“Why are we so fascinated by ancient Egypt? » By questioning himself during the presentation of the exhibition “Champollion, the path of hieroglyphs” which has just opened at the Louvre-Lens and of which he is the general curator, Vincent Rondot, director of the department of Egyptian antiquities at the Musée du Louvre, asks the question that resonates the most in this year of the bicentenary of the decipherment of hieroglyphs.
Why this unequaled attraction for the pharaonic era? Why have the names of Cheops, Ramses II, Tutankhamun, Cleopatra pierced the millennia and evoke more images for us than many kings of France? Why are the workshops where children learn the basics of hieroglyphic writing always sold out? Why, finally, does a part of ourselves feel connected to ancient Egypt?
The answer is complex and plural. Egypt remains a fantasy deeply inscribed in the collective imagination, well beyond the recuperation of the most famous pharaonic figures by popular culture. As the Lensoise exhibition reminds us, the Bible, in the Old Testament, gives pride of place (or rather ugly, as they have the wrong role) to these unnamed pharaohs who oppress the Jews. Also in Antiquity, Greeks and Romans set up Egypt – State born in the IVe millennium – as the mother of civilizations and cherish her as a precious heritage to be permanently reclaimed. This is evidenced by the interest of the Romans in the cult of Isis, a mystery cult which attached to Egypt a pseudo-taste of secrecy, of the thou and of the hidden. This all the more easily as the hieroglyphs had become illegible, enough to complete the fantasy.
During the Renaissance, which brought Antiquity back into fashion, it was therefore natural to go to Rome to see this Egypt, frozen in the role we wanted to give it, through the monuments that the emperors, then relayed by the popes, reported from the other side of the Mediterranean… As summarized by Vincent Rondot, “we then have an Egypt of convention, the mute guarantor of the antiquity of humanity”. Not being able to hear his voice any longer suits the Catholic Church, which fears that the deciphering of hieroglyphs, by saying to what distant past dates back the Pharaonic civilization, will undermine the biblical chronology.
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The Louvre-Lens exhibition, which retraces the life of Egyptologist Jean-François Champollion (1790-1832), is therefore first and foremost the restitution of a cultural, religious, philological but also geopolitical context – against a backdrop of expedition to Egypt and Franco-British rivalries.
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