- Written by Percy Pike
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Seattle Art Museum staff member faces Tutankhamun’s gold death mask, 1978. The museum hosted the blockbuster ‘Treasures of Tutankhamun’ exhibit that attracted millions of visitors across America. Image Credit: Seattle Art Museum Photo Archives. |
There is something about Egypt and its ancient civilisation that has gripped the Western imagination for millennia. From Roman antiquity to modernity, scholars, artists, and architects have visited the Near East and drawn inspiration from its imposing architecture and ornate decorative style, endeavouring to reproduce them on European shores. At the height of Egyptomania in the early twentieth century, overseas travel was inaccessible to most, meaning the general public relied on these Western reproductions for insight into the ancient Egyptian world.
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Observation intersects with imagination in this copperplate engraving of an Egyptian sepulchre, a burial place carved into rock or made with stone, c. 1780. The engraving was produced for Thomas Bankes, a vicar who compiled geographical prints of colonial voyages – including those captained by James Cook in the Pacific. Image Credit: Engraving, private collection. Photograph, Macquarie University History Museum. |
Between 1798 and 1801, Napoleon and a crew of scholars and scientists travelled to Egypt to document the region and its monuments, sparking the phenomenon known as Egyptomania upon their return. It was also on this expedition that the Rosetta Stone, a trilingual stela holding the key to decoding ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, was found.
When the Stone was eventually deciphered by Jean-François Champollion in 1822, public appetite for Egyptianised goods grew stronger, as silver, glass and ceramic pieces adorned with hieroglyphs entered the contemporary art market. Later in the 19th century, luxury jewellers like Cartier and Tiffany & Co. followed suit, creating pieces with Egyptianising colours and motifs. After a trip to the Valley of the Kings in the 1870s, Louis Comfort Tiffany designed an 18-karat gold necklace in the form of a menat, an Egyptian pectoral said to ward off evil spirits. The piece was listed for auction by Sotheby’s in 2022, in recognition of the centenary of the unearthing of Tutankhamun’s tomb.
The reach of Egyptomania even extended as far as the Southern Hemisphere, with examples of Egyptian Revival architecture still standing in Australian cities today.
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The Hyde Park Obelisk, erected in 1857. It originally served as a sewerage duct to prevent noxious odours escaping into Sydney’s central business district. Image
Credit: Wikimedia Commons |
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The base of the obelisk is decorated with sphinxes, serpents, and the winged sun associated with ancient Near Eastern divinity. Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons |
While fuelled to some extent by legitimate scholarly and scientific interest in the past, Egyptomania has come to represent the colonial lens of Orientalism, which places Western civilisation at odds with an exoticised, Eastern other. Products of the phenomenon emphasise the sense of difference between these two worlds, overshadowing the lived experience of Near Eastern history. As a consequence, Egypt has become an eternal symbol of wealth, immortality and imperial power in contemporary popular culture.
When archaeologist Howard Carter began excavating the tomb of Tutankhamun in November of 1922, the pharaoh gained celebrity status as the contents of his burial chamber were revealed to the Western public. Months after the excavation began, its financial backer, Lord Carnarvon, died under mysterious circumstances, and tales of a mummy’s curse began to spread, told to condemn those who disturb the tomb of an ancient Egyptian.
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| Archaeologist
Howard Carter excavating the tomb Tutankhamun. Image Credit:
Wikimedia Commons |
In the 1970s, millions of people visited museums across America to see the world’s first blockbuster exhibition, the ‘Treasures of Tutankhamun’, where they could expect to wait up to seven hours to gaze upon the pharaoh's now-infamous solid gold death mask, and Tutmania made all things “Egypt” world more profitable than ever. The craze was satirised by a Steve Martin Saturday Night Live performance in 1978, where he exclaims ironically that the Boy King ‘gave his life for tourism’.
By the 21st century, the notion of ancient Egypt as a kingdom of opulence became a mainstay in the Western imagination, particularly on the silver screen – but no aspect of ancient Egyptian culture fascinates Western audiences as much as its funerary practices and belief in the afterlife.
From as early as 1930s, tales of mummies rising from their tombs and terrorising Hollywood starlets and heroes have attracted audiences, from the first iteration of The Mummy in 1932, to the Brendan Fraser blockbuster in 1999, to the most recent reboot of the franchise with long-time action hero Tom Cruise on 2017, all of the same name.
For thousands of years, the West have looked to Egypt for its architectural and aesthetic brilliance, and continue to use its landscape as a backdrop for orientalist intrigue. While the mystique of the ancient Near East lives on, institutions like the Macquarie University History Museum are tasked with navigating the relationship between Egyptology and Egyptomania without falling into the cliches of the latter.
References
Hubschmann, Caroline. ‘The Curation of Ancient Egypt in the Twenty-First Century: How Should the Present Engage with the Past?’ The Australasian Journal of Popular Culture 7, no. 1 (2018): 75–91.
Humbert, Jean‐Marcel. ‘Egyptomania’ in A Companion to Ancient Egyptian Art, 463–482. Chichester, UK: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd, 2014.
Marino, Alessandra. ‘The Tomb of Orientalism?: Europe after the Lure of the East.’ Third Text 27, no. 6 (2013): 762–773.
About the Author
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Percy
on the Macquarie University grounds, where they intend to |