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Educational Resources |
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Lecture Archive |
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Christianity's First Centuries in Africa |
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| Introduction By Helen C. Evans |
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 figure 1  figure 2 |
Hello! I am Helen Evans, the Metropolitan Museum’s specialist on
early Christian and Byzantine art. I am delighted to welcome you
all here today. We appreciate the attendance of many from the Coptic
and Ethiopian communities, especially Bishop Suriel and other members
of the Coptic Church; and Archbishop Yesehaq, Aba Geber Dengel, and
other clerics of the Ethiopian Church. As today’s exploration of some
of the earliest Christian communities in Africa is a very special
event that would not have been possible without the generous support
of Kay Harrigan Woods and Suzanne Fawbush and Christopher Grisanti,
I would also like to extend my special greetings to them and to Donna
Sutton and Liz Hammer of the Museum’s staff, who have worked so hard
to make this event a success. Finally, I would like to welcome Mary
and Michael Jaharis, who have funded the installation of our galleries
of Byzantine art, including the special crypt with our works from
Egypt. [figure
1] I hope you will go see the gallery after these talks. Please
excuse me if I have failed to recognize any other distinguished
members of our audience, for we are very happy to have you here. As you all know, Africa is central to the Judeo-Christian tradition. The Book of Exodus describes Moses leading his people out of Egypt through Sinai to the Holy Land. In turn, centuries later, the Gospels describe the baby Jesus being taken into Egypt for safety. As the Christian church spread into Egypt in the first centuries of the Common Era, Alexandria, the great cosmopolitan city at the mouth of the Nile, would become one of the most influential centers for early Christian theological debate. Egypt would also be the site where the Christian monastic tradition was established. In the Mary and Michael Jaharis Galleries of Byzantine art, we have brought together a significant portion of the Museum’s collection of works from Egypt that were produced during the era of Byzantine rule of the state. Byzantium was the extension of the Roman Empire that was established when the imperial capital was moved to Constantinople, now Istanbul, in 330 A.D. In the same century, Christianity would be established as the official religion of the state. Throughout this period, Egypt would be an integral part of the empire and, in fact, the breadbasket from which the state provided grain for the poor of Constantinople. While in graduate school at the Institute of Fine Arts of New York University, I often discussed how to incorporate this complex period of history into an effective installation with Professor Thelma Thomas, as we completed our dissertations together. [figure 2] Professor Thomas, formerly associate dean of the Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studies at the University of Michigan is both a professor in the university’s department of the History of Art and a curator at the university’s Kelsey Museum of Archaeology. As her dissertation was based in part on the Metropolitan Museum’s collection of sculpture of the Byzantine era in Egypt and as she has worked on the Museum’s collections of Egyptian textiles of the period on several grants here, it was only reasonable that I would ask her to advise on the installation of our special gallery on the art of Byzantine Egypt. I am happy to introduce Professor Thomas to you to speak about how such visual culture reflects the core beliefs and ritual practices of Africa’s earliest Christian communities, especially in Egypt but also in Nubia and Ethiopia. For those of you interested in learning more about her understanding of this era, I would highly recommend your obtaining her book Late Antique Egyptian Funerary Sculpture: Images of This World and the Next, which was published by Princeton University Press in 2000. Lecture: The Arrival of Christianity in Africa |
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