How the Egyptians really dealt with death
A new show overturns our preconceptions about one of the great, ancient civilisations
Death on the Nile Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge ★★★
As subjects for exhibitions go, the evolution of coffin design in ancient Egypt is not, perhaps, the most tantalising prospect. And yet this is the story told
by Death on the Nile: Uncovering the
Afterlife of ancient Egypt, a free new exhibition at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, which is celebrating its bicentenary this year.
Drawing extensively upon the institution’s holdings, and embellished by a scattering of loans from the British Museum and the Louvre, this well-presented show mounts a solid and scholarly investigation into the ancient Egyptian funerary industry.
In preparation for it, the Fitzwilliam X-rayed, CT-scanned, and meticulously examined its Egyptian coffins, yielding an abundance of technical information about how they were made.
In truth, the Fitzwilliam’s findings are not as breathily exciting as the curators would have us believe. But the exhibition does provide a number of startling insights that remind us of the glorious strangeness of the past. It also showcases spectacular objects that will bewitch a younger audience, and encourage them to study the ancient world.
After the briefest of introductions, in which we see a selection of beautifully serene faces once attached to Egyptian coffins, floating against dark blue walls, the exhibition proceeds in a chronological fashion.
To begin with, prehistoric Egyptian burial practices were rudimentary. The dead were placed on their sides in the foetal position and laid to rest beneath hot sand, which preserved their bodies. These simple burials often included bowls and beakers of food and drink, suggesting that already the Egyptians believed in providing sustenance for the afterlife.
Slowly it became customary to bury bodies in containers such as reed baskets, large pots handmade from Nile silt, and wooden coffins. The latter were commonplace by the end of the Old Kingdom, the first peak of Egyptian civilisation that gave us the pyramids at Giza. A fine example can be seen at the Fitzwilliam: the wooden coffin of an administrator called Henenu, dated around 2345-2150 BC.
Skilfully constructed from unpromising, irregularly shaped planks of sycamore fig that curve upwards like a smiling mouth, the coffin was decorated with a simple band of blue hieroglyphic text, as well as a pair of prominent eyes painted low in one corner. Henenu’s mummified body was placed inside the coffin on its side, so that his face was close to this wedjat (well-being) eye-panel, which was in turn oriented towards the east, thus allowing him to “see” the rising sun and so be brought magically back to life.
Wedjat eyes recur throughout the exhibition. Egyptian art was strikingly conservative, and whenever a new motif was accepted, it lingered on for hundreds, if not thousands, of years.
Indeed, the dominance of the remarkably consistent Egyptian approach would be challenged only by the advent of realistic Greco-Roman art. The show closes with examples of hybrid craftsmanship using both styles.
The curators are particularly thrilled by the discovery that many of the Fitzwilliam’s Egyptian coffins appear to have been reused. The evidence lies in technical things such as misaligned dowel holes, unused mortise cavities, and scraps of different wood used to repair damaged surfaces.
Some ancient Egyptian coffins truly were patchwork affairs: one of the colourfully decorated wooden coffins of Pakepu, a “water pourer on the west of Thebes” who lived in ancient Egypt’s Late Period, during the 26th Dynasty, contains 74 pieces of ropey sycamore-fig wood held together by at least 155 dowels. Wood was scarce in ancient Egypt, and it is possible that tomb robbers sustained a black market in materials for the funerary industry.
While this will interest scholars, the layman is likely to be more fascinated by the biggest shift in the history of ancient Egyptian burials, which occurred around 1900 BC, during the time of the Middle Kingdom. This was the moment when mummies began to be enclosed in the anthropoid (human-shaped) coffins that remain visual shorthand for ancient Egypt today.
There is a fine example here in the coffin of Userhet, which presents a dark, bearded likeness of his head above a sleek, white capsule containing his body.
In fact, the colour of his face may help to explain why anthropoid coffins came into vogue. Userhet’s skin is black – the colour of fertile Nile mud, which caused the regeneration of Egypt’s all-important crops. This linked him to Osiris, god of the underworld, who usually appears with a black-green face, and was also associated with rebirth.
It seems that, by the Middle Kingdom, people no longer wanted simply to join Osiris in the afterlife. Rather, they believed that, in death, they would actually become him – hence the need for a new type of coffin that would signify this transformation.
Anthropoid coffins were still going strong during the New Kingdom, when they were often densely and richly decorated, as was the case with the magnificent coffins of Nespawershefyt, a proud man who worked at the important temple-complex at Karnak. We can say with some authority that Nespawershefyt was proud, because he had his job titles inscribed on his coffins more than 40 times. There are even areas on his outer coffin where these titles appear to have been altered, presumably to record a promotion.
It may seem strange that an object which, to us, appears so enchanting and otherworldly was in fact preoccupied with mundane things such as a CV. Yet this is the revelation of the Fitzwilliam’s exhibition: the ancient Egyptians – at least, the elite ones – believed that paradise consisted of replicating the status and material comforts they had enjoyed during life.
In this respect, Egyptian coffins were a bit like modern spacesuits: hermetically sealed units, precision-engineered for the preservation of their owner’s luxurious lifestyle, while voyaging through the hostile environment of death.
This is why Egyptian burials commonly included boxes of roughhewn shabti figurines – essentially ready-made armies of willing servants who would perform all of the boring, onerous tasks, such as looking after animals and tending crops, which would still be necessary. As long as you had enough shabtis, then you could guarantee an easy afterlife.
It’s funny: in the popular imagination, the ancient Egyptians had a grand, magnificent obsession with death. Yet the reality is that their vision of the hereafter was often surprisingly literal and small-minded.
Until May 22. Details: www.fitzmuseum.cam.ac.uk/