Dan Snow's History Hit - Treasures of Ancient Egypt

Episode Date: January 4, 2022

Ramesses the Great, ego in the ancient world and Tutankhamun's sacred underwear. These are all covered in today's episode with Dr Campbell Price about the treasures that will be housed in the new Grand Egyptian Museum in Giza, set to open later this year. Dr Campbell Price is the Chair of Trustees for the Egypt Exploration Society, the UK’s leading charity supporting archaeological fieldwork and research in Egypt. He's also the curator of Ancient Egypt and Sudan at the Manchester Museum.If you'd like to learn more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad-free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe today! To download the History Hit app please go to the Android or Apple store.

Hi everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History. For those of you listening to this podcast yesterday and today, first of all, well done. Gold star for you. Consider yourself part of the team. But you'll have heard me talking about King Tut. Yesterday was an anniversary of the uncovering of King Tut's sarcophagus in 1924. But on this episode I want to talk about his new home. For the first time ever, ever, a massive display of Tutankhamun objects is going into a permanent gallery in Cairo it's very exciting it's called the Grand Egyptian Museum it's an enormous museum in the desert cost about a billion dollars that's not an exaggeration and it is out of town so you no longer have to

drive from the pyramids into central Cairo through all the traffic magnificent objects from ancient Egypt you're going to love it. It's an insulated concrete design that overcomes the challenge of desert temperatures. The roof often gets to 70 degrees centigrade apparently. It's amazing. It's got 100,000 artefacts in it. 20% of those are displayed for the first time. It's so cool. If you go and look at the pictures, amazing monumental statues of kings and gods. It is so exciting. And as I say, huge numbers of objects, something like five and a half thousand objects which which are brought from his tomb, but aren't really displayed because there's only a little small section in the museum in Cairo. These will now be there for the first time

on permanent display. It is so cool. What I love about Egypt, I like looking up. I like going there. In Britain, we go and look at archaeology. It's lovely, but it's at shin level, at knee-high level. Isn't that a marvellous bit of wall from the anglo-saxon period how wonderful i can just see the hypercourse and the roman underfloor heating there that's great of course it's great when you go to egypt you're looking up it's multi-story heritage and archaeology that's what i love about it and we all love egyptology some of us forgot to love egyptology when we went through puberty bear in mind we all loved it when we were kids. So reconnect with your Egyptology here in this episode. We've got the wonderful Dr. Campbell Price. He's curator of Egypt and Sudan at Manchester

Museum. It's one of the most significant collections of Egyptian objects in the UK. He's a brilliant communicator. You're going to absolutely love him. If you want to go and listen to more podcasts, even watch some documentaries about ancient Egypt, there's only one place to really, and that's History Hit TV. Head over to History Hit TV. You can follow the link in the information, the description of this podcast.

Just click on it from your phone. So simple. Just do that. Follow the link, and then you'll be taken to a joyful place of safety for history fans. So head over and do that. Sign up today.

You get 14 days completely free, so you can check it out for free. In the meantime, though, here's Dr.bell price talking about egypt and the new grand egyptian museum opening this year campbell great to have you on the pod pleasure dan i'm a big fan oh well i'm a big fan of yours dude i'm also a big fan of Egyptology. I went to Egypt a couple of years ago for a work project and I did find myself thinking, like,

we all loved Egyptology when we were kids. It's like dinosaurs. Why did we ever fall out of love with them, right? Exactly. Yeah, I mean, Egyptology is the best. It's unbelievable. Yeah, when I was a kid, I remember distinctly being five years old,

going into a museum, going straight past the dinosaurs and to the Egyptology room and just seeing things in a case and thinking, what was life like that long ago? And as you say, you know, if you've been to Egypt and you've looked around, it's just one big living museum. Incredible place. Yeah. And we almost think kind of ground zero for western culture I know that's dodgy but like it's kind of Greece and actually we don't think enough about the ancient Near East don't think about Egypt enough when you're looking at the grave goods the quality of statuary then

the Greeks start to look a lot less impressive because you're just like okay well hang on they were doing this a thousand years before. Yeah I think you, you know, the Greeks and the Romans are the first tourists to Egypt. They go, they are impressed by the depth of history, comparative to what they perceive as their own history. And they just interact with monuments and with the people in Egypt. And that's something I find interesting in sites like Karnak. You know, it's like, sort of like the ancient Egyptian Westminster Abbey. It's around for, well, it's well over a thousand years. And Greeks and Romans go and they're fascinated and they absorb, yeah, especially ideas of the principle of depicting the human form in statuary. And so Greece and Rome is this kind of conduit for us in the West and modern Western culture and ancient Egypt. What's going on in Egyptology at the moment? I've been to the Grand Egyptian Museum. It is like a

giant, you know, in one of those films where like a spaceship lands on Earth that's so big, you can't actually kind of see it from the ground. And we've all seen the images recently of this kind of a parade like of dead pharaohs who have been brought from central Cairo, the traditional museum, out to the suburbs, out to near the pyramids at the new Grand Museum. Is this exciting? Yeah, I mean, I think the Egyptian authorities are very conscious that the world is watching

and especially because of the downturn in tourism due to the pandemic, they want to put on a good show. So yeah, the Royal Mummies were transferred, as you say, from the downtown museum, Tahrir Square, which the old museum I kind of have a love for because as a student, I spent a lot of time there. And you would see people coming in, some of them very respectful, some of them not. And it's just a beautiful, hallowed space, this kind of temple of Egyptology. But yeah, the royal mummies were taken out to another museum, the National Museum of Egyptian Civilisation, which is in Fustat,

a kind of area of medieval Cairo. And then everything else, all the good stuff, is going to go out to the pyramids, to the Grand Egyptian Museum, which we assume will open in 2022. But yeah, I've been to the site a couple of years ago,

and when the conservation laboratories opened, gosh, five or six years ago, I went for a tour of those, and it was absolutely jaw-dropping stuff because it's stuff you see reproduced in books all the time, the Tutankhamen material, just people working on it, the best conservators in the world working with great pride, Egyptian colleagues working with great pride in their own heritage, and it's just very impressive. And it's just very impressive.

And it's going to be the biggest museum of archaeology on Earth. Yeah. So stated by the authorities, 100,000 objects, a good chunk of those that have never been on display before. I think as a tourist, you know, without any knowledge of archaeology, the first thing you will see, the most impressive kind of entrance is this what's been called the grand staircase so you walk up and there will be dozens of royal statues to kind of mark different kings and queens of egypt and as someone who is a great lover of egyptian sculpture i wrote my phd on egyptian statuary i just i'm excited to see that and it'll lead you up to this great vista this panorama of the pyramids and then you can go around and explore all of the Tutankhamen material again people assume because the Tutankhamen stuff is so famous it was always on display that's not the case a chunk of it was in Cairo

in the downtown museum but always bits of it were kind of sequestered away or in storage or on loan so this will be the first time the The pants were in storage, for example. The pants are quite delicate. Toon Carbon's underwear is quite delicate. But there were lots of pants, as we all need, for an eternal journey. Well, indeed. And I've wondered about that.

Whether they were included for eternity or were they included because they had actually been used? So they touched the divine body. And, you know, if the king is a god, then his pants are by extension. His underwear is touched by a god. And we know of people even saying that they wrap mummies up in shrouds and in linen bandages, which had touched the statues of gods in temples. So, yeah, maybe that's why they're keeping the underwear.

Interesting. I like that theory. That's good, man. Well, we could go down the old rabbit hole on Tutankhamen, but as you say, gigantic number of objects which will be displayed fantastically. Let's get away from King Tut for a second, because I would actually like to indulge your fascination in statuary a bit more, because is it just good to get them all on one roof looking magnificent? What's the vibe here? Always, as a curator, curator wants to tell a story.

And with the Grand Egyptian Museum, there is just so much stuff to paint with. You know, you're painting on this vast canvas. Something that I like to get across to visitors at Manchester Museum, and when they're talking about statuary is, you know, this stuff was never designed to be in a museum. It's not meant to be like in a gallery.

So statues were meant to function on a different level. So they're not meant to look like the people they represent. And we cannot, a modern Western brain cannot compute that a statue might not be intended to look like the person. So when you go in, there's this vast, you know, almost 10 metre tall statue of Ramses II, which has been... Can I stop you there, Campbell? I think modern people are used to all the Instagram filters and all the rest of it.

Might be quite used to the idea that people depicted are not actually anything like what they look like. Maybe. Ramesses was certainly fond of a filter. But the fact that his statue has been re-inscribed often several times with different kings' names on is not, you know, a sign of lack of respect. It's because these objects, especially Ramesses II's sculpture, colossal sculpture, these were worshipped as gods. Statues themselves had their own names. They were individually idolised and worshipped and were given offerings so later kings would add their own names to kind of tap in to that kingly magic that kind of power and so far from being a kind of a way of dissing your predecessor by putting your own name on something it only adds to the power of the statue

but you know it's about the phenomenology the aspect of going in and looking up and thinking, wow, that king is a god. And I'm sure the statues were also designed with the king, the living king in mind, as an audience himself, because they would make him feel even more godlike if he was walking through the temple and there were 10 metre statues of himself. You're listening to Dan Snow's history we're talking about the Grand Egyptian Museum opening this year the 100th anniversary of the discovery of Tutankhamen's tomb wonderful more after this I'm Matt Lewis and I'm Dr Eleanor Janaga and in Gone Medieval we get into the greatest mysteries the gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research from the greatest millennium in human history. We're talking Vikings, Normans, Kings and Popes, who

were rarely the best of friends, murder, rebellions and crusades. Find out who we really were by subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. wherever you get your podcasts. And how should we read these statues if they're not designed to look like someone? In some way, I guess, they're meant to embody the idea of kingship. And so you're meant to look up at them absolutely and be impressed by them.

But they are also made, I think, with the gods in mind and i mean this is something we don't take seriously that a lot of ancient egyptian monuments were not just made to impress living people because most living people couldn't see them regular people the hoi polloi were not allowed inside temples like karnak so you are building something massive well i guess like a pyramid most people can see that but statuary in in a temple most people in ancient egypt were farmers so they wouldn't be allowed to or have any inclination to go into a temple you're building big so that you can press the gods and

say to the gods i am one of you i'm one of your peers so you know grant me eternal life in the afterlife and recognize me as a legitimate powerful king but we forget of course often with a modern secular perspective how important the gods were as an audience that's a really good point just while we're on the subject of rameses because i've got an expert here where are we on rameses at the moment like terribly overrated like are we buying his own PR? Or was he great? I mean he was lucky because he lived so long. Well hey listen pal, like all great men are lucky right? But if you asked me who would I invite to my you know historical dinner party, Ramesses the Great wouldn't be on there. I think he would be quite dull actually to talk to. Much

better to speak to someone like Hatshepsut, female pharaoh. I think she would be quite dull, actually, to talk to. Much better to speak to someone like Hatshepsut, female pharaoh. I think she would be far more interesting a conversationalist. But no, I think Rameses was lucky to an extent. He had ambition and he had a vision for how he wanted things to go. But, you know, he had people around him. You know, the king doesn't make all the... He's not the one with the chisel and the mallet carving those statues. I think the people around him, the PR machine, for want of a better term,

was pretty powerful in the reign of Ramesses II. How much can we know about Ramesses? So little. I mean, even texts that purport to be personal accounts, like his texts about the Battle of Kadesh. So he goes into battle, he beats up Egypt's enemies, so he claims, of course, they claim they won in their historical texts. All of that is filtered through what Egyptologists call decorum,

this idea of what is right and wrong to represent in word and image. And so it's not appropriate to describe things which are negative or make the king look anything less than superhuman. So you cannot trust anything. We want to. We look at ancient Egypt. It looks kind of familiar. And as you already alluded to, that's problematic in itself. In the 19th century, British European archaeologists were going to Egypt and seeing themselves in the ancient Egyptians,

seeing this kind of imperial race of people, which of course is loaded with racist and minimalising assumptions. But in fact, the text, the images are so, historical reality is so incidental. History, as we understand it, wasn't of interest to the ancient Egyptians. And also the time period. I mean, it's like Ramesses lived as long as Cleopatra, as Alfred the Great before us, right? We're talking like gigantic. Yeah, long periods of time.

Cleopatra is closer in time to us than she was to the pyramids being built. So you're talking a vast amount of time. And I think even Ramesses II, by the time he was on the throne, you know, he had 1800 years of dynastic history to look back on. And the ancient Egyptians, although they don't have the same interests as we do, they are aware of the past. You know, the pyramids are already a thousand years old by the time Ramesses the Great's around. And I think they derived not just historical interest, because we've got evidence of basically tourist graffiti from the reign of Ramesses II,

where they're going to visit the pyramids. But someone like Ramesses would derive kind of legitimacy and power if he could prove that he could connect himself to great kings from the past. And he does this. He has his artisans compose these big long king lists where there's a vast sweep of history and he puts himself in the active most recent present and he's drawing on all this this power i often think it's like a divine energy battery that would have charged him for the 66 years he was on the throne. Well, it's, you know, making fancy family trees.

You know, the European aristocrats did not invent that idea. Just quickly, on his great battle of Kadesh, I'm disappointed to learn recently that it was a bit of a strategic standoff. So he just comes back and he says it was a great victory. If we've learned anything from Ramesses, just write your own press releases. Yeah, it's interesting with the Battle of Kadeshadesh because of this system i mentioned of decorum it's appropriate to carve certain things in certain places in egyptian temples so if you walk in to great temple you'll find like karnak on the outside walls there are scenes of battles but inside that's not permissible.

It's not allowed to be shown in the presence of the gods. So you have those kind of dangerous, violent engagements with disorder on the outside, but the pure, sanctified, sacred stuff on the inside, nearer the god's statue. So you do wonder, he's carving it on a temple wall to advertise and show off to the gods. As I've said, that's definitely true.

Hieroglyphs themselves are the medu, necce, the words of the gods. So if you write something in hieroglyphs, the gods can magically read it, regardless of whether a human eye can see the inscription or not. publicity snapshot is on the outside does maybe assume that he was expecting to impress people who couldn't otherwise get into the inner parts of temples so yes you're right there's nothing new under the sun i mean the gods are an audience for him is there a political audience surely an element of doing that age-old thing which is wrapping yourself up in divine sense of kingship time hallowed that must be about nasty humans trying to get him off the throne and give it to his kids, you know. Exactly. And we know that because later King Ramses III definitely gets the chop at the hand of one of his scheming wives. And we've

got a text that discusses this, basically trial transcripts of this harem conspiracy where there are people who do plot to murder the king so you see it more in the Ptolemies the Ptolemies seem particularly scandalous and scheming and outrageous but that's only because we've got the word of other historians about it the same thing's probably happening earlier on in Egyptian history and we know with Ramesses III, you know, x-rays and CT scans show that he had his throat cut. So, you know, people can be bumped off. So I think you've got to keep people on side. And that's where I think someone like Hatshepsut, who rules a few generations before Ramesses II,

kept people on side. You know, one of her great feats was that she could rule Egypt quite successfully for 20 years and keep everyone in the inner elite, the political movers and shakers, happy. Let's come back to the museum. Is it at all controversial? Everything in Egypt and sadly in everything in the heritage sector seems very political. What are you hearing about the museum and how it's being taken on all sides of egyptian society yeah i mean sure you can't attempt such a grand project by name and by nature you know billions of pounds worth of building without it being political and of course it's been said it's a massive vanity project but for those of us who are interested in egyptian antiquity it will be great to see this stuff

shown off to best advantage. So that's great to work with Egyptian colleagues to bring that to fruition. I mean, one big question, of course, that hangs over a museum like that is not what's in the museum, but what's not in the museum. So, you know, there's a big story there about the movement of Egyptian antiquity all around the world. And for a period of time between the 1880s to the 1970s, there was a system called fines division. And the Egyptian government did allow, under pressure in various cases, material to leave in vast numbers. So there are hundreds of thousands of objects in museums all around the world

through this legally legitimate route, but also through theft and through theft and through trading and dealing and it depends what position you take on it it's a complicated issue whether if all that material was returned to Egypt then you'd have to go to Egypt to see it and you know speaking with with a colleague who's the director of the Grand Egyptian Museum. For some people, seeing an Egyptian sculpture in Berlin or Manchester or Chicago is a way of engaging with Egypt and a way of advertising Egyptian tourism that might not otherwise exist. So it's a complicated issue. Of course, it's political. I fully believe it will open by the end of next year, and I'm sure it will be very impressive. I find my opinions on this depend where I am.

When I'm in Liverpool or Manchester, I'm very, very glad there's lots of Egyptology there. It's very nice. When I'm in Egypt, I regard it as an absolute act of criminal theft that it was removed from the country and I want to see it all in the right context. You know, the idea that so-called needles in Paris, New York and London, if they were back where they belonged, it would be so much richer. And yet it's also kind of magical when you walk down the embankment and see it.

So I'm glad I'm not making the decisions, basically, because I'm hopeless. Well, yeah, the decisions are hard ones to make and trying to strike the balance between what we've just mentioned is tricky. What else is exciting? We all talk about the big ticket issues. We've got Ramesses, we've got Tutankhamen.

Presumably there will be pre-dynastic stuff there. And will there be Hellenistic stuff? You mentioned the Ptolemies. Will that be there as well? Yes. I mean, one thing about the Grand Egyptian Museum is it kind of makes a value judgment about what is grand. There is...

Yeah, where's the Islamic art? Yeah, there's lots of beautiful, grand, impressive Islamic, Coptic period, Christian period material in Egypt. But that's not really part of that story. I mean, by the description of the gem, the Grand Egyptian Museum website, it's about kingship and about statehood. That's what you'll get when you go to the Grand Museum. It will take, in a historical sweep, it'll take in the Old Kingdom. Of course, the pyramids date to the Old Kingdom. And it will involve Hellenistic Egypt, so Egypt under the Ptolemies, into the Roman period.

I worry that it therefore says, you know, history stops when, I don't know, Cleopatra pops or clogs. And as you said, Egyptian heritage is much richer than that. But decisions, curatorial decisions have to be made I guess. Will you be heading back to Egypt soon as possible? I will indeed I'm hoping to go in March I don't think the museum will be open by March 2022 but yeah I've not been back for just over two years so can't wait. Fantastic well thank you very much Campbell for coming on this podcast and talking about it. My pleasure. you