The Afterlives of Egyptian History by Yekaterina Barbash;Kathlyn M. Cooney;

Author:Yekaterina Barbash;Kathlyn M. Cooney;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lightning Source Inc. (Tier 3)
Published: 2021-02-15T00:00:00+00:00

6 The Various Lives of Statues in the City of the Sun

Simon Connor

Introduction

It is both a pleasure and an honor to dedicate this chapter to Edward Bleiberg, with whom I have had so many enjoyable discussions about Egyptian sculpture. The first time was in 2012, when I came to study Middle Kingdom material in the Brooklyn Museum for my PhD. More recently, our interests were joined when, working on iconoclasm in the framework of a fellowship at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, I again met Edward. He was then curating an exhibition on a similar subject for the Pulitzer Arts Foundation in St. Louis.1

Heliopolis is probably one of the best sites to approach the topic of iconoclasm—or, more precisely, the mutilations carried out on ancient Egyptian material, and the various ways that such practices may be understood. The city’s rich repertoire not only illustrates the great creativity of pharaonic artists, but also offers ways to approach the manner in which the ancient monuments were perceived throughout the different phases of Egyptian history.

The site of ancient Heliopolis now lies in the northeastern part of modern Cairo. The extension of the ancient city and necropolis is in large part covered by the neighborhoods of Ain Shams and Matariya, while the remaining part of the urban area within the temenos is more and more threatened by the construction of new buildings. On the northern half of the city’s precinct enclosure wall are the ruins of ‘Arab al-Hisn, the western part of which is currently being excavated by Cairo University, while the southern half of Heliopolis has been the object of investigations by the Egyptian–German mission in recent years.

Since Heliopolis is no longer a landscape composed of standing walls, reliefs, columns, and statues, like Tanis and Karnak, it is quite difficult to reconstruct the appearance that it may have originally had. Nevertheless, the large repertoire that can be gathered from Alexandria and Old Cairo provides a first glimpse of the monumentality and originality of Heliopolis’ sculptural program. An overview will be completed with the study of material found in Matariya at the beginning of the twentieth century and now housed in various museums, as well as with the corpus that continues to come out from the ground in the framework of the excavations led by the mission currently working in the field.2

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