Reporter | Chen Jiajing Edit | Yellow Moon
Mummies, gold, and beliefs about rebirth in the afterlife are the core elements that make up our long-standing impression of ancient Egypt. But how important were they to the Egyptians? How long did Egypt affect Egypt after the last pharaoh?
The exhibition "Meet the Golden Mummies of Ancient Egypt" held in Beijing recently brought 6 golden mummies to the domestic audience for the first time, in addition to presenting more than 100 rare treasures of ancient Egypt. As a metal that retains its luster forever, gold is believed to be the composition of the bodies of the ancient Egyptian gods. The ancient Egyptians believed that adding gold leaf to mummified masks, coffins, and even the skin of the deceased could bring the deceased closer to the gods. Only when the deceased obtains the flesh of God can he attain eternal life and be eligible to be listed with other gods in the afterlife.
The exhibits focus on the relatively unknown "Greco-Roman" period of Egyptian history, spanning around 300 BC to 300 AD. During this period, Egypt was first ruled by the Ptolemaic dynasty from Greece, the last pharaoh was the famous "Cleopatra" VII, and later ruled by the Roman Empire, becoming a province of the latter. If you look closely at the shape and decoration of the mummies in the exhibition, as well as the patterns on the wooden halls, covers and other objects, you will find that ancient Egypt in this period is quite rich and complex, and it is a mixed multicultural society. The wealthy groups in society prepared elaborately for the afterlife and combined egyptian, Greek, and Roman ideals of eternal beauty.
Most of the collections in this exhibition were excavated during British rule in Egypt in the 1880s and 1910s, and were later collected by the Manchester Museum in the United Kingdom. At the time, the British archaeologist Flinders Petri was an important host of this archaeological work. Historically, generations of people like Petry who were curious about ancient Egypt have excavated and studied mummies in the name of "science" in an attempt to interpret its history and culture, but it is inevitable that they will fall into the imagination of ancient Egypt. As curator Campbell Price puts it, the owners of these richly decorated mummies were among the wealthiest few in society at the time and did not reflect the full picture of ancient Egypt. Today, our observation and understanding of these artifacts is more based on the perspective of modern people than on the people who created and used them.
Located in the middle and lower reaches of the Nile, ancient Egypt was for a long time regarded as an ancient, closed and mysterious country. In fact, ancient Egypt was not as isolated and isolated as people thought. In 1894, British archaeologist Flinders Petri presided over a large-scale archaeological excavation of a pre-Dynastic period (around 4500 BC – 3000 BC) in ancient Egypt. The remains in ancient tombs are generally lying on their sides, usually wrapped in blankets, and occasionally replaced with resin-coated linens. In addition to the remains, the tomb contains stone tools, pottery, agate and crystal jewelry, tools made of flint and obsidian, and ores such as galena and malachite. From these funerary objects, it can be seen that the Egyptians at that time already had superb textile and pottery techniques, and had extensive trade with the surrounding areas. Obsidian came mainly from Ethiopia at the time, while other ores were produced in the surrounding areas of Egypt. The abundance of funerary items in different tombs means that the Egyptians of that era already had a class consciousness, and different social classes could enjoy different tomb specifications.
There is evidence that by the end of the fourth millennium BC, the ancient Egyptians had established contact with civilizations as far away as Mesopotamia. It can be said that the early settlements of ancient Egypt already possessed many of the characteristics of later Egyptian civilization. Small states and tribes scattered throughout Egypt subsequently annexed and reorganized with each other, forming a unified government, a unified system of temples and gods, and trade and resources were gradually centralized. Under the rule of successive pharaohs, ancient Egypt's trade relations with its southern Nubia and the Mediterranean Sea lasted for thousands of years, and many non-Egyptians came to Egypt to do business or settle here.
As an influential "superpower", ancient Egypt exported both goods and culture. As early as the 9th century BC, Eastern patterns from Egypt appeared on pottery in the Greek island of Crete, and by the 6th century BC, Egypt had a great influence on Greek architecture and sculpture art. Around 620 B.C., Egypt, which had just had a navy, took the trade with Greece to a new level—Greek merchants were allowed to establish trading posts in Egypt. After that, the Greeks began to travel around Egypt as travelers, they were shocked by what they saw, and some people believed that Greek civilization originated in Egypt.
Ancient Egyptian civilization lasted for thousands of years, but the land was not at peace, and kings from the Kush, Assyrian and ancient Persian empires all ruled Egypt one after another. In 332 BC, when Alexander the Great led an expedition to Persia and Egypt, Egypt was almost a satellite state of the ancient Persian Empire. The native Egyptians were overjoyed by the arrival of Alexander the Great and joined the Hellenistic Macedonian army against the rule of the Persian Empire. Egypt thus entered the Ptolemaic era, which came to an end with the death of Cleopatra, and the Romans turned to Egypt into their sphere of influence. It seems unimaginable that the cultural memory of the ancient Egyptians has endured after several regime changes. The British historian Christine Riggs believes that this is related to the ancient Egyptians recording their long history in hieroglyphs on the porches, stone tablets and walls inside and outside the temple. These works of art, myths and legends, and commemorative rituals, themed after generations of pharaohs, can help maintain a shared cultural memory.
It is interesting to note that even the "foreign pharaohs" who once ruled Egypt, such as the Ptolemaic family, embraced local cultural traditions after ruling Egypt, including funerary practices such as mummifying bodies after death. The Ptolemaic dynasty also advocated the worship of a new, multicultural deity-—— Serapis, a "Greek-Egyptian" composite deity. Pharaoh Ptolemy I used the sacrifice of Serapis as a means of dominating the Greeks and Egyptians, and the worship of this composite god continued even into Roman rule. During the "Greco-Roman" period, people worshipped various Greek, Roman and Egyptian gods at home, and many of the images and stories of the gods were rewritten and reintegrated into the myths of different peoples.
During the "Greco-Roman" period, people's preparations for death and the afterlife were also influenced by multiculturalism. The Greeks and Romans had rather pessimistic expectations of their existence after death, however, the Egyptian conception of the afterlife offered them the possibility of being born again into a bright, perfect world. The Egyptians believed that the gods were immortal, that the gods had an unchanging golden flesh and precious lapis lazuli hair, and that the deceased, in a sense, would have to be one of them if they wanted to attain eternal existence. As a result, the mummies of the nobles who could afford it usually enjoyed coffins, masks, or other coverings decorated with gold leaf, and the hoods were painted blue. For centuries, the Egyptian upper class was buried in wooden coffins after death, but during the "Greco-Roman" period, wooden coffins were largely no longer used, instead mummies were masked and covered with masks and covered, and fixed with linen bandages. Although ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs were no longer well known to the public by this time, they appeared on the decoration of noble funerals as a magical "amulet" to ensure the successful transition of the deceased to the next life.
As Riggs said, on the surface it seems that a foreign culture entered the Egyptian dove's nest, but from another point of view, the indigenous culture of ancient Egypt has continued to perpetuate itself through integration and transformation with foreign cultures.
For the Egyptians, the purpose of mummification was not just to preserve the remains, but to create "a perfect, eternal version of the deceased" so that they could enjoy the afterlife. Since ancient times, many people have been obsessed with uncovering the shroud of a mummy to see what was hidden inside. In the 17th century, people ripped off the bandages of mummies in order to get a black substance called "mumia", which is said to cure diseases. In modern times, curious researchers open the mummy in the name of "science" to try to explore the ethnic identity, body structure, and health of the ancient Egyptians.
From the end of the 18th century to the beginning of the 19th century, as medicine moved toward specialization, autopsy developed as a discipline. At the same time, scientists began to notice the problem of religious diversity within Europe's vast colonies, and Egypt happened to be at the intersection of three major cultural circles in Africa, the Middle East, and the Mediterranean. At that time, society still had restrictions on the direct dissection of fresh corpses, but mummies were not within the scope of restrictions, and studying them was a huge deal for Western academics. After Napoleon's expedition, European scholars had easier access to various artifacts, including mummies, from Egypt than before, and dismantling and studying mummies became popular among scholars and doctors for a time.
At the time, scientists made different guesses about their origins based on the ethnic characteristics of the ancient Egyptians. The German scholar Blumenbach believes that the ancestors of the ancient Egyptians may have come from ancient Ethiopia because they had some similarities with other ancient African peoples who once lived in the region, while the French scholar Cuvier believes that the ancient Egyptians originated from the Caucasian race. In fact, all such studies have a lot of conjectures based on objective facts, especially the contour of the nose, the size of the lips, the color of the skin, and other information that is usually considered to distinguish races is mostly based on subjective assumptions, and the final conclusion often leads to the ranking of human races - no matter what kind of basis is taken, European or Caucasian races are always ranked at the top of human civilization.
However, these racist studies of ancient Egypt had a great deal of popularity in the 19th century, and even developed a standard process from mummification to skull measurement to ethnicity determination. Until the late 19th century, scientists were convinced that the truth about ancient Egypt could be found out if scientific theories were strictly followed. In the 1890s and 1910s, the British archaeologist Petry excavated a large number of artifacts, including tens of thousands of mummies, at the hawala site in central Egypt, but he recorded only a very small number of mummies decorated with gold or color, and the bones that did not appear to be of research value were buried in the ground. Eventually he concluded that the mummies were mainly Greek settlers in Egypt.
We now know that hawala's wealthy class is much more mixed than Petrie said. In fact, there are many problems in the study method of using mummies as a basis to decipher the racial makeup of the ancient Egyptians. The biggest problem is that the ancient Egyptians who were fortunate enough to be mummified and preserved were often from a small number of upper-class groups, who did not represent the whole picture of ancient Egyptian society.
Today, with ct scans and three-dimensional contrast techniques, researchers no longer need to disassemble mummies by hand to achieve the same research results. But it is worth reflecting on the fact that in past studies, the practice of unwrapped mummies and carefully playing with their bodies does not seem to be within people's ethical and moral considerations. We know almost more than the ancient Egyptians about how to make mummies — what substances are used to disinfect and embalm, how to wrap the body in strips of cloth, and so on. But from the standpoint of the ancient Egyptians, what the present has done is unforgivable. Mummies are expensive to make and labor-intensive, and can only be done by professional priests, and the parties who spend such a large price are to obtain eternal life. Under such a premise, the mummy must be hidden and protected forever from the interference of the world, which explains why the makers have never left a record of how to make the mummy.
Instead of focusing on the sparkling mummies decorated with gold, turn to more of the ordinary that existed in the lives of the ancient Egyptians. For example, few researchers have paid attention to the linen strips removed from mummies, which are often discarded as garbage after the study, but the purchase of these strips was one of the most expensive and highly valued aspects of the ancient Egyptian funeral. In ancient Egypt, flax was not only the most important cash crop, but also culturally considered "clean" and "sacred." In the ancient Egyptian tradition, secrecy, concealment, and ritual behavior were almost inseparable from the wrapping of linen. Ancient Egyptian society, like other societies, was filled with anxiety and fear, but developed ways of coping with uneasiness and accepting reality, skillfully balancing the needs of the living and the dead. This may be the wisdom of the ancient Egyptians that we should learn.
bibliography:
6001 Nights, by Christina Riggs, translated by Cao Lei, China Social Science Press, 2019-07.
Egypt, Greece and Rome, by Charles Freeman, translated by David Lee, Houlang 丨 Democracy and Construction Press, 2020-09.
The Golden Thread, by Cassia St. Clair, translated by Ma Bo, Pu Rui Culture Hunan People's Publishing House, 2021-05.