HYPERPYRUS archive - Egyptomania

Noreen Doyle

Egyptology Nautical Archaeology Fiction

Home

Fiction

Short Stories in Print

Anthologies

Scholarship

Scholarly Publications

Nonfiction

Nonfiction for Kids

Photography
(coming soon!)

HYPERPYRUS
THE HYPERPYRUS ARCHIVES: Egyptomania

5 August 2007
Sunday
The Blog Starts in the Toilet
Subject: Egyptomania

Imagine you're a modern Chinese architect. Your assignment: design an enormous public toilet facility on Beijing's Foreigners Street. With more than 1,000 stalls in more than 32,000 square feet, it will possibly be the largest in the world. Make it opulent. Make it unforgettable. Make it... Egyptian?

Yes, this four-story building called "Sunshine Toilet," whose urinals include some shaped like crocodiles, opened in July with an Egyptian facade. A photograph displayed on The Daily Page, which might (or might not) be of the facade, shows a gold wall with registers of divinities, flanked by lotiform columns sporting Anubis, god of the dead, and Hathor, goddess of love. And if reflecting upon these details aren't enough to occupy you while you're attending to business, there are televisions, too. (No reports, alas, that they're running The Prince of Egypt or Cleopatra.)

News reports also don't convey any reason for this peculiar 21st century invocation of the Egyptian Revival. In the United States, 150 to 200 years ago, symbolism tended to lurk behind the decision to use Egyptian architectural motifs. This resulted in such buildings as New York City's House of Justice and House of Detention, better known as "the Tombs." Quite unlike the 21st-century Sunshine Toilet, in the early 19th century the Egyptian style was viewed as "having few and bold details and, consequently, not requiring expensive workmanship or materials," to quote William J. Short, writing in 1835. The following year, John Dawson offered that "The Egyptian style, from the largeness of its parts, is capable of the highest degree of sublimity."

These days, Egyptian Revival architecture--uncommon though it is--is capable of the highest degree of versatility!

23 August 2007
Thursday
A Case for Curses
Subject: Egyptomania, Egyptology

One expression of Egyptomania is an interest in Egyptian artifacts. There is much to admire in the Egyptian aesthetic sense, which seems to offer something for everyone: from black-topped burnished pottery for the modern minimalist to Roman Period mummy portraits for the realist.

Unfortunately, one manifestation of this admiration is the illegal trade in antiquities. Worldwide this trade--not just in Egyptian artifacts--is estimated to carry on to the tune of some $4 billion. Some objects are stolen from museums or other types of collections. Most are dug up fresh, ripped untimely from their archaeological contexts, most of the information that these objects might have given humanity forever destroyed in the process.

Seizing such stolen artifacts won't restore all that lost information, but it at least returns the object back into the collection or back to the heritage of its country of origin.

Take the case of the unnamed German man who shipped to the Egyptian embassy in Berlin something referred to in yesterday's news reports as "a Pharaonic carving" from a tomb in the Valley of the Kings. His stepfather had smuggled the object out of Egypt in 2004. Sometime thereafter his stepfather fell ill. Recently, he died. A note from his stepson explained that the carving was being returned for the sake of the dead man's soul. He wanted to be free from the "Pharaohs' curse."

It's a shame that there isn't a real curse that prompts the return of other artifacts. Well, I suppose that there is, but it doesn't work as well as we all might hope. It's called a conscience.

News stories on the German case:
Reuters
7Days

More information on the illegal trade in antiquities:
An interview with Zahi Hawass, Secretary General of the Supreme Council of Antiquities
SAFE: Saving Antiquities For Everyone

COMMENTS? E-mail me.

1 September 2007
Saturday
The Eyes [of Horus] Have It
Subject: Egyptomania, Egyptology

That Cleopatra eye is back in style again. Or so some high-style (high-brow?) cosmeticians seem determined to convince the makeup-wearing women among us.

Macy's calls its current "fall eye" the "cat's eye, or the Egyptian eye." Natasha Singer of the New York Times describes it as a thin line of black eyeliner that, as it runs from the inner corner of the eye, widens "into a graphic block at the outer corner," and here it angles up 45 degrees. But of course the look doesn't stop there. This is then followed by thick layers of cool shades of eye shadow ("white, black, purple and lilac") above and below the eye. The effect is not, Singer reports, especially pretty. It could, however, be well described as striking. Or struck. Like a black eye.

And this season's eye is not merely an affliction of the western side of the Atlantic. No, Ema Cook of the Guardian reports the same effect appearing in Britain--"feline kohl curves," she writes: "Hollywood kitsch meets Queen of the Nile" being perpetrated by Dior, Chanel, and McQueen.

The "modern" inspiration the stylists are invoking is, of course, Elizabeth Taylor's Cleopatra from the 1963 film. It's a look that's come and gone in the past decades both before and after Liz. After all, Cleopatra has been a beauty icon for some two thousand years. But what about those eyes? Push aside the movie set curtains, peek beyond the iconic Greek-blooded queen of the Nile, and what is really lurking back there in the historic pharaonic past?

The ancient Egyptians did indeed like their makeup. In fact, they liked it so much that the dead asked to be provided with not just black eye-paint but green, too, for use in the netherworld.

To make eye-paint, or kohl, the Egyptians crushed a mineral on a palette (the famous Palette of Narmer is an especially elaborate example of a cosmetic palette) and mixed the powder with water to form a paste. It was probably applied to the eye with a careful finger, at least until the beginning of the Middle Kingdom (c. 2050 BCE), when cosmetic rods made of wood, ivory, and so on came into use.

To make green eye-paint (called wDw or "udju"), the Egyptians typically ground up malachite. Black eye-paint (msdmt, "mesdemet") very often started as galena. Now, this can hardly have been the healthiest of practices, seeing as that galena is lead sulphide. But the Egyptians attributed healing properties to both colors of eye-paint and "doctors of the eyes" prescribed one, the other, or both for the treatment of a number of eye diseases.

By the middle of the Old Kingdom (c. 2500 BCE), green eye-paint, wDw, had fallen mostly out of fashion as a beauty aid. wDw did remain in the doctor's kit and might, in fact, have had antibacterial properties. But no, for everyday wear, women--and men--chose black, and confined it to lining their eyes and eyebrows, not the space between. Egyptians were more restrained than Hollywood and inspired stylists might like to think. Even in 1923, Mary McAlister observed that "Modern interpretations of Egyptian costume have an air that is dashing and bizarre; in reality the Egyptians were conservative in costume as in all else."

One authentic pharaonic Egyptian place you do occasionally see green (or blue) eye-paint liberally applied between the upper eyelid and the eyebrow is the Eye of Horus. The Egyptians believed that the falcon-god Horus lost his eye in battle against the god of chaos, Set, and that his eye was later magically healed and restored to him. The Eye of Horus (wDAt; wedjat or wadjet) was a powerful symbol of health and protection.

The Eye of Horus appears as a nicely made-up human eye with the additional eye markings of some kind of falcon--a detail that has mercifully not caught on among cosmetic trendsetters. One species that has that distinctive falcon marking but the wrong range to have inspired the Eye is the American kestrel (Falco sparverius). But the kestrel's range is just right for me here in northern New England.

For most of August, I was plagued by a seemingly ceaseless, high-pitched barrage of KREE! KREE! KREE! as a certain pair of birds flew constantly over the house. I hadn't heard this call before, and the swift fliers tended not to stay in sight for long. (But they stayed plenty long in earshot.) Finally, however, I fixed binoculars on one as it perched high atop a Norwegian spruce in a neighbor's yard. Robin-sized, the bird was an ambiguous near-silhouette against the blue sky until it--she, as it turned out--swiveled her head and presented me with those unmistakable Horus markings. So for the month of August I had the honor of being annoyed by a pair of kestrels.

Kesterel

After the identification, I was considerably more tolerant. And now that they have flown off to elsewhere, just days ago, I miss them.

So should you infer from this story that, when we see someone wearing the fashionable if overblown Cleopatra eye this season, we should look at it with new appreciation? Equate current fashion with the stately grandeur of the ancient Egyptian aesthetic? Admire the fact that all that eyeshadow invokes a symbolic tradition going back perhaps five thousand years?

No, even I can't go that far.

The photograph of a male kestrel is a U.S. government photograph in the public domain, displayed from Wikipedia.

More information about the "fall eye" of 2007:
Natasha Singer in the New York Times
Emma Cook in the Guardian

More information about American kestrels (also called "sparrowhawks"):
Audubon Society

COMMENTS? E-mail me.

7 September 2007
Friday
UPDATE: The Eyes [of Horus] Have It (1 September 2007)
Subject: Egyptomania

Photographs of one interpretation of the Cleopatra eye -- by Alexander McQueen and Charlotte Tilbury -- can be seen at Javno.

COMMENTS? E-mail me.