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E-book Egyptian Things : Translating Egypt to Early Imperial Rome

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Penilaian

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The Temple of Dendur stands grandly in New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art (fig. 1). Reflecting pools and cool tan-marble floors stylishly evoke the Nile and its surroundings; an enormous semi-translucent ceiling remains a relic of 1970s mod-ernism; a vast wall of glass looks out to Central Park and E. Eighty-Fourth Street. All frame the Egyptian temple’s relocation to the former Sackler Wing as a feat so grand that the original temple and its construction look pedestrian. Nominally, the room complements the temple, suggesting an original Egyptian setting. But the soaring space, large reflecting pools, and majestic windows become the object of admiration. We are asked to stand in awe of the imperial project of relocation that allowed an ancient temple to look so small against its modern exhibition. Lyndon Johnson’s letter to the museum announcing that it would house the temple, which had been gifted to the United States after its help in the Aswan High Dam Project, proudly concludes that the temple’s move to New York “will protect it and make it available to millions of Americans in a setting appropriate to its character.”1A setting appropriate to its character, indeed. To most visitors, the Temple of Dendur tidily evokes a transhistorical model of an Egyptian temple. The temporal disjoin between it and the statues of Amenhotep III sitting before it—over 1300 years!—certainly adds to this sense of nebulous timelessness. But the temple is decidedly of Roman-Egyptian origin. It was built in 10 bce by the emperor Augus-tus and erected just south of Egypt’s southern border. This space, long the fron-tier of Egypt and Nubia, became a place where Roman power and its cooption of Egyptian iconography of empire were formalized. On its walls (fig. 2), the emperor himself, in traditional pharaonic regalia, burns incense for a local Nubian chief-tain’s deified sons and the pantheon of Egyptian gods—Isis, Osiris, Thoth, Horus, and Hathor—to whom the temple is dedicated.In the Temple of Dendur, Augustus perpetuates the visual language of Egyp-tian religion to associate Roman power with the Egyptian forms of imperial self-styling that long preceded it. But precious little of this context has made the trip to the Metropolitan Museum, where the temple’s original semantics are now con-densed into a bare sign of Egyptian religion that has been improbably and magnif-icently hauled off to New York. At the Met, the Temple of Dendur inevitably loses much of the spatial and temporal liminality that makes it such an atypical typical Egyptian temple.That museumgoers in New York can look on Augustus worshipping Isis, Tefnut, Horus, and other animal-headed gods is at first strange.

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Ketersediaan

Informasi Detail

Judul Seri

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No. Panggil

732.8 KEL e

Penerbit

USA : University of California Press., 2024

Deskripsi Fisik

261 hlm

Bahasa

English

ISBN/ISSN

9780520402195

Klasifikasi

732.8

Tipe Isi

text

Tipe Media

computer

Tipe Pembawa

online resource

Edisi

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Subjek

Sculpture of Ancient Egypt

Info Detail Spesifik

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Pernyataan Tanggungjawab

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Versi lain/terkait

Lampiran Berkas

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