The most common question that curator Edward
Bleiberg fields from visitors to the Brooklyn Museum's Egyptian art galleries
is a straightforward but salient one: Why are the statues' noses broken?
Bleiberg, who oversees the museum's extensive
holdings of Egyptian, Classical and ancient Near Eastern art, was surprised the
first few times he heard this question. He had taken for granted that the
sculptures were damaged; his training in Egyptology encouraged visualizing how
a statue would look if it were still intact.
It might seem inevitable that after thousands of
years, an ancient artifact would show wear and tear. But this simple
observation led Bleiberg to uncover a widespread pattern of deliberate
destruction, which pointed to a complex set of reasons why most works of
Egyptian art came to be defaced in the first place.
Bleiberg's research is now the basis of the
poignant exhibition "Striking Power: Iconoclasm in Ancient Egypt." A
selection of objects from the Brooklyn Museum's collection will travel to the
Pulitzer Arts Foundation later this month under the co-direction of the
latter's associate curator, Stephanie Weissberg. Pairing damaged statues and
reliefs dating from the 25th century BC to the 1st century AD with intact
counterparts, the show testifies to ancient Egyptian artifacts' political and
religious functions -- and the entrenched culture of iconoclasm that led to
their mutilation.
In our own era of reckoning with national
monuments and other public displays of art, "Striking Power" adds a
germane dimension to our understanding of one of the world's oldest and
longest-lasting civilizations, whose visual culture, for the most part,
remained unchanged over millennia. This stylistic continuity reflects -- and
directly contributed to -- the empire's long stretches of stability. But
invasions by outside forces, power struggles between dynastic rulers and other
periods of upheaval left their scars.
"The consistency of the patterns where damage
is found in sculpture suggests that it's purposeful," Bleiberg said,
citing myriad political, religious, personal and criminal motivations for acts
of vandalism. Discerning the difference between accidental damage and
deliberate vandalism came down to recognizing such patterns. A protruding nose
on a three-dimensional statue is easily broken, he conceded, but the plot
thickens when flat reliefs also sport smashed noses.
The ancient Egyptians, it's important to note,
ascribed important powers to images of the human form. They believed that the
essence of a deity could inhabit an image of that deity, or, in the case of
mere mortals, part of that deceased human being's soul could inhabit a statue
inscribed for that particular person. These campaigns of vandalism were
therefore intended to "deactivate an image's strength," as Bleiberg
put it.
Tombs and temples were the repositories for most
sculptures and reliefs that had a ritual purpose. "All of them have to do
with the economy of offerings to the supernatural," Bleiberg said. In a
tomb, they served to "feed" the deceased person in the next world
with gifts of food from this one. In temples, representations of gods are shown
receiving offerings from representations of kings, or other elites able to
commission a statue.
"Egyptian state religion," Bleiberg
explained, was seen as "an arrangement where kings on Earth provide for
the deity, and in return, the deity takes care of Egypt." Statues and
reliefs were "a meeting point between the supernatural and this
world," he said, only inhabited, or "revivified," when the
ritual is performed. And acts of iconoclasm could disrupt that power.
"The damaged part of the body is no longer
able to do its job," Bleiberg explained. Without a nose, the statue-spirit
ceases to breathe, so that the vandal is effectively "killing" it. To
hammer the ears off a statue of a god would make it unable to hear a prayer. In
statues intended to show human beings making offerings to gods, the left arm --
most commonly used to make offerings -- is cut off so the statue's function
can't be performed (the right hand is often found axed in statues receiving
offerings).
"In the Pharaonic period, there was a clear
understanding of what sculpture was supposed to do," Bleiberg said. Even
if a petty tomb robber was mostly interested in stealing the precious objects,
he was also concerned that the deceased person might take revenge if his
rendered likeness wasn't mutilated.
The prevalent practice of damaging images of the
human form -- and the anxiety surrounding the desecration -- dates to the
beginnings of Egyptian history. Intentionally damaged mummies from the
prehistoric period, for example, speak to a "very basic cultural belief
that damaging the image damages the person represented," Bleiberg said.
Likewise, how-to hieroglyphics provided instructions for warriors about to enter
battle: Make a wax effigy of the enemy, then destroy it. Series of texts
describe the anxiety of your own image becoming damaged, and pharaohs regularly
issued decrees with terrible punishments for anyone who would dare threaten
their likeness.
Indeed, "iconoclasm on a grand scale...was
primarily political in motive," Bleiberg writes in the exhibition catalog
for "Striking Power." Defacing statues aided ambitious rulers (and
would-be rulers) with rewriting history to their advantage. Over the centuries,
this erasure often occurred along gendered lines: The legacies of two powerful
Egyptian queens whose authority and mystique fuel the cultural imagination --
Hatshepsut and Nefertiti -- were largely erased from visual culture.
"Hatshepsut's reign presented a problem for
the legitimacy of Thutmose III's successor, and Thutmose solved this problem by
virtually eliminating all imagistic and inscribed memory of Hatshepsut,"
Bleiberg writes. Nefertiti's husband Akhenaten brought a rare stylistic shift
to Egyptian art in the Amarna period (ca. 1353-36 BC) during his religious
revolution. The successive rebellions wrought by his son Tutankhamun and his
ilk included restoring the longtime worship of the god Amun; "the
destruction of Akhenaten's monuments was therefore thorough and
effective," Bleiberg writes. Yet Nefertiti and her daughters also
suffered; these acts of iconoclasm have obscured many details of her reign.
Ancient Egyptians took measures to safeguard their
sculptures. Statues were placed in niches in tombs or temples to protect them
on three sides. They would be secured behind a wall, their eyes lined up with
two holes, before which a priest would make his offering. "They did what
they could," Bleiberg said. "It really didn't work that well."
Speaking to the futility of such measures,
Bleiberg appraised the skill evidenced by the iconoclasts. "They were not
vandals," he clarified. "They were not recklessly and randomly
striking out works of art." In fact, the targeted precision of their
chisels suggests that they were skilled laborers, trained and hired for this
exact purpose. "Often in the Pharaonic period," Bleiberg said,
"it's really only the name of the person who is targeted, in the
inscription. This means that the person doing the damage could read!"
The understanding of these statues changed over
time as cultural mores shifted. In the early Christian period in Egypt, between
the 1st and 3rd centuries AD, the indigenous gods inhabiting the sculptures
were feared as pagan demons; to dismantle paganism, its ritual tools --
especially statues making offerings -- were attacked. After the Muslim invasion
in the 7th century, scholars surmise, Egyptians had lost any fear of these
ancient ritual objects. During this time, stone statues were regularly trimmed
into rectangles and used as building blocks in construction projects.
"Ancient temples were somewhat seen as
quarries," Bleiberg said, noting that "when you walk around medieval
Cairo, you can see a much more ancient Egyptian object built into a wall."
Such a practice seems especially outrageous to
modern viewers, considering our appreciation of Egyptian artifacts as masterful
works of fine art, but Bleiberg is quick to point out that "ancient
Egyptians didn't have a word for 'art.' They would have referred to these objects
as 'equipment.'" When we talk about these artifacts as works of art, he
said, we de-contextualize them. Still, these ideas about the power of images
are not peculiar to the ancient world, he observed, referring to our own age of
questioning cultural patrimony and public monuments.
"Imagery in public space is a reflection of
who has the power to tell the story of what happened and what should be
remembered," Bleiberg said. "We are witnessing the empowerment of
many groups of people with different opinions of what the proper narrative
is." Perhaps we can learn from the pharaohs; how we choose to rewrite our
national stories might just take a few acts of iconoclasm.
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