Gods of the Nile Rule ‘Divine Egypt’ at the Metropolitan Museum of Art

There is a reason the Bible thunders at paganism with such fury. The tangible is taboo because it is so tempting. That, at least, is the impression one gathers from “Divine Egypt” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The show is a blockbuster of the kind at which the Met excels. Now the Temple of Dendur and the colossal Pharaoh in the Great Hall are joined by a teeming pantheon of divinities. Not since pyramids rose over the Nile have gods been so glamorous.Meet Hathor, the most powerful goddess of ancient Egypt. She emerged around 2600 BCE, and is marked by cow horns and a sun disk. Her name means “mansion of Horus,” linking her with an even older celestial deity. She carries the sun god, Re, between her horns to the primordial mound from which the world is born from the surging seas of creation. Like nearly all the gods, she is a psychedelic Frankenstein of human and beast, beauty and bovine.One limestone relief on display depicts her wielding a scepter under a hieroglyphic banner that reads “Hathor, Chieftainess of Thebes.” Another column announces her as “Hathor of Four Faces,” and features her visage gazing omnisciently in each cardinal direction. Hathor, who is also depicted sitting next to an early pharaoh as a kind of co-regent, descended from an even earlier goddess, Bat. A blue stone could offer a clue to this Paleolithic empress of the skies. ‘Triad of Osorkon II,’ circa 874-850 BCE. Mathieu Rabeau for Metropolitan Museum of ArtAmong the most important of the gods was Horus, linked to kingship and pharaonic might. The Egyptian priests taught that he inherited the crown of the gods from his father Osiris after a struggle with his uncle Seth, an enigmatic god represented by a composite animal with a downward snout and forked tail that corresponds to no known species. Horus, though, wore the double crown that signified dominion over the united Egyptian kingdom.A different kind of kingdom is presided over by Anubis, the jackal-like god of the dead. The Met explains that he “oversees mummification, judges the weighing of the heart, and guards the deceased while guiding them into the afterlife.” A diorite statute on display is massive and sleek, enthroned with endless silence of the grave. Another statue has been recovered from an animal necropolis, where pets found repose in hundreds of catacombs.Also connected to the afterlife was the goddess Maat. Her name means “what is right,” and the exhibit elucidates that it refers to a “complex, culturally specific concept that encompasses notions of rightness, truth, justice, and social and political order.” She is adorned with a feather against which the heart of every dead person is weighed to determine their fate. Her father was the supreme god, Re. She sometimes accompanies him on his solar barge.‘Goddess Hathor, King Menkaure, and the Deified Hare Nome,’ circa 2490-2472 BCE. Museum of Fine Arts Boston via Metropolitan Museum of Art A stunning relief from some 3,500 years ago shows Maat painted in profile on stone and limestone. It was found in the tomb of Seti I in the Valley of the Kings, and is festooned with images of other gods and hieroglyphics. So vivid is her ostrich plume that a viewer is tempted to snatch it. Pause, though, might be given by the inscription above her head, which announces her preeminence in the “the Land of Silence” — the underworld.The fecundity of “Divine Egypt” — more than 200 objects are arranged across the Tisch galleries on the museum’s second floor — conveys a sense of the vastness of the Egyptian pantheon, which numbered some 1,500 gods who were worshiped for more than 3,000 years. The show’s curator, Diana Craig Patch, explains that the “Egyptians of the time had no difficulty understanding and accepting the resulting multiplicity.”One of the oldest of those goddesses is Neit, whose beginnings are so clouded in mystery that she is sometimes represented by symbols — crossed arrows, click beetles, and bows. She wears the red crown of Lower Egypt, and it was fashionable for women of the First Dynasty to incorporate their name into hers. Her son was the crocodile god Sobek, a god of the Nile. One statute here bears an inscription to “be strong in the Enclosure of Neit forever.”Thoth, the god of scribes, is represented with the head of an ibis and the body of a baboon. A cobra-goddess’s name means “She Loves Silence.” A seated ram god demands that worshippers bend the knee. A monumental scarab from the Ptolemaic period rolls the disc of the sun across the sky. Immersion in this polytheistic menagerie makes it all the more remarkable to recall that a slave people carried from Egypt, along with bricks, the notion of one God, invisible and able to split a sea.

Gods of the Nile Rule ‘Divine Egypt’ at the Metropolitan Museum of Art

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