Connections/Survival

I'm Dorothea Arnold from the department of Egyptian art at the Metropolitan Museum.

As we live today, we constantly throw things away, so it is even more astonishing that things survive.

Since I'm dealing a lot with objects that are at least three thousand and even then four thousand and five thousand years old the question, "how does all this survive?" comes up again and again. "How could it survive for so long?"

Textiles that are in such prime condition that you could use them for your bedding. And this is only possible because of the very dry climate in Egypt.

Natural disasters like Pompeii which was covered by the eruption, then excavated. And this beautiful bed chamber is in a condition almost like it must have been when people used it.

If there was human destruction like in the case of the female pharoah Hatshepsut

whose sculpture was completely smashed on the commission of her successor, thrown into a quarry for several centuries

discovered and painstakingly reassembled.

Or there is the famous piece in the attic. The piece that has been neglected, and that somebody comes, sees what it is, and it comes back to light.

Another important cause is that pieces go from generation to generation. So for instance this famous painting by Rembrandt was originally commissioned by somebody from the Rufo family in Messina in Sicily, and went then from generation to the next generation to the next generation.

And for a museum especially many, many collectors are involved in the survival of the works of art that we see here.

There is one item in this history: people. There must have been people who preserved bodies in ancient Egypt. Wrapped them up, adorned them, put them into coffins. So this kind of pious treating was absolutely necessary.

But it's not only the physical pieces that survive, there's something important and that is the survival of the images. Images have a tenacity that is quite astonishing.

For centuries the original Three Graces has been lost. What we have are copies from Roman times and then when these sculptures were found in Renaissance Italy and around the Mediterranean

there was a new revival of appreciations by the use of that image.

The Sphinx as an image became almost a symbol of ancient Egypt and so it became a symbol of ancient Egyptian thinking.

This superhuman being was a kind of sign of survival through time.

This memorial was for a very young dying sculptor

and you see what he was sculpting was a sphinx. Here we have the survival of the Egyptian sphinx image into the nineteenth-century.

Because it is the sign of the Egyptian deep thinking about death and about survival. So this is a very good example that an image has suddenly that power and spreads and just doesn't

die.