Missed View

The tendency has been to treat ancient Egyptian art as merely an impressive precursor to the masterpieces of classical Greece. And with some reason, since Egyptian art was known to most viewers only through those available examples brought home by 19th century plunderers. To the Western eye, attuned to the realistic and lyric drapery of Greek sculpture, most seemed sleekly stylized, looking vaguely like objects suitable for reproduction as paperweights.

Fortunately, the Egyptians managed to save for themselves some of the best of their art. They enshrined these pieces in the Cairo Museum, and taken together, the collection is a forceful demonstration that Egyptian art need take second place to none. Three years ago, Perry Rathbone, director of Boston's Museum of Fine Arts and a dedicated admirer of Egyptian art, dispatched an emissary to Cairo to wangle a truly representative selection for a tour of the U.S. Rathbone got the cooperation of the Metropolitan in New York and later the Los Angeles County Museum to share the huge expenses of shipment and insurance. Last year Egyptian authorities finally agreed to lend 43 pieces. It would have been the greatest Egyptian show ever.

War Casualty. Then, abruptly and even as the last few treasures were being crated for shipment, the great show became a casualty of Middle Eastern tensions. In the U.S., pro-Israeli sentiment had been inflamed by the suspected Arab sabotage of an Israel-bound jet, France's visiting President Pompidou had been booed and picketed because his government had closed off military aid to Israel. Rumors spread through the art world that the Met's director, Thomas Hoving, was about to withdraw the Met's support on the ground that he could not assure the safety of the treasures when the exhibition moved to New York in late August.

In Egypt, feeling turned strongly against the loan, particularly when a misdirected Israeli attack on a factory killed 88 civilians. Said one high official bitterly: "How can we send such a magnificent exhibition to a country that is supplying the army of our enemy with planes and pilots that attack and kill our people?" Egypt's Minister of Culture, Sarwat Okasha, cabled Rathbone that he was postponing the exhibition "until a happier atmosphere prevails."

Incarnate Goals. The "postponement" ripped apart a carefully woven fabric of international cultural cooperation that had survived many other political and ideological shocks. For its part, Egypt lost the admission charges that U.S. museums had been prepared to donate to a UNESCO project for rescuing the temples of Philae from inundation by the waters of the Aswan High Dam. But the chief losers were U.S. art lovers. Among the masterpieces they had been about to see were many that had never before left Egypt.

Greatest of these is the statue of Chephren, builder of the second pyramid and the Sphinx at Giza. "It is as important as the Mona Lisa or Michelangelo's Pieta" says Curator Edward Terrace of the Boston Museum. Originally placed in Chephren's temple beside the Sphinx, this work comes closer than perhaps any statue in any age to achieving both monumentality and humanity. It meets the ancient Egyptian sculptor's challenge of depicting a real king as an incarnate god. Twelve hundred years later, when Ramses II built his temples at Abu Simbel. Chephren's serene face and regal pose still served as a model for statues of royalty.

Steatopygous Queen. For lesser mortals--and foreign royalty--such dignity was not required. The steatopygous Queen of Punt (modern Somalia) is portrayed in a polychromed limestone relief with a humorous naturalism that borders on the grotesque. The dwarf Seneb, a priest of the funerary cult of Cheops, is shown in a unique and touching representation of the ancient Egyptian ideal of the happy family. These small effigies were fashioned to go into the family tomb, which was equipped in Egyptian custom with representations of the family and models of the household furnishings against the day of resurrection. Traditionally, husband and wife are shown side by side, flanked by their smaller children. But because of Seneb's deformity, the artist tucked Seneb's legs up underneath him, and put Seneb's children where another man's legs would be. Thus both artistic composition and Seneb's dignity are preserved.

The realistic impulse that periodically animated Egyptian art found dramatic expression in the black diorite portrait bust of Mentuemhat, a vigorous and effective Governor of Thebes who restored the economy of his province after the Assyrian invasion and maintained order during a long and difficult period. Most of Mentuemhat's many statues show him in the traditional and conventional state of ideal manhood. Toward the end of his life, he ordered a revealing study of himself as an old man. In all art history, there are few portraits that so clearly convey the power--and the strain --of a man whose word is law.

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