There’s Something About a Pharaoh
Back in the 1950s, one of the great things about being a kid was Saturday morning cartoons. Another was comic books. And both of them showed “memes” of Egypt: pyramids, hieroglyphics on stones, people walking sideways with their hands at funny angles.
And pharaohs: kings and princes of a desert land (but don’t forget the Nile River) who wore ornate robes, with headgear that draped ornamentally around their brown faces, and clutched jeweled and gilded scepters. Also Queen Nefertiti.
A visit to the British Museum when I was 15 showed me massive stones that the British pillaged from Egypt, pieces of pyramids, incredible treasures. Later, because I was late getting to it, I found the Egyptian wing of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art and temporarily lost the ability to even frame questions, overwhelmed. Here’s the museum’s description:
“The Met collection of ancient Egyptian art consists of approximately 26,000 objects of artistic, historical, and cultural importance, dating from the Paleolithic to the Roman period (ca. 300,000 B.C.–A.D. 4th century). More than half of the collection is derived from the Museum’s 35 years of archaeological work in Egypt, initiated in 1906 in response to increasing Western interest in the culture of ancient Egypt.”
