pharaonic egypt on display

Yesterday, I finally trucked it on over to the Egyptian National Museum. For those who don't know, this museum is where all sorts of crazy famous stuff is kept. Like the finds of Tutakhamun's tomb. Or the Fayum Portraits (the only known instance of portraiture in the ancient world, the Fayum Portraits are a series of paintings from the Christian community of the 3rd - 5th centuries done on wood panels designed to resemble their sponsors... as they were attached over their mummified face so that their soul could find their body after the Resurrection). Or thousands of thousands of other treasures.

The collection truly is unlike any other, dwarfing any other archeological museum in the world. That said, the curation job does its best to destroy the impressiveness of this collection. Nothing in the museum is meaningfully labeled, and priceless artifact upon priceless artifact are stacked to the ceiling. Nevertheless, it is not an experience to be missed, and I'm glad I went.

That said, while wandering around these amazing 4,000-5,000 year old artifacts for hours, as I returned to the love of Pharaonic (and continued my love of post-Pharaonic) Egypt, I realized that I have a kind of permanent sense of disbelief for Pharaonic objects. Notably, that I suspect that every Pharaonic object, every sphinx, every obelisk, every carving is made of styrofoam. Basically, I realized that my conditioning of Egyptian "artifacts" stems entirely from the Lost River of the Pharaohs ride at Water World in Denver, CO. It's kind of hard to get over this association once it's in your head, no matter how priceless and rare the object. Kind of like having a song stuck in your head, but rather that you unconsciously associate all of the antiquities with a cackling styrofoam head, fake smoke, and being thrown down a manmade stream in an inflatable raft.

This probably says a lot about me.

oh the places you'll go...

The joys and trials of being a tourist again...

 

Yesterday, I actually did wake up before 3pm thank you very much (10am to be precise) and decided to actually go see the sites of Coptic Cairo, including the Mu'allaqa Church (the Hanging One, as architecturally it is in fact suspended over a gate, although that is difficult to see), 

interior entrance to al-Mu'allaqa

pulpit of al-Mu'allaqa

more views!

stained glass!

icons!

so, this is Saint Jacob المقطع, or the cut-up...

Rather ominously, this is simply called, "The Sinning Woman."

I may have a slight fascination with Middle Eastern decorative arts...

Yeah, I do...

Then the Coptic Museum, which is quite impressive actually...

Coptic museum

 Followed by St. George's Church (technically Orthodox, but same neighborhood)...

St George's

adorable children

... and, my personal favorite, the Christian cemetery located behind all of these things.

  I am about to quote someone far more intelligent than I who I unfortunately cannot precisely recall the name of.  If anyone knows, please correct my plagiarism, because such an insightful statement should be properly credited.  Getting to the point, whoever this is said that only in Egypt was the Christian idea of the Resurrection fully explored and fully appreciated, for only in a culture of mummification could the idea of a physical Resurrection really be understood.  Wandering around the Christian cemetery, it was hard not to keep focusing on these words, as, should I have not bothered to read a sign, I would have assumed the entirety was a neighborhood of sorts.  A creepy neighborhood that was a little run down, but nevertheless a neighborhood.  The tombs appeared more as homes than mausoleums (to me at least) with a feeling that, should the mood strike, the inhabitants could just open their porch doors and continue about whatever it is they had been doing before they "went inside."  It should be said that Egyptians in general seem to take to the idea of life near the dead a little more positively than say, Americans, with an entire phenomenon of the "Cities of the Dead" inside the Islamic cemetery, now one of the more populous neighborhoods of Cairo.  That said, these are not modern dwellers alongside tombs, but rather, old and new tombs that, well, look like homes.  I have always been struck by the graphic and fantastic early Christian descriptions of the Resurrection, which feature martyrs' arms flying out from lions' mouths to rejoin torsos burned in furnaces, remaking the Christian on the Day of Judgment.  When such a day comes, the Christian dead of Cairo need only to open their doors.

 

For all the complete set of photos (i.e. all the extras of random wood paneling and tombs that I kept taking pictures of), click here