Czére Andrea szerk.: A Szépművészeti Múzeum közleményei (Budapest, 2008)
ANNUAL REPORT • A 2008. ÉV - ZOLTÁN HORVÁTH: Egyptian Renaissance. Archaism and the Sense of History in Ancient Egypt
INTERIOR VIEW OF THE EXHIBITION In the exhibition organised in Budapest, after Ljubljana (4 March - 20 July 2008), it was not generally the archaising trends that were placed at the forefront but rather the art of the Egyptian renaissance from the period of the Twenty-fifth-Twenty-sixth dynasties (716-525 BC). This short period was the last flourishing of the pharaonic culture and owes its peculiar name to the period when the Kushite (Nubian) Twenty-fifth Dynasty occupied the throne and in the wake of the aspirations of the kings of foreign origin to legitimise their positions a qualitatively different kind of dialogue pursued with the past emerged in Egypt, which in its character had similar features to the Italian Renaissance. As Jan Assmann argued: "References to the past now took place on a scale that was completely unprecedented in Egyptian history and that certainly merits being called a renaissance." Egypt not only (re)discovered "its own antiquity, but elevated it to the rank of the normative past". 2 Their striving for perfection which demonstrated itself in the copying of ancient visual forms and in other areas of culture, such as in the use of language and in the reproduction of textual artefacts fundamentally makes the situation for modern Egyptology more difficult when dating some artefacts that have no context. An extreme example of this is the religious historical composition hewn into stone during the rule of King Shabako (713-698 BC), the so-called Memphite Theology, which early research had dated to two millennia earlier, to the Archaic Period (2920-2650 BC) or to the rule of the Fourth-Fifth dynasties (2465-2150 BC). As a part of the canonisation accompanying the archaising trends, the Book of the Dead texts were amended and the order of the chapters was established in the Saite Period (Twenty-sixth Dynasty) with the application of serious philological effort. It is in the art of this period that the Egypt dominated by the schémas which Plato referred to can be most perceived, with the postulation that the standard practice of being tied to the past did not stand in the way of invention and innovation; indeed, just the opposite. For example, in plastic art some sculptures follow the ancient types in their form but their facial features attest to new stylistic elements which research interprets as a shift in the direction of
