Hedvig Győry: Mélanges offerts a Edith Varga „Le lotus qui sort de terre” (Bulletin du Musée Hongrois des Beaux-Arts Supplément 1. Budapest, 2001)
SAPHIN AZ-AMAL NAGUIB: Cultural Heritage and its Display
Cultural Heritage and its Display^ Introduction T he notion of cultural heritage encompasses a legacy of tangible and intangible goods. It is first and foremost based on the idea of possessions to keep, manage and transmit in their integrity, hopefully also augmented, to the next generations. Supplemented by the epithet 'historical' the meaning of cultural heritage acquires values tied to identity and to collective memory in addition to those related to genealogy and economy. In the case of cultural heritage, memory may be tied to the idea of a common past that transcends the limits of national boundaries. This was clearly shown recently during the campaign launched by the international community to save the Buddhas of Bamiyan from destruction in spring 2001. Ancient Egypt has long had the status of a transnational civilization, which pertains to everyone's past. It is regarded as belonging to Humanity and, thereby, to a universal cultural heritage. There are nowadays various types of institutions, both national and international, acting as managers of cultural heritage. Among them, museums hold a leading role. The present article discusses some of the challenges museums housing ancient Egyptian collections face today. It is concerned with questions of display in the sense of choosing, arranging and exhibiting objects according to different criteria of interpretation. How the new technologies and the use of mixed media systems affect the structure and transmission of cultural heritage and at the same time generate a new kind of awareness of its worth. Implicitly, I address questions of authenticity that is of genuiness, accuracy and authoritative trustworthiness. Bibliography: M. Bakhtin, Forms of Time and the Chronotopc in the Novel, in: M. Holquist (ed.), The Dialogic Imagination, Austin 1981 [1937], pp. 84-258; F. H. Choay, L'allégorie du patrimoine, Pans 1999 1 1992]; R. Lumley (ed.), The Museum Time Machine: Putting Cultures on Display, London 1988; A. Malraux, Le musée imaginaire, Paris 1965; S.-A. Naguib, Egyptian Collections: Myth-makers and Generators of Culture, GM 114 (1990), pp. 81-90.
