Introduction

Writing in his journal in February 1888, the archaeologist Flinders Petrie considered the vividly naturalistic paintings he had just discovered in the Hawara necropolis, which were set into the wrappings of Roman Period mummies (figure 49.1):

I have the notion — beside any special exhibition that we make of these — that it would be a grand joke to send in all the paintings that I bring home to the winter exhibition of Old Masters at Burlington House.

Since 1869, Burlington House in London’s Piccadilly had been home to Britain’s premier body of artists, the Royal Academy. Founded in 1768, the Royal Academy organized summer exhibitions of contemporary British painting and, from 1870, made good use of its new premises with an additional winter exhibition of Old Master paintings on loan from British collections. Conservative in taste and scope, these exhibitions were popular enough to support the Academy’s schools and running costs (Fenton 2005).

Diagonally across the street from Burlington House, opposite Old Bond Street, stood a very different exhibition venue: the Egyptian Hall. William Bullock constructed this venue, with its Egyptian revival facade, in 1812 to house ‘‘Bullock’s Museum,’’ his collection of assorted antiquities, ethnographic curios, and natural history objects inspired by the ‘‘cabinets of curiosities’’ of old. By 1816, however, Bullock had abandoned the permanent display and instead turned his ‘‘museum’’ into a space for changing exhibitions that would bring the world to Britain (Pearce 2008; Yanni 2005: 26-8; Werner 2003: 82-6). Laplanders and their reindeer, the arts of Mexico, and Giovanni Belzoni’s reconstruction of the tomb of Sety I were popular, reasonably priced, and open to the entire public. Belzoni’s facsimiles of the Sety I tomb were part of a selling exhibition, albeit not a very successful one, with a range of antiquities and models of tombs and temples available for purchase (Pearce 2000).

Figure 49.1 Portrait of a woman, from Petrie’s 1888 season at Hawara. British Museum EA 74706; formerly National Gallery 1263. Copyright the Trustees of the British Museum.

In the late 1840s and 1850s, the Egyptian Hall featured a long-running ‘‘new and splendid MOVING PANORAMA of the NILE, exhibiting the whole of the stupendous works of Antiquity now remaining on its banks,’’ which were based on the paintings of Joseph Bonomi and publicized in middle-class magazines like Art-Journal. By the late nineteenth century the Egyptian Hall alternated between exhibitions and performances, such as magic demonstrations, and advertised itself accordingly as ‘‘England’s home of mystery and the arcane’’ (Montserrat 1998).

In the end, it was to the Egyptian Hall, not Burlington House, that Petrie took the panel portraits, funerary masks, and shrouded mummies he brought to England from Hawara, under the terms of the division of finds permitted foreign excavators in Egypt at that time. Petrie relied on income from subscriptions (in return for a share of finds), public lectures, and popular books to fund further excavations and scholarly publications, and the Egyptian Hall - at once emporium and museum - was deemed a fitting venue. The Hawara finds went on display in June and July 1888, within months of their discovery. The paintings that Petrie had privately likened to Old Masters caught the attention of the anonymous reviewer in the Illustrated London News, who reached a similar conclusion and name-checked the Royal Academician Leighton, as well as the French painter Bouguereau, both of whom favoured sentimentalized Classical themes:

These heads are by various artists, some of them wielding a brush as vigorous as Velasquez, others a pencil as delicate and refined as that of Sir Frederick Leighton or Bouguereau. There is no mistaking the fact that they are all veritable portraits of men and women who have been coffined these seventeen centuries. (quoted in Montserrat 1998: 174)

Petrie distributed his share of the Hawara mummy portraits to his financial backers, who included institutions like the Ashmolean Museum as well as wealthy individuals, such as railway scion Henry Martyn Kennard and Manchester cotton merchant Jesse Haworth. He also kept a selection for his own collection, which, as ‘‘The Petrie Collection,’’ was sold to University College London during his lifetime. Among the national collections the British Museum received material that was catalogued in either the Egyptian or the Greek and Roman Departments, based on judgements about the cultural character of the objects: mummies belonged to the Egyptian Department, for instance. But more than a dozen portraits separated from their mummies, like that illustrated in figure 49.1, were given instead to the National Gallery in Trafalgar Square - the home of the nation’s Old Master paintings. Thus Petrie almost had his ‘‘grand joke,’’ although the mummy portraits were physically moved to the British Museum in the 1930s (followed by a transfer of title in 1994).

The collection history of the Hawara portraits follows a telling trajectory away from Egypt, the country in which they were made, used, and found. It is both a physical and a conceptual divide; for the portraits became first exotic (Egyptian Hall), then European (National Gallery), and finally settled somewhere between the two, in a leading repository of both Egyptian and classical antiquities. The difficulty of slotting the mummy portraits into an established taxonomy, whether in the 1880s or the 1990s, was, in part, to do with their ‘‘lifelike’’ representation of human physiognomy and their perceived affinity with the easel paintings familiar from a Renaissance and later European context. But such troubled and troubling taxonomies chiefly result from an ambiguity about Egypt itself. Museums confronted a problem of their own making: how to slot Egypt into Western categories of knowledge.

Petrie’s jocular aside about the discoveries at Hawara reveals the extent to which Egyptian art and archaeology were enmeshed in the ‘‘exhibitionary complex’’ of the nineteenth century. In the industrializing, increasingly democratic societies of Europe, an array of institutions emerged which enshrined power and knowledge relations based around visual display, including the museum, amusement park, department store, and venues like the Great Exhibition of 1851 (Bennett 1988). As Petrie was well aware, the material remains of Ancient Egypt, together with representations of Egypt in the form of models, facsimiles, photographs, and written words, had played a key role in exhibitions throughout the nineteenth century. Egypt was, in fact, at the heart of developments not only in the exhibition and museum sphere, but also in the definition and professionalization of academic disciplines like archaeology and Egyptology, to the extent that Petrie himself would be dubbed ‘‘the father of Egyptian archaeology’’ and inaugurate a University College London chair, the first of its kind in Britain.

These developments, and debates about where Ancient Egypt belonged in the new exhibitionary order, took place in tandem with the development of Ottoman Egypt as a colonized territory, whose infrastructure supported the cultivation and export of raw cotton foremost, and tourism and archaeology secondarily (Mitchell 1989, 2004). Museums provided a space where the fruits of colonial contact - art, artefacts, ‘‘knowledge’’ of the colonized country - could be ordered and arranged to create knowledge of oneself and one’s own society, the colonizer. To this end, museums displayed objects in categories presented as intuitive (Europe or other? painting or sculpture? early or late?), little acknowledging their own role in the creation and promulgation of these categories. For a European audience familiar with an Ancient Egypt found in the Bible, or in Greek and Latin authors, museums offered an opportunity to see the monuments, craftwork, and even human bodies of antiquity in person. This powerful and power-driven act of seeing, within the wider institutional setting of the museum, constructed multiple ‘‘Ancient Egypts’’ whose presence continues to resonate, more than a century after Petrie displayed Egypt on the ‘‘arcane’’ side of Piccadilly.

This chapter considers how museums conceptualize and construct Ancient Egypt through practices of collecting, cataloguing, display, interpretation, and education. It traces historical developments in museum practice as well as examining contemporary issues. Analysis of museum histories and relevant cultural theory is marked by its absence from Egyptology, despite the centrality of museum collections in academic research and the number of trained Egyptologists employed by museums. Where Egyptologists have explicitly addressed the subject of Ancient Egypt in museums, the publications favour positivist accounts of‘‘discovery’’ or hagiographic descriptions of collectors, revealing little or no engagement with the large body of critical and museological literature (for which see the summary in Preziosi and Farago 2004: xxi-xxiv). Originating outside the discipline of Egyptology, recent books by Reid (2003), Moser (2006), and Colla (2007) bring a more nuanced reading to the cultural undercurrents that shaped, and were shaped by, museum collections of Egyptian antiquities. By drawing on such literature and using specific examples of museum practice, this chapter explores the Ancient Egypts found in the vitrines, sculpture galleries, storerooms, and gift shops of that unreservedly modern institution, the museum.