Elizabeth Frood on Ancient Egypt

Let's start with Jan Assmann. Tell me about Death and Salvation in Ancient Egypt

A lot of people, when they come to look at Ancient Egypt and Egyptian material, think that Egyptians were obsessed with death and funerary rituals because so much that survives from their world relates to death and the transformative realm; the transfiguration of a person in the next world. This is also true, in part, because death is one of the most problematic experiences for people in any age. Assmann offers studies and interpretations of a whole range of funerary texts and liturgies, biographies, songs and hymns and shows us the full complexity of the Egyptians’ relationship with death. Their images of it were diverse, complex, and often conflicting. Death was denied and feared, ‘an enemy’, but death was also a kind of return to an original state, to the womb, and also, perhaps more familiarly, death was a transition to another world.

When you start to look in detail at Egyptian concepts of death they often seem contradictory. There is a paradise similar to earth but better; then there is a real fear, death as something that will dismember you and take you apart. This is very human in a way, the contradiction, and of course it makes sense that death has all these possibilities.

Assmann is an Egyptologist but he is also a great humanist scholar, and he uses Egypt almost as a case study for a wider way of looking at human concepts of the world and experience, especially religious belief and practice. His background in comparative religion perhaps makes Egyptology and Egyptian religion more broadly accessible.

How did you get interested in Egyptology?

I’m from New Zealand, the other side of the world from Egypt, but my parents took me travelling from an early age and it was somewhere in Greece that I decided I wanted to be an archaeologist. Then, at the beginning of my university career, somebody showed me Gardiner’s Egyptian Grammar and I fell in love with hieroglyphs and Egyptian texts. I was very lucky to have Anthony Spalinger as a Professor at Auckland University – a world-renowned Egyptologist at the bottom of the world! I go to Egypt a few times a year and I’m just starting my own project there, in Luxor.

The Ancient Egyptian period, but it covers thousands of years. Presumably things changed a lot in that time?

My work is mostly on the Late New Kingdom and early first millennium (ca. 1200 to 700BC); you really do have to specialise! Change over time is difficult to approach, in part because we do specialise, but certain basic features such as art and religion also seem, on the surface, to be so static and unchanging. But there is enormous change and diversity – linguistic, religious and social developments were dramatic, for example ­– but ruling groups also wanted to preserve traditions so sometimes change isn’t immediately obvious and can be hard to assess.

Tell me about the John Baines book.

He’s a professor here at Oxford so he’s a colleague of mine, but also one of the most influential Egyptologists of the past 20 years. His work has been enormously significant. This book collects a number of his essays and presents them as a coherent whole and commentary on central Egyptian cultural institutions. He integrates different aspects of material culture - visual and textual - from tiny carved ivory tags to massive stone temples, emphasising the importance of context in analysis as well as comparative, anthropological perspectives. He explains how visual and written domains, two sides of the same coin, are complementary and mutually transforming and sustaining. These essays are a snapshot of his career over time, and what I find most inspiring is the way he can take a little detail and, through his reassessment of it, completely change your perspective on a whole topic.

Can you think of an example?

Well, he talks about approaches to Egyptian two-dimensional art and its ‘lack’ of perspective, which makes it look strange to us; we are trained in perspective as a representational tool from very early on. He argues that we shouldn’t see this as a deficiency; it wasn’t lack of ability, but rather that art had a different aim. Egyptian artists made play with the flat surface, using its potential and quite often having fun with it. When you start to think about the flexibility and potential of flat surfaces and the possibility to represent multiple viewpoints, you start to see the incredible complexity and freedom of Egyptian art, as well as its relationship to particular ways of seeing and understanding the world.

The Chapel of Ptahhotep – this is really cool. It’s a photographic study of a single tomb space, an Old Kingdom tomb in the necropolis of Saqqara, near Cairo. There are hundreds, thousands of books and catalogues on Egyptian art, and most offer a good sense of visual culture, but this one is different. It is a detailed study of the tomb of one individual, taking you through the space and allowing you to examine all aspects, from the modelling of the dominant figure of the tomb-owner, to tiny details such as how the harpist’s fingers move over the strings, how the lips of the flautists are wrapped around the flute.