On These Ancient Sands

After almost a decade of political upheaval, more stable times—and visitors—are returning to Egypt. And while the streets of Cairo may still resound with speculation over the future, the country’s ancient past remains vividly, gloriously alive in the monuments of Giza, Luxor, and Aswan.

- Aatish Taseer

UNTIL THAT FIRST MORNING in Cairo, I had always felt the art of ancient Egypt to be out of reach. I could admire its scale, of course, and its impassive beauty. Like most New Yorkers, I had delighted at the sight of the Temple of Dendur, all lit up in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, as I made my way home through Central Park. But for art to really live, it cannot be the mere background. One has to find a way to understand its spirit, to inhabit the world it came from. To me, the culture of ancient Egypt had always seemed so heavily caricatured, it hardly felt real. And I’d struggled to get my head around its mind-boggling antiquity. Was it really possible that as many centuries separate Alexander the Great from the Pyramids of Giza as separate us from him?

But on that bright December morning, at the new Grand Egyptian Museum in Giza, just west of Cairo, something changed in me forever. Finding myself in proximity to objects now banal, now wondrous, the art of ancient Egypt ceased to be remote or cartoonish. Here was Tutankhamun’s papyrus chair; there were ushabti, or funerary figurines, in various enticing shades of blue. In another room were slim-limbed funerary beds, their gold leaf still intact. One had cat-faced Sekhmet on its posts, the other the sky cow Mehet-Weret , with black trefoils decorating its gold skin. It was all so near, so intimate. Even the masked world of the pharaohs did not seem out of reach once I’d just stood inches away from Tutankhamun’s underwear—a great linen thong stained brown, not through any fault of his own, but by 33 centuries of oxidation.