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Egyptian heroines on show
Viewpoint
Tuesday August 26th 2008
An exhibition throwing new light on the reigns of Egypt's ancient queens is on show at Monaco's Grimaldi Forum. Grégoire Allix reports in Le Monde
Tuesday August 26th 2008
A display at the Queens of Egypt exhibition in Monaco. Photograph: Grimaldi Forum
In the summer of 2007 the Grimaldi Forum in Monaco devoted a lavish exhibition to the memory of Princess Grace. Pursuing its policy of organising spectacular and costly summer exhibitions, the forum currently offers a show devoted to the "Queens of Egypt", which covers an area of 4,000 square metres and cost $4.2m to stage. Visitors are plunged into 3,000 years of Egyptian antiquity covering the reigns of Nefertiti, Cleopatra and many other queens. Laudably, the exhibition aims to throw new light on a little explored aspect of Egyptology: the role of women in the upper reaches of power.
In organising the show, Christine Ziegler, who was honorary chief curator of the department of Egyptian antiquities at the Louvre Museum in Paris until 2007, has tried "to construct a discourse on a complex subject that is both scholarly and intelligible to the great majority of people". Scholarly but accessible? The show strives constantly, but not always successfully, to strike a balance between the two.
While there is some sense in resorting to papier-mâché when evoking the myth of Cleopatra and Hollywood films, elsewhere the top-heavy design rather swamps the delicately wrought treasures brought together by Ziegler in her bid to bring her heroines to life. These include, in addition to other less well-known queens, Hatshepsut, whose face, painted in red on limestone, dates from 1479-1458BC; Nefertiti, whose face, sculpted in stone around 1350BC, radiates a very modern charm; and Cleopatra, immortalised as a Greek beauty, but minus her nose, in a 30BC marble.
Motherhood is depicted in some moving pieces, such as a translucent alabaster statuette of the queen mother, Ankhenesmeryre, holding her son Pepy II, who became king at the age of six, on her lap (circa 2246-2152BC). But it is women’s relationship with power and their social role that form the key element of the show. That role was performed in various settings: the pharaoh’s palace, the temple of the divine female worshippers of Amon, who often included the king’s daughters, or secluded harems, which were perfect for plotting. "Harems were not places of seclusion, as they were in the east, but vast farms run by men, whose income went to secondary wives and their households," Ziegler notes.
She believes that women enjoyed an unusual position in ancient Egypt. "Monogamy was the rule for ordinary subjects. Women... were allowed to work, own property and bequeath it, and they could be priestesses." But royalty was a masculine preserve. Only a very few, like Hatshepsut or Cleopatra, succeeded in rising to the rank of pharaoh and ruling in their own name.
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