It has not been often in the history of this blog that I have added a new category. Ancient Egypt for miniaturists is the new category for many reasons.
Talking to miniaturists at Miniatura I realised how much I knew about Ancient Egypt. I didn’t have to look anything up, it was all there in my head.
Straight after spring Miniatura I started doing the research, though it was hardly a new topic for me. I was not introduced to the topic at school, though it is now part of many curricula but first became aware of it in a major way with the 1963 film of Cleopatra. There is a copyright free image of Howard Terpning’s iconic film poster, here it is.
The film had absolutely everything, it was gorgeous. I haven’t been able to find it online to watch yet, but I’ll keep looking.
The film tells the story of the end of Ancient Egypt, which story has considerably more drama than most end of empire tales. There is betrayal, romance, a woman fighting to save a whole kingdom, fabulous costumes, amazing crowd scenes and three of the biggest box office stars of the time. It didn’t hurt the action one little bit that Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton first met on set in the eternal city, Rome, and started a romance that sizzled through the celluloid. In real life they had a glamorous time, she was the most beautiful woman on the planet, he was somewhat unfettered and bought her gigantic diamonds. Really, really big diamonds.
Much of the tale of Ancient Egypt has a lot to do with things similar to really, really big diamonds. Everyone knows the Howard Carter quote when he was asked what he saw with his head in Tutankhamun’s tomb, and said he saw wonderful things and ‘everywhere the glint of gold.’
There isn’t a person on earth whose attention wouldn’t be grabbed by gold and diamonds, add a fabulous film, that amazing year 1963, the most beautiful woman in the world and we all want to know more.
I963 was the year that I began to be interested in Ancient Egypt, I was gifted a book about it by my parents, then 1972 brought the Treasures of Tutankhamun to London, and though I didn’t go, being a very new teacher struggling to afford rent and all expenses away from home for the first time, it was impossible to ignore the souvenir items flooding the market everywhere you looked.
That is the impetus for my revisiting this past interest, and interest in the past. A huge purpose-built museum is due to open in Cairo on November 1st which will house all the treasures of Tutankhamun, in the same place for the first time since they were discovered, the solar boat of Khufu, an enormous statue of Ramses the Great and many other wonders.
Why does this civilization, which began to flourish 5,000 years ago have such a grip on us today?
The gold has a lot to do with it.
Because of their beliefs that important people in their civilization would, upon death, be reborn again, if they were good, and go to the Elysian Fields, a beautiful country where they would be happy forever, the Ancient Egyptians focussed their attention on the afterlife, and provision for its splendour. This is understandable when you consider their actual lives, which were in the main, not very long. Life expectation was about forty years if nothing went wrong. However, many things did go wrong, starting with childbirth which was hazardous in all ancient civilizations.
Mummies have been discovered of women who died in childbirth with one or more babies trapped inside them. Delivery by Caesarean section is called after Julius Caesar, that’s him in the poster above, played by Rex Harrison. There he is in the poster, the first person we know to have been born successfully this way. In the whole preceding 3,000 years of Egyptian civilization this had not happened, hence the stuck babies. It did not help that any type of midwifery in Ancient Egypt was considered a low status job, given to the dancing girls, who were not generally important enough to wear clothing. There was a birthing stool, examples of which have survived and the sacred lotus flower, which, as well as being nice in a bouquet and pretty as decoration on pillars, happens to be a powerful drug. If you had had a baby stuck inside you for a couple of days, Nile flies swarming all over you and your only help a stool with a bit at the front missing and a lithe but dim dancing girl, you’d want a powerful drug. Frequently.
Having read and reread all I could get my hands on about Ancient Egypt, I began to compare notes and books and discover mistakes, or areas of ignorance in earlier published works that have been updated or infilled with later research. One of these is a mystery object labelled an apotropaeic wand. Surviving examples are often made of hippopotamus teeth, which are naturally curved, the entire object looking like a very small boomerang.
The pointed end shows signs of wear and the whole is covered with images of various deities and magical animals known to be protective of children. There is an inscription which translates as: words spoken by these (animals depicted) are to spread protection over this child.
I read about these wands as mystery objects in numerous reference works and now believe by context of finding, by size and by previous descriptions and by hints in more recent publications, that this is an early version of a high forceps delivery tool to assist in childbirth. If you are a female reader you may cross your legs now.
At Autumn Miniatura, exhibiting my mini Egyptians, more than one visitor told me that the Ancient Egyptians wore white because it deflected the rays of the sun or indicated purity. A moment’s reflection on the probable condition of a child, dressed in white, sent out to play on the muddy banks of the Nile, would be unlikely to conjure up purity. In fact, after a lot of reading, it becomes obvious that the Ancient Egyptians never found out how to make colours applied to linen to stay when the garment was washed.
As any miniaturist will tell you the Arts and Crafts movement with its emphasis on nature was the vehicle for the popularisation of mordants used to make natural dyes permanent. If William Morris could have time travelled to Ancient Egypt the Egyptians would have been delighted to dress in the naturally derived colours that we see in all the late nineteenth century paintings of the Arts and Crafts movement.
In fact the textile technology of the Romans, who were getting very good at dyeing using natural resources such as murex shells, a type of snail, to produce Tyrian purple, the status defining Imperial Purple, would have been available to the Egyptians had it not been for the unfortunate defeat of Antony and Cleopatra by Octavian at the battle of Actium in 31BC. Subsequently Egypt, one of the world’s great civilisations, became a Roman province.
It was civilised in some quite modern ways; Antony and Cleopatra spent time in the library at Alexandria, the greatest collection of literature (on scrolls) in the world at the time. You’ll be pleased to know that cats were employed to keep down the numbers of mice that wanted to nibble the edges of the books.
I will be watching the new BBC series: Civilisations Rise and Fall with great interest. There has never been a civilisation on this planet that has lasted forever. They have all put out propaganda about their existence into the far distant future, which always grinds to halt when they are conquered, overrun, succumb to interesting new viruses or fail because of geography, climate change or numerous other reasons.
One of the programmes is about the Aztecs. Their legends about wonderful four-legged gods caused them to interpret the Spanish conquistadors, who arrived riding on horses, as benevolent. As these ‘gods’ had arrived drawn by the gold, which they proceeded to steal in industrial quantities, bringing with them an assortment of diseases which the Aztecs had no defence against, including smallpox and measles, that was the end of that.
One of the advantages of studying ancient civilisations with the perspective of time is that we can sometimes see where they went wrong, but with the eye of a miniaturist, reproducing their reality, we can also experience their technology, their reality and the wonderful things they made and did.
As a miniature doll dresser, I have nothing but admiration for the textile technology of the Ancient Egyptians. In the illustrations of their lives, the size of their hands is usually exaggerated because everything from textiles, to pots, to buildings and carved stone was made by hand.
A hand-made civilisation is a marvel we will visit again in the future. If any reader has the chance to visit GEM, the new museum of Ancient Egypt in Cairo, please get in touch, we’d love to see your photos.
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