Why I won’t go to the NGV’s perplexing and problematic Pharaoh blockbuster

We’re getting better at dealing with old stuff appropriately. At a solemn ceremony in Cambridge recently four spears taken by Captain Cook from Indigenous people at Botany Bay in 1770 were returned to descendants of the original owners. There is growing acceptance that, whatever their scientific or archaeological significance, skulls and skeletons deserve more fitting resting places than filing-cabinet drawers or display cases.

Anzac Day is about remembering and respecting the dead. Meanwhile, efforts continue to identify individual bodies in the mud of the Western Front – also the setting for memorial services in April. Desecration of graves is considered a step too far, even in the underworld. At a Hobart school, the discovery of human remains during building works has prompted a sensitive recovery operation on the site of an old cemetery.

All of which makes the National Gallery of Victoria’s next blockbuster exhibition both perplexing and problematic.

The promotion has already begun. A huge picture now overlooks St Kilda Road, announcing that Pharaoh opens on June 14, the latest in a series of Melbourne Winter Masterpieces. Last year the focus was on French artist Pierre Bonnard; the year before, Spanish rascal Pablo Picasso. Now the gallery will be featuring “exquisite jewellery, papyri, coffins and a rich array of funerary objects”.

I think the picture used on the gallery’s exterior wall is detail of a stone sculpture of Thutmose III, a pharaoh from about 1479 to 1457 BC. I’m no Egyptologist, so I can’t be sure. But that’s OK, as one striking thing about the gallery’s description of items featured in the exhibition is uncertainty. A head of a statue is “probably Amenemhat III”; there is also a “relief of a mother, possibly a queen”. What is definite, though, is that these objects will be a long way from home.

Home, it seems, is the British Museum, a partner in the exhibition. Yes, the same museum still hanging onto the Elgin Marbles, which the Greek government would like back. If you believe one museum is much like another, and aren’t much fussed whether marbles or relics are displayed in London or Athens or Melbourne, ask yourself if it would seem acceptable for, say, the Louvre in Paris to be staging a collection of Indigenous Australian artefacts, many of them associated with rituals around death.

There’s actually a French connection with the NGV show: the tomb of Thutmose III, a renowned warrior, was discovered by French Egyptologist Victor Loret in the so-called Valley of the Kings in the late 19th century. Another Frenchman unwrapped the mummy, but only after a German archaeologist had taken a good look – finding, among other things, that tomb-raiders in ancient times had refused to let the pharaoh rest in peace. His expression on the NGV’s website is serene, betraying no hint of gross indignities to come.

The NGV show includes symbolic figurines left in graves and at least one coffin (wooden; Thebes, 900BC). Also some intriguing objects with a closer association to life than death – jewellery, for example, and a sheet of papyrus from 1110BC covered in script. (Best not to seek a translation in case it’s a ministerial statement.)