RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – With 140 pieces brought from the Egyptian Museum of Turin (Museo Egizio), in Italy, and 89 from other collections, the Banco do Brasil Cultural Center (CCBB) in Rio de Janeiro inaugurated, on Saturday, October 12th, “Ancient Egypt: from everyday life to eternity”. The exposition, in addition to beautiful art works, exhibits aspects of culture and religion in ancient Egypt through style, materials, available technical resources and, most of all, the references used, such as their influence on the daily life of Egyptians in a period that spans from 4,000 to 30 years before Christ.
The way in which nature conditioned life and inspired religious development is also strongly reflected in the exhibition, which is divided into three sections – Daily Life, Religion and Eternity – each marked by three colors and brightness intensities.
In addition to the original pieces from antiquity – many of which were found in diggings during the 19th and early 20th centuries – there are replicas, such as the tomb of Queen Nefertari, wife of Ramses II, and a scenic pyramid at the circle on the CCBB ground floor, measuring 6 meters in diameter.
“There are camels sized proportionally, so the visitor has a sense of the height of the original pyramids, which reach 104 meters”, explains Dutchman Pieter Tjabbes, who organized the exhibition together with Italian Paolo Marini, curator of the Museo Egizio.
To enable an understanding of the meaning of the pieces, a 4-minute film on the history of ancient Egypt is shown at the beginning of the exhibition, on the first floor of the CCBB.
It is a story developed mainly from the first pharaoh, Mennes (between 3,100 B.C. and 3,000 B.C.) to 30 B.C., after Cleopatra’s defeat by the Roman Empire in the Battle of Alexandria – Almost 3,000 years of relative political stability, economic prosperity and artistic development, with great influence on fashion, design and architecture.
Other films show the discovery of Tutankhamen’s tomb in the 20th century in addition to a reconstruction of temples in 3D.
It should shine
The sun, a god in addition to a star, was starting one more day each time it shone anew. It was when its first rays of light appeared from the akhet (horizon) to illuminate Kemet, the black land (Egypt).
The morning is also displayed, in its brightest lighting environment. Among yellow walls, small ornaments and objects of personal use, such as clothes, combs, boxes and bottles of cosmetics illustrate part of Egyptian daily life, and help to understand some of its aspects, from clothing to nutrition and health, as the surrounding paintings, made to protect them from sunlight in periods of strongest light.
Yellow is also associated with gold, from which the skin of the gods was said to be made, as well as the ochre tone commonly used in the 18th Dynasty (1550-1295 B.C.) in Deir el-Medina, a village where workers lived in the tombs of the Valley of the Kings, the source of most of the information about the day to day life of ancient Egyptians.
In the soft light of the gods
With the luminosity giving way to shadows, the polytheist religion of the time of the pharaohs is set in green, a color related to rebirth and regeneration, as well as the skin of the god Osiris, king of the dead, and the papyrus, made from a plant that is identified with the river Nile and that, according to the rites, represented a new life.
The soft light simulates that of the temples, where rites were practiced and the priests wrote the sacred texts. The average size of objects varies between statues of deities, such as the amulet of the goddess Isis (664-332 B.C.) of 7.7 cm, to the largest piece in the exhibition, the statue of Sekmeht (1390-1353 B.C.).
A sun goddess, Sekmeht is shown with the head of a lioness, who – no longer as gentle – engaged in war and revenge, commissioned by Ra to punish humanity for its disobedience to the gods.
Cats, dogs, and falcons were other animals linked to the religious rites, also being mummified, in addition to being portrayed as deities and thus documented in their statues and drawings.
Filled with sarcophagi and mummy pieces, the third section of the exhibition illustrates how the Egyptians used to nurture the idea of eternal life and the preservation of what they believed would be alive after death.
Marini explains that they were not the only ones in antiquity to practice burial rites, because the same happened in the civilizations of Mesopotamia (where Iraq is today), but “they could not mummify the bodies due to the higher humidity of the region”, which favors the development of bacteria that consumed the corpses.
Mummification was considered as a protection of the body to continue life after death. The organs were removed, treated and stored in special vessels because the Egyptians believe they needed to preserve them to ensure eternal life. Only the brain was discarded. The heart, the “house of the soul”, was repositioned in the mummy.
I dressed in blue
Between blue walls, Eternity is represented by the night, when, in agreements with the Egyptian rites, the goddess Nut engulfs the Sun. Blue is also the color of lapis lazuli, a precious mineral valued by the Egyptians and which has its place in the history of the continuity of the aspect of the works on display.
In the opposite direction of the night’s darkness, several slabs of stones and, particularly, sarcophagi remain colored after two to six millennia.
The coloration’s preservation is an attraction in itself in the exhibition. Interestingly, it is largely due to the fact that, for most of the period covered by the exhibition, there were still no resources such as oil paint, the earliest record of which dates back to around 650 B.C. “They used minerals, such as stones, and sands of different colors,” explains Paolo Marini. After being discovered in the diggings, sarcophagi, slabs, and objects taken to museums such as the one in Turin have undergone chemical component application processes that help preserve their color, but “no additional painting,” as the curator points out.
Ancient Egypt: from everyday life to eternity
CCBB – Banco do Brasil Cultural Center
Address: Rua Primeiro de Março, 66, Centro, Rio de Janeiro (in front of Candelária Church)
Tel.: +55 (21) 3808-2000.
From October 12th, 2019 to January 27th, 2020.
Wednesday through Monday, from 9 AM to 9 PM.
Free admission.