Day: 19th 8月, 2022

Among the almost 200 opulent ancient Egyptian artifacts in the new exhibition “Ramses the Great and the Gold of the Pharaohs,” curator Zahi Hawass says he’s been transfixed by one sculpture: an 8-foot-tall, red granite head of Ramses II dating to the 13th century B.C.

The commanding visage of Egypt’s most influential New Kingdom ruler, wearing the iconic white crown of Upper Egypt and a chin-strapped false beard, originally topped a colossal statue in a Memphis, Egypt, temple. Discovered there in 1888, the deified pharaoh’s likeness now greets visitors entering the de Young Museum’s immersive 12,000-square foot installation, opening Saturday, Aug. 20. The exhibition explores the reign of one of Egypt’s most powerful and longest-ruling monarchs; Ramses the Great ruled for 67 years and lived past age 90, a rare life span in the ancient world.

It’s the greatest collection of Ramses II objects ever to travel to the United States, including numerous items never loaned outside Egypt — sarcophagi, royal masks, sculpture, recently discovered animal mummies, amulets and magnificent jewelry — as well as a virtual reality component installed in the museum’s Piazzoni Murals Room.

Review: ‘Ramses the Great’ show in S.F. uncovers the ‘fine art’ in immersive experiences

“I really love that statue at the beginning of the exhibit,” an exuberant Hawass told The Chronicle by phone from Los Angeles before his trip to San Francisco, where he plans to give a free public lecture on Saturday. “When I look at his face, I imagine that I am talking to Ramses II. In fact, when I wrote the (exhibition) catalog, which includes more personal stories, it was as if Ramses was here in front of me, talking to me, telling me his story himself.

“He told me he was not just a ruler but a philosopher, a warrior, a peacemaker,” the famed archeologist and Egyptoloist continued, “a man who was so in love with Nefartari as a young man, he built for her the most beautiful tomb ever made for a queen.”

Now, if anyone else were to recount in such breathless fervor an imaginary conversation with the 3,000-year-old pharaoh known as Ozymandias in Greek texts, whose mummified body rests in Cairo’s National Museum of Egyptian Civilization, we might rightly question their hold on reality. But it somehow makes sense for a nostalgic showman like Hawass, whose career since working as a young inspector at the great pyramids has been guided by an unquenchable curiosity and sense of connection with Egypt’s epic past.

“When I heard a Ramses exhibition would be available to travel here, I jumped at the opportunity,” said Renee Dreyfus, de Young’s curator in charge of ancient art.

Hawass, former secretary-general of Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities, is best known in the U.S. from his frequent television appearances on the Discovery Channel, Fox and the History Channel (“Chasing Mummies”). There seems to scarcely be media coverage involving ancient Egypt without Hawass’ involvement. He’s filmed CT scans of King Tut’s remains and his 2010 discovery of the tombs of the Khufu pyramid builders.

A man in perpetual motion at 75, Hawass hasn’t slowed a bit in spreading the gospel of Egypt’s past grandeur.

“I’m giving 23 lectures in America next May,” he gushed.

He also rattled off a dizzying number of current ventures, including a new project working in the tomb of Ramses II in the Valley of the Kings (which was plundered in ancient times, and suffered numerous subsequent floods), and overseeing the ambitious Grand Egyptian Museum set to open later this year in Giza.

But he said he keeps in mind that every exhibition he works on aims to tell a distinct story about Egypt’s glorious past.

“Ramses the Great” is about the “king of kings who signed human history’s first peace treaty (with the Hittites),” Hawass explained. “He left his name everywhere,” inscribed on monuments and temples throughout Egypt, from the Nile delta to the Nubian Desert.

While King Tut’s gold-and-jewel-encrusted artifacts may be more iconic due to the stroke of fate that kept his burial chamber from flooding, the boy king who died at 19 was far from the most consequential pharaoh, Hawass noted.

“The two most famous Egyptian kings are, first, Ramses II, and second, King Tut,” he said. “I believe this (exhibition) is one of the most important things ever to leave Egypt to travel abroad. It is educational, but it is also breathtaking. It will capture the hearts of young people.”

Dreyfus said the timing to spark renewed interest in ancient Egypt couldn’t be better, with the Ramses show to still be on view at the de Young on Nov. 4, a date marking 100 years since Howard Carter’s discovery of King Tutankhamun’s intact tomb.

“What I’ve tried to do over the years, including the last King Tut show in 2009, is to bring the finest Egyptian objects to San Francisco to satisfy this city’s great love of Egyptian art,” said Dreyfus about the popularity of the Egyptian exhibitions, noting that the 1979 King Tut show — also curated by Hawass — attracted more than 1.3 million visitors.

“There is something hauntingly interesting about people who truly believed (in an afterlife), that you could take it with you, and that the next world would be equally good, if not better.”

“Ramses the Great and the Gold of the Pharaohs”: 9:30 a.m.-5:15 p.m. Tuesday-Sunday. Opens Saturday, Aug. 20. On view through Feb. 12, 2023. $25-$40. De Young Museum, 50 Hagiwara Tea Garden Drive, S.F. 415-750-3600. deyoung.famsf.org

Ancient Art Council Lecture on Recent Egypt Discoveries with Zahi Hawass: 2 p.m. Saturday. Koret Auditorium. This is a free program on the exhibition’s opening day. Seating is limited and unassigned. Tickets are distributed on a first-come, first-served basis in front of the Koret Auditorium an hour before the presentation begins. Lecture tickets do not include admission to the exhibition. For more information, visit deyoung.famsf.org/calendar.

Ramses the Great was the most powerful, most celebrated pharaoh of ancient Egypt.

A talented military leader, he ushered in a golden era of security and prosperity and built a never-before-seen number of monuments, temples, and colossal statues (mostly dedicated to himself) across his kingdom. By the time of his death 67 years after assuming the throne, there were few in Egypt who’d ever known another ruler.

Three thousand years later, Ramses the Great’s legacy still looms large, and the artifacts associated with his reign are among Egypt’s most treasured heritage. On Friday, August 19th, 181 of them make their debut in San Francisco for the first time in the de Young Museum’s new exhibition, Ramses the Great and the Gold of the Pharaohs.

The exhibition, however, is more than just a set of beautiful objects. Using virtual reality and multimedia, it brings to life the most important events and places of Ramses’ rule.

“This is a once in a lifetime opportunity,” says Thomas P. Campbell, director and CEO of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. “It’s truly an immersive experience that engages all the senses with muscle.”

The artifacts on display in Ramses the Great range from stone cartouches and life-sized statues to delicate jewelry and exquisitely detailed coffins. In one room, an unusual collection of animal mummies that were recently discovered in the ancient city of Memphis—cats, lion cubs, mongoose, crocodiles, and scarab beetles—appear for the first time ever. In another, they recreate the crypt of Sennedjem, a royal artist and the builder of Ramses’ own tomb, surrounding his real, lavishly painted coffin with images of the afterlife projected on the walls and ceiling; these images are the same as those that were found painted in the actual tomb.

Elsewhere, a multi-platform presentation illuminates what ancient scholars consider the largest, most chaotic battle ever fought, the Battle of Kadesh, which Ramses the Great won in 1274 B.C. just a few years after assuming the throne. The epic assault takes place across three screens that combine cinematic views of the combat with shifting imagery of the battlefield.

But the most exciting multimedia element of Ramses the Great is the 10-minute virtual reality component, Ramses & Nefertari: Journey to Osiris, installed in the Piazzoni Mural Rooms upstairs. With noise-canceling headphones, VR goggles, and a spinning, tilting, rumbling chair, visitors follow Ramses’ first wife Nefertari on a tour of her husband’s most impressive monuments, Abu Simbel and Nefertari’s Tomb. The temple and crypt appear like they would have at the time of their construction, immensely detailed and convincingly real. The makers even threw in a bit of extra drama to keep things interesting.

“The temples [Ramses] erected, statues he commissioned, and monuments he inscribed throughout Egypt and Nubia, and funerary temple and royal tomb he built, were reminders of his earthly power and closeness to the gods,” says Renee Dreyfus, George and Judy Marcus Distinguished Curator and curator in charge of ancient art at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. With VR, visitors get the chance to experience what moving through those spaces was like thousands of years in the past.

// Both Ramses the Great and the Gold of the Pharaohs and Ramses & Nefertari: Journey to Osiris will be on exhibition from August 20th through February 12th, 2023. Timed entry tickets can be purchased in advance and there is an extra charge, $18/person, for the VR experience; De Young Museum, 50 Hagiwara Tea Garden Dr. (Golden Gate Park), deyoung.famsf.org.

The VR experience “Ramses and Nefertari: Journey to Osiris.”

Thousands of years before the ’49ers descended upon San Francisco in the hopes of unearthing a fortune in the mountains of California, a living god half a world away was laid to rest in The Valley of the Kings with a cache of gold that all but the most fortunate prospecters could have only dreamed of.

“Ramses the Great and The Gold of the Pharaohs,” opening Aug. 20 at the de Young Museum, showcases this royal mother lode in one of the largest exhibitions of ancient Egyptian splendor to come to the West Coast since the de Young’s “King Tut” exhibits—which captivated local museum goers in 1979 and 2009.

The exhibit features 181 artifacts lent to the de Young by the Egyptian government. It includes priceless relics found at the tomb of the powerful Pharaoh Ramses II, along with animal mummies, intricate jewerly and recently uncovered burial objects from the ancient cities of Dashur and Tanis along the Nile River. Present day Egyptologists continue to excavate and unearth new treasures.

The collection has been billed as a “once-in-a-lifetime” opportunity to see the “greatest collection of Ramses II objects and Egyptian jewelry ever to travel to the United States”—and the hype is not without merit.

In recent decades, evolutions in international law and curatorial codes of ethics have made exhibitions like “Ramses the Great” increasingly difficult to coordinate. All of the objects currently on display at the de Young are on a short-term special loan from Egypt—approved by the Egyptian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities and the Supreme Council of Antiquities of the Arab Republic of Egypt. They are not likely to leave their country of origin again for a long time after this world tour ends in 2025.

But “Ramses the Great” is more than a rare chance to see Egyptian treasures. It is also a cutting-edge display of applied technology. The highly choreographed experience features state-of-the-art lighting, sound and multimedia equipment—and includes a virtual reality tour of two of Egypt’s most impressive monuments (tickets to this cost extra).

With all there is to see and experience, you may feel overwhelmed by it all. To help you better appreciate “Ramses the Great and The Gold of the Pharaohs” here are eight essential takeaways—from easily recognizing a Pharaoh and quickly understanding Egyptian seating arrangements to avoiding the nausea some experience while strapped into a VR headset. Read on to prepare yourself to walk through the show like an Egyptian.

The King is King

With few exceptions, artistic depictions of the pharaohs remained the same for 3,000 years. But while the people of ancient Egypt were familiar with the uniform aesthetic, modern museum goers would do well to keep a few things in mind.

For starters, ancient Egyptian artists often put the king’s head on the body of a lion to form a sphinx. Also, the patriarchy was just as real then as it is today: All pharaohs, no matter their actual sex or gender, were depicted as male.

Finally, keep an eye out for some of these key pieces of royal regalia:

• Triangular royal kilt, with an ornamental bull’s tail.
• Emblematic crown with a sacred cobra, uraeus, at the forehead. The nemes, the most common headdress, has black and gold stripes framing the face and hanging to the shoulders.
• False rectangular beard.
• Hand held scepters, crook and flails or an ankh (symbol for life).

Size Matters

Size indicates relative importance. Pharaohs are often rendered larger than life to symbolize their authority and superhuman powers. In wall reliefs and paintings, workers and entertainers, flora and fauna, and architectural details are subsidiary and usually shown in smaller scale than the figures of the gods, kings, high officials or landowners.

Walk Like an Egyptian

Why did the ancient Egyptian paintings depict people in such stilted and stiff poses? The key is to think of these paintings as a composite established hieroglyphic forms, which were never intended to be naturalistic representations. The views of the body come from different perspectives: the eye and shoulders from the front; torso and hips from three-quarter view; head, feet, legs and arms in profile.

Take a Seat

Seated figures are almost certainly of a higher social status than anyone shown standing or working. Gods, goddesses, kings and scribes are often depicted as sitting. Scribes were part of an elite group of individuals who knew over 700 hieroglyphs. The elevation of these select writers attests to the importance of writing and literacy in Egypt. A scribe is usually seated with a papyrus scroll on his lap.

Stoned Poses

Egyptian sculptors seldomly completely freed the figure from the stone block. With few exceptions they did not carve out the space around the legs or between a figure’s body and arms due to the stone’s brittleness. Artists left that negative space filled in so the sculpture stayed intact.This technique provided not only with a desired longevity but also resulted in a very centered, calm, poised and motionless pose.

Colorful Patterns

Jewelry, sculpture, wall paintings and coffins are enriched with patterns and bright colors. Egyptians adored patterns—not only because they are pleasing to the eye, but because they could go on and on without end and thus served as a potent symbol for eternal life. Colors also had both aesthetic appeal and symbolic meaning for ancient Egyptians:

• Yellow & Gold = Sun and Ra, the Sun God
• Red & Orange = Desert, power, blood and vitality
• Blue & Green = Water, the Nile River and vegetation
• White = Lotus flower and purity
• Black = Death and resurrection

As Good As Gold

Mined along the Nile River and the Eastern Desert of Egypt, gold was prized for its color and sheen. Since it does not rust, gold served as a metaphor for eternal life. The Egyptians’ love of gold has never been a secret, and royal Egyptian burial sites have been a target for grave robbers for millennia. As such, exhibits like “Ramses the Great” are particularly noteworthy; by the time modern museums started seeking out ancient Egyptian relics, much of the gold beneath the sand was long gone.

In recent years, Western museums have been forced to reckon with the role they have played in encouraging, enabling and profiting from ancient plunder. In an effort to right historical wrongs, the UNESCO 1970 Convention, a permanent intergovernmental committee, oversees the return and restitution of cultural property and takes measures to prohibit the import, export or transfer ownership of objects from the country of origin.

Don’t Skip The VR Tour

Tucked away in a side room on the ground floor of the de Young, the “Ramses & Nefertari: Journey to Osiris” virtual reality tour is available to visitors for an additional $18. Donning a VR headset and headphones, viewers are invited to sit in an articulating chair that twists, turns, rumbles and even occasionally releases the scent of frankincense. The experience is not recommended for small children and a disclaimer on the de Young’s website warns that it may induce anxiety and vertigo in some participants. However, the virtual tour does an impressive job of conveying the scale and grandeur of these ancient Egyptian sites without the price or stress of intercontinental travel. It is well worth the extra charge. Pro tip: closing your eyes while swooping through narrow hallways can help viewers avoid feeling nauseous.

Ramses the Great and The Gold of the Pharaohs

de Young Museum, 50 Hagiwara Tea Garden Dr.
Aug. 20 Through Feb. 12, 2023 | $23+ ($16-$18 additional for VR experience)