A Historic Encounter

At the Israel Museum, an exhibition illuminates a lesser-known period of history in our area.

By BARRY DAVIS
Updated: APRIL 13, 2016 17:19
Pharaoh in Canaan: The Untold Story exhibition at the Israel Museum (photo credit: THE ISRAEL MUSEUM)
Pharaoh in Canaan: The Untold Story exhibition at the Israel Museum
(photo credit: THE ISRAEL MUSEUM)
Eran Arieh expressed undisguised delight at the new Pharaoh in Canaan: The Untold Story exhibition at the Israel Museum, and well he might.
As co-curator of the show, along with venerated Egyptologist Daphna Ben-Tor, Arieh has a hefty vested interest in the impressive display of archeological finds, but he also has a professional altruistic motive for introducing the public to some of the treasures produced by two of the great civilizations of ancient times.
“What do people know about the encounter between the Israelites and ancient Egypt?” he muses.
“They know about the Hebrews going down to Egypt in the time of Jacob when there was a famine here, and they know about the Exodus with Moses, but that’s about all. There is much more to know about how Egyptian culture and culture from this part of the world mixed.”
That is abundantly clear from the rich array of sculptures, sarcophagi, stelae – decorated and inscribed tombstones – scarabs and hundreds of other objects apportioned between the five display halls of the museum’s Bella and Harry Wexner Gallery.
AS WE wended our way through the exhibition, relatively late hour notwithstanding, it was evident that Arieh and retiring museum employee Ben-Tor have a hit on their hands.
The place was abuzz with people of all ages, including schoolchildren who were having fun making sketches of some of the items in the showcases.
“The exhibition basically presents the story of Egypt and Canaan over a period of around 600 years, from around 1700 BCE to 1100 BCE,” explains Arieh. It appears that the Egyptians enjoyed a prolonged hold over this neck of the woods in pre-Israelite times. The curator notes that it wasn’t all one-way traffic.
“We are not just talking about the period when the Egyptians were here, it also includes the years when the Canaanites controlled the northern part of Egypt.”
The latter group was called the Hyksos, a people of mixed origins who settled in the eastern Nile Delta some time prior to 1650 BCE.
Arieh and Ben-Tor put a lot into getting the exhibition off the ground and spent the best part of three years on the project. When you invest such significant resources in a show, you don’t just want to ply well-trodden territory. The idea was to provide the public with new insight into the cultural and political machinations that were afoot during the aforementioned passage of history.
“This story [of the Canaanites and the Egyptians] is mostly well known to archeologists and historians, but no one has ever placed the spotlight on an exhibition specifically on this topic,” Arieh declares, adding that he and Ben-Tor fully expect museum visitors to come away from the show with new historical insight.
“No one has ever talked about this before,” he continues.
“We all grew up on the Bible, in some form or other, and the Bible talks only about how we went down to Egypt and then left a few hundred years later, but the Canaanites were here throughout. We thought this would be a wonderful opportunity to enlighten the public in a clear and easily palatable way.”
The curators have, indeed, done themselves proud.
Even in terms of aesthetics alone, the exhibition is tailor- made to grab the eye and push the pulse up a gear or two. There are regal-looking sphinxes, imposing statues, fetching anthropoid coffins, assorted ceramics, amulets and, of course, a plethora of scarabs, the scarab being one of the most popular icons of ancient Egypt.
There are even a few examples of ancient board games.
All told, there are some 680 items on display, including loans from the Metropolitan Museum, the Louvre, the Egyptian Museum in Turin, and the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, as well various important collections worldwide. Together, they spin out a fascinating tale of cross-fertilization of ritual practices and aesthetic vocabularies between two distinct ancient cultures.
The exhibits incorporate a wide stretch of materials, including granite, quartzite, chalkstone, gold, glass and alabaster. Some alabaster vessels are lit from within, producing a charming effect that shows off both the shape and the texture of the item in question to excellent effect.
“We wanted to show how different they are when they are illuminated,” says the curator.
Naturally, the craftsmen of old used materials that were at hand, so there are material differences, depending on the artifact’s geographic origin. The vast majority of the stone vessels in the show hail from Egypt.
“There were no expert stonemasons here at that time; there is no granite here,” explains Arieh. The cross-border influence equilibrium is evident in many of the exhibits.
That comes across in no uncertain terms when you catch a view of a display case that contains a large number of vessels, of various shapes, sizes and substances.
“Here, the exhibition gets a kind of twist,” says the curator.
“We wanted to show off the great abundance of finds, but we did not want to show them right at the beginning.”
Indeed, that might have been a little overwhelming for the untrained eye, and the visitor gets an enticing entry into the Egyptian-Canaanite confluence with a quartzite sphinx image of Thutmose III, who ruled Egypt in the 15th century BCE. The fine workmanship and polished facial features imply that the item was produced at a royal workshop in Egypt, although the sphinx’s nose and front feet have been damaged, probably intentionally in times of yore.
There is also a stately upper torso and head granodiorite statue of the same ruler, complete with characteristic stylized Egyptian ears, extended goatee and kingly headdress.
THERE ARE sumptuous offerings wherever you turn in Pharaoh in Canaan: The Untold Story, including an impressive array of fashion accessories.
“We divided the jewelry into two categories,” says Arieh.
“There is jewelry that imitates the Egyptian style, but was made in Canaan, and things that were imported from Egypt. Then there are the gold objects. The source of gold in those times was Egypt. All this jewelry is Canaanite, but the gold came from Egypt.”
Interestingly, gold was more readily available than silver. That market situation was reversed once Egyptian rule here came to an end.
“Then gold suddenly vanished from Canaan, and silver, which probably came from Anatolia [Turkey] or Greece, became very popular,” Arieh notes.
The exhibition takes on a far more contemporary nature when you suddenly spy a print of the famous triad from the Camp David Accords, with a smiling Anwar Sadat, Menachem Begin and Jimmy Carter. The iconic photograph provides the backdrop for a bent scimitar dating to around 1200-1500 BCE.
“The sword was put out of action back in ancient times,” says Arieh.
“It was probably intentionally damaged when it was placed in the grave of a soldier and, in 1979, when Begin went to visit Sadat, the museum gave him a replica for Begin to take to Egypt, to give to Sadat as a symbol of peace, as in the prophesy of Isaiah ‘They will beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks.’ “The stand of the replica bears the legend: ‘There should be no more wars. This sword was bent 3,300 years ago.’ I have been told that the replica is now in the War Museum in Egypt, as a symbol of peace.”
One of the most eye-catching exhibits is a chalkstone stela with gorgeous polychromic figures and hieroglyphics. The find was discovered in Deir El-Medina in southern Egypt and dates from the 13th century BCE. It exemplifies a fascinating aspect of Egyptian- Canaanite coexistence in that shows Egyptian figures worshiping Canaanite deities. It appears that the Egyptian rulers felt so secure in their culture and imperial power that they were not concerned about the possibility that their subjects might be swayed by foreign gods.
www.jpost.com 13 THE EXHIBITS, which include finds that have undergone reconstructive repair work – and there is the odd replica – are complemented by some layman-friendly videos that portray the Exodus of the Children of Israel, the conquest of Jaffa by the Egyptians in the 15th century BCE, and the invention of the world’s first linear-lettered alphabet.
The latter was, of course, a cornerstone development in the annals of human evolution.
It is one of the exhibition’s highlights, and comes right at the end of the circuit.
“We wanted to end with something that everyone could take with them and identify with, and which references the Western side of the affair,” Arieh explains.
“Writing was invented several times across the world, for example in Mesopotamia, in China, in Egypt and in the Americas, but all the alphabets stem from the interface between Canaan and Egypt, around 1800 BCE. Canaanite turquoise miners at Serabit el-Khadim in Sinai see all the hieroglyphics, all the gravestones – there was an enormous temple there to the goddess Hathor.” The workers were suitably intrigued and inspired by what they saw and ran with it in a history-changing initiative.
“They took around 30 symbols from the hieroglyphics. They didn’t know what they meant and they imbued the symbols with a new meaning. Each sign received the meaning of the first consonant of the word.” The rest, as we see in the accompanying video, is history.
“Every alphabet in the world comes from this genius invention,” says Arieh, “because of this liaison [between the Egyptians and the Canaanites].”
Visitors can also go home with a little something from the exhibition by writing their own name on a screen in Proto-Sinaitic script and sending it to their email address or cellphone.
“We want to do everything we can to bring the general public closer to material which can be difficult to understand,” says Arieh. He and Ben-Tor appear to have done that with aplomb. 
Pharaoh in Canaan: The Untold Story closes on October 25. For more information: (02) 670- 8811 and www.imjnet.org.il/