The vogue for world exhibitions in Europe and North America went hand-in-hand with the founding of more museums, replicating or expanding on the ‘‘universal survey’’ model of the Louvre or the British Museum (Duncan and Wallach 1980). In England, new museums included the Victoria and Albert Museum (founded as the South Kensington Museum in 1852), natural history museums engaged in the Darwinian enterprise (such as the Oxford University Museum, opened 1860), and museums established by local councils in county towns or boroughs after the Museum Act of 1845 (such as the Salford, Bolton, and Rochdale museums in the industrial north). These last were an amalgam, combining fine and decorative arts, local archaeology, Egyptian antiquities, and natural history. Like the Victoria and Albert Museum, the local museums had a practical goal of improving and increasing British manufacturing exports by exposing the public to past models of taste and technology (Burton 1999).
In the United States private initiatives by businessmen and civic leaders saw the founding of museums in major cities throughout the 1870s and 1880s: the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (both founded 1870), the Philadelphia Museum of Art (1876), the Art Institute of Chicago (1879), and the Detroit Institute of Arts (1885). Unlike European museums, all were run without government backing (Abt 2006: 130-2). These museums expressly concerned themselves with ‘‘fine arts,’’ but this did not preclude collecting Ancient Egyptian material - far from it; for the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and the Metropolitan Museum of Art both funded archaeological expeditions to Egypt in order to expand their collections. This successful tactic ensured Egypt’s importance in the museums, and, once up the steps and through the grand facade of the Metropolitan Museum, today’s visitor can still choose one of three axes: to the left for the Classical world, straight ahead and up more stairs for European art, and to the right for Ancient Egypt. Other areas - ethnographic, East Asian, modern - occupy spaces beyond or in between the main axes, mapping priorities in much the same way as the Louvre’s Rotunda of Mars had. The American ‘‘survey’’ museums could draw on the vast financial resources of collectors like J. P. Morgan in New York, or the Detroit businessman Charles Freer, who collected in the 1890s and 1900s with the firm intention of establishing a gallery in his name at the Smithsonian Institution (Gunter 2002). American universities also established museums and sponsored excavations, using the division of finds both to expand collections and promote academic research. The University of Pennsylvania Museum was founded in 1890, and the University of Chicago’s Oriental Institute and its museum in 1919, with funding from John D. Rockefeller, Jr. (N. Thomas 1995: 44-69). The Canadian Charles Currelly, who developed a passion for collecting while excavating in Egypt, founded the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto in 1914, with an explicitly typological approach to collecting and display (Currelly 2008).
In the new American museums, as in the Louvre, Ancient Egypt sat comfortably in a discourse of ‘‘art,’’ although some natural history-based museums also developed Egyptian collections, notably the Field Museum in Chicago (founded in 1893, in the wake of the Columbian exhibition) and the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh (founded 1896). In Britain, the new council-run museums slotted Egypt in between natural history specimens and local watercolours, as if the seventeenth-century art versus nature debate remained unresolved. In larger ‘‘survey’’ museums Ancient Egypt also sat alongside ethnographic collections, the two separate from, but related to, each other by dint of ‘‘otherness’’ in the time-arrested space of the museum. When hundreds of bronze plaques from the kingdom of Benin reached London in 1897, their display at the British Museum triggered public debate about Ancient Egypt’s link to West Africa; for it was thought that only the Ancient Egyptians, not West Africans, could be responsible for such skilled bronze-casting. The Egyptian department at the British Museum was thus mooted as a home for the bronzes, until internal pressure for greater recognition of ethnography helped keep them in the ethnography section, at that point attached to the Department of Medieval and British Antiquities (Coombes 1994: 37-8, 57-60).
For the conceptualization of Ancient Egypt, it was - and is - significant what kind of museum a collection belongs to, even more so than what that collection contains. Fine-arts and ethnographic or archaeology-based survey museums may attract similar visitors, but they elicit quite different responses (Bal 1996; Beard 1992: 506). The classification of collections and objects within museums likewise affects the construction of meaning, as the example of the Benin bronzes demonstrates. In the latter nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, many museums acted as what Bennett (2004) terms ‘‘evolutionary museums,’’ concerned with typologies as a tool for the classification of knowledge, and they applied this taxonomic approach to their administrative and gallery structures as well as their collections. When General Pitt Rivers offered his, largely ethnographic, collection to Oxford University in the 1880s, the Ashmolean Museum debated whether its archaeological collections could absorb material that did not seem to ‘‘fit’’ (Larson 2008). The deeply typologized and evolution-based Pitt Rivers collection became an independent museum instead, physically (and intellectually) attached to the University Museum of natural history - and both the Ashmolean and the Pitt Rivers continued to collect Ancient Egyptian material.
The professionalization of academic disciplines also influenced the classification of museums and collections (and vice versa). For instance, the recognition of an independent Egyptian Department at the British Museum immediately predated the founding of Egyptology posts at University College London in 1892, Oxford University in 1901, and the University of Liverpool in 1906 (Champion 2003a), and
Oxford’s debate about the Pitt Rivers collection coincided with the establishment of anthropology as a subject of study (Larson 2008). In Britain, university education became the route to a university career, while the museum-based professions - curators, technicians, educators - emerged along a career path that did not require university training. As early as 1850 the British Museum emphasized that its staff received training on-the-job, as it were (Moser 2006: 175-7). From Birch and Budge at the British Museum, to Winifred Crompton, who was responsible for the Egyptian collection in Manchester from 1912 to 1932, museum work in Egyptology was separate from ‘‘academic’’ work, and in terms of professional status university teaching positions rapidly surpassed the museums that had helped establish them. The effect of this divergent professionalization has had a long tail: when women qualified in Egyptology in larger numbers, in the 1960s and 1970s, they became disproportionately represented in museums rather than universities, and there remains a feeling among many Egyptology curators that university colleagues judge them ‘‘second class’’ in academic terms (Schulz 2003:95; cf. discussions in Haxthausen 2002).
The growth in archaeology was the biggest influence on Egyptian collections and displays around the world in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Mariette's excavations at the Serapeum of Memphis added around 7000 objects to the Louvre, and French museums benefited from the division of finds from excavations carried out by the Institut francais d’archeologie orientale (IFAO), founded in Cairo in 1880. Based in London, and reliant on the support ofprivate individuals and museum subscriptions, the Egypt Exploration Fund (now Society) was founded in 1882 to support the work of Petrie and commission other archaeologists to work in Egypt, such as Edouard Naville (James 1982). Again, the partage system served museum collections well, with EEF finds distributed to places as far-flung as Kyoto, Boston, and Dublin. The local council museums in Britain received particular attention: Bolton, Norwich, Brighton, and many others swelled with predynastic pottery and Late Period shabti figures, and the Museums Journal, which started to publish in 1901, regularly included accession notices for EEF material. As a result, a 2006 survey counted almost 200 public collections of Egyptian antiquities in the United Kingdom (Stephens 2008).
The nature of the burgeoning, archaeology-derived collections altered yet again the Ancient Egypt formulated in museum displays. Museums like the British Museum also devoted greater resources to active collecting and devised strategies to fill perceived gaps or redistribute duplicates (Moser 2006: 171). Museums could display objects according to the more detailed historical and chronological information that became available and place excavated material in an archaeological context. More numerous and discursive labeling became the fashion, and exhaustive guidebooks or exhibition checklists were the norm. On a practical level museums needed more storage and display space to accommodate growing collections; unwieldy stonework and coffins, pottery and sherd collections, plus multiple small objects (amulets, scarabs), all presented logistical difficulties in terms of cataloguing, storage, and exhibition mounts, as they do today. The number of small-scale artefacts meant that vitrines could be packed with objects, the implication being that the quantity of material on display was directly proportional to the quantity of information visitors would absorb. Here was the taxonomic principle at work: overwhelming visual evidence, appropriately ordered and on view, would educate the masses.
Figure 49.3 The new Egyptian gallery in the 1912 extension to the Manchester Museum, with Winifred Crompton (in dark skirt and tie) standing next to the ‘‘Two Brothers’’ vitrines. Copyright The Manchester Museum/University of Manchester.
To accommodate their archaeological acquisitions, museums needed more space, and private initiative often funded the space as well as the actual collecting. In 1911, the Manchester Museum announced construction of a new block, paid for by Jesse Haworth; joined to the existing museum building by a bridge, the new block would display the collection Haworth had donated to the University of Manchester, the promise of financial support having finally overcome the university’s reluctance. The plans accommodated a galleried display space for Egyptian antiquities, with offices for Egyptology and geology occupying the lower floors (Museums Journal 11, 1911, 179-80; Museums Journal 12,1912,172-7). Opened in 1912, with a keynote speech by Petrie, the gallery was light and airy, with displays arranged in chronological order, under Winifred Crompton’s supervision (figure 49.3).
Chronological displays coexisted with thematic or aesthetic displays in many institutions, the most common thematic division being made between ‘‘daily life’’ and funerary practices. Although research has made the point that almost all ‘‘funerary’’ objects (the exception being coffins and canopic jars) have also been found in the context of quotidian religious practices (Pinch 2003), the distinction between death and life manifests itself in most museums today. This reinforces the concept of Egyptian culture as obsessed with death and the dead, which in turn feeds the Western public’s fascination with Egypt. Where space permits, many museums devote a specific gallery to funerary themes (the Ny Carlsberg Glyptothek, Manchester Museum, and Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, to name three), often decorating the space with dark walls, lower ceilings, and reduced lighting that creates the imagined feel of a tomb. The need to protect organic materials with low lux-levels is secondary and could be achieved in another way. Visitors may also need to pass through other galleries, or descend ramps and stairs, to reach the funerary display, recreating the hero-myth of the archaeologist discovering a burial (cf. MacDonald 2003: 89-90). Some museum professionals feel that a funerary display is essential, given the popularity of the subject, while others aver, rather disingenuously, that Egyptian objects function in museums just as they did in tombs, by ensuring the resurrection of the dead (e. g. Wildung 1995).
In current museological practice, thematic arrangements have gained favour in part because research suggests that visitors are unfamiliar with historical concepts and the expression of dates (MacDonald 2003: 96-8). Although a sharp contrast to the date-and data-packed labels of earlier practice, the move away from chronological display may be especially suited to museums and the timeless, unchanging Egypt they project. Museums are heterotopias, in Foucault’s term, where ‘‘time never stops building up and topping its own summit’’:
[T]he idea of constituting a place of all times that is itself outside of time and inaccessible to its ravages, the project of organizing in this way a sort of perpetual and indefinite accumulation of time in an immobile place, this whole idea belongs to our modernity. (Foucault 2004: 377)
In conversation with museum staff, visitors today will often ask how old an object is, and whether the answer is two, three, four, or five thousand years, the response is one of amazement that anything could last so long. Faced with Ancient Egyptian objects in the museum, nineteenth-century visitors perhaps were not so different from such visitors; for both experience an ‘‘Ancient Egypt’’ that circulates as a self-contained entity far removed in both time and space. Indeed, museums collapse both time and space through categories of display: Ancient Egypt ‘‘ends’’ variously at the Roman, Christian, or Islamic periods, and it occupies the Nile Valley, featured on gallery maps without reference to other geographical areas (Fazzini 1995; MacDonald 2003: 98-9). Museums have felt the need to create distinct and separate displays to present anything beyond these time and space boundaries, such as the Predynastic Period, or material from southern Egypt and Sudan.
The self-containment of Egypt, left floating physically and ideologically between Africa, the Middle East, and the Mediterranean, has had repercussions for conceptions of the Ancient Egyptians as people. Influenced by stage and cinema enactments, as well as museum representations, the popular Western idea of what Egyptians looked like has favoured a vaguely southern Mediterranean appearance, not unlike that seen in some mummy portraits (figure 49.1). Winifred Brunton, a trained artist and wife of British Egyptologist Guy Brunton, painted richly imagined, and quite pale-skinned, portraits on ivory depicting the Egyptian kings and queens, which were published in the 1920s (Brunton 1924, 1929) and remain popular enough today for them to be available as a screensaver. Archaeology had brought such intimate objects to light - combs and cosmetics, clothing and tools - that viewers could not help but imagine the physical appearance of these objects’ owners. But, concomitantly, Egypt held a particular lure for anyone interested in developing schemes of evolution and racial classification, sparking a debate that began in the late nineteenth century and continues in the present.
World History
