Bad stuff first. The audio tour is "Cleopatra" telling her life story in an excessively breathless tone, and without always clear connection to the exhibits. The wonderful "naos" is covered with hieroglyphs, but there’s no translation. Even I could see that there was a lot of repetition, but still… There was too much hype about the possibilities of the new site where they’re searching for her tomb. Some detailed maps explaining what was found where in the harbor would have been very good. So would a ground plan showing more or less where a naos fit in the temple. A few more useful details of Cleopatra’s life would have been nice—such as how her panicked retreat at Actium led to the destruction of Antony’s fleet. (Malaria didn’t help him much either.)
Good stuff: you can see a naos (inner shrine, where the god’s statue sat) up close; and the video with it explains a lot of points we non-hieroglyph-fluent miss. The naos was broken apart: the cap went to a museum long ago and the rest was recently fished out of the harbor, and now they’re together again. The colossi are very impressive, and videos show how they were retrieved from the harbor. (The queen’s right side is still missing.) You can see how the sculptors worked their tricks to make the figures seem dynamic. They’re supposed to have Hellenic features on standard Egyptian styles, but I couldn’t quite tell. The sphinx of Ateles the Flute Player (Cleopatra’s dad) was quite different—the face was very clearly classical and lively Greek on a standard Egyptian sphinx.
Cleopatra had coins made with her head in the classic Isis style, but that has little or nothing to do with her real appearance. What remains of statues may or may not have anything to do with her either. At the end of the exhibit they displayed copies of famous paintings of her, with a rather amusing variety of imagined attitudes and styles, from a Medieval image of her with serpents hanging off each breast to a neoClassical painting of her lounging while a recently poisoned slave is dragged away. Conclusion—we still have no idea what she looked like.
She and Antony professed to be gods (Isis and Serapis) in the usual pharonic tradition, but if one source can be believed they also went in for nights on the town of revelry and pranks. Egypt was rich from food exports, and ostentatious consumption went with being a Ptolomaic pharaoh—like dissolving pearls in wine to impress the Romans guests.
IIRC, someone found that that actually takes more than a few minutes, even if you use a very vinegary wine. The meal must have been a long one.
There’s a beautiful sculpture of a shaved priest carrying an Osirian canopic jar with his hands wrapped in his robe so they don’t touch it directly. He is not looking at the jar, but his cheek is pressed against it. This was hauled in from the harbor at Cleopatra’s palace, like many of the exhibits, so she undoubtedly knew what it meant.
Alexandria was a port in an earthquake zone, and a major quake dropped the ground level and drowned the area with a tsunami, so her palace is now under the harbor. This is on top of any normal subsidence of the coast. It makes archaeology harder, but more rewarding, because things weren’t dragged off in the intervening centuries. Vandalized by clams, yes, by people no. And a surprising amount of gold showed up, presumably because people fleeing the tsunami didn’t take time to empty their jewelry drawers.
A headless statue of a queen was dressed in a fetching outfit with an "Isis-knot." (The costume was not on offer in the gift shop.) Given Cleopatra’s self-identification with Isis it might be of her. After her defeat and death there was a campaign to obliterate her name and face—which might explain the missing head. The outfit was carved to be diaphanous in front but heavier in back, which might be the sculptor’s shortcut or might be a real feature of clothing meant to be worn in hot weather while seated on cold stones.
A papyrus under glass (or copy—a sign said they rotated the two because the original was so fragile) was an edict in Greek waiving taxes and import duties for a friend, signed with a "make it happen" by Cleopatra. That little mangled document says a lot about Egypt: not just that cronies got favors from the government then as in Chicago/DC today. The document was not dramatic; there were no seals or other official marks. It looked easy to forge, and that wouldn’t be good for revenues. So there must have been multiple copies filed in different places, with some kind of referencing system, so that the merchant, coming into port, could proffer his document and have it verified in a reasonable amount of time. I wonder what the filing scheme was—I didn’t see a date or a code. (But I don’t read Greek either.)
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