Met Museum’s first Egypt show in over a decade brings ancient gods, goddesses to life

NEW YORK — The mighty gods of ancient Egypt gather on Manhattan’s Upper East Side.

It would be at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It’s been more than a decade since the museum’s last major exhibition on Egypt, so “Divine Egypt” — a lavish exploration of how the ancient Egyptians represented their gods — is a major event, as evidenced by the crowds that have filled the exhibit since its Oct. 12 opening.

After all, few things excite museum audiences as much as ancient Egypt, notes Diana Craig Patch, curator of Egyptian art at the Met.

“It’s the first ancient culture you learn about in school,” Patch says. “The pyramids, the mummies, the great tomb of Tutankhamun… they are part of our popular culture, books, films and now video games.”

But Patch hopes visitors will learn something deeper in “Divine Egypt,” which explores how the gods were represented by Egyptians, both royal and ordinary, and not just in temples where only kings or priests could go, but also in the everyday worship of ordinary people.

Ancient Egyptian civilization lasted approximately 3,000 years; The exhibition, which runs until January, covers all periods and features more than 200 objects, from huge limestone statues to tiny golden figurines. It includes 140 works from the Met’s collection, as well as others on loan from museums around the world.

“The divine landscape of ancient Egypt is teeming with gods — in fact, 1,500 if you count them all,” said Patch, who led the Associated Press on a tour last week. The show focuses on 25 main deities.

Even reduced to 25, the search was daunting. Material and textual information in Egyptology is fragmentary. Additionally, the Egyptians kept introducing new gods or giving established gods new roles. “This makes it a very complex but fascinating landscape,” says Patch.

One goal is to show visitors that all of these images are “about how the ancient Egyptians related to their world. These gods were how they solved problems of life, death and meaning – problems that we are still trying to solve today.”

Some highlights:

You would think that the young King Tutankhamun, aka King Tutankhamun, would be the star of any party, given the astonishing riches from his tomb that the world has come to know about. But in a sculpture welcoming visitors for the first time, from the Louvre in Paris, the sun god Amun-Re sits on a throne, presenting the much smaller pharaoh beneath his knees – or rather protecting him – with his hands resting on the small shoulders. The god is identified by his feather crown, curly beard, divine kilt and jewelry – and is undoubtedly the main attraction. Amun-Re was worshiped in the Karnak temple complex; the presence of Re in his name closely links him to the sun.

The first of five galleries, “Expressing the Divine,” focuses on two main deities, the god Horus and the goddess Hathor. Horus is always depicted as a falcon with a double crown, meaning he is the king of Egypt and related to the living king. But Hathor, who represents fertility, music and defense among other things, takes many forms, including a cow, an emblem, a lion-headed figure or a cobra. In a statue here, she wears cow horns and a solar disk.

“So there are two main ways of representing gods: sometimes with many roles, sometimes with just one,” Patch explains.

This gallery looks at the all-important Re, whose domains are the sun, creation, life and rebirth. Re often merges his form with other deities. “Re rules the world – he is the source of light and heat,” explains Patch.

He is presented in this room as a giant beetle. “It’s his morning side,” Patch says. “He is considered a beetle that pulls the sun out of the underworld and pushes it toward the sky.”

Also here is a brightly painted relief of the goddess Maat, from the Valley of the Kings in Thebes (modern Luxor). She embodies truth, justice and social and political order. Patch Notes: “The best way to translate it today is rightness. It represents the world in rightness, the way it should work.”

This gallery explores five myths surrounding the creation of the world and its inhabitants.

“That’s one of the things I hope people will begin to understand: that the Egyptians had multiple ways of dealing with things,” Patch says of the competing myths. “I find it fascinating. They overlapped.”

She stands next to a huge limestone statue of the god Min, a headless representation of a hard-to-define god associated with vegetation, agricultural fertility and minerals.

Only kings and priests could access state temples to worship their gods. What should ordinary people do?

Patch explains: “During festivals, the god would come out of the temple on a sacred barque (sailing boat), and people could commune with this image in the streets and ask him questions. »

In this room, the curators have arranged a set of objects as if on a boat. Top and center: a gleaming solid gold statuette of Amon, which the Met purchased in 1926 from the collection of Lord Carnarvon, who was involved in the 1922 discovery of Tut’s tomb.

Some of the most striking art related to Egyptian gods concerns death and the afterlife. “Overcoming death is something that both kings and non-royals have had to face,” says Patch.

The gods in this section include Anubis, who embalms the deceased and leads them to the afterlife; Isis and Nephthys, the sisters of Osiris, who mourn and protect the dead; and Osiris, judge and ruler of the afterlife.

This gallery houses the signature object of the exhibition: a superb statuette, on loan from the Louvre, representing the triad Osiris, Isis and Horus. Made of gold inlaid with lapis lazuli, it depicts an enveloped Osiris, falcon-headed Horus, and Isis in a solar disk and horns. Gold represents the skin of the gods, lapis their hair.

Although this final section is about overcoming death, “I think you will have seen that most of the exhibition is about life,” notes Patch. “And that’s what all these deities are for. Even overcoming death, it was about living forever.”

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Associated Press video journalist Ted Shaffrey contributed to this report.