BALTIMORE, 2 October 2003 — Things go faster and faster now, which is one reason to see “Eternal Egypt: Masterworks of Ancient Art From the British Museum” at the Walters Art Museum, in which they don’t. The beauty of the show, and its instructive power, are both to be found in its wondrous lack of hurry. Every now and then it seems a good idea to just stop.
That’s what old Egyptian art, even cracked and broken, does.
It holds still.
It stands firmly.
It stays locked.
The images and signs that our era likes best often involve rushing — the quick stabs of the impressionists, the moving paint of Jackson Pollock, the quick cuts of action movies. Our ads and wide receivers ceaselessly accelerate, which makes old Egypt well worth pondering.
Stasis was the secret of its art, and its longevity. There has seldom been a nation so successfully conservative. We don’t think of it enough.
Or catch its true spirit. What rises from the Camel pack, the back of the dollar bill or the obelisk on the Mall is only a faint whiff of the land along the Nile. The Egyptian exhibition — which smells of mud and reeds, of dust and sun-baked brick, of continuity and patience — gives off a pure perfume.
The show is big. With 144 objects, and two floors of exhibits, it is the largest exhibition ever mounted at the Walters. But its art is mostly smallish, and in that sense misleads.
Bigness is, of course, a great thing Egypt gave us. But bigness cannot travel. There is no way to pack the hugeness of the Pyramids, or the vast, doubt-crushing scale of the column rows at Luxor, or Queen Hatshepsut’s temple, into wooden cases small enough to be flown about on airplanes, and the present exhibition has been touring for 40 months. It already has been seen in Toledo, Memphis, Brooklyn, Kansas City, San Francisco, Minneapolis and Chicago. Because its art has to fit into packing cases, the old colossal heads on view aren’t all that colossal. And though the alert red granite cat reposing at the exhibition’s entrance — the “Lion of Amenhotep III Reinscribed for Tutankhamen” (circa 1390-1352 BC) — weighs a good 6,000 pounds, it’s still smaller than its bronze descendants at the doorway to the Corcoran gallery in Washington, DC to say nothing of the Sphinx.
What’s best about the show is that it’s chronological.
The immensities it offers are immensities of time.
It stretches on and on.
The oldest object in it is a finger-size and incomplete statuette in ivory, a figure of a king, large-eared and tall-hatted, from 3000 B.C. Among the newest is a limestone plaque, the “Funerary Stela of Petobastis-Imhotep,” from AD 23, and it, too, depicts a monarch, and he, too, has big ears (to hear the voices of the people), and he, too, wears the knob-topped crown of Upper Egypt, and presides in sure serenity. And between these two related images 30 centuries have passed.
And nothing much has changed. The laws are still the same. And the rules have been in place right from the beginning, and right from the beginning everyone involved — the peasant on the riverbank, the scribe at his papyrus, the cleanser of cadavers, the pourer of libations, the plasterer of tombs — knew those rules precisely, and trusted and adhered to them.
The Egyptians had a name for that ordered everlastingness. They called it maat. When maat appears personified, she does so as a mythical figure with a feather on her head. This, according to the catalogue, is what she represents: “A ruling principle of rightness, order, and justice,” maat, reports the catalogue, was “believed by the Egyptians to permeate the cosmos, from the solar cycle and the annual Nile flood to the actions of individuals.”
Maat’s absence is the theme of “A Fragment of a Battle Scene With Defeated Asians,” a broken slab of painted limestone from the funerary temple of Pharaoh Mentuhotep II, circa 2004 BC. Nothing else on view resembles this old picture, for what it shows is chaos. The defeated soldiers tumble like dolls in a dryer. Most are pierced by arrows. The viewer cannot tell what is up and what is down. These soldiers aren’t Egyptians, they’re foreigners. They are not immortal, they’re dying. All is in disorder. This picture is a picture of the opposite of maat.
That quality makes Egypt’s art seem gentler than that of other early agricultural societies. The dripping fang, the monstrous face, the sacrificial knife, these are often seen in Aztec art and Incan art and in ancient Chinese bronzes, as if such imagery existed primarily to scare one into terrified obedience. Egyptian art is calmer. Whether it depicts the peasant or the priest, the mythical king or his squatting scribe, or the voyage to eternity, or expressions of affection, its spirit is unhurried, confident, benign.
Where did that spirit come from?
A thousand years before this show begins, 80 percent of the Egyptians were still hunter-gatherers. And then something happened, and 80 percent of them were farmers, and the sun was what they venerated most, and their world had found its order, and everything was agreed.
That system worked. And kept on working.
Egypt, of course, was fortunate. Protected by vast deserts to both the east and west, it had the blessings of the Nile, those field-drenching floods, and only one frontier requiring vigilant protection, that on the Mediterranean sea. It’s hard to believe that there wasn’t some disruption, some bitterness and madness and scheming and destruction at work in ancient Egypt, but nothing so distressing is acknowledged by these artifacts. Maat reigns in this art.
Among the finest objects shown are the paintings on papyrus, the best of which are magical, at once clear and dense and fabulous. A Book of the Dead that’s known as the Papyrus of Ani (circa 1295-1186 BC) — a scrolled and captioned narrative with vivid little pictures and lengthy incantations — is 78 feet long.
Also on display are objects made of silver, of carved and polished wood, alabaster, bronze. Here are dark-skinned pharaohs from the south, from Kush, and the heretic Akhenaten (with his thin neck and his paunch), and mythological figures who have heads of birds, and dogs, and hippopotamuses (and even once a turtle), and earrings made of gold, and sphinxes of blue glass, and the spirit that pervades these things is stable as a pyramid. No wonder ancient Egypt flourished for so long.
