Deities and Sacrifices. Animals of ancient Egypt
23.04-16.07.2017, Deities and Sacrifices. Animals of ancient Egypt.
Exhibition from the collection of the National Museum in Warsaw
The exhibition will treat the importance that animals had for the ancient Egyptians. The subject of animals will be treated in a multifaceted way: animals will be presented as forms of deities, as votive offerings, as sacrifices. The role of animals in art and in hieroglyphic writing will be highlighted. The exhibition will include animal sculptures and figurines, animal mummies, figurines of deities with partially animal forms, amulets in the shape of animals or their fragments, as well as objects covered with hieroglyphic writing and decorated with animal imagery, such as sarcophagi, steles, urns and Canopic boxes.
The Egyptians felt a very strong connection with nature, and the nature that surrounded them – plants, trees, animals, birds – influenced their perception of the world and ideas about the hereafter, accompanied them in various ways in their daily life and was a source of inspiration in art.
The extraordinary qualities of animals – speed, agility, strength, deadly venom, great eyesight, ability to fly – made them creatures close to the gods. This does not mean that the Egyptians worshipped animals as such – after all, they hunted and bred them for various purposes, including consumption – but they believed that through their superhuman abilities the divine element was manifested in them. Some animals were thus considered representatives of the gods on earth.
While in earlier eras only single specimens of sacred animals were mummified, bred at temples and treated as embodiments of the deity, the Late Period saw the development of the custom of mass burials of animals, offered as votive offerings during the festivals of particular deities and probably specially bred for this purpose. It is estimated that millions of animals were buried in the necropolises of sacred animals. In Sakkara, where the most important catacombs of sacred and votive animals were located (north of Pharaoh Djoser’s district), baboons, ibises, falcons, dogs and cats were buried in addition to Apis bulls.
The animal world also provided a wealth of artistic inspiration. Animals, their heads, paws or hooves, feathers, horns, wings – all these elements were very readily used in decorative art, demonstrating an incredible ability to observe and use animal forms for decoration and a love of detail. But the decorative function usually had other meanings in the subtext – symbolic, mythological, magical.
Favorite animal motifs in architecture were the friezes of ureushas crowning shrines, shrines, niches, stele, altars and other objects of an architectural nature like some sarcophagi or canopic boxes. The frieze of the ureush had an apotropaic, protective meaning, concentrating in itself all the power of the destructive power of the sun: the ureush, an elongated cobra, was the main royal and solar symbol. Its role was to protect the pharaoh and destroy his enemies.
The relationship of the gods with animals was shown in art through the particularly characteristic Egyptian method of combining a human figure with an animal head or, less frequently, vice versa. Deities with animal features appear both on temple walls and on votive and tomb objects. Stele, sarcophagi, urns and Canaanite boxes were decorated with painted depictions of deities associated with tomb beliefs and with the care of the dead – hence the frequent images of goddesses with outstretched caring wings, as well as depictions of the Four Sons of Horus, who had the mummified entrails of the dead in their care.
Attributes derived from the animal world, characteristic of the gods, also indicated the pharaoh’s divine power. From the earliest times, the king would attach an animal tail to his belt, and put a crown decorated with feathers – falcon or ostrich – and ram’s horns on his head. But the most distinctive element of the royal costume is undoubtedly the ureush, or battle-extended cobra, adorning the forehead of the pharaoh – the embodiment of powerful goddesses whose task was to protect the pharaoh and destroy his enemies.
We can also find animals of Egypt among the hieroglyphs.
Egyptian writing consisted, at different periods, of about 1,000 characters in the Old Kingdom period, to about 5,000 characters in the Ptolemaic Period.These signs took the form of various objects, animals and birds, human figures, fragments of buildings and elements of the landscape – although it should be remembered that this was not a pictorial writing, but an ideographic-phonetic one (i.e., the signs represented concepts and sounds).
It is customary to group these signs into 26 categories, of which various groups of animals and their parts occupy 7 categories, which amounted to 176 animal signs in the classical period of Egyptian writing.
Kurator wystawy dr Monika Dolińska (Muzeum Narodowe w Warszawie)
Koordynacja wystawy: Monika Kuraś, współpraca Magdalena Kołtunowicz, Beata Trybuła (Muzeum Regionalne w Stalowej Woli)
Aranżacja wystawy: Koza Nostra Studio
http://kozanostrastudio.pl/pl/
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