Ancient Egyptian concepts of this world and the next are the focus of this spring's major exhibition at the Louvre in Paris, writes David Tresilian This spring's major exhibition at the Louvre museum in Paris brings together a variety of ancient Egyptian artifacts -- sculpture, fragments of papyrus, tomb furniture, mummy cases and mummies -- and uses them to illustrate the ways in which the ancient Egyptians thought about the world and their place within it. It will be very welcome to anyone who has ever wandered through museum Egyptology galleries and been struck by the impressive scale and detail of the materials on display but felt rather lost when it comes to making sense of them. Entitled Les Portes du ciel, the "gates of heaven," the exhibition investigates the division in ancient Egyptian thought between the visible and the invisible world and the ways in which the ancient Egyptians thought about the boundary between life and death and between the world of the gods and the human world. Ancient Egyptian tombs and mortuary temples usually featured stone stelae, or markers, which were carved to resemble doors or gateways, and these seem to have had a symbolic function as ways of access to the dead. Investigation of the function of such gateways is one part of the exhibition's remit, but the general idea is much broader than that. Beginning with such points of access between the worlds of the living and the dead, Les Portes du ciel examines many of the basic oppositions that structured ancient Egyptian thought, including the ancient Egyptians' famous preoccupation with preparation for the afterlife. The exhibition is presented in the Louvre's main temporary exhibition gallery in the Hall Napoléon and is arranged in the form of a loop that takes the visitor through four main parts. Boundaries are established between each as if to underline the exhibition's preoccupation with symbolic lines or crossing points, and the overall design changes as the visitor proceeds through the galleries. There are some 370 objects on display culled from the major European museums as well as from the Louvre, and these range from sculptures made to a larger than human scale to tiny amulets and various kinds of tomb goods. The exhibition will certainly be a haven for all devotees of ancient Egyptian materials. Families with young children were much in evidence on a recent visit, along with the Louvre's more familiar middle-aged audience, children perhaps always being fascinated by dinosaur bones and ancient Egyptian mummies. The exhibition's first room, entitled "'first time': the creation of the world," examines ancient Egyptian creation myths, looking in particular at the ways in which the ancient Egyptians seem to have carved up the cosmos into adjoining spaces and how they conceptualised the boundaries between them. Writers in the characteristically sumptuous catalogue accompanying the exhibition stress what the ancient Egyptians seem to have conceived of as the paradoxically fragile nature of the apparently solid world around them. This world, created according to myths whose details change from place to place and from period to period in ancient Egypt's exceptionally long history, rested upon another, invisible world, the boundaries of which seem to have lain beyond the horizon, in the skies, or beneath the earth. While there was a kind of permanent connection in ancient Egyptian thought between the visible world and this other world, which was the world of the gods and of the dead, there was also a need to foster and strengthen this connection. Ancient Egyptian religion was the principal mode in which such contact and strengthening took place, and a vast priestly caste provided the necessary mediation. A special role seems to have been played by the ancient Egyptian king or pharaoh, who was seen as the living person closest to the gods. Various materials in the first room of the exhibition illustrate this idea, one of the most striking being a temple relief from the Karnak temple complex in Luxor dating from the Ptolemaic period. As is well known, the Ptolemaic kings, Greek- speaking descendants of a general of Alexander the Great who conquered Egypt in 331 BCE, took over the role previously played by the Egyptian pharaohs, even presenting themselves in Egyptian guise and maintaining the Egyptian religion. In the relief included in the present exhibition, now itself in the Louvre, Ptolemy VIII Euergetes (reigned 170-163 and 145-116 BCE) is shown making an offering to the god Amun-Re, something which, the catalogue note explains, was part of his "mission to maintain the initial dynamism involved in the creation of the world, as conceived by the ancient Egyptians." The first room of the exhibition is painted bright yellow in reference to the role played by the sun in ancient Egyptian thought, particularly when conceptualising the solid, visible world. From here, the visitor moves to the second room, darkened throughout, which is given over to the world for which the ancient Egyptians are most famous, that of the dead. However, "far from being fascinated by death," as popular impressions of them might suggest, writes curator Marc Etienne in the exhibition catalogue, "the ancient Egyptians wanted to be able to do everything in the afterlife that they had been accustomed to doing in this one." The idea was to make all the preparations they could in this life for the life that was to come, though the ways in which they ancient Egyptians thought about the afterlife, particularly their ideas about its topography, seem to have altered over time. While there are comparatively few Old Kingdom representations of the afterlife aside from descriptions in the so-called "pyramid texts" found on the walls of Old Kingdom pyramids that describe the pharaoh moving through the heavens in a "solar boat," Middle and New Kingdom representations are much more lavish, placing the afterlife in a region resembling an "underworld" and providing the dead person with maps, charms and other materials that will help him find his way through it. These materials, the so-called "coffin texts" found inscribed in Middle Kingdom tombs and the New Kingdom texts now known as the "Book of the Dead," are displayed in the present exhibition in various recensions, with the Middle Kingdom coffin texts perhaps being particularly striking. The outer coffin of an official named Sepi who lived during the reigns of the Middle Kingdom pharaohs Sesostris II and III (1868- 1843 BCE) is on display, and this includes a detailed map of the afterlife showing the areas through which the dead man could have been expected to move and providing him with the various spells that could be used to charm the guardians of the different regions. This coffin, found at Deir el-Bersheh in the outer chamber of the tomb of another official named Djehoutyhotep, is now in the Louvre. During the later New Kingdom the provision of texts about the afterlife seems to have grown into quite an industry, with individuals commissioning papyrus copies of different spells in the form of what the ancient Egyptians knew as the "Book for Going Forth by Day" and what has come down to us as their Book of the Dead. Such spells were written out on papyrus according to the needs of the individual client, and the exhibition includes many different versions of such commissions together with further examples that were carved or painted on tomb walls. Among the carved forms, a large black granite sarcophagus dating from the Ptolemaic period that belonged to a woman named Tenethep is included that is decorated with texts from the Book of the Dead. This item demonstrates the survival of ancient Egyptian religion and religious practices into the Ptolemaic period and beyond. One late mummy on display, that of Amun, the 14-year-old son of Antinoos, who died in Antinopolis around 225-250 CE, is also decorated with images of the ancient Egyptian gods Thot, Horus, Anubis and Osiris, as well as with an image of the weighing of the heart that the ancient Egyptians thought took place on entrance to the afterlife. The inscriptions on the mummy are, however, in Greek, and the assemblage dates from a period when Egypt as a whole was a province of the Roman Empire. This mummy is probably one of the most touching items on display, and the visitor may well be struck by the realism of the Roman-style portrait of the boy painted on the mummy case. Another item in the next section of the exhibition similarly shows how ordinary people, not necessarily officials of the pharaoh's court or members of the priestly caste, might have followed their religion. This piece, a simple strip of cloth painted with the image of a mummy and decorated with rudimentary hieroglyphs, dates from the Ptolemaic period and today is kept in the Louvre. According to the exhibition catalogue, people not able to afford the kinds of elaborate tombs today excavated by archaeologists would have wrapped unmummified bodies -- mummification in itself was an expensive procedure -- in lengths of cloth of this sort and buried them in desert graves. The body's face would have been marked by a kind of earthenware mask that served the same sort of function as the golden masks used by the pharaohs, while not possessing gold's immutability. The last two rooms of the exhibition are given over to the modes of communication that could take place, mediated by religion, between the living and the dead. Once again the emphasis is on gateways, doors, and the various connecting points identified by the ancient Egyptians between this world and the next. Vast mortuary temples were constructed where rituals were performed on behalf of the influential dead, and on the forecourts of other temples, most famously at the Karnak complex in Luxor, obelisks and statues were set up to serve as "bridges" or "vectors of communication" between this world and the next and between the human world and the world of the gods. The impressive temple gateways, or "pylons," served as markers of the transition between profane and sacred space, with priests alone able to move through the enfilade of connecting rooms to the innermost sanctuary where a kind of tabernacle contained the image of the god. According to egyptologist Christiane Zivie-Coche writing in the exhibition catalogue, the aim of Les Portes du ciel is to provide visitors with "an introduction to ancient Egyptian thought" through extending and deepening the notion of the door or gateway, which functioned for the ancient Egyptians as an access point between the physical and non- physical worlds and between this world and the world of religion and of the imagination. Some things about the exhibition are less good than others, the audioguide in particular being something of a missed opportunity. Why provide a commentary that ignores most of the objects on display and does not include the useful material to be found in the catalogue? On the whole, though, this is one exhibition of ancient Egyptian artifacts that confirmed devotees and slightly bewildered amateurs can visit with probably almost equal pleasure. Les Portes du ciel, visions du monde dans l'Egypte ancienne, musée du Louvre, Paris, 6 March -- 29 June 2009.
