Egypt in the Western imagination

Egypt in the Western imagination has loomed large from the very first written texts in the Greek and Hebrew traditions. Egypt was already immemorially ancient to outsiders, and the idea of Egypt as a figment of the Western imagination has continued to be at least as influential in the history of ideas as the actual historical Egypt itself. All Egyptian culture was transmitted through the lens of Hellenistic conceptions of it, until the decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphics by Champollion in the 1820s.

After Late Antiquity, the Biblical image of Egypt as the land of enslavement for the Hebrews predominated, and "Pharaoh" became a synonym for despotism and oppression.

However, Enlightenment thinking and colonialist explorations in the late 18th century renewed interest in ancient Egypt as both a model for, and the exotic alternative to, Western culture.

Contents1 Antiquity
1.1 Classical texts
1.2 Bible
2 Middle Ages and Renaissance
3 18th century
4 19th century
5 20th century
6 21st century
7 See also
8 Notes
9 Bibliography



Antiquity
Classical texts
Herodotus, in his Histories, Book II, gives a detailed if over-romantic and imaginative description of ancient Egypt. He praises peasants' preservation of history through oral tradition, and Egyptians' piety. He assumes Egypt to be the birthplace of religion, and Greek religion to be directly descended from it. He lists the many animals that Egypt is home to, including the mythical phoenix and winged serpent, and gives inaccurate descriptions of the hippopotamus and horned viper.


Bible
Egypt is mentioned 611 times in the Bible, the first time in Genesis 12:10, the last in Revelation 11:8. [1].


Middle Ages and Renaissance
Following the Muslim conquest of Egypt, the West lost direct contact with Egypt and its culture. In Medieval Europe, Egypt was depicted primarily in the illustration and interpretation of the biblical accounts. These illustrations were often quite fanciful, as the iconography and style of ancient Egyptian art, architecture and costume were largeley unknown in the West. Biblical hermeneutics were primarily theological in nature, and had little to do with historical investigations. Throughout the Middle Ages “mummy,” made by pounding mummified bodies, was a standard product of apothecary shops.[2]

During the Renaissance, the German Jesuit scholar Athanasius Kircher gave a fanciful allegorical "decipherment" of hieroglyphs, and Egypt was thought of as a source of ancient mystic or occult wisdom.

This short section requires expansion.


18th century
The 18th century witnessed the rise of a first authentically historicist imagination, one that attempted to picture the cultures of the distant past as truly different in kind, not merely in curious detail and superstitious idolatry. In an atmosphere of antiquarian interest, a sense arose that ancient knowledge was somehow embodied in Egyptian monuments and lore. An Egyptian imagery pervaded the European Freemasonry of the time and its imagery, such as the eye on the pyramid — still depicted on the Great Seal of the United States (1782), which appears on the American dollar bill — and the Egyptian references in Mozart's Masonic-themed Die Zauberflöte (The Magic Flute, 1791).

The revival of curiosity about the Antique world, seen through written documents, spurred the publication of a collection of Greek texts that had been assembled in Late Antiquity, which were published as the corpus of works of Hermes Trismegistus. But the broken ruins that appeared in settings of the newly prominent iconic episode of the "Rest on the Flight into Egypt" were always of Roman character.

With historicism came the first fictions set in the Egypt of the imagination. Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra had been set partly in Alexandria, but its protagonists were noble and universal, and Shakespeare had not been concerned to evoke local color.


Modern Antiques: British caricaturist Thomas Rowlandson's 1806 satire on the craze for things ancient-Egyptian after Napoleon's invasion.The culture of Romanticism embraced every exotic locale, and its rise in the popular imagination happened to coincide with Napoleon's failed Egyptian campaign. A modern "Battle of the Nile" could hardly fail to stir renewed curiosity about Egypt beyond the figure of Cleopatra. At virtually the same moment, tarot captured the imagination of the Frenchman Antoine Court de Gebelin, who brought it to European attention, giving it occult and mystical qualities, which could best be expressed by attributing to it the keys to the occult knowledge of Egypt.


19th century
Further information: Egyptomania
On the most popular 19th-century level, all of ancient Egypt was reduced in the European imagination to the Nile, the Pyramids and the Great Sphinx in a setting of sand, characterized on a more literary level in the English poet Shelley's "Ozymandias" (1818):

round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.


The American John Martin's Seventh Plague of Egypt (1828), in a widely popular engraving, set the Biblical plague in the Hellenistic harbor of Alexandria.
The entrance to the Egyptian Avenue, Highgrove CemeteryEgyptian Revival architecture extended the repertory of classical design explored by the Neoclassical movement and widened the decorative vocabulary that could be drawn upon. The well-known Egyptian cult of the dead inspired the Egyptian Revival themes first employed in Highgrove Cemetery, near London, which was opened in 1839 by a company founded by the designer-entrepreneur Stephen Geary ((1797-1854); its architectural features, which included a 'Gothic Catacomb' as well as an 'Egyptian Avenue', were brought to public attention once more by James Stevens Curl.[3]

Ancient Egypt provided the setting for the Italian composer Verdi's stately 1871 opera Aida, commissioned by the Europeanized Khedive for premiere in Cairo.

In 1895 the Polish writer Bolesław Prus completed his only historical novel, Pharaoh, a study of mechanisms of political power, described against the backdrop of the fall of the Twentieth Dynasty and the New Kingdom. It is, at the same time, one of the most compelling literary reconstructions of life at every level of ancient Egyptian society. In 1966 the novel was adapted as a Polish feature film.[4]


20th century
Further information: Egyptomania
In 1912, the discovery of an exquisite painted limestone bust of Nefertiti, unearthed from its sculptor's workshop near the royal city of Amarna, added the first new celebrity of Egypt. The bust, now in Berlin's Egyptian Museum became so famous through the medium of photography that it became the most familiar, most copied work of ancient Egyptian sculpture; Nefertiti's strong-featured profile was a major influence on the new ideals of feminine beauty of the 20th century.


Nefertiti. Bust in Egyptian Museum, Berlin.The 1922 discovery of the unlooted tomb of Pharaoh Tutankhamun introduced a new celebrity to join Nefertiti — "King Tut." The tomb's spectacular treasures influenced Art-Deco design vocabulary. Also, for many years there persisted rumors, probably tabloid-inspired, of a "curse"; the rumors focused on the alleged premature deaths of some of those who had first entered the tomb. A recent study of journals and death records, however, indicates no statistical difference between the ages at death of those who had entered the tomb and of expedition members who had not; indeed, most of the individuals lived past age 70. The idea of a "mummy's curse" inspired films such as The Mummy, starring Boris Karloff, which popularized the idea of ancient Egyptian mummies reanimating as monsters.

Hollywood's Egypt is a major contributor to the Egypt of modern culture. The cinematic spectacle of Egypt climaxed in sequences of Cecil B. deMille's The Ten Commandments (1956) and in Jeanne Crain's Nefertiti in the 1961 Italian Cinecittà production of Queen of the Nile, and collapsed with the failure of Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor in Cleopatra (1963). The 1966 Polish film adaptation of Bolesław Prus' novel, Pharaoh, while spectacular, left something to be desired.

In 1978, Tutankhamun was commemorated in the whimsical song, King Tut, by American comedian Steve Martin.

A best-selling series of novels by French author and Egyptologist Christian Jacq was inspired by the life of Pharaoh Ramses II ("the Great").


21st century
HBO's miniseries Rome features several episodes set in Greco-Roman Egypt. The faithful reconstructions of an ancient Egyptian court (as opposed to the historically correct Hellenistic culture) were built in Rome's Cinecitta Studios. The series depicts dramatized accounts of the relations among Cleopatra, Ptolemy XIII, Julius Caesar and Mark Antony. Cleopatra is played by Lyndsey Marshal, and much of the second season is dedicated to events building up to the famous suicides of Cleopatra and her lover Mark Antony in 30 BCE.