Think selfies started with the iPhone? Pharaohs beat us by 5000 years

In the age of the relentlessly filtered selfie, when augmented perfection is in the palm of our hands, it’s reassuring to know that humanity’s obsession with image management goes back quite a bit further than the invention of the iPhone. The Ancient Egyptians, it seems, were masters of the art.

It’s almost impossible to know what the real pharaohs looked like because the statues and sculptures they erected were idealised assemblies of pharaonic motifs rather than realistic portraits. Propaganda, to put it bluntly. Computer scans have suggested Tutankhamun had buck teeth and a club foot, but anyone looking at his burnished gold death mask might imagine he resembled a kind of pharaonic superhero.

Marie Vandenbeusch, a British Museum expert on Ancient Egyptian funerary culture and the curator of the NGV’s upcoming Pharaoh exhibition, says this idealised imagery is all we have to go on. “When it comes to the pharaohs we only know what they wanted us to know, what they wanted to project. But what they thought, or what they believed? That’s not something that’s easy to tell.”

The NGV’s Winter Masterpieces exhibition includes more than 500 artefacts - everything from a 1.5 metre-wide granite fist from a monumental statue of Ramses II, to small pieces of jewellery that haven’t seen a wrist or neck for more than 3000 years. It is the largest international loan in the British Museum’s history.

The London museum is filled with precious artefacts from around the world, but its Ancient Egyptian collection is a crowd favourite. Many of its visitors make a beeline for a shard of rock displayed on the ground floor. The Rosetta Stone – the museum’s most popular attraction and the key that unlocked Egyptian hieroglyphs – has found a new role as the backdrop to an endless succession of selfies.

While the Rosetta Stone is staying put, Melburnians will be able to snap themselves beside a granite lion weighing more than two tonnes (erected by pharaoh Amenhotep III between 1390 and 1352 BC), or a striking pair of one-tonne obelisks.

“The scale of this exhibition makes it unique,” says Daniel Antoine, the head of the British Museum’s Department of Egypt and Sudan, looking remarkably sanguine for a man about to send so many treasures to the other side of the world. “The logistics of safely transporting this many objects, including statues weighing more than two tonnes, is … quite a challenge. But we have a great deal of experience in this area.”

Antoine also has insurance. Even obelisks can be covered for damage or loss, apparently. The sheer size of the exhibition serves a dual purpose. “On a primordial level I’m hoping visitors will be awed by all this wonderful art from Ancient Egypt,” he says. “But I also think it will give a more nuanced understanding of what being a pharaoh would have been like and how royal imagery evolved over time.”

The exhibition might also correct a few misconceptions. With the notable exception of Cleopatra, the “Queen of the Nile” who took her own life in 30BC and handed Egypt to the Romans, it is often assumed the pharaohs were all male. Familiar names such as Tutankhamun, Ramses the Great and Khufu stand testament to the idea that it was men and boys (King Tut was just nine when he ascended the throne) who held the top job.

In fact, more than one woman reached the pyramid’s peak long before Cleopatra’s ill-fated dalliance with Mark Antony. Female pharaohs such as Hatshepsut, Merneith, Sobekneferu (also known as Neferusobek), and Tawosret may lack Cleopatra’s celebrity, but they are proof that the idea of the pharaoh as head of state – intermediary between the gods and the people and protector of ma’at, a cosmically ordained sense of equilibrium – was resilient, but malleable. Issues such as gender and ethnicity were hurdles rather than roadblocks.

Hatshepsut was one of the most successful female pharaohs, and arguably the most maligned. She came to power circa 1479BC following the death of her husband, Thutmose II. His son, Thutmose III, was still an infant, too young to ascend the throne, so Hatshepsut ruled on his behalf as Egypt’s regent. A few years later, she promoted herself to a full-blown pharaoh and presided over a period noted for its peace and prosperity.

Hatshepsut would have been well aware her gender and route to power raised questions about legitimacy. She responded in an intriguing way: depicting herself as a male ruler with bulging muscles, masculine garb and a beard. Paradoxically, she was also referred to as a woman in many of the texts written during her lifetime. A statue held by The Met in New York has it both ways, showing her with breasts beneath a male pharaoh’s finery.

Her story took a dark turn. After she died many of her statues and monuments were either defaced or destroyed in what appears to be a concerted effort to erase her from history. One of the exhibits in the NGV exhibition is a stone tablet on which her name has been obliterated by a chisel.

American Egyptologists Herbert Winlock and William Hayes, who excavated Hatshepsut’s funerary temple in the 1920s, believed the explanation was straightforward. The queen was a “vile usurper”, a “vain, ambitious and unscrupulous woman” who seized power and paid the price. The campaign to write her out of history was likely orchestrated by Thutmose III, who resented the years he’d spent in her shadow.

This theory likely says as much about Winlock, Hayes and their times as it does about Hatshepsut. The contemporary view is rather more nuanced, says Vandenbeusch.

“The fact that most of her representations have been erased is true, but it used to be believed that it happened right after her death, that it was an immediate reaction by Thutmose III. We’re revising that now. It probably happened later in his reign and it was more about a question of legitimacy for him.”

The fact Hatshepsut enjoyed a long, successful reign might be seen as evidence that women freely wielded power in Ancient Egypt. After all, there were female deities – the NGV exhibition includes 10 statues of the lion goddess Sekhmet – as well as women working in the temples. And while a pharaoh’s son would always have the inside track in terms of succession, his wife, mother and daughters could attain official titles such as God’s Wife and Great Royal Wife that conferred genuine status and power.

Further down the social ladder, women had the right to buy and inherit property, bequeath it to whom they chose, and initiate a divorce. But this, at its core, was still a patriarchy. Men did the fighting and ran the administration. Which is why it’s “so remarkable” that Hatshepsut took the throne and held it for so long, says Vandenbeusch.

Egyptology used to focus almost exclusively on the pharaohs and the treasures they attempted to take to the afterlife. But things are changing. There is a growing interest in the lives of ordinary Egyptians, the people who built all those tombs and monuments. This evolution will be reflected in the NGV exhibition, which aims to put the pharaohs in context by shining a light on the lives of those they ruled.

“We are trying to tell a multi-layered story,” says Vandenbeusch. “One that is not just based on what the pharaoh projected, but based on what everybody else projected through different types of objects.”

A group of artefacts in the exhibition were found in a small village called Deir el-Medina on the banks of the Nile. The men who built the tombs in the Valley of the Kings lived here and the things they left behind paint a vivid picture.

“They produced an incredible amount of material for themselves,” says Vandenbeusch. “We have tombs they built for themselves, pieces of furniture and many of the texts that they wrote to each other. There are lists of men who were sick that day and why they were sick. There were a lot of scorpion bites!”

The workmen also produced art, though it’s very different to the grandiose works commissioned by the pharaohs. “This is not drawing for any official purposes, it’s drawing just to pass the time, to have a bit of fun,” says Vandenbeusch. “For example, we have an ostracon [a small piece of stone or ceramic used as writing material] with a small baboon picking up some figs painted on its surface. It’s through objects like this that you get a sense of the humour of these people and the jokes they could make.”

“There are lists of men who were sick that day and why they were sick. There were a lot of scorpion bites!”

Marie Vandenbeusch, curator

The extensive display of jewellery in the exhibition also seeks to tell the stories of people who worked for a living as well as those who ruled. “There are quite a lot of pieces made of relatively modest materials such as glass and different types of stone,” says Vandenbeusch. “The idea is to use it to show people’s differing status. At all levels of society you would get access to objects which were a beautifier, but also had a meaning. Many pieces of jewellery would have a certain shape associating it with a god and attracting protection from that god.”

These objects help build a picture of ordinary Egyptians, but it is still hard to know what they thought – what they felt. Did they revere the pharaohs or despise them? Some rulers were certainly more popular than others. Khufu, the builder of the Great Pyramid, is mocked in a folk tale written after his death, while Akhenaten’s name was erased from temple monuments after he tried to introduce monotheism.

One thing is certain: life was hard for ordinary Egyptians. Archeological evidence suggests the workers who dragged and laid the 2.5-tonne granite blocks making up the pyramids went to their graves with deformities and broken limbs. But there is also evidence these labourers were relatively well-fed and their injuries were treated at camp infirmaries.

British historian Guy de la Bedoyere has said Egypt’s golden age created some of history’s greatest treasures, but behind the glittering facade lay a society built on brutality, inequality and staggering levels of corruption. But Vandenbeusch is wary of any suggestion the pharaohs were simply tyrants who enslaved an entire country and forced its people to create vainglorious monuments.

“It’s much more complex than a bunch of megalomaniacs trying to build big stuff,” she says. “There’s an idea that power and control is used to provide stability for the country.” The pharaohs were obliged to ensure that ma’at – the delicate balance of nature, gods, people and the economy – was maintained.

“It’s so complex,” she says. “When you start looking at the religious texts you can see they developed something of an insane complexity, something quite remote from what ordinary people would think and do. But there is a rationale behind all this.”

The ownership question

It is almost impossible in this day and age to mention the British Museum – or any other repository of antiquities from around the world – without discussing the thorny question of ownership and repatriation. A very old joke asks the question: why are the pyramids in Egypt? Because they wouldn’t fit inside the British Museum.

Several petitions calling for the return of the Rosetta Stone to Egypt have been signed by thousands of Egyptians in recent years, but to date there has been no official request from Cairo.

Asked about the status of the objects selected for the NGV’s Pharaoh exhibition, Vandenbeusch says: “Obviously, we did all the due diligence and there is nothing contested or problematic in terms of provenance. Something I think is important to mention is the complexity of the question of repatriation and the fact that each object is completely different and has its own story. I’d also like to stress the point that we have very good collaboration with our Egyptian colleagues.”

Pharaoh opens at NGV International on June 14.