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Well, here were Egypt’s animals – a glorious menagerie: tangential, yet oddly familiar. As I turned the pages the dreamlike succession of images recalled that matchless passage in Penelope Lively’s novel Moon Tiger : Like anyone else, I knew Egypt before ever I went there. And when I think of it now . . . I have to think of it as a continuous phenomenon, the kilted pharaonic population spilling out into the Nile valley of the twentieth century, the chariots and lotus, Horus and Ra and Isis alongside the Mameluke mosques, the babbling streets of Cairo, Nasser’s High Dam . . . Past and present do not so much co-exist in the Nile valley as cease to have any meaning. What is buried under the sand is reflected above, not just in the souvenirs hawked by the descendants of the tomb robbers but in the eternal, deliberate cycle of the landscape – the sun rising from the desert of the east to sink into the desert of the west, the spring surge of the river, the regeneration of creatures – the egrets and herons and wildfowl, the beasts of burden, the enduring peasantry. So many aspects of that ancient civilization defy comprehension today – not least the unchanging form of these artworks over the course of a mindboggling timespan. Compare the transformation in our own visual arts lexicon over the past century and a half with the formulae reproduced on the walls of sealed tombs buried under 21
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A Glorious Menagerie sand over 3,000 pharaonic years. For millennia, the familiar sideways profile of human face and body with forward-facing eye and torso endured, likewise the colours of sun and desert and water – ochre, sand, rust, black; turquoise, green, lapis, gold – and the mysterious imposing figures of animal- and bird-headed gods. So too did the columns of hieroglyphics, studded with owls, ibis, scarabs, snakes – of some 700 signs in the Middle Kingdom’s written language, one in four use images of living creatures . . . Another thought to try to get one’s head around: ancient Egyptians had no word for art in their language. These exquisite images, created by skilled craftsmen using the finest materials, appeared only in underground tombs and those flat-roofed burial plots called mastabas, rarely seen by the living. Their purpose was to keep the deceased’s memory alive for their survivors, and for their resurrection and eternal survival. To render a subject visually was to give it permanent existence: texts and images not only symbolized the rich life awaiting the mummified deceased but became the things themselves in an ideal everlasting present. Death was a rite of passage at the start of a long underground journey strewn with obstacles towards the eternal afterlife, which was, as Germond writes, ‘a comforting extension of life on earth, played out in the same natural habitat populated by the same animals, and featuring the same activities, joys and woes’. Here we are pitched into the mythical cosmos of a people living thousands of years ago, who used images to express themselves in a symbolic language that constantly shifted between the real and the imagined. A century ago, European Egyptologists confidently explained the symbols and beliefs behind the decorated tombs then being unearthed to feverish worldwide interest. Today’s experts hesitate to assume anything, speculating that even the ancient Egyptians’ concept of time was radically different from our own present-day historical perspective. Germond, careful not to over-interpret, describes rather than explains, dividing his subject matter into two parts: the secular and 22

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Well, here were Egypt’s animals – a glorious menagerie: tangential, yet oddly familiar. As I turned the pages the dreamlike succession of images recalled that matchless passage in Penelope Lively’s novel Moon Tiger :

Like anyone else, I knew Egypt before ever I went there. And when I think of it now . . . I have to think of it as a continuous phenomenon, the kilted pharaonic population spilling out into the Nile valley of the twentieth century, the chariots and lotus, Horus and Ra and Isis alongside the Mameluke mosques, the babbling streets of Cairo, Nasser’s High Dam . . . Past and present do not so much co-exist in the Nile valley as cease to have any meaning. What is buried under the sand is reflected above, not just in the souvenirs hawked by the descendants of the tomb robbers but in the eternal, deliberate cycle of the landscape – the sun rising from the desert of the east to sink into the desert of the west, the spring surge of the river, the regeneration of creatures – the egrets and herons and wildfowl, the beasts of burden, the enduring peasantry. So many aspects of that ancient civilization defy comprehension today – not least the unchanging form of these artworks over the course of a mindboggling timespan. Compare the transformation in our own visual arts lexicon over the past century and a half with the formulae reproduced on the walls of sealed tombs buried under

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