Thursday, March 17, 2005 | 8:37 a.m.
We huddled around Fred O'Hare, our tour guide, as he flipped through notecards and explained how the painted images on "Stele of Nebnakht and Family," an ancient limestone slab, would help ensure Nebnakht's survival in the afterlife.
As O'Hare struggled with the pronunciation of the name of Nebnakht's wife, a woman from the crowd sarcastically blurted "Susan!" then shrugged her shoulders and added, "What do we know?"
We were 10 minutes into our tour of "The Quest for Immortality: Treasures of Ancient Egypt," which began at the Colossal Head of Ramses II and would conclude at a red granite statue of Thutmose III.
By now our group had explored the boat from the tomb of Amenhotep II and a sculpture of a scribe when O'Hare exclaimed, "Let's go to the next gallery and look at a coffin!"
And so it went last Friday evening at the Guggenheim Hermitage Museum at the Venetian, where we learned of the 12-hour journey the soul takes through the netherworld to reach the afterlife.
There were coffins and the canopic jars of Prince Hornakht, which held body parts extracted during mummification.
There was a child's chair, a false door from the western wall of the tomb of Puyemre (where the deceased could come and go), sculptures of gods and goddesses, the funerary mask of Wenudjebauendjed, gold toe and finger stalls and other samples of what the rich would want in the afterlife in ancient Egypt.
On loan from the Egyptian government, the 105 funerary objects, thousands of years old, are part of a National Gallery of Art touring exhibit that will be at the Guggenheim Hermitage through July 31. It is the largest collection of ancient Egyptian materials ever to be exhibited outside Egypt.
"It's not Egypt, but it's lovely because it's Las Vegas," said Carol Siegel, a Las Vegas resident who has been to Cairo with her husband, Frederick, and knows a little about Egyptology.
"We poke around the world," Frederick, a retired cardiologist, added later. "It's wonderful we have this kind of archaeology in Las Vegas. Tonight we're going to the lecture."
Lecture?
Yes. As it turned out, Dr. Betsy Bryan, chair of Near Eastern Studies at Johns Hopkins University and curator of the exhibit, was in town Friday to speak about the Egyptian importance of afterlife. It was the museum's first lecture of its kind and the first of many planned lectures to come.
An unusual theme for the gallery that just finished its extended exhibit of Western art from the 16th century to the early 20th century, "Quest for Immortality" and its accompanying lecture arrived after the museum's first plan for an Egyptian exhibit fell through and left it with a hole to fill.
"We got a lucky tip," Elizabeth Herridge, the Guggenheim Hermitage's managing director, said.
Of the Egyptian theme, Herridge added, "Every once in a while it's time to get off this painting riff and onto something else. I like this Egyptian theme because it's so accessible."
The items are mostly from the Egyptian Museum in Cairo and Luxor Museum of Ancient Art. The collection revolves around the afterlife journeys of pharaohs, who believed that after they died they followed the journey of the sun god Re (also known as Ra).
"One of the reasons to do an exhibition of sun god's journey is because the public has never heard of it before," Bryan said. "The scholarship only goes back about 45 years. People always thought the god Osiris was all there was to it."
That all changed with the work of Swiss Egyptologist Erik Hornung, who in the 1960s published the first edition of the Amduat, the royal funerary text, which describes the journey of the sun god through the netherworld.
"Since then it has been the focus of the Egyptological scholarship of the afterlife," Bryan said.
According to research, Egyptians believed that when the sun set each night, the god Re died, then journeyed into a dangerous underworld, defeating demons, and was reborn each morning.
"The story of the journey through the afterlife is really the story of the sun god journey at night," Bryan said. "The Egyptians, this was their main sort of notion of what happens on the journey ... as (the sun god) triumphs, they triumph."
After the life
Bryan's area of specialty is the New Kingdom. She's been to Egypt nearly 80 times beginning with her first trip in 1975. Now as a professor at Johns Hopkins University, she travels to Egypt three times a year.
While speaking to Las Vegans on Friday, Bryan read from a letter written 3,250 years ago by a man to his deceased wife, with whom he discusses a dispute.
"The letter poignantly tells us that the place in the afterlife was very real to the Egyptians and communication with the deceased was possible," Bryan told the audience, then compared Egyptian and medieval concepts of afterlife.
"Most people seem not to have much knowledge how closely they connect," Bryan said. "There is a much more closer connection between Egyptians and Judeo Christians, than Greeks (and Judeo Christians)."
Of the Egyptians, Bryan said, "They were the very first people in the world to have a concept of morality tied to their religion. The Greeks did not do that."
In establishing further understanding of Egyptians, Bryan said she often works to counter the myth that Egyptians as a society were consumed with death.
"The Egyptians were not obsessed with death," Bryan said. "They were obsessed with living and they didn't want to give up living. These are people who really had an enormously fortunate existence.
"The Nile is such a fertile land. Often, it's been a very long notion that it heavily colored their attitude toward their world."
Unlike the Mesopotamians, who thought their lot in life was unfair, Bryan said, "Egyptians thought the sun crosses the sky to look down on them."
Soul searching
The only element missing from the exhibit at the Guggenheim Hermitage is the full-scale reproduction of the tomb of Thutmose III explaining the Amduat hours on its walls. The tomb is presented at other locations on the tour that have the necessary space to display the exhibit.
Objects on display are elaborately painted, carefully sculpted projects that took years to complete and were planned by the Egyptians early in life. Whether they believed that the objects would actually be used in a physical sense is still a source of controversy for some scholars.
"That's where we start to run into difficulties," Bryan said. "There are some people who like to say they were more commemorative. But all the inscriptions say it will be available to them. The magical use was made possible by the material subject in the object.
"It was built into their belief that the object itself would be transported as if the bed contained the soul of the bed. So when you destroy the object you destroy it in both places."
How the Egyptians came up with the concepts of funerary objects and the underworld also isn't known.
"No one is ever going to know the real answer to that question," Bryan said. "How it developed, it's impossible to trace. As soon as there was writing it was very long practiced ... The preparations of a tomb are first and foremost about protecting their bodies through the tomb so the soul has a place to go. It was very functional."
Of the mummification, she said, "It was necessary for coming back to life because a soul needed a container."
But as with every religion, not everybody bought into it.
"There were disbelievers," Bryan said. "In Egypt, there are literary commentaries that are questioning the amount of time and energy one spends preparing a tomb when they could be spending time with family and treasuring the moments on the Earth."
Examining a mirror and pieces of jewelry once owned by Queen Ahhotep of the 18th Dynasty, Las Vegan Don Benton said, "I'm particularly interested in this queen. She might be the first powerful woman in Egypt."
Of the exhibit, Benton added, "I'll have to visit this one several times. I can't do it in one trip. It's very representative of all the dynasties. That's what amazes me."
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