Tutankhamun
Jul. 18th, 2011 12:36 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
catsidheThe exhibition is excellent, if crowded. And that's with a careful management of flow. It did not help that the girls had to fight to be able to see most things. People were, IMO, unconscionably rude in standing front and center before the exhibits, and not even acknowledging the two girls politely asking to be allowed through the wall of cud-chewing tourists so that they could see it too.
It helped, I suspect, to already have a good idea what I was looking at before I arrived. The display notes were succinct to the point of being laconic, although specifically useful, especially to answer the interminable questions of “what's that, daddy?”. (Again: having the background knowledge was the difference between knowing what something was and what it meant: It's all well and good to know that this is a statue of Sekhmet, but who was Sekhmet? Or Nephthys, or Horus?) The wall-mounted info was not always so useful, although there was one video which described how to read Tutankhamun's two names[0] which was both informative and useful.
Mimdancer, her sister and mother and I spent our time half looking at the exhibits and marvelling thereat, and half explaining to the girls what they were looking at. In the process, I think we explained quite a lot to the people around who weren't zombified by the voices of Omar Sharif and Zahi Hawass in their ears for the bargain price of $7.50. And I suspect that some of what we were explaining was not in the tape: what is faience, for example; what pigments were used[1]; why there were two statues of the same person and why the crowns were different on each. One lady complemented me on the education the girls were getting, and asked why Tut's tomb wasn't found until now, and received a short lecture on the political economy of tomb robbery and the psychodynamics of not sticking all your treasure under a heap of stone big enough to be seen from the next country over. Also of the catastrophic inbreeding of Tut and his family, and the takeover of the country by Ay, and the ending of the dynasty not long thereafter.
I did also greatly appreciate photos of the tomb as found, near some of the objects depicted therein. It somehow made it more real, and tied it together from a collection of stuff (albeit very shiny stuff) to a vignette of a place, and an event, and of a moment of history.
And then we exited into the gift shop.
Feh. A greater collection of overpriced tat I never hope to see again. The catalogue (at $65) was a National Geographic production, and catered to the shiny, not the informative. As did all the other glossy papered books there, every single one of them written or co-written by Zahi Hawass. And the overpriced coin-belts for belly dancing (several layers of wrong, there), and the glass baubles for some reason, and the official Zahi Hawass branded hats, and the photos you could buy of yourself standing in the line, digitally superimposed upon a photo of a sarcophagus, like the green-screen videos of you flying like superman, and almost as convincing. It really was the Zahi Hawass Gift Shop, Featuring Tutankhamun.
It would have been the perfect place to have even a small section of more academic texts, introductions to Hieroglyphics, translations of the Book of the Dead, histories, anything. No, what was there was, after being exposed to all these ancient and beautiful things, was expensive tchotchkes, shiny baubles and tat. There were computer booths set up to transliterate your name into sloppily spelled and badly-rendered hieroglyphics, but nothing to enable you to read them back again after.
I got the girls each a "mummy excavation kit", with plastic mummy parts encased in a clay-ey sand brick, which they spent a happy few hours demolishing. And I got a ruler with a template for hieroglyphs matched to Latin letters, and the girls spent another hour or so spelling their names in hieroglyphics. (Well, the transliterations are naive at best, and downright wrong in places, but what's important is the girls were interested and actively involved.)
[0] These being his personal name ‘Tutankhamun’, and his kingly name ‘Nebkheferure’. The latter I particularly appreciated, because 1. I didn't know about his kingly name before, and 2. I can now read that name: It is the sundisk ‘Re’, a scarab ‘kefer’, three short lines being the plural marker ‘-w’, and the basket ‘neb’. ‘Neb-kefer.w-re’. It translates as “Re is the Lord of Manifestations”. If you were curious.
[1] It looked to me like white clay, red ochre, turquoise, lapis and verdigris. I stand to be corrected.
It helped, I suspect, to already have a good idea what I was looking at before I arrived. The display notes were succinct to the point of being laconic, although specifically useful, especially to answer the interminable questions of “what's that, daddy?”. (Again: having the background knowledge was the difference between knowing what something was and what it meant: It's all well and good to know that this is a statue of Sekhmet, but who was Sekhmet? Or Nephthys, or Horus?) The wall-mounted info was not always so useful, although there was one video which described how to read Tutankhamun's two names[0] which was both informative and useful.
Mimdancer, her sister and mother and I spent our time half looking at the exhibits and marvelling thereat, and half explaining to the girls what they were looking at. In the process, I think we explained quite a lot to the people around who weren't zombified by the voices of Omar Sharif and Zahi Hawass in their ears for the bargain price of $7.50. And I suspect that some of what we were explaining was not in the tape: what is faience, for example; what pigments were used[1]; why there were two statues of the same person and why the crowns were different on each. One lady complemented me on the education the girls were getting, and asked why Tut's tomb wasn't found until now, and received a short lecture on the political economy of tomb robbery and the psychodynamics of not sticking all your treasure under a heap of stone big enough to be seen from the next country over. Also of the catastrophic inbreeding of Tut and his family, and the takeover of the country by Ay, and the ending of the dynasty not long thereafter.
I did also greatly appreciate photos of the tomb as found, near some of the objects depicted therein. It somehow made it more real, and tied it together from a collection of stuff (albeit very shiny stuff) to a vignette of a place, and an event, and of a moment of history.
And then we exited into the gift shop.
Feh. A greater collection of overpriced tat I never hope to see again. The catalogue (at $65) was a National Geographic production, and catered to the shiny, not the informative. As did all the other glossy papered books there, every single one of them written or co-written by Zahi Hawass. And the overpriced coin-belts for belly dancing (several layers of wrong, there), and the glass baubles for some reason, and the official Zahi Hawass branded hats, and the photos you could buy of yourself standing in the line, digitally superimposed upon a photo of a sarcophagus, like the green-screen videos of you flying like superman, and almost as convincing. It really was the Zahi Hawass Gift Shop, Featuring Tutankhamun.
It would have been the perfect place to have even a small section of more academic texts, introductions to Hieroglyphics, translations of the Book of the Dead, histories, anything. No, what was there was, after being exposed to all these ancient and beautiful things, was expensive tchotchkes, shiny baubles and tat. There were computer booths set up to transliterate your name into sloppily spelled and badly-rendered hieroglyphics, but nothing to enable you to read them back again after.
I got the girls each a "mummy excavation kit", with plastic mummy parts encased in a clay-ey sand brick, which they spent a happy few hours demolishing. And I got a ruler with a template for hieroglyphs matched to Latin letters, and the girls spent another hour or so spelling their names in hieroglyphics. (Well, the transliterations are naive at best, and downright wrong in places, but what's important is the girls were interested and actively involved.)
[0] These being his personal name ‘Tutankhamun’, and his kingly name ‘Nebkheferure’. The latter I particularly appreciated, because 1. I didn't know about his kingly name before, and 2. I can now read that name: It is the sundisk ‘Re’, a scarab ‘kefer’, three short lines being the plural marker ‘-w’, and the basket ‘neb’. ‘Neb-kefer.w-re’. It translates as “Re is the Lord of Manifestations”. If you were curious.
[1] It looked to me like white clay, red ochre, turquoise, lapis and verdigris. I stand to be corrected.