This abiding appeal dates back even to the ancient Greeks, says Susan Edwards, executive director of the Frist Center for the Visual Arts, and today it still captures the public's attention.
''Egypt has many fascinating aspects and layers. Firstly, it was the site of the pyramids, which were among the seven wonders of the ancient world. These remarkable engineering feats are still mind-boggling to us. Egyptians were the first architects, the first people to develop written language, and the first people to make beer. Their complex beliefs about an afterlife have never ceased to be a source of intrigue and mystery from ancient times until today.''
Nashvillians are getting a firsthand look at that alluring and mystical world with The Quest for Immortality: Treasures of Ancient Egypt, which opened at the Frist on Friday. Organized by the United Exhibits Group, Copenhagen, and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., in association with the Supreme Council of Antiquities in Cairo, the show is the largest collection of artifacts ever loaned by Egypt to travel across North America.
With objects spanning more than a millennium, from 1550 B.C. to 332 B.C., the Frist Center galleries will be overflowing with the materials that make Egyptology so engrossing: gold, intricately wrought jewels, enormous stone sculptures, ornately decorated coffins, hieroglyphic texts. As an added bonus, the Frist has pulled together an accompanying exhibit of human and animal mummies — giving visitors an up-close look at life and death in a civilization thousands of years removed from our own.
As the title suggests, The Quest for Immortality focuses on the defining trait of the ancient Egyptians: their belief that, through careful preparation and observance, their bodies and their belongings could transcend death and find eternal life in the great beyond. And it is this fixation in particular, suggests Frist Center curator Mark Scala, that continues to capture our attention thousands of years later.
''Part of what gives meaning to many people's lives is the idea that, after we die, there's something else. In most cultures, that something else may be poorly defined, but in Egyptian culture, it's pretty clear: These are the things you have to do if you're going to get to the next life, this what the next life is going to be like. The next life for the Egyptians wasn't floating around on a cloud; it was basically just like this life, only better, only nicer.''
With their stylized representations of kings and queens and their half-animal/half-human deities, the ancient Egyptians seem remote and exotic. And yet, the more you find out about the way they lived, the clearer it becomes that they were people a lot like ourselves. ''Egyptians, especially the upper-crust, led lives that we can relate to,'' Scala says. ''They wrote poetry, they raised gardens, they had pets, they had parties. And to think this was happening 5,000 years ago is remarkable.''
The Quest for Immortality and its auxiliary exhibits are a major undertaking for the Frist. ''It is certainly our most ambitious project to date,'' says executive director Edwards. ''These ancient treasures have never been outside of Egypt before. The works of art on display are coming from the Cairo Museum, which has the largest collection of Egyptian antiquities in the world; the Luxor Museum; and from the architectural sites of Tanis and Deir el-Bahari. This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. You would have to spend weeks in Egypt to cover the same turf.''
Making history come to life
Ancient Egyptian history is astonishing in its depth, with more than 30 successive royal dynasties. To help organize the sequence of events, scholars have divided the country's history into a dozen different periods, beginning with the Predynastic Period circa 5300 B.C.. The Frist exhibit picks up in the year 1550 B.C., with the beginning of the New Kingdom, and runs through the Late Period, just prior to the rule of Alexander the Great.
Making sense of all that history isn't always an easy task, Scala admits. ''My job as the curatorial liaison is to sift through as much information as I can, figure out what's of interest to the general public and find little points of connection.''
It helps that most everyone likes looking at mummies and giant statues. The first thing visitors will see when they walk into the exhibit is the nearly 8-foot-tall red-granite head of Ramesses II, who ruled from 1279 to 1213 B.C., and left more monuments to his rule than any other Egyptian king.
''You look at that, and it just screams Egyptian convention,'' Scala says. ''Everything about it conforms to what people expect it to be. One of the interesting things about this sculpture is that it was made for Ramesses II by his craftsmen, but adapted or usurped from Senusret I, an earlier pharaoh who lived 700 years before.
''Why would a leader do that?'' Scala asks, searching out that connecting point for modern-day viewers. ''If it's because he is wrapping himself in the mantle of a great leader who came before, we can certainly understand that impulse.''
From there, the exhibit highlights other rulers from the New Kingdom, chief among them Thutmose III, one of the country's most powerful pharaohs, whose foreign conquests have led historians to dub him ''The Napoleon of Egypt.'' And no object better captures the imagination, Scala says, than the sphinx of Thutmose III.
''The incredible artistry of this thing — it's really just gorgeous. You look at the sphinx, and you can see how artists like Aaron Douglas and art deco designers were really inspired by Egypt.''
The sphinx also gives viewers an entry point into Egyptian theology. ''The lion had a sacred component because he prowled the East and West horizon, where the sun rose and the sun set,'' Scala explains. ''The sun rising and the sun setting was the whole basis for the Egyptians' theological system — the sun was Re, and he came in the morning, and then when he sank, he died and was reborn. So the sphinx was basically an affirmation of the sacredness of the king himself, embodying him as a half-lion, half-man.''
In The Tomb of a Noble section of the exhibit, visitors are treated to an array of objects that were buried in the tombs of the elite class, including some of the elaborately ornamented coffins and sarcophagi for which the ancient Egyptians were so famous. It was also an important practice, when people died, to bury them with many of their personal effects, and these artifacts allow us to get a glimpse of the lives that Egyptians led.
''The items were placed there to help you get through the 12-hour journey through the netherworld that the Egyptians equated with night, and make it to the afterlife,'' Scala says. ''So people would bring food, and drink, and chairs, and musical instruments and toys — all sorts of things. That whole idea can get our visitors thinking: when you die, what would you want to have buried with you? That is, if you could 'take it with you?' ''
The Royal Tomb section of the exhibit is devoted to objects excavated from the tombs of rulers. Scala points to the gold death mask of Wenudjebauendjed, who served in the court of Psusennes I around the turn of the first millennium B.C., as an emblematic piece.
''It's an amazing, graceful, beautiful thing. The Egyptians believed that gold was literally the flesh of the gods, and so they put these death masks on people — something that would make the person as beautiful as possible in the afterlife. It's an extraordinary work.'' Other pieces include pendants, amulets, necklaces and other jewelry with smooth gold surfaces, delicate beadwork and inlaid semiprecious stones.
The two other sections of the exhibit are The Realm of the Gods, featuring statues and objects honoring some of the more than 700 deities who figured into Egyptian religion, and a full-scale re-creation of the burial chamber of Thutmose III. It's here, in the burial chamber, that visitors can see the text of the Amduat, the funerary text that helped usher royals from this life into the next one.
Everybody wants to see mummies
Impressive as The Quest for Immortality exhibit is, the Frist Center is expecting that visitors will be equally drawn to its accompanying exhibit of mummies on loan from several institutions. ''We felt like we shouldn't do this show without having a mummy exhibit, because people are very interested in mummification, and it has so much to do with the whole belief system,'' Scala says.
''We borrowed a mummy from the Michael C. Carlos Museum in Atlanta. It came with its coffin, and there's a mount that elevates the lid so you can see inside.'' Though there are some unwrapped mummies on view at other museums — perhaps most famously at the British Museum in London — the one at the Frist, Scala explains, will remain wrapped up tightly. ''The body inside the wrappings is a disturbed mass of jumbled bones, indicating that it received rough treatment before it was wrapped in linen.''
Accompanying the human mummy are mummies of animals on loan from the Metropolitan Museum in Manhattan, the Brooklyn Museum and the University of Memphis. ''This exhibit will also include a cat, a canine, an ibis and a hawk, raising the question: Why would the Egyptians have mummified animals — was it for sacred purposes or for having your pet with you in the afterlife, or maybe it was practice for the embalmers?''
Accompanying text will explain the process of mummification, and even if viewers won't be able to see an actual mummified body, Scala explains, there will be CT scans and X-rays offering a glimpse of what's under all that linen wrapping. There's also an animated ''fly through'' of a child mummy on view in the Rosicrucian Egyptian Museum in San Jose, Calif. The short video was constructed using 60,000 CT scans, allowing viewers to simulate the experience of looking at the inside of a mummy from top to bottom.
Getting the royal treatment
With its focus on Egyptian kings and queens, The Quest for Immortality deserves the royal treatment, and Frist Center exhibition designer Michael Brechner has provided just that with his tasteful exhibition design. Though he modestly insists that his work is entirely in service of the objects on view, it also goes a long way toward creating an immersive experience for viewers, drawing inspiration from the Egyptians' own finely attuned design sensibilities.
''With an exhibition like this, I feel like there's a mandate to create an atmosphere,'' Brechner explains. ''The Egyptians engaged their larger pieces of sculpture much as architecture, and so we're trying to create an atmosphere for that. At the entrance, behind the Colossal Head of Ramesses II, we've created a battered wall that angles back subtly. We've also raised our gallery walls to accommodate the size of this piece. It creates a more monumental presence.''
Throughout, trapezoidal entryways and gold finishes further help to establish a distinctively Egyptian environment. One of the most creative touches includes some trapezoidal cut-outs in the gallery walls. ''They're meant to be seen through, so you get glimpses of other galleries and don't so much feel like you're in a maze. There's also a kind of temple reference, with the narrow passageways and niches and ability to see from one area to another.''
Brechner also has drawn from the Egyptians' color schemes, bathing the gallery walls in tones of lapis lazuli, turquoise, terra cotta and sandy gold. But, again, he concludes, his charge is to create a setting for the viewer, not a distraction. ''When you're working with any antiquities, you're in awe of the forms that you're working with.''
That dual commitment to the viewer and to the artwork is emblematic of the Frist's relationship to the community as a whole. For executive director Susan Edwards, her greatest hope is that the whole city, in all its diversity, finds a way to see the exhibit. It's for this reason that the Frist Center makes a point of keeping admission free for visitors under the age of 18. ''The Quest for Immortality can be a life-changing experience,'' she says, ''because of the fact that it exposes us to another culture. This is especially true for young people who will have their first introduction to Egypt.''
That emphasis on accessibility is a key part of the institution's mission. ''Our mission at the Frist is to provide people with the opportunity to look at their world in new ways,'' Edwards says. ''Seeing the art of the world is educational in both active and passive ways, rewarding immediately and because it triggers an ongoing enthusiasm for learning. You can only learn so much from your visit, but you can come away with a passion for further investigation. After seeing this exhibition, I think we'll all pay closer attention to what's going on in Egypt, what's going on in Africa, what's going on in the Middle East.''
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