Ancient Egyptian lives unwrapped at Sydney’s Powerhouse Museum

The Powerhouse Museum exhibition of Egyptian mummies delves into an ancient culture.

The coffin of Nestawedjat, who died around 700-680BC; coffin portrait of a young man (AD140-180).

In the middle of the 17th century, at the height of the baroque period and when Rome was still indisputably the cultural and scholarly capital of Europe, a magnificent set of three volumes was published under the intriguing title Oedipus Aegyptiacus (1652-54). Their author was the Jesuit polymath and adventurer Athanasius Kircher, who had been driven across Europe from Germany to Avignon by the Thirty Years’ War before finally settling in Rome.

A handsome frontispiece shows Oedipus solving the riddle of the Sphinx: the hero is the alter ego of Kircher himself and the riddle is the meaning of the hieroglyphics of ancient Egypt, which had fascinated early modern scholars, heirs of the Greek and Roman interest in Egypt as the oldest known civilisation and the repository of arcane and esoteric knowledge.

One of the reasons for this was a habit of mind diametrically opposed to rationalist and progressive assumptions that have, over the past two centuries, coloured the thinking even of the uneducated. Today we generally think the passage of time leads to a better understanding of scientific and other questions. In most other cultures, as in our own before the Enlightenment, the opposite assumption has been more common: understanding was more lucid in the past, when truths were first revealed by a divinity or a great teacher, and has become progressively muddied and corrupted ever since.

Interestingly, we still tend to share that assumption in fields and activities that are not primarily concerned with rational inquiry: in religion or in various spiritual practices, authority is associated with antiquity and authenticity with the original form of the teaching.

For Renaissance scholars, Christ’s teaching was meant to be the final revelation, but God had already disclosed parts of the truth to the Egyptians, the Jews and the Greeks — and these doctrines were in practice the most mysterious and alluring to explore, especially for intellectuals of a mystical turn of mind.

Statue of Isis and Horus; mask in cartonnage.

This is one of the main reasons for the Renaissance love of Greek mythology, held to embody hidden and esoteric teachings. And it is why intellectuals were absorbed in the study of the Corpus Hermeticum, a collection of late antique mystical writings wrongly believed to be of great antiquity, and to represent a fount of wisdom at the source of both Greek and Hebrew traditions. It was largely thanks to this mystical and hermetic mode of interpretation that Kircher’s would-be translation of the hieroglyphs was greeted with such admiration.

Almost two centuries later, and significantly at the end of the Enlightenment, Napoleon invaded Egypt and the modern craze for Egyptology began. Nothing could be more foreign to the Enlightenment than hermetic thought, and the study of comparative linguistics had made considerable advances since the 17th century, when it had begun with the oriental language studies of Kircher’s Jesuit colleagues. Jean-Francois Champollion, a French scholar who had met Napoleon and was a passionate Egyptologist, eventually deciphered the hieroglyphs with the help of the Rosetta Stone.

It turned out that Kircher’s translation was almost entirely wrong, although he had correctly guessed that modern Coptic was related to the ancient demotic script; Champollion’s success was that of a positive and scientific approach as opposed to a mystical one guided by a preset view of what the outcome of the research should be. But the association of the hieroglyphs and of Egyptian art more generally with the mystical and the arcane would not go away. Sigmund Freud, who made the story of Oedipus emblematic of the process of individuation, had a collection of Egyptian antiquities in his consulting room. The imagery of Egypt was equally important to Carl Jung, as well as to artists and writers influenced by psychoanalysis.

This is not surprising when we reflect that Egyptian imagery, apart from its animal-headed or theriomorphic divinities, is really all about death. Unlike the Greeks, for whom the afterlife was originally a dim and undifferentiated place in contrast to the vivid light and dark of life, the Egyptians appear to have seen things in almost the opposite way. The most important concern in this short earthly existence was to prepare mind and body for the eternal life to come.

The mummy of Nestawedjat, with an X-ray scan.

This meant living a good life, for your heart would one day be weighed against the feather of the law, and if you were found unjust, it would be devoured by a hippopotamus-headed monster. The scene is the most familiar from the Egyptian Book of the Dead, but the book itself is much longer and contains an interminable set of instructions and spells to be used at critical points in the journey into the afterlife.

So important was knowledge of these spells, prayers and charms, that the text of the Book of the Dead, as we see in the present exhibition from the British Museum, could even be written on the mummification bandages. For preservation of the body was another prerequisite of continued life in the underworld, and the mummification of dead bodies is something that has gripped the attention of Western observers since the time of Herodotus, who wrote the first eyewitness account of life in ancient Egypt in the 5th century BC.

Herodotus describes both the full and expensive mummification process that was no doubt followed in most of the mummies we see in museums, but also the budget version of the process followed in the case of the poor. The sheer number of bodies preserved in one way or another over thousands of years must have been staggering, and a great many survive, discovered and undiscovered, in spite of the passage of time and the depredations of tomb robbers. With the new fashion for Egyptology in the 19th century, Europeans began buying mummies and unwrapping them, partly out of curiosity and partly to obtain the amulets and gems buried with the bodies.

In recent decades, however, the progress of CT (computer tomography) technology has allowed these ancient cadavers to be studied in a non-invasive manner: already the technology has made huge advances since the first generation of CT scanning, and we can now, for example, see a highly detailed image of the hips and pelvic girdle in three dimensions, slowly turning to allow us to focus on joints and bone shapes, allowing us to ascertain the sex of the individual and also approximate age based on the wear and tear of the joints. Further advances in the quality of scanners available will soon make many other still finer details visible, perhaps revealing traces of the illnesses of which the individuals died.

The exhibition begins with the mummy of a woman named Nestawedjat, who lived about 2700 years ago. The perfectly wrapped body, as though only just prepared for burial, lies in a glass case. Behind it on the wall is a video of its virtual unwrapping, dissolving the layers of bandaging to reveal the skeleton and what remains of mummified soft tissues. All this is made more uncanny because the body that lies before us is so completely sealed, enclosed and mute. And yet we can see inside it almost better than we could if we opened the bandages to reveal the shrivelled form of the body itself.

There are six mummies altogether, of different ages, sexes and professions, each accompanied by painted sarcophaguses covered with magical imagery of the gods, particularly of Osiris. He was the god of the underworld and of new life, and the first being to be mummified, after his evil brother Seth dismembered him. His sister Isis reassembled all the pieces except his penis, which had been eaten by a fish; making an artificial phallus, she is said to have used it to breathe life into his body again.

Isis then magically conceived their son Horus, whom she is shown breastfeeding in a small faience figure (4th-3rd century BC), an iconography later taken over by the imagery of the Virgin Mary and the infant Christ. The association is hardly a surprising one, for in the highly syncretistic religious atmosphere of the Roman imperial period, Osiris was already associated with Dionysus who, in one version of his myth, was also dismembered and reborn; in due course the examples of Dionysus and Osiris helped the early Christians to accept the story of Christ’s death and rebirth.

Although the whole exhibition is full of fascinating material evoking both the daily life of the Egyptians and their beliefs about the afterlife, the most surprising section is the last one, where we encounter the mingling of traditions in the Hellenistic and then the Roman periods. One of the most poignant objects, from the first century AD, is a carved sarcophagus lid in the form of a man wearing the Roman toga.

Although dating from long before Caracalla’s edict that extended citizenship to all free men in the empire, this sarcophagus clearly bears witness to the ambiguous position of a man caught between two worlds, proud of his status as a Roman citizen, yet also attached to traditional Egyptian burial rites.

Perhaps most telling are several realistic painted funerary portraits, including one that belongs to the last of the six sarcophaguses, a young man from Roman Egypt in the second century AD, his age inferred with amazing precision from the state of formation of bones in late adolescence.

Often known as Fayum portraits, after the region in which they are most commonly found, these likenesses are strikingly vivid, heirs to the Hellenistic tradition of naturalistic portraiture, and suggest a strong sense of individuality. They are found attached to mummified bodies, and yet, almost 500 years after the conquests of Alexander, they represent a mentality profoundly at odds with that of earlier centuries: the imagery of the ancient burials was about mystical transformation into something like a form of Osiris; now even portraits destined to be buried and never to be seen again cling to the self, with all its particularity and limitations.

Egyptian Mummies: Exploring Ancient Lives

Powerhouse Museum, Sydney, until April 30.