Pharaonic Renaissance

Opening times: Tuesday through Saturday, 10.00 –20.00 h, Sunday 11.00 – 19.00 h and Monday 10.00 – 15.00 h.

Further information by phone: +386 (0)1 24 17 170

For guided exhibition tours call +386 (0)1 24 17 161 from 9.00 to 12.00 h.

E-mail: stiki@cd-cc.si


Price of the catalogue: 25 EUR


Curated by: Italian Egyptologist Francesco Tiradritti, PhD
Exhibition Project Manager: Nina Pirnat Spahić
Exhibition and Graphic Design: Ranko Novak


The term "Pharaonic Renaissance" indicates a period spanning the beginning of the seventh to the middle of the sixth century B.C. (XXVth and XXVIth dynasty). In this period Egypt knew a moment of renewed splendour after the three centuries of political and economic crisis that followed the New Kingdom.

In the Pharaonic Renaissance, cultural manifestations are characterized by a conscious retrieval of the past. Archaic tendencies aimed at preserving the country’s cultural identity are recognizable in several other moments of Egyptian history. Only in the Pharaonic Renaissance, though, can one find a conscious re-modelling of older artistic expressions into new forms. This resulted in a renewed view of the main religious and social concepts, which undergo noticeable changes indeed during the Pharaonic Renaissance. This moment is vital to the history of Egypt also due to the arrival of the first Greek travellers. The latter, charmed by the Nilotic culture, exported it to their homeland and then to the entire Mediterranean basin. It can be hence said that contemporary European culture is eventually a direct result of the way of feeling and thinking elaborated between the seventh and sixth centuries B.C.

Studies on the Pharaonic Renaissance have grown over the last few years, and the exhibition in Ljubljana aims to reflect this. This is the first time the public is being offered an up-to-date analysis of this era through a highly valuable exhibition. Besides the era between the seventh and sixth centuries B.C., other classical periods of Egyptian history (Old, Middle and New Kingdom) are also documented, supplying a necessary introduction to the event. The exhibition is hence also the spark for a more generic reasoning about archaism and the sense of history in ancient Egypt. This is in turn another topic focusing the attention of contemporary Egyptological research.

140 exibits within the exhibition come from major European collections: the British Museum (London), Louvre (Paris), Kunsthistorisches Museum (Vienna), the Egyptian museums of Berlin, Munich and Florence, Civico Museo di Storia e Arte (Trieste), Archaeological Museum »A.Salinas«, Palermo, Museum of Fine Arts (Budapest) and Archaeological Museum (Zagreb). Some items belong to the private collection of the lost Giuseppe Sinopoli, who developed in his last years a real passion for classical, Egyptian and near-eastern antiquities.



Scientific Committee

Guillemette Andreu
Chief Curator of the Egyptian Antiquities Department
Musée du Louvre, Paris

Jean-Luc Chappaz
Director of the Egyptian Collection
Musée d’Art et d’Histoire, Geneva

W. Vivian Davies
Keeper of the Department of Ancient Egypt and Sudan
The British Museum, London

Giuseppina Favara
Director
Archaeological Museum “A. Salinas”, Palermo

Alfred Grimm
Keeper
State Egyptian Museum, Munich

Maria Cristina Guidotti
Director
Egyptian Museum, Florence

Regina Hőlzl
Deputy Director of the Department of Egyptian and Near Eastern Collection
Museum of Art and History (Kunsthistorisches Museum), Vienna

Éva Liptay
Head of Department of Egyptian Antiquities
Museum of Fine Art (Szépmüvészeti), Budapest

Elena Pishikova
Director
South Assasif Project, University of Arizona, Egyptian Expedition

Sylvia Schoske
Director
State Egyptian Museum, Munich

Loredana Sist
University “La Sapienza”, Rome

John Taylor
Assistant Keeper
of the Department of Ancient Egypt and Sudan
The British Museum, London

Igor Uranić
Chief- curator of the Egyptian Collection
Archaeological Museum, Zagreb

Marzia Vidulli
Curator
Civic Museum of History and Art, Trieste

Dietrich Wildung
Director
Egyptian Museum and Papyrus Collection, Berlin

Francesco Tiradritti
Mission Director and Egyptologist. Before beginning research at the tombs of Harwa and Akhimenru, he carried out various archaeological excavations in Italy, Sudan and Egypt. He has been working in Egypt since 1988. He was a consultant at the Egyptian Collection of the Archaeological Museum of Milan for thirteen years and has held teaching posts at the Suor Orsola Benincasa University in Naples and the University of Foggia. In 2004–2005 he held the Dorothy K. Hohenberg Chair of Excellence in Art History at the University of Memphis (Tennessee). He was a member of the commission set up to carry out a pre-feasibility study of the project for the new Grand Egyptian Museum in Giza and has been closely involved with the renovation project for the Egyptian Museum of Turin. He has collaborated on and curated several Egyptology exhibitions and events in Italy and abroad (Egypt, Spain and Slovenia). He is the editor of Egyptian Treasures from the Egyptian Museum in Cairo and the author of scientific publications in the fields of Egyptology and Sudanese archaeology. He is a regular contributor to Il Giornale dell'Arte and collaborates frequently with Archeologia Viva.

Points of interest

Funerary equipment of Tjeres-ra-peret King Taharqo’s daughter's nurse (XXVth dynasty, 690–664 B.C.), from the Archaeological Museum of Florence. To this kit belong an external sarcophagus (rectangular) and an internal sarcophagus (anthropoidal) painted in bright colours, as well as a mirror with its original case and a wooden stele coated in gold foil.

Sarcophagus of the gatekeeper to Amon temple Djed-montu-efankh’s temple (XXVIth dynasty, mid VIIth–mid VIth century B.C.). This stunning finding, renovated for the exhibition in Ljubljana, belongs to the son of A-keswy-ta (Isahta), whose sarcophagus is exhibited in the National Museum of Slovenia less than 500 metres from Cankarjev Dom, where the Pharaonic Renaissance exhibition is hosted. After centuries, father and son meet again in an ideal setting.

Limestone panel with the family tree of priest Ankhef-en-sekhmet (XXIst dynasty, mid XIth–mid Xth century B.C.). This exhibit is extremely unique. It is a list of Ankhef-en-sekhmet’s sixty forefathers, stretching back approximately 700 years. It vividly illustrates the deep sense of history that was present even in common Egyptians.

Imhotep statue (XXVIth dynasty, mid VIIth–mid VIth century B.C.). The majestic bronze statue with silver and gold inlays is hosted in the Museum of Fine Arts in Budapest. Imhotep was the architect of King Djoser (2630–2611 B.C.) and is traditionally considered to be the creator of the step pyramid in Saqqara. This architectural feat (it is the first monumental building made entirely of stone) granted him posthumous deification. Imhotep became in this way the god of wisdom and magic, as well as a symbol of all knowledge deriving from the study of the past.

For the first time in Slovenia, five exhibits kindly loaned by the Vienna Kunsthistorisches Museum are to be displayed. The noble Knight Anton Lavrin, consul of the Austrian Empire to Egypt, donated them to this eminent institution between 1845 and 1951. The collection comprises four objects dating back to the New Kingdom (18th – 20th Dynasty); namely two stelae, pyramidion and a meter high solid figure statue, as well as a colossal head of a king from a later, Ptolemaic period.

In 1845, Lavrin (1782-1869) send to his native Vipava two ancient Egyptian sarcophagi, found at the foot of the Khafre’s pyramid in Giza in the sepulchres of courtiers from 4th and 5th dynasties (25th and 26th century BC). The left sarcophagus of the courtier Ravero contains the remains of Lavrin’s nonaged son Albert Aleksander Lavrin, and the right, prince Junmin’s (supposedly the offspring of king Mycerinus or Menkaure), holds the corpses of Lavrin’s parents, Jernej and Jožefa, nee Uršič.

In 1846, Knight Lavrin donated to the then Carniolan Provincial Museum in Ljubljana an anthropomorphic wooden coffin containing a mummy of an Egyptian priest (presumably from the 25th or 26th Dynasty). Today it is on display at the National Museum of Slovenia together with the exhibits from the Ancient Egypt antiques collection donated by Baron Jožef Švegl, also a 19th century diplomat representing the Austrian monarchy.

The Palermo Stone

It is unprecedented that the Palermo Stone, donated to the citizens of Palermo 130 years ago, will leave this city. The management of the "Antonio Salinas" Museum, i.e. its Director, Giuseppina Favara, has kindly agreed to lend this valuable specimen to Cankarjev dom for the purposes of the "Pharaonic Renaissance– Archaism and the Sense of History in Ancient Egypt" exhibition to be opened on 4 March 2008. Alongside 140 other exhibits from the most prominent European museums (Louvre, The British Museum, Berlin, Budapest, Florence, Monaco, Trieste, Vienna and Zagreb), the Palermo Stone will be on display until 20 July 2008.

The "Antonio Salinas" Archaeological Museum in Palermo houses one of the most important documents for the reconstruction of ancient Egyptian history. This is a fragment of an old Egyptian stela made of amphibolitic diorite, 43 cm high and 30 cm wide. It is probably the earliest extant Egyptian historical text. Of monumental significance, the find is popularly known as the Palermo Stone. The original stela was much larger (over 2 metres high), but has broken into a number of fragments and many portions are missing. This is the largest portion that has been found. It details the reigns of the first Egyptian kings through the middle of the Fifth Dynasty. Manatho may have used it to construct his dynastic chronology in the third century BC. He was Egyptian and his topics dealt with Egyptian matters, but he wrote in Greek for the Ptolemaic period.

The stela is a hieroglyphic list (formatted as a table or outline) of the kings of ancient Egypt before and after Menes, with regnal years, and notations of events up to the time of its engraving in the Fifth Dynasty, the period of the reign of Neferirkare Kakai (2446–2426 BC). The stela supposedly dates from this period.

The circumstances surrounding the stone’s appearance in Palermo remain vague. This (largest) fragment has been in Palermo since 1866 and was owned by a lawyer, Ferdinand Guidano. It was discovered by a visiting French archaeologist, Emmanuel De Rougé, in 1895 and first published by Heinrich Schäfer in 1902. On 19 October 1877, it was donated by the Guidano family to the citizens of Palermo and, since then, the specimen has been in the collection of the Palermo Archaeological Museum. There are other sizeable pieces in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, one discovered in 1910 and another purchased on the market as recently as in 1963, and in the museum of the University College London, given by Sir Flinders Petrie.

The topmost register of the recto of the Palermo Stone lists the names of seven mythical or Lower Egyptian kings (recognizable by the Red Crown, the symbol of the rulers of North Egypt) who are believed to have reigned at the beginning of history, when, according to myth, regal power was relinquished from divine entities to humans. It seems, though, that these seven persons are entirely fictitious, and to date no attempt at their identification with historical figures has been entirely successful.

The lower registers are presented in a continuous line – the name of the king is inscribed, as well as that of his mother – to which the cases below refer. Each case is bound to the right by a hieroglyph of a palm branch, denoting the word renepet, meaning “year”, and contains a meaningful event that took place in that particular year. According to the data furnished by the Palermo Stone, the recto of the original slab must have contained the annals of the kings of Egypt until the reign of Khefren. The verso would, instead, have contained a period of only about a century (late 4th – mid 5th Dynasty).

Although the classical Egyptian 365-day calendar and three seasons already existed at the time, in this case the basis for the determination of years is not progressive enumeration (as practised in subsequent periods), but an indication of the most prominent annual events. Hence, separately tabulated are the most noteworthy religious holidays, livestock count (bi-annual), construction of temples, and dedication of statues to a certain deity or sovereign. Under each year-line, the level of water during inundations, which fertilized the plains along the banks of the Nile, is specified. In most cases, it is impossible to pinpoint the exact significance of events engraved on the Palermo Stone. Nonetheless, they offer a certain backdrop out of which an idea of Egyptian society during that era, which has borne only a few witnesses, can be shaped.

Between 4 March and 20 July 2008 the Isahta mummy can be seen free of charge. The deceased, whose mummified body and casket are kept at the National Museum of Slovenia, is the father of Djed-montu-efankh. The casket of the son is displayed at the exhibition in Cankarjev dom.

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