Egypt - a land of wonder and mystery
that's too often misunderstood.
Over the years, the culture of ancient Egypt has
hardened into a set of visual cliches - the pyramids,
the great Sphinx, hieroglyphics, the golden mask of Tutankhamen,
people in profile, mummies and pharaohs
and strange animal-headed gods.
But there is a reason why these things are so familiar.
People say the history of art began in ancient Greece.
But it didn't - it started here
in the two lands of Upper and Lower Egypt.
In this series, I've been tracking down 30 treasures that deserve to be
celebrated not just as antiquities,
but also as genuine masterpieces of art.
The Egyptians didn't have a word for art
but don't let that put you off
because the craftsmen who worked for the Pharaohs and their noblemen
fashioned a sophisticated visual culture that endured in triumph
for thousands upon thousands of years.
In this final episode, I'll be seeking ten treasures
that reflect Egypt's transition during its last millennium
from an all-powerful civilisation to a lackey state of the Roman Empire.
The story begins when Egypt was a super-power
ruled over by the mighty Pharaoh Ramesses II.
You can see from these colossal awesome statues that this was
a nation projecting an aura of invincibility.
But in the centuries after Ramesses II's death, Egypt first teetered
and then tumbled into this terminal decline.
A curious thing, though,
is that Egyptian art didn't suffer nearly so much.
The conventional view is that as Egypt declined, so did its art.
But far from being a static frieze of gods and pharaohs,
the final phase of Egyptian art
explodes with unruly vigour and touching humanity.
With the foreign invaders who conquered Egypt came new styles
that enriched the country's glorious artistic tradition.
I'm starting my treasure hunt in Egypt's deep south,
and travelling back to a time known as the New Kingdom,
when the land of the pharaohs was at the height of its powers.
Ramesses II, or Ramesses the Great, ruled for 67 years
in the 13th century before Christ
and he's known as the great builder Pharaoh.
His name is incised on more monuments
than that of any other Pharaoh in ancient Egyptian history
and he constructed several temples
here in lower Nubia including these two behind me which were cut out of
the sandstone cliffs bordering the Nile at Abu Simbel
and the one to the left, the Great Temple, was once known as
the "Temple of Ramesses beloved of the god Amun"
and it's the quintessential expression
of how pharaohs of the late New Kingdom chose to portray themselves.
This magnificent temple is my first treasure.
Standing beneath these four seated colossi is actually quite
intimidating because you're placed directly in the position of the
enemies of Ramesses II about to be trampled underfoot,
so this is truly art for an autocrat.
It bludgeons you, as the viewer, into submission.
It's art that tries in a weird way to actually beat you up.
You realise that for Ramesses II, size did matter.
Stupendous scale was everything.
From an artistic point of view,
size isn't automatically successful.
In this case, you could say it is slightly crude,
even a little bit awkward.
You sense that the craftsmen who created these colossi
didn't make allowances for looking up at them from this angle,
where you can see these thick tree-trunk legs like grain silos.
Really, you're staring straight up
at Ramesses II's bulging eyes and into his nostrils.
It's not very flattering.
But it completely and effectively conveys the information about
who's the boss here - the overlord warrior king, Ramesses II.
As you walk up to the main entrance to the temple, you're
flanked on either side by these sunk relief carvings depicting
the enemies of Ramesses II.
Here you have a row of Nubians - they're bound and tethered,
they're kneeling in humiliation.
They're about to be crushed
beneath the clod-hopping feet of the Pharaoh above.
The Pharaohs understood the power of propaganda,
but Ramesses II was the master.
This temple contains a potent example of the dark art.
This entire north wall of the inner hall of the temple is devoted
to one of the defining events
of the early years of Ramesses II's reign - it is the Battle of Qadesh.
It is one of the most famous battles of antiquity
and it records the campaign Ramesses waged against the Hittites
as he tried to take the fortified town of Qadesh.
You see here this panoply of activity, a whirl, a frenzy of
all these different people, animals, chariots, and over here you've
got the enemy who are, well, I mean they're being completely destroyed.
But immediately the eye is drawn to the larger figures
and surprise, surprise, the largest figures of all are those
of the king, carved in this deep sunk relief fashion so that it could
never be obliterated by future Pharaohs - quite a clever trick.
He didn't capture Qadesh but you'd never know it
if you looked at this wall.
For me it's a bit like the Trajan's Column of Ancient Egyptian art.
One of the big themes of this temple is domination -
time and time again, we see Ramesses II in the guise
of a very effective warlord.
Here he adopts the classic Pharaoh pose - victorious, striding,
smiting his enemies with a mace.
And you can see, for instance, this thick tangle of bodies
of people effectively cowering, about to be slaughtered at his feet.
As you leave behind the pillared entrance hall,
you head towards the much darker inner sanctum of the temple,
where you encounter this moment of pure theatre.
At the back you've got these four figures, hewn out of the rock.
They represent some of the chief ancient gods of Egypt,
and Ramesses himself, the king, suddenly identifying himself
with the most venerable gods of Egypt's religion.
This is his moment of apotheosis, he's now on a par with the gods.
And you kind of get the sense
that his megalomania really knew no bounds.
This type of art leaves me with mixed feelings,
a bit of a moral dilemma.
This is quite a salutary lesson for any would-be tyrants -
you can see the colossal head and crown of this sculpture here
has landed with a great thump in front of the temple.
That's the crown, here's the head of Ramesses, with his headdress,
a giant ear, that's his brow,
there's another ear around the corner.
And in some ways, for me, it's a reminder that Abu Simbel
is almost repellent.
It's a bit of a blunt display of omnipotence
and vainglorious chest thumping
and it's decorated with all manner of propaganda
so you don't come here looking for refinement.
That said, these colossal sculptures are viscerally thrilling
they really are impressive -
it's impossible not to succumb
to the shock and awe of this place.
The temples at Abu Simbel were just two of the many
self-aggrandizing monuments that Ramesses built across Egypt.
His capital, Thebes, is filled with vast statues that
embody his overblown self-belief.
Looking at all this grandeur, it's easy to assume that Egyptians
were obsessed with scale, but that wasn't always the case.
Now this...
is called a shabti - it's a mini mummy,
a funerary figurine that was once placed in a tomb.
The shabtis were mass produced, you could say they were the first
mass-produced works of art in history and often, like this one,
they appear just a little bit rudimentary, quite rough and ready,
but they played an essential role in Egyptian religious beliefs -
people genuinely believed that shabtis
were imbued with magical powers.
And it's the shabtis that are my second treasure.
Shabtis were servants in the afterlife who would help
the owner of the tomb with daily chores.
So these are all made out of faience...
Out of faience, which is this glassy ceramic material.
Here you have the normal servants, and then the overseers.
They have like these kind of skirts. They are the organisers.
So let's see some here. I will give you an example of one of them,
which is quite nice, from the late dynasty,
so I would say 2,400 years old.
The colour is just beautiful,
the way it changes.
Yes, they mastered the use of these chemicals and minerals.
And the material is essentially clay stuffed into a mould like this...
No clay whatsoever. It's pure sand.
Is it? It's just the desert.
Just the desert - crushed sand with the addition of some alkali
that acts as a flux to melt the sand and form this glassy layer.
I love the fact that the material
is so simple and just comes from the world of Ancient Egypt.
Absolutely, it's magical.
The name of faience in ancient Egypt is "tjehenet",
which means the dazzling, the sparkling.
And the idea was to replicate semi-precious stones.
They wanted turquoise lapis lazuli, all the way from Afghanistan,
so it was more expensive than gold.
And then all of a sudden by this kind of magical alchemy
they could turn the sand, which is available everywhere,
into this magical precious material.
Here we have a hedgehog, who is a baby hedgehog,
and what is the fascinating thing about that,
this is like a rattle, so if you shake it.
So inside there are little balls of clay,
to entertain a little child.
That is the sweetest thing I have ever seen.
But does that mean that this was made
to go in the tomb of a baby?
it was associated with a little child, a favourite toy,
or something like that.
Actually, that is quite an affecting thing, isn't it? Yes.
To look at that little face, I think that is really beautiful.
Do you think that ancient Egyptians considered them as works of art?
Or did they just have a practical, religious function?
Both - look at this example, this is from a late dynasty.
Look at the details here, this is a work of art.
It makes you realise why people could believe in gods
and the afterlife, because if something so magical
could happen turning sand into that,
then why couldn't people live for ever?
In a way they lived.
You know, this is 4,000-year-old objects,
and they impress us in the same way
that they impressed the Egyptian at the time.
Zahed is also an artist who creates his own shabtis with a modern twist
using the same ingenious recipe as the ancient Egyptians.
So what goes in our mixture is 90% silica,
which comes from the sand,
and then we add the crushed fine natron salt...
That's my flux,
and what we found out from the chemistry,
they add a bit of limestone, crushed limestone.
OK, this is like the arts Great British Bake Off.
Here we are, normally is the colour blue,
comes from the copper oxide, pure copper oxide.
Should I put this in? Absolutely, yep, go ahead.
So we'll give it a good mix to start
and then add some water to make it into a paste.
OK, mix this all in. We mix it all in.
You need to mix it a bit more.
OK, I can see you itching to do some mixing.
You need to get the water everywhere.
That's quite good. It's all come together in a big ball.
This is as good as it gets.
Pushing, pushing into all the details.
'The secret ingredient is natron salt - a kind of baking soda
'that rises to the surface
'and lowers the temperature
'at which the sand melts and becomes glass.'
Hey, here he is. Here we are.
Our little alien.
'The next stage is to leave the little alien
'standing for a day to allow a magical chemical reaction to occur.'
When we get it out and start drying,
you see all the salt growing on the surface.
How odd. It's like it's rusted.
The longer you leave it, the more flow of air,
the more florescence, and you have more salt and more salt...
The salt is the natron - that fuses with the sand.
It fuses with the sand.
And melts at a lower temperature and turns into glass. Turns into glass.
So this one has been drying for how long?
That's been one day. That's 24 hours of drying.
24 hours of drying. And he becomes furry.
And that's ready to be fired.
Can I put him in? Yes, go ahead. He will stand.
It's completely white, but when you put it in the kiln...
Because the property of the glass,
that white salty layer,
will show the colour blue. It's an optical thing.
How long does it take to do that? About 6 hours. 900, you just start.
Shall I do it?
'Six hours later, Zahed's new-born figurine is ready
'to join his army of free modern-day shabtis.'
So it is a piece of magical transformation, then?
Yes, from sand to semi-precious stone.
Shabtis were servants in the afterlife,
but my next treasure was made by workers in this life.
And to find it, I'm off to a village near the Valley of the Kings...
if my donkey, Pops, has the energy.
Just over the hill in the desert on the west bank of Thebes
is the village of Deir El Medina,
which was home to the artists and craftsmen who created
the temples and tombs for Ramesses II.
It's a bit like the ancient Egyptian equivalent of those great
19th century model villages for workers,
Bourneville or Port Sunlight.
But to the Egyptians this was no ordinary village.
It was a sort of gated community, an exclusive place actually filled with
stonemasons, draughtsmen, sculptors, and they had a very important task.
They had to ensure the safe passage to the afterlife of the kings
who ruled over Egypt.
Now I'd quite like to go and see it, Pops, shall we give it a go?
Not far to go now, come on, don't give up at this point.
What's great about this place is that we know
the names of the artists as well as where they lived.
They even have tombs, cut out of the rock, some capped by small pyramids.
It's a bit like a toy town Egypt - a relief from some
of the overpowering places I've visited so far.
Deir el Medina is a very special place because it gives us real
insight, a rare glimpse into the working practices and daily lives of
artists, but it also lets us see how they decorated their own tombs,
in other words, what they painted
when they were left to their own devices.
I'm hoping to see a departure from the sometimes stifling
conventions of official painting as I head down into the tomb
of a stonemason called Pashedu.
This is where the burial chamber proper begins, and you can tell
because you are greeted by these two jackal-headed gods, Anubis,
on either side guarding the tomb,
against a very colourful background.
And you come through, into the chamber proper...
and...
you've got all the usual gods, Osiris, Hathor,
there's an ankh sign, hieroglyphics,
but the thing that really strikes me
is this bright yellow which links the entire painting of this tomb.
It's a very lively colour. It's the antithesis of death, I guess,
it's sunlight.
This feels like a quite late spring,
early summer vision of the afterlife.
It's like coming across a nugget of gold buried deep within the rock.
And you can see the way, even with these hieroglyphics,
that they've been painted
in quite a seemingly spontaneous rapid, brushy feel
and that gives the whole space an atmosphere, I think, of informality,
intimacy which aids the scene in a sense
because you have Pashedu's family.
You can see his father there with his snow-white hair.
It's actually quite a down-to-earth tomb.
It's been painted by a friend for a friend
and the fact that they have left things slightly spontaneous
gives it a freedom like the backgrounds here behind Anubis -
they are really wonderful.
You can see the speed with which this has been painted.
And it's not someone who can't paint a geometric zigzag to kind of help
create this pattern, it's someone who likes that slightly deliberately
artless effect and thinks that it really adds something and it does.
It's got that winning charm, the same kind of charm you might
find in, say, a homespun patchwork quilt.
It's a rare and special thing to see the art of the workers.
In other tombs at Deir El-Medina,
the paintings are just as fresh and vibrant,
but they don't break free from the age-old rules of Egyptian art.
My next treasure does just that
and it was also found in the workers' village.
Life in Deir El-Medina wasn't all that easy.
It was difficult simply transporting water up into the settlement
so the villagers decided to construct an enormous well.
After they'd dug down for round about 50 metres, though,
they had to admit to defeat
but their bad luck was our good fortune
because they started using this great pit as a rubbish dump
and the scraps and odds and ends that were discovered
down there during the 20th century
transformed our understanding of ancient Egyptian art.
What the ancients threw away turned out to be
manna for Egyptologists who discovered thousands of ostraca,
like these replicas.
An ostracon is either a pottery shard or a limestone flint
which has been used to write down letters, lists, or also sketches.
So these are a bit like the e-mails of the day. Oh, definitely.
Tell me who this bloke is, because he looks like you could
meet him down your local boozer sinking a few pints of beer.
This one is a caricature of a stonemason, actually.
So you see the toughness of his daily routine
and he's very muscle man because actually his work is very tough.
This presumably is a chisel and a kind of hammer...
And a hammer, exactly, his tools for his daily work.
So what does that tell us?
Well, it appears that actually the ancient Egyptians,
the draughtsmen here, they were able as well to deal with
the daily realistic images as well as,
I would say, more idealistic images,
like what we are most used to see on temples and inside the tombs.
Obviously this isn't entirely real,
because still the conventions of Egyptian art apply.
Of course. Are there any moments within ostraca
where you feel that the artist
actually instinctively breaks free of some of those rules?
Definitely - you have that on this particular ostracon here.
This is a really nice example of what
we call a tipsy-turvy...
Topsy-turvy. Topsy-turvy world, sorry...
because the usual iconography
of that is that you see the king in his chariot
riding a glorious horse,
but instead of that you have a mouse riding just a donkey,
so it's like a mockery, or a very high sense of humour of the scribe.
These discarded fragments give us
a glimpse into the inner thoughts of the artists.
Witty, irreverent, free -
they offer a welcome contrast
to the straitlaced formality of Egyptian art.
And in the Cairo museum, there are even more exquisite examples.
There's a wonderful dog here,
and there's tremendous observation that's gone into that small drawing.
And you really feel close here to the artist's hand.
And this is a really great cabinet.
You see a whole variety here.
This is typical of a big theme of the ostraca.
You have a cat on its hind legs driving a flock of geese.
In the ordinary world, in our world, cats chase geese and eat them
but here it has been flipped on its head
and the cat has adopted the human role as the protector of the geese.
It's a paradox.
And then here, down here right at the bottom,
appallingly displayed, is one of the most beautiful ostraca of all.
You can see this female musician,
with very slender elegant limbs,
the ringlets of her wig coming down and then this quite transparent,
quite revealing, clinging dress and she's playing a lute.
And she's fully frontal which is quite rare in Egyptian art -
mostly people are shown in profile.
And the immediate thing you think is that it looks very modern,
it feels like it could have been a sketch
done by Modigliani in Paris at the beginning of the 20th century.
CAR HORNS HOOT
Things are very volatile here
and one of the ways that that manifests itself
is that all around the place I've seen lots of examples
of really quite exciting street art, graffiti on the walls.
I can't help thinking that the ostraca are the sort of ancient
equivalent of graffiti but this is really fascinating because
contemporary street artists, like this one,
have in turn been influenced and inspired
by the art of ancient Egypt.
I meet the artist who painted this graffiti, Alaa Awad.
Do you remember when you were a boy
and you first saw Ancient Egyptian art?
Do you remember how you felt?
So, I wonder whether at all you have been inspired
by the ancient Egyptian ostraca?
One of Alaa's works I saw in Cairo shows a pharaoh,
like Ramesses II, smiting Egypt's enemies.
It sounds to me you are very proud of Egypt's past.
One thing that Egypt's past does tell us
is that triumph in war comes at a price.
Ramesses III's campaigns against his enemies
led to economic disaster at home.
The artists' village at Deir El-Medina
became the focal point of the looming crisis.
It all started when the workers' pay and rations were late.
Now as a result, they organised the first recorded
strike in history - they staged sit-ins,
they marched on royal temples, and they held demonstrations.
They were protesting, "we're hungry, we're thirsty,
"there's no more oil, there's no more fish, no more vegetables."
One worker even threatened to attack a royal tomb,
which would have been total sacrilege.
In the end, some say that Ramesses III had his throat slit
by members of his harem in about 1155 BC.
It marked the beginning of a long, slow decline for Egypt.
I've been thinking about this final millennium
of ancient Egyptian history
and it's often written off as a period of political fragmentation,
social turmoil, of decline - it was a chaotic time of power struggles
and invasions that ultimately brought about
the downfall of the Pharaohs.
The economy was faltering, the gifts of the Nile seemed to have
withered and dried up, and Egypt appeared to be in constant peril.
The curious thing, as far as art history is concerned,
is that all of this conflict and confusion sometimes galvanised
and reinvigorated Egyptian culture.
Many of the foreign strongmen who invaded Egypt
and came to dominate the country wanted to present
themselves as more Egyptian than the Egyptians,
none more so than their neighbours up the Nile,
the Nubians or the Kushites,
who I saw being trampled underfoot beneath Ramesses II.
In a remarkable reversal of fortune, the Kushites -
an African people from what is today Sudan -
seized Egypt in around 750 BC.
Not surprisingly, my next treasure is a piece of Nubian art...
and at the Cairo museum, the director, Mohammed Ali,
is initiating me in the wonders
of a little-known cultural renaissance.
Yes, he does! Don't you think it's a distinctive face?
Which parts of it are Egyptian,
and which parts of it are more Nubian?
What shall I say?
I can't. I'm finding it hard.
Which one do you like the most, if you had to choose one?
Can you choose one?
I think it is very beautiful.
I believe you.
I must admit I feel a bit punch-drunk after
Mohammed Ali's performance.
But he does have a point.
While the black pharaohs harked back to the Egyptian past,
they reinvigorated the art of the portrait
and created a fascinating hybrid.
This alabaster statue of a Kushite princess called Amenirdis
is imperious yet sexy, though I'm not quite sure about her big ears.
The Kushites were proud of their African origins
and didn't hide them.
This pink granite bust of the Pharaoh Shabako
is inspired by the art of the Middle Kingdom,
but his facial features are undeniably Nubian.
And of all these Kushite works in the Cairo museum,
the one I most admire is the face of Mentuemhat.
He looks wise, yet tough, thick-skinned yet astute.
He has the aura of a man who actually lived
and was capable of ruling a great city like Thebes.
It's a fascinating fusion of two different artistic styles.
And this sphinx with the face of the Nubian pharaoh Taharqo
proves to me that Egyptian art
really benefited from a bit of foreign DNA.
Kushite rule over Egypt lasted about a century.
But Egypt was easy prey
and faced repeated invasions from other enemies.
The Egyptians returned to their ancient gods for succour.
This spawned a bizarre cult - the worship of animal mummies.
One of its main centres was Tuna al-Gebel.
I'm heading deep under the desert sands into 2,500-year-old
catacombs that were held sacred by the ancient Egyptians.
I have visited catacombs in the past and they are always so spooky
because you feel immediately that you've
stepped into the realm of the dead, these subterranean chambers.
But this one, this is a catacomb with a difference
because it was a cemetery for millions, quite literally,
of mummified animals who were placed in these niches.
The animal mummies were votive offerings
given as gifts to the gods to bring health, good luck and protection.
It's like shopping for a loaf of bread in a bakery.
This looks like a nice chunky baguette.
If you have a look, this is one of the animals.
This is actually a mummified bird.
It's a sacred ibis and you can just about make out
the head of the bird curled in on itself, swaddled all around with
the mummy wrappings and then left, placed in this niche for eternity.
I'd better put it back and see what else I can find.
In the 4th century BC, these animal cults became immensely popular.
It was a huge business for the priests.
They actually bred baboons and ibises
just so the pilgrims who came here could buy them.
This is much, much smarter in here -
you can see these more carefully cut blocks, I suppose of limestone.
And then these shrines, steps, leading up to - oh look,
leading up to a baboon.
That is a mummified baboon.
And this is a sort of chapel, a shrine to the God Thoth,
and this would have been an offering to the god.
I don't know if I'm supposed to go over here.
Let's see if we can find a baboon.
And here is the god.
He is squatting - you can see a very thick muzzle
and snout, a sun disk on top of his head.
Original paintwork, a red for his skin this almost
like a sort of feathery cloak that he has around his shoulders.
And then look at the eyes. It looks like mother-of-pearl,
and it's a reminder that this isn't just a piece of art,
it's an article of belief.
Mummification was most certainly an art form for the ancient
Egyptians. I am sure that there were very many different ateliers,
vying with each other for being known
for the best embalming in Thebes or Memphis, or wherever.
And the late period is very peculiar in the way that the ancient
Egyptians archaised.
They went back to the past
to think of a great time of their civilisation.
This was just after they had been invaded by the Nubians
and had kicked them out, had kicked out the Syrians as well,
and so this was a moment of great national pride and a re-crafting
of national identity,
and so by doing this they went back to traditions
that they knew had been common in earlier periods of Egyptian
culture, and so this sort of made them grand again in their eyes.
The ancient Egyptians mummified all types of animals
because they believed the gods could come down in animal form.
And animals are neither human, nor quite divine
because they live on this earth, so they are this intermediary group,
and they can speak to the gods.
For example, in the morning the baboons would turn to the sun,
raise up their hands and cry out,
and that would help the sun rise, according to the Egyptians.
And so the baboons became associated with the sun god Ra.
So there were very few animals
that weren't mummified in religious rituals.
It's debatable whether they are works of art.
though this menagerie of the dead reminds me of Damien Hirst.
As well as mummies, the obsession with animals
produced refined sculptures
like this delightful cat that was discovered at Saqqara.
But my next treasure is no pussy cat.
It's arguably the weirdest masterpiece of all Egyptian art.
Allow me to introduce you to a very distinctive deity called Tawaret.
She's hardly the sexiest of Egyptian Goddesses.
In fact, she looks quite terrifying.
She's a composite of several different beasts.
She has a head of a hippopotamus
along with a hippo's swollen body.
She has the paws of a lion, and then some human
attributes as well, including those pendulous breasts.
The thing about Tawaret is that, although she looks terrifying,
she was actually a protective goddess,
who protected women during childbirth.
And she's been sculpted from a very hard stone called greywacke, and
the sculptor's done a tremendous job because he's managed to manipulate
tough material into plump, soft, Mrs Blobby-like forms - she's swollen,
almost pneumatic, there's a sense of pressure from within ballooning
outwards, which is a really effective trick to have pulled off.
You have to look beyond that slightly grisly,
scary visage and see the inner beauty within and once you do,
I think you'll quite like Tawaret as well.
One of the big turning points in Egypt's long history
came in 332 BC with another invasion -
this time by one of the most famous names from antiquity,
Alexander the Great.
The Greek hero swept into Egypt and was greeted by the people
as a liberator from the Persians who had been ruling the country.
Alexander - seen here in Luxor Temple - did the politic thing
and paid tribute to the Egyptian gods.
And his arrival had an immediate and surprising impact on Egyptian art.
To witness it, I return to Tuna El-Gebel to visit
the tomb of a priest called Petosiris.
This tomb is very rare and it's fascinating
because of the decoration in this inner porch.
You have these scenes of daily life, everyday scenes
which, in itself, is quite a traditional Egyptian subject.
So it's reviving this old Egyptian tradition, and yet the style
of the scenes doesn't really look Egyptian at all, it looks Greek.
So if you have a look down here, here are some labourers.
They're harvesting grapes, they're about to make wine,
and yet it could be a sort of Bacchic scene,
these could be followers of Dionysus, surrounded by very lush,
scrolling vines, there's a sense of energy, a greater movement
and an attempt at naturalism, which is a sort of Greek trait.
You can see this go that the artist has had at trying to show
the drapery as it folds over the human form
and here there's a naked man, who's plucking grapes,
but that torso is very different
to the kinds of torsos you normally find
in Egyptian art, often quite rigid, blank, little schematised.
Here, there's an attempt to actually show the musculature.
You can see, over on the other wall, more of these scenes.
So for instance, up here they're collecting grain.
There's a sense of something quite new,
a glimmer of a whole different style
that's trying to be grafted onto the Egyptian canon
with its registers and bands, with its baselines and profiled feet.
And in many ways it's a little bit awkward,
it's a little bit misshapen.
I'm not convinced that this is great art,
but it is fascinating art and the reason is Petosiris has commissioned
an artist or a designer, who may have been Egyptian, but he was
undoubtedly influenced by Greek art and he's trying to demonstrate that
in the way that he's representing this wall, these scenes.
And the reason Petosiris did that is
because he lived at a very important crossroads in history.
All of a sudden, Alexander the Great had swept in and conquered Egypt
and no one was quite sure what way the wind was blowing.
It's possible that the Greeks, the Macedonians,
wouldn't have lasted and that one day the Egyptians would come back
into power but for now Greek culture was very much in vogue
and this is what Petosiris wanted to broadcast.
I guess it's no surprise that the politically astute Petosiris
wanted to imitate the art of his new overlords,
but what about the Greeks themselves?
They were no strangers to beauty.
Perhaps they'd fall for the charms of Egyptian art?
Alexander the Great is a little bit of a glamorous enigma to me
because obviously he's the peerless warrior king
but he was dead at 32, and you could argue that he
destroyed as much as he created,
most infamously when he sacked the magnificent city of Persepolis
in 330 BC.
But he was a man of culture, he had great artists in his entourage,
he had people like Lysippus and Apelles.
And he lived at the beginning of this new phase in classical art,
the so-called Hellenistic style,
this great thunderous, tumultuous,
almost Baroque type of art
that couldn't be more different from that ordered
and sometimes quite restrained tradition of Egyptian art.
So I'm really intrigued to find out what happened
when those two styles came together.
Did they clash or did they fuse, and ultimately, which one won out?
After the death of Alexander, one of his generals,
Ptolemy, became Pharaoh.
He was the first of a dynasty of 15 Ptolemies who ruled
Egypt for the next 300 years.
They based themselves in Lower Egypt, in the north of the country.
Before he left Egypt to carry on conquering the known world,
Alexander had a vision of a vast metropolis built here
on the coast of the Mediterranean Sea, and the city
that he founded here still bears his name today, Alexandria.
Alexandria was the powerbase of Ptolemaic Egypt
and one of the great cities of antiquity.
Undoubtedly, the most spectacular sight at Alexandria once towered for
hundreds of feet into the sky, just over there on the Island of Pharos.
And it was a great lighthouse, topped with this mighty beacon
that was visible from miles and miles out to sea.
It was once one of the seven wonders of the ancient world.
It must have been a colossal statement
of Ptolemaic power over Egypt.
The lighthouse was constructed out of these whopping great blocks
of red granite, each one weighing about 75 tonnes.
And it was destroyed by successive earthquakes in later centuries
and most of it's now underwater.
When marine archaeologists excavated
the ruins of the lighthouse recently,
they discovered ancient works of art languishing on the seabed.
One of the colossal statues that they dredged up from the base
of the lighthouse is just over there and it's a curious hybrid really
because it presents Ptolemy II in the traditional guise of a pharaoh.
You can see the pillar supporting his back.
He's got the double crown of upper and lower Egypt,
he's wearing a pharaoh's kilt, he's got that very stiff,
non-naturalistic torso fully frontal with arms clenched at either side.
But there is a glimmer of a new style creeping into the statue.
If you look at the face, which admittedly is quite eroded
because it's been immersed in the sea, you can
make out these locks of hair,
flickering from beneath the headdress - they're very Greek,
very Alexander the Great.
In one sense, it's a brilliant metaphor for what happened to Egypt
in the next few centuries because it's a Greek head
on an Egyptian body, just as you had this Greek Macedonian
elite ruling the Egyptian people, but from an art historical
point of view, it's perhaps slightly less successful,
because the two styles, Greek and Egyptian, jar,
they butt up against each other.
To find my treasure, I am going to have to leave Egypt briefly.
I return to the Egyptian Museum in Berlin,
home to the world-famous bust of Nefertiti.
This time, I'm here to see a less well-known work of art.
I defy anyone looking at this head to deny that it is a
masterpiece of world sculpture.
Now it's a portrait of a middle- aged bald man, probably a priest,
and it's made from this highly polished hard stone called
greywacke, and it's slightly smaller than I had expected,
it's less than life-sized, but it is still this ball of concentrated
expression and energy, there's such a palpable sense of character here.
He has this fierce gaze, like a political bruiser, and those
heavy lips that feel like he is about to argue or remonstrate.
At any minute he's about to speak to us,
so that it feels like portraiture
in a modern sense, in the sense that we would understand today.
You've got all of these Egyptian traits like the supporting
back pillar, his outlined eyes, the smooth bald head.
But you have something else as well,
the influence of art from the Mediterranean elsewhere in that
sense of realism - the crows-feet, the wrinkles, the furrows, and
most important for me, the way that this skin is soft and supple, yet
stretched tight across all of these different dithers of his cranium.
That is a brilliant piece of sculpture.
And in that sense, he is this wonderful amalgamation of two
different traditions that usually didn't really go very well together.
So if you still have questions about the lifelessness, supposedly,
of ancient Egyptian art, just ask our chap here,
because I suspect he'd give you an answer that would be curt,
but which you would find pretty persuasive.
The Green Head is a genuine masterpiece,
but it didn't herald a new dawn for Egyptian art.
And I've got a theory that what we call Egyptomania,
that fascination with the magical and mysterious world of the pharaohs
actually began long ago in antiquity itself, long before Napoleon,
English lords, or Hitler became obsessed by Egyptian treasures.
The foreign conquerors who ruled Egypt were equally inspired
and seduced by the past of this great country.
Under the Ptolemies, Egyptian culture
returned to its archaic roots again.
Instead of mimicking the classical style of Athens,
they gave Egypt beautiful temples where the Pharaohs of old
would have felt quite at home.
My next treasure is one of the greatest of these -
the temple of Horus at Edfu.
Built by the Greeks but dedicated to one of Egypt's oldest
and most revered gods - Horus the falcon.
It's fascinating to see how the Ptolemies embraced Egypt's
well-established visual language with new vigour.
They needed the powerful Egyptian priests on their side,
so what better than to give them a temple like this?
This is probably the best preserved temple in Egypt
and it provides this wonderful impression
of the grandeur of the temples
that was experienced by the ancient Egyptians themselves, because every
surface is covered with decoration. You can see these sumptuous
sunk relief carvings and actually, in places, traces of pigment.
All of this would have been a polychrome display,
visually magnificent.
And there's a detail about this colonnaded court that
I particularly like, which is
that each of the capitals on the columns is different.
And the craftsmen have relished the decoration of those capitals.
They are individual as a snowflake, they are beautiful.
And over here, there's a surviving colossal,
black granite statue of the falcon god Horus,
wearing the double crown of Ancient Egypt,
upper and lower Egypt combined.
And it fuses divinity and kingship. It's a very powerful piece.
It's a very beautiful piece, sleek.
I bet Brancusi would have loved something like this.
If you have a look at his expression,
he looks slightly grumpy, I think!
Perhaps he's sad that he's rooted to the spot,
and can't take off and soar above the temple.
Oh look! There's Horus, look, look, look!
As in all Egyptian temples, the centrepiece is the sanctuary,
the holy of holies.
It contains a replica of Horus's sacred boat.
But if you look over here, right at the back,
you've got possibly the most revealing artefact in the temple,
because this thing is the oldest part of the temple,
and it doesn't date from the Ptolemaic period at all.
It must have been the shrine of the temple that was on this site,
before the current temple was built.
And it's highly instructive that the Ptolemies have decided to keep it
because this is a statement of intent on their part.
They're saying that we want to feel continuous with Egypt's past.
This way?
This is a piece of luck really, I've bumped into Mohammed,
the chief inspector of the temple and he's offered to take me this
special route, which looks like it involves, well, actually clambering
up the side of the wall of the temple,
to get a proper view from the top,
but it's quite special because people don't normally see this.
Keep on going?
It's a little bit hairy there.
What a fantastic vista.
This is a great vantage point to get a sense of the plan,
the layout of the temple.
You can see this mass of the pylon, the colonnaded court.
I mean, it's a spectacular temple,
but I'll tell you what I find quite curious about it is that this
was built over a period of around 180 years
during the reigns of the Ptolemies, who were Greek Macedonian
and I was expecting to see some evidence of that Hellenistic culture
in the architecture and the decoration but you can't find it.
Everything here is traditionally on the nose Egyptian.
And I guess what it suggests is that the Ptolemies didn't feel
so powerful that they could impose wholesale
their foreign culture on Egypt.
Instead they had to embellish and lavish money
and funds to create enormous temple complexes just like this one,
essentially to keep the Egyptian priests sweet.
In the end, it wasn't the Egyptian priests that the Ptolemies had
to worry about, but a new superpower in the Mediterranean - Rome.
The Egypt of the Pharaohs was about to
complete its epic 3,000-year journey.
Its end came in Alexandria and it couldn't have been more dramatic.
The scenario pitted the Ancient World's most famous woman,
Cleopatra, against Octavian, the future Augustus,
first emperor of Rome.
The trouble with Cleopatra is that despite her legend,
she remains elusive.
In popular culture, she appears as this ravishing temptress,
so by rights we should be ending the series with
a beautiful image of Egypt's most famous queen.
But the trouble is, not many contemporary likenesses of her have
survived, and of those that have, one of the most reliable is this.
It's an image on a coin, and as you can see, she was no beauty.
This is not how Elizabeth Taylor appears playing the role.
She's got a hooked nose, this very pointy chin,
she looks really like a wicked stepmother in a fairy-tale.
Legend has it,
after defeat by Octavian, Cleopatra committed suicide in her
mausoleum which is thought to lie beneath the waves in the harbour.
I leave Alexandria behind in the quest for my final treasure
and head to a town called Dendera
where Cleopatra built a temple
dedicated to the mother goddess Hathor.
It's one of ancient Egypt's last great temples and it's very special.
The interior is a stunning multi-coloured visual feast,
the like of which I've not seen anywhere else in Egypt.
It's a very vivid space, with bright blues, some of the reds
and ochres still apparent.
It's been recently cleaned. You can
see there's the dark film of filth on one side and it's left
this visual spectacle of what this temple must have been like.
Cleopatra features in a massive relief on the back wall
of the temple with her son by Julius Caesar, Caesarion.
In artistic terms, it's nothing new.
I'm here to meet someone else, a character who would have an
important role to play in Christian art in the future.
I'm here to meet the forefather of the Devil.
One of the innovations of temple design under the Ptolemies
was this building.
It's known as the Mammisi, or birth house, and it's a smaller
temple, usually placed at right angles to the big building,
and it celebrates rituals associated with the birth
of the child God Horus,
and his relationship with the mother goddess, Isis or Hathor.
But my favourite part of the birth house is this guy,
who's one of the most curious of Egyptian gods.
He's my favourite member of the Egyptian religious pantheon.
He's a dwarf god. He's known as Bes.
Once you've started to see him, then in sites like this,
he suddenly seems to appear everywhere.
You see, here he is again, this is Bes, and yep, you can see he's
got all of his classic attributes here. He's really ridiculously
ugly, he's got this bushy beard, he's fat, he's squat, he's
often standing there with his great tongue lolling out of his head,
you often see his penis, and unlike most of the gods in Egyptian art,
he is face on, he's full frontal.
There is something unashamed about Bes.
And the reason I like him
is because he's got this real whiff of anarchy and mischief.
He's so ugly that he's a prototype for devils and medieval gargoyles.
But in ancient Egypt he was actually a sort of protector god.
He was on the side of the people.
He warded off evil spirits during childbirth.
He was a god associated with music and dancing and sex
and drinking, all of the good things, and I think of him
as like the grit in the pearl of Egyptian art.
I return to Britain and to Kingston Lacy,
the home of a 19th-century adventurer called William Bankes,
where I had my first taste of Ancient Egypt.
Now I've been to many of the places that Bankes explored,
I feel very different about the art of that great civilisation.
A powerful Mesopotamian king
once said that gold in ancient Egypt was as plentiful as dirt,
and he was right.
During three spectacular millennia, ancient Egyptian art reached
uncharted summits of luxury and magnificence and colossal scale.
But during my travels I've discovered something a little
less shiny and bombastic, like the vigorous dwarf god Bes,
friend alike to expectant mothers and beer-swilling carousers,
or those homely visions of paradise
in the workers' tombs, humble shabti figurines,
scraps of pottery decorated with delightfully rapid sketches
that are thrilled about the texture of a bird's wing
or the fur of a dog.
And I used to think that I had something of a handle on what
ancient Egyptian art was all about, but now I realise
that to really understand it would take several lifetimes.
It could be intimate, as well as intimidating,
it was down to earth, as much as it was divine.
And why not? Because the ancient Egyptians held fervent,
profound beliefs about the afterlife, so of course,
they understood that there could be more than one route to eternity.