TVM Entry Floor: Egypt on Tour (part 1)

Ancient Egyptian Art
Greece
Etruscan
Rome

Egypt on Tour
in the 19th and 20th Centuries

This part of the museum surveys Egyptian geography and monumental art. The trip is funded in part by the United States government with a surplus supersonic U2 plane which we use to transport visitors from the North Pole, where the museum is located, to Egypt. It is a fast plane, and it flies high (near the edge of space) so the views are spectacular, but seating and comfort is somewhat limited. Welcome to your plane: the Artexplorer. All flights leave from the Cerf International Airport, CIA, located a few miles South of here on the Prime Meridian.

U2 Tourist Plane
"Artexplorer"

All Aboard!

This tour is presented using high up U2 views of Egypt, historical sites and modern Egyptian life is presented using classic postcards and modern ground photographs. This geographical tour of monuments is designed to complement the art presentations, which are primarily chronological and tend to show smaller artifacts. It would be nice to have more good contemporary photographs of Egypt. If anyone visits Egypt or has visited Egypt recently and can give us copies of their photographs, we will expand the pictures in this section.

Time and space (chronological and geographical) are two ways of organizing historical material. The location of objects is not necessarily related to the time in which they were important. However, sometimes time and space are highly related. Egyptian monuments tend to be confusing in a historical sense, because funeral sites, which are related to a specific time event are intermixed with monuments raised by later kings that honor former ones, in temples that lasted for many centuries.

The Kings of Egypt were gods. It was important to the kings to have their personal temples respected, and thus they often honored temples of earlier kings by adding to them or redecorating them. Temples to all the Egyptian gods were constantly added to, modified, or left to crumble, depending on economics, politics, and the whim of the king. Sometimes decorations in one temple were moved to another when the center of government shifted. This confuses both the spatial and temporal organization of historical data. Only by examining historical material both geographically and temporally does one get a feel for the historical sweep of Egyptian art and history.

In this museum, the mummies and the artifacts associated with royal burials are organized and displayed historically along with other artifacts of that period. Most Egyptian artifacts that has come down to us are from tombs, mummies, or as decoration on temple or burial site walls, so seeing the historical view is enlightening. The way people were buried changed as time went on; this was both a matter of style, and as a response to grave robbing. (See Egyptian Artifacts.)

The classic postcards which make up much of this geographical survey of Egypt were made from drawings by David Roberts (1796-1864), a Scot artist, who visited Egypt in the 1830s. These drawings were later reproduced as 3 by 5 inch postcards and sold to tourists for most of the first half of the twentieth century. Several other artists from the nineteenth century were also made into postcards, in the museum each reproduction of a postcard identifies the original artist. Our tour of Egypt will start at the Delta and move up the Nile, following the river just as most early visitors did.

Overview of Egyptian Geography

Egypt is located in the Northeast Corner of Africa. It will take us about 3 hours to fly there on our supersonic U2 Tourist plane. Ancient Egypt occupied all of what is called Egypt today and half of today's Sudan. In ancient times the country south of Egypt was called Nubia. The southern boundary of Egypt varied over time, depending of the strength of the particular dynasty and the resistance of the Nubians to Egyptian domination.

Egypt is located in a dry arid region of Africa. It is mostly desert and what makes Egypt both inhabitable and valuable is the Nile. The Nile starts at Lake Victoria in Central Africa and flows up the map emptying into the Mediterranean Sea. In the past, before the High Aswan Dam, monsoons in central Africa would send a rush of water annually down the Nile carrying rich silt from the forests of central Africa to Egypt. The Nile would overflow its banks and inundate the regions around the river dropping its silt and fertilizing the grain field of Egypt. This annual flooding which made agriculture relatively easy and highly productive in Ancient Egypt. Egypt was the bread basket of the Greek and Roman world, exporting grain and gaining wealth for itself. If the monsoons in Central Africa failed, the Egyptian crop would be less. This meant Southern Europe would have to do without Egyptian grain, often causing starvation to many. This meant that during the classical period of the Greek and Roman empires (300BC to 300AD) Egyptian politics always played a central role for the dominant empire; the country that controlled Egypt controlled a major source of food for the Eastern Mediterranean.

Historically Southern or Upper Egypt has been distinguished from Northern or Lower Egypt. The Delta of the Nile, the most Northern part of Egypt has always considered itself unique. From earliest times there have been separate crowns that the Pharaoh wore to represent each region. There was also a combined crown. Egypt was administratively broken into provinces, called Nomes. Each Nome had a regional capital, it's own sacred sites, and it's own symbol and standard or flag. Allocation of taxes, levies for soldiers, and grain distributions were done by Nome.