Bringing the dead to life

Osbert Sitwell tells a story in Left hand! Right hand! about visiting a country house and sitting on a hall chair which promptly collapses. ‘Don’t worry, Osbert,’ his hostess tells him, ‘it was a very old chair.’ Indeed it was, as Sitwell later discovers: Egyptian and about 3,000 years old. Fortunately, more ‘very old’ objects have survived from ancient Egypt than from any comparable period, because the Egyptians set such store by filling the tombs of their pharaohs with chairs, sculpture, jewellery, wall paintings, gold, alabaster, model boats, board games – anything that might come in handy for the after-life in which they so firmly believed.

The magnificently conceived exhibition The Pharaohs, at the Palazzo Grassi, Venice (until 25 May 2003), has hundreds of such artefacts on view, a third of them on loan from the Egyptian Museum in Cairo. It sets out to bring the pharaohs to life, something which, although they anticipated it in a rather different way, so preoccupied their waking thoughts as they contemplated eternity. Like all the exhibitions in this Fiat-inspired series devoted to ancient civilisations, The Pharaohs is not for the faint-hearted. The materials on view are ravishing but the exhibition is very large and serious in intent, although displayed with exemplary clarity. If, for example, a frieze or papyrus records the use of a musical instrument such as the ‘sistrum’, a nearby case will be sure to display a surviving sistrum, or even two. Records of warfare are accompanied by the gold or bronze daggers belonging to the pharaoh or general mentioned. A fascinating section on scribes, who were vital to the documentation and archival programme of the court, is accompanied by shrewdly chosen examples of their palettes, brushes and pens.

It is a far cry from a recent Timewatch programme on the subject, judging by the blurb in the Times, in which we were promised insights into the lost capital city of Akhenaten and his wife Nefertiti.