Like an Egyptian

Like an Egyptian



Book Details

Molly Swetnam-Burland

EGYPT IN ITALY

Visions of Egypt in Roman imperial culture
261pp. Cambridge University Press. £70 (US $110).
978 1 107 04048 9

The cultural impact of Egypt on Imperial Rome

PETER THONEMANN

Deep in the rolling Cotswold hills west of Chipping Norton, at the end of an avenue of ancient oaks, stands the sole example of what we might call the Islamo-Palladian architectural style. "And there they burst upon us", wrote John Betjeman in Summoned by Bells (1960), "the onion domes, Chajjahs and chattris made of amber stone . . . exotic Sezincote". Exotic seems almost too mild a word. Built by an affluent officer of the East India Company between 1805 and 1812, Sezincote is like a Mughal emperor's bad dream brought on by a surfeit of claret and snuff. Georgian windows, golden Cotswold stone and a gracefully curving orangery squabble noisily with peacock-tail arches, fiddly minarets, and a squat copper Mughal-style dome. Even the estate farm buildings and dairy are modelled on an Indian fort.

The reason why Sezincote looks so outlandish to modern eyes is simply that there is nothing quite like this anywhere else in England. (The Royal Pavilion at Brighton, built a decade or so later, is an exception: the Prince Regent was blown away by Sezincote, and wanted one of his own.) Two centuries of British rule in India ended up leaving virtually no mark on the architecture and material culture of the imperial mother country. Victorian London built no mosques or Hindu temples to cater for ardent English Indophiles; no looted statues of Shiva or Buddha were set up on The Mall to commemorate the capture of Lucknow or the Younghusband expedition.

The Romans would have found this very peculiar. In 30 BC, Octavian annexed the Ptolemaic kingdom of Egypt to the Roman Empire. The conquest was followed by an explosion of Egyptian artefacts, cults, building styles and interior decoration throughout Italy. Visitors to Rome can still boggle at the colossal tomb of a Roman aristocrat called Gaius Cestius, a 36-metre-high pyramid faced in marble, completed around 12 BC. A couple of years later, two gigantic obelisks from Egyptian Heliopolis were shipped to Italy at fabulous expense. They were re-erected in prominent locations at the heart of Rome, one in the Circus Maximus, the other on the Campus Martius, where it served as the gnomon of a colossal sundial. A huge sanctuary of the Egyptian gods Isis and Sarapis was laid out on the Campus Martius, complete with antique sphinxes, basalt baboons, and pharaonic portrait-sculptures imported from Egypt. In Victorian London, the Raj was all but invisible; in Julio-Claudian Rome, provincia Aegyptus was a noisy, colourful, and sometimes bizarrely incongruous presence.

This Roman Egyptomania of the late first century BC and first century AD is the subject of Molly Swetnam-Burland's lively new book, Egypt in Italy. One of its major themes is the variety and sophistication of Rome's engagement with Egyptian art and culture. Although countless Egyptian statues, inscriptions and curios ended up in Italian fora, temples and private houses, the Romans were far from just mindless looters. Italian craftsmen also produced careful imitations of Egyptian artefacts, ranging from little alabaster jars to monumental pharaonic statues, and Egyptian genre-scenes are lovingly recreated in the domestic wall paintings of Pompeii and Herculaneum. Even if the Romans did not always understand Egyptian art "correctly" (by our standards), their reactions to it were neither superficial nor triumphalist.

A nice example of creative Roman adaptation of Egyptian material culture comes from the south Italian city of Beneventum. Here, in the late 80s AD, a local civic benefactor called Rutilius Lupus commissioned two brand new obelisks of Egyptian granite, probably to adorn the city's own lavish temple to Isis. In most respects, the dedicatory inscriptions on these obelisks are conventional enough: they record Lupus's status as a legatus Augusti ("envoy of the Emperor"), and include a prayer to Isis for the health and happiness of the reigning Emperor Domitian. More startling is the fact that these inscriptions are written not in Latin, but in perfect Egyptian hieroglyphic script, complete with ingenious Egyptian paraphrases of technical Latin terms (legatus Augusti becomes "he who runs back and forth for the emperor"). Lupus had clearly gone to some trouble to produce a monument of the highest possible authenticity.

How many people in Rome (let alone Beneventum) could actually read hieroglyphs is another matter. The Romans were fascinated by the hieroglyphic script, and at least some Roman antiquarians made serious efforts to master it. The late Roman historian Ammianus quotes a complete Greek translation of the hieroglyphic inscription on the Circus Maximus obelisk, attributing it to an otherwise unknown figure called "Hermapion". In a brilliant recent article, Amin Benaissa has shown that this mysterious Hermapion must in fact be the well-known scholar Apion of Alexandria, who lived in Rome during the early Julio-Claudian period and who wrote a monumental encyclopedia, the Aegyptiaca, on the history, geography, religion and customs of Egypt.

Apion's translation of the Circus Maximus obelisk-inscription is an odd mixture of creative intelligence and outrageous muddle. The Egyptian titulature of Ramesses II, "Horus, powerful bull, son of Seth, golden Horus, chosen by Re", is rendered by Apion as "powerful Apollo, son of Helios, bright-shining, chosen by Helios". The Greco-Roman gods Apollo and Helios ("Sun") are perfectly plausible equivalents for the Egyptian deities Horus and Re (the Egyptian sun god). Apion seems to have been baffled by the hieroglyphic sign for "Seth", and so simply adds another reference to Helios. As Swetnam-Burland nicely puts it, "The act of translation here is twofold, both linguistic and cultural, translating the words of the Egyptian language while transforming their meaning into terms readers standing outside Egyptian culture could understand".

The chief problem with Swetnam-Burland's otherwise admirable book is her assumption that "Egypt" can be treated as a single homogeneous culture. By the time of the Roman conquest, the Egyptians had been ruled for three centuries by the Macedonian dynasty of the Ptolemies. The Ptolemaic capital of Alexandria, founded in 331 BC by Alexander the Great, was the greatest city of the ancient Mediterranean, with a population (largely of Greco-Macedonian origin) probably larger than that of late Republican Rome. The Romans suffered from a deep inferiority complex towards the glittering high culture of Ptolemaic Alexandria. Roman imperial architects studiously imitated or adapted the Alexandrian architectural style; Roman poets, from Catullus onwards, were heavily influenced by Ptolemaic literature, notably the third-century Alexandrian poet and librarian Callimachus.

Swetnam-Burland nowhere really engages with the long history of Roman reception of Ptolemaic culture. Of course, her main interest is in Roman responses to native Egyptian art and architecture, not the aesthetics of Greco-Macedonian Alexandria. But the trouble is that the two cannot always be separated. So, for example, a large part of Egypt in Italy is dedicated to Italian cults of the Egyptian goddess Isis. Isis was, it is true, a very ancient Egyptian maternal goddess. But long before she arrived in Rome, she had received a thoroughgoing Alexandrian makeover. In the last three centuries BC, the Ptolemaic kings energetically promoted a new hybrid "Greco-Egyptian" Isis (modelled on the Greek goddess Demeter), whose cult frankly had little in common with the earlier Egyptian Isis rituals. It was this new-style Isis who was worshipped so enthusiastically in early imperial Rome. Swetnam-Burland simply assumes that the cult of Isis was popular in Roman Italy because it was "Egyptian". Instead, might Isis not have been popular precisely because she was seen as Alexandrian – that is to say, because she was closely associated with the luxurious lifestyles of the Greco-Macedonian elite in Egypt?

Or take the pyramid of Cestius in Rome. Most people have simply assumed without argument that this tomb alludes to the venerable Old Kingdom pyramids at Giza. But can this really be right? The tomb of Cestius does not actually look much like any "real" Egyptian pyramid: the apex is too high in proportion to the base, and its sides are smooth, not stepped like the Egyptian structures. There is no sign of any Egyptian iconography anywhere else in the tomb; the materials (concrete core, marble facing) are quintessentially Roman, and the various tomb inscriptions (all in Latin) make no reference to Egypt. Might Cestius in fact have been aligning himself not with Cheops or Ramesses, but with the cultivated Greeks of Alexandria? We are pretty sure that the near-contemporary Mausoleum of Augustus (not discussed by Swetnam-Burland) was modelled on two of the most famous monuments of Ptolemaic Alexandria, the Lighthouse and the tomb of Alexander the Great. Cestius' tomb may well have been something similar: a good imitation of fashionable Alexandrian tombs, rather than a bad imitation of ancient Egyptian pyramids. If so, then Roman "Egyptomania" starts to look like a very different kind of phenomenon: not so much an antiquarian fascination with the remote and exotic Egyptian past, as a zeal to emulate the Romans' own refined Greco-Macedonian contemporaries.

Nonetheless, Egypt in Italy is a milestone in our understanding of Rome's cosmopolitan imperial imaginary. One of the most magnificent objects discussed in the book is a two-foot-high Egyptian vase carved from a single gigantic piece of honey-coloured calcite alabaster. According to the hieroglyphic inscription on the front, this vase (now in the Louvre) was made in the ninth or eighth century BC for an Egyptian priest called Nebneteru, who dedicated it in a temple at Thebes in Upper Egypt. Some 700 years later, probably at the time of the Roman conquest of Egypt, the vase was carted off to Italy as war booty, ending up in the hands of one P. Claudius Pulcher, the son of the notorious Republican demagogue Clodius, who eventually recycled it as his own funerary urn. The back of the vase now carries a brash Latin inscription in big black letters listing Pulcher's various political offices.

For a member of the Roman upper class to have had himself buried in an antique Egyptian pot is truly extraordinary, as if Lord Salisbury had chosen to be interred in a mummy casket. What did this vase signify for Pulcher? Was it simply a generic objet d'art, prized purely by dint of being foreign, expensive, and rare? Or was its "Egyptianness" significant to Pulcher in some way – either as a symbol of a modern, luxurious Alexandrian lifestyle, or as a link back to remotest Egyptian antiquity? Either way, we can enjoy picturing the patrician mansion of the Claudii Pulchri as a kind of Sezincote on the Tiber, with sphinxes guarding the entrance, miniature obelisks in the garden, and colourful frescoes of women in kohl eyeliner – all of it, naturally, in the best possible taste.