late in the enormous span of history encompassing civilization in Egypt. Most of these things, generally religious statuary and votive offerings, were produced between about 600 BCE and 200 CE. Thus, much of this material may be attributed to the Ptolmaic period -- that is, a time when Egyptian culture was subject to Hellenizing (and Roman) influences. The show's gimmick is that brave French archaeologists diving off the sea-coast comprised by the Nile delta discovered two lost cities, drowned beneath Mediterranean sea -- the frisson, as it were, advertised by the exhibition's title is that of bold adventure and discovery, the exoticism surrounding deep sea or high-mountain or deep jungle excavations that accompanies an Indiana Jones movie. (This is the appeal that the formidable and ubiquitous Zahi Hawass, the big boss of Egyptian archaeology with his trademark broad-brimmed hats and handsome piratical features, brings to innumerable TV shows about lost mummies, pyramids, and secret tombs in the Valley of the Kings.) This appeal is questionable in my mind -- it confuses archaeology with mere looting, the excitement of finding some wonderful object in a lagoon or desert and, then, without regard for context, seizing the thing and bringing it back to a museum to be contemplated by a sensation-seeking public. In fact, real archaeological research is intensely dependent on context and involves a lot more cataloguing of pottery shards than the excavation of spectacular golden masks and monuments.
In fact, as it turns out, Sunken Cities is a misnomer. After a couple of galleries featuring images of divers and murky undersea photographs blown up to mural size, the show settles into its real, and fascinating, theme -- an exploration of religious rites relating the murder, dismemberment, and resurrection of the Egyptian vegetation God, Osiris. The two lost cities turn out to be Thonis-Heraclieon and, across a two-mile causeway, Canopis. (Thonis is the Egyptian name for a Nile delta port known to the Greeks as Heraclieon.) Two large statues of Egyptians pharaohs were found in the silt at Thonis -- they are about 35 feet tall and shown in the museum lobby. A variety of other objects dragged from the sea are shown in the exhibit, most of them quite small, including small bronze figures, votives, and jewelry apparently donated to Osiris at a large temple to his cult now submerged beneath the sea. The first two galleries are painted with blue walls to simulate the sea and bubbling water plays from hidden speakers, seemingly an attempt to make visitors feel that they are swimming in forty feet of water and digging in the silt. Egyptian antiquities are stiff and impersonal and their general aura of imperturbable, stylistic certainty (the exact opposite of the anxieties that post-renaissance art dramatizes) are, for me, a little abstract and off-putting. But in the first room, I saw a stucco shard marked indelibly with a beautifully outlined ram and, then, a jovial plaque of Bes, the Egyptian god used to scare away demons and ghosts and repel the evil-eye and these artifacts had a real presence -- you could feel the artist's hand working in the wonderfully assured sketch of the ram and Bes had a wacky nonchalance, grotesque, witty, like a cartoon superhero. These objects intrigued me and, as the real theme of the show emerged, I discovered that, in fact (and to my surprise), the exhibit was genuinely fascinating. About 70% of the objects on show are loaned from museums in Cairo or Alexandria and, in fact, weren't pulled from the sea at the sister cities of Canopis and Thonis. These objects are generally images, charms, and religious statues (the Old Testament calls them "idols") relating to the veneration of Osiris. There are two splendid figures of Osiris and, his sister, Isis in the show -- carved from beautifully polished graywracke stone. Similarly, an idol of Tawaret, a destructive goddess of water and chaos, is so exquisitely preserved that it looks like it was made yesterday -- in fact, the four-foot tall idol has the zany exuberance of a sculpture of Jeff Koons: it's a fat, pregnant hippo standing on her hind legs and grinning through the toothy head of a crocodile. In the festival month of Khoniak, the birth of Osiris is celebrated -- images show him sitting on the lap of his sister Isis and, in fact, being suckled by her. (The God is just a smaller version of his fully grown mature self). During Khoniak, the priests in Thonis made small mummies of Osiris, doughy figures bound in bandages with protruding erections -- this is Osiris vegetans, a miniature mummy with a hard-on made from clay mixed with grain and seed. These mummies were sealed in little cases and, then, set afloat -- some of the boats are equipped with seven falcon candleholders so that the small ceremonial vessel would be illuminated when it was wafted out to sea on the tide, the so-called "Great Navigation" which is one of the concluding rites of Khoniak. Osiris was ripped to shreds, reassembled by his sister, and his body, then, resurrected -- this life-story staged and re-staged by priests as a guarantor the annual life-giving flooding on the Nile. Later, Osiris was synthesized with Zeus and became Serapis, a furry-looking Herculean deity, great and bearded like Poseidon. Sometimes, Osiris appeared in his avatar as a sacred bull, Apis -- and there is a spectacular life-size sculpture of a bull in the show. As time progressed, the art becomes more Hellenic in character although it never loses its stiff, formal and hieratic Egyptian aspect. At the end the show, as a valedictory image, we see an almost life-sized statue of a priest of Osiris, the man characterized in a portrait like those favored by the Romans, a real flesh and flood human being -- the priest clutches to his chest a great canopic jar showing Osiris with his uraeus (rearing twin cobras, also an emblem of the Egyptian pharaohs). It's a wonderful work of art, combining the particularizing tendencies of Roman portraiture with the stiff, abstract, and impersonal art of the Egyptians and a fine l'envoi to a show that I highly recommend.
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