Tutankhamun and the Golden Age of the Pharaohs
A Special Exhibition Review
In Tutankhamun and the Golden Age of the Pharaohs, 130 objects from Cairo's Egyptian Museum (50 from the boy-king's modest four-chamber tomb) paint a vivid tableau of Eighteenth Dynasty culture. Some describe intriguing facets of the deep drama concerning how the seemingly innocuous adolescent monarch ruled a vast ancient empire in the wake of the swirling religious controversy into which he was born. The special exhibition at Philadelphia's Franklin Institute Science Museum is impeccably mounted by David P. Silverman, Professor of Egyptology at the University of Pennsylvania and Curator at its Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. Oversized reproductions of vintage photographs, taken by The Metropolitan Museum of Art's Harry Burton (1879-1940) during the tomb's excavation, cleverly guide the visitor along ramps that lead to the show's entrance and connect its two floors. The display cases include Dr. Silverman's printed erudite observations about each work of art.
Soon after the show's multimedia introduction, the notion of ancient Egyptians' preoccupation with death dissolves with the awe-inspiring reddish gold Gilded Coffin of Tjuya, the great-grandmother of Tutankhamun (r. 1332-1322 B.C.). Its elaborate imagery is a visual celebration of life in the hereafter. Her wooden anthropoid sarcophagus has dazzling obsidian, calcite and blue-glass eyes. Tjuya's arms are gently crossed over her chest in the characteristic funereal pose of Osiris, the mummiform god of the Egyptian underworld and benevolent judge of the dead. Her broad floral collar terminates in two profiles of Horus, Osiris' falcon-headed son and god of renewal in the afterlife.
Tutankhamun's presumed father, the visionary Pharaoh Amenhotep IV (r. 1353-1336 B.C.), renamed himself Akhenaten, shunned ancient Egypt's polytheistic beliefs, relocated Egypt's capital from Thebes to Akhetaten (present-day Tell el-Amarna) and enacted a short-lived monotheistic revolution centered on the Aten or sun's disk. A deliberate iconoclastic move away from idealized formalism in portrature resulted in distortions of the human physiognomy in sculptural art. The crystalline limestone Balustrade Showing Akhenaten and Family Under the Aten depicts the pharaoh, his wife Nefertiti and Meritaten, their eldest daughter, arranged in hieratic scale or size order of importance. The royal couple makes offerings to the solar deity, its outstretched rays of light bestowing the ankh (symbol of life) upon their elongated bodies, distinctly exaggerated with almost androgynous features.
The circumstances of Akhenaten's death remain a mystery. But during the brief reign of his successor Tutankhamun, the heretical pharaoh's experiment in monotheism came to an end, worship of ancient Egypt's multitudinous deities was restored and artistic standards gradually returned to what they were before the Amarna Period, all described superbly in the exhibition.
Sources:
- Allen, Susan J. Tutankhamun's Tomb: The Thrill of Discovery (Photographs by Harry Burton) (exh. cat.). New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2006
- Freed, Rita E., Yvonne J. Markowitz, Sue H. D'Auria (eds.), et al. Pharaohs of the Sun: Akhenaten, Nefertiti, Tutankhamen (exh. cat.). Boston, New York and London: Bulfinch Press/Little, Brown and Company, 1999.
- Hawass, Zahi. Tutankhamun and the Golden Age of the Pharaohs (exh. cat.). Washington, D.C.: National Geographic, 2005.
- Silverman, David P., Josef W. Wegner and Jennifer Houser Wegner. Akhenaten and Tutankhamun: Revolution and Restoration. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006.
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