(Originally posted: 6/10/2011)
I finally made it to Cincinatti to see “Cleopatra: The Search for the Last Queen of Egypt.” I’m pleased to say that, of the several major museum exhibits I’ve seen in the last several months, it is by far the best. Click through to read my full thoughts.
The exhibit is showing at the Cincinatti Museum Center through September 5. Admission for adults is a reasonable $23. The Museum Center itself is well worth a visit; to my eye, it looked like nothing so much as an art deco version of the Hall of Justice from the old Superfriends cartoon. It combines several museums under one roof. The Cleopatra exhibit is in the main exhibit hall.
The show is an exploration of the artifacts recovered from the Alexandria harbor over the last fifteen years or so. For those who don’t know, Alexandria was the capital from which Cleopatra VII ruled Egypt. It was founded by Alexander the Great on the Mediterranean coast as part of his campaign to draw Egypt into the larger Mediterranean world. Following his death, it remained the capital until Cleopatra’s death, when Octavian eliminated the Egyptian monarchy and formally annexed Egypt to the Roman Empire. In the first millennium A.D., several earthquakes and tsunamis destroyed the city, ultimately sinking much of the royal quarter and commercial port under the waters of the modern harbor.
The show is structured in part as a journey through that underwater excavation. When you enter the galleries, the first room is a raised glass walkway, with faux-sand floors underneath and blue walls. The lighting replicates sunlight shining through the water’s surface. This room, unfortunately, has several quite stunning artifacts, but no text at all to even identify what they are. There were fragments of various Ptolemaic & Hellenistic sculpture, an amphora or two, and one massive stone piece that I think was the capital of a giant column. But without any interpretive material, these artifacts did little more than create atmosphere. Even someone like me, with a bachelor’s degree in Classics, couldn’t say much.
The next galleries, happily, more than made up for this shortcoming. Text was everywhere, and the walls were covered in maps and LCD monitors showing video. Each individual artifact did not have interpretive text, but each case did, and the text on the case was sufficient to feel like the pieces inside had been described. The audio tour, which was recorded as if narrated by Cleopatra herself, did not add much to the interpretation of the artifacts; it merely narrated the story of her relationships with Caesar & Antony, and often had little to do with the aritfacts on display nearby. That is a minor quibble, though.
Unlike the earlier exhibits I’ve written about, this one had a clear organization from the beginning, and the order the artifacts were presented in was always obvious. The galleries were ordered by city, with Alexandria’s artifacts coming first, then followed by three other nearby cities that were also important in Cleopatra’s time. One got the sense that life for Cleopatra and her contemporaries was not circumscribed by the walls of a luxurious palace. Each gallery began with a map showing the modern and ancient coastlines, the location of the city in question, and an artist’s rendering of the city based on excavations. The attempt to ground portable artifacts in geography was a welcome change from other exhibits, where artifacts from hundreds of miles (and thousands of years) apart are shown side-by-side with no indication that the makers did not veiw them that way.
What was most satisfying about the show is that, in addition to the truly stunning gold jewelry and the perfectly preserved sculpture, there were also on display much more utilitarian artifacts: amphorae, metal utensils, sculpture so eroded by millennia underwater that it was hardly recognizable. My main complaint with the Maya and Tutankhamun exhibits was that both gave the idea that all ancient artifacts are perfectly preserved. This exhibit, while it certainly does have shockingly beautiful pieces on display, makes an attempt to show the everyday things that are most often recovered by archaeologists. That coupled with the plentiful interpretive material means that a layman might actually learn about life in Ptolemaic Alexandria in this exhibit!
There were four pieces that stood out most in my mind, and anyone seeing the exhibit should keep an eye out for them. The first is called the Naos of the Decades. A naos is a carved stone conatiner in which the idols of Egyptian gods were stored in temples. This one was found in fragments in the Alexandria harbor, still with the hieroglyphic inscriptians largely legible. They describe an Egyptian zodiac, dividing the years into ten-day periods (hence, decades). The various fragments are reconstructed to show the full sized naos. Unfortunately, the interpretive text at the artifact itself does not reveal that the top of the naos is a reproduction (the original is in the Louvre). A museum employee mentioned that to me later as we were chatting. I always hate when reproductions aren’t marked as such, since they tend to be much better preserved than the real pieces.
The second and third pieces that stood out are the monumental sculptures of a Ptolemaic pharaoh and his queen, standing maybe twenty feet high each. Though they lay below the harbor for two thousand years, they are still remarkably well preserved, and give a real sense of how imposing Egyptian royal architecture was, even in this period centuries past its golden age. These two figures are anonymous, unfortunately; I’d love to know who is being depicted, but unfortunately that info was lost long ago.
The final piece to keep an eye out for is the papyrus on display almost by itself near the end of the exhibit. This is a routine legal document, written in Greek, granting certain tax privileges to a business associate of Marc Antony. The most interesting thing about it, however, is a single Greek word (which the text translates as “Get it done”) added at the bottom of the document, in a different handwriting. The interpretive text suggests that this last bit was actually written by Cleopatra herself. If so, then this otherwise uninteresting scrap of paper is probably the most amazing piece on display!
The last room of the exhibit shows various images of Cleopara from the Middle Ages, Renaissance, and more recent periods. Clips of movie versions of Cleopatra’s life are playing on a loop on one wall. This was a pleasant way to complete the show, reminding people of how a single woman’s life has continued to have such profound impact throughout the ages.
One final note: in the museum gift shop (which the exhibit empties guests into, as usual) is a DVD made specially for the exhibit. It documents Franck Goddio’s underwater excavations at Alexandria and shows the preparations for transporting and displaying the artifacts. In the course of the ~45 minute documentary, you actually get to see many of the same aritfacts on display being removed from underwater sediment. It is a great eye-witness despiction of how underwater archaeology works, and what goes into a major exhibit like this. At $21, it’s a great addition to a great experience.