LONDON.- In Agatha Christie’s Death Comes as the End, the arrival of a priest’s new concubine disturbs an Egyptian household already divided by jealousy, inheritance and resentment, until her death sets in motion a sequence of murders. Published in 1944 but set at Thebes around 2000 BC, the novel took its central situation from the Heqanakht papyri, a group of Middle Kingdom letters in which an estate owner writes to his family about their refusal to accept his new wife. Working from these surviving documents, Christie and the Egyptologist Stephen Glanville reconstructed the domestic world of a society separated from them by nearly four thousand years.
The novel offers an unusually vivid example of how the surviving traces of ancient Egypt can preserve more than its monumental history, allowing individual voices, family disputes and the structures of everyday life to re-emerge. As Fragments enters its final week, four works in the exhibition consider a related process of recovery, from two remnants of Egyptian funerary culture to nineteenth-century photographs that record the monuments themselves and the modern history of their rediscovery.
The Twenty-sixth Dynasty, during which this coffin was made, occupied an uncertain place in histories of Egyptian art. Earlier scholarship tended to regard the first millennium BC as a period of belated imitation, in which artists returned to the achievements of the Old and Middle Kingdoms because the capacity for invention had been exhausted. Since Bernard V. Bothmer’s Egyptian Sculpture of the Late Period, however, the so-called Saite Renaissance has been understood in more exact terms, namely as a deliberate and highly selective engagement with the past, undertaken at a moment when rulers based at Sais had reunited Egypt after successive periods of political division and foreign domination. Archaism, in this context, was a means of establishing continuity, placing contemporary kings, officials and priests within an institutional history that reached back to the beginnings of the Egyptian state.
The coffin of Horudja belongs to this culture of historical self-consciousness. Its finely cut hieroglyphs preserve part of the ḥtp-dỉ-nsw, the offering formula that had appeared on Egyptian funerary monuments since the Old Kingdom and would remain in use into the Roman period. Addressed here to Osiris as “Foremost of the Westerners”, the great god and Lord of Abydos, it asks that Horudja receive bread, beer, cattle, birds, clothing and “all good and pure things”. Such texts are easily mistaken for records of offerings that had already been made, whereas their purpose was prospective and active. Through inscription and recitation, the goods named in the formula were made perpetually available to the deceased, even when the ceremonies once performed at the tomb had ceased.
Horudja’s title of Samaref, literally “he who loves him”, places him within the same concern for ritual and familial continuity. The Samaref priest assumed the position of the devoted son within the cult of the dead and was associated with the Opening of the Mouth, the ceremony through which the faculties of the mummy or cult image were restored. Related fragments identify Horudja’s mother, Khaatirbint, as a musician of Heryshef, the principal god of Heracleopolis, situating the family within a hereditary priestly community in which religious authority, social status and the obligations owed by one generation to another were closely connected.
The two surviving sections have themselves undergone a modern history of separation and recovery. Both were acquired by Chakib Slatine in Paris in 1975 and entered the same private collection two years later, but were subsequently dispersed, the upper section appearing at TEFAF in 2020 and the lower at auction in Paris in 2023. Their matching grain, dimensions and continuous inscription have now allowed them to be reunited for the first time in more than fifty years. The original coloured glass paste that filled the hieroglyphs is no longer preserved, although comparable inlay survives on the coffin of Djedthutiefankh in Turin and on a related wooden strip published by Hans Wolfgang Müller from the Kofler-Truniger Collection.
The conquest of Egypt by Alexander the Great in 332 BC and the establishment of the Ptolemaic dynasty created one of the most complex societies of the Hellenistic Mediterranean. Alexandria became a Greek-speaking royal capital whose library and Mouseion embodied the intellectual ambitions of the new regime, yet beyond the court the administration of the country continued to depend upon Egyptian temples, landholding networks and hereditary priesthoods. The Ptolemies therefore ruled through several political languages at once: they were Macedonian kings within the wider Hellenistic world, but appeared as pharaohs on Egyptian temple walls, where their authority was expressed through forms that were already ancient when Alexander entered Egypt.
The persistence of Egyptian funerary imagery under Greek rule was not, therefore, the survival of an unchanged native tradition beneath an imported political culture. As Marsha Hill has argued, Ptolemaic art is better understood through the varying forms of continuity and exchange produced by particular regions, patrons and functions. Funerary practice remained one of the contexts in which Egyptian conventions exercised their greatest authority, not least because burial depended upon a coherent account of the body, divine protection and rebirth that had been developed over many centuries.
This fragment formed part of a cartonnage covering placed over the chest of a mummy. By the Ptolemaic period, such coverings were commonly assembled from separate masks, collars, torso panels and foot cases, each physically independent but joined through a continuous iconographic programme. The surviving wing probably belonged to Nut, Isis or Nephthys, although the interchangeability of their attributes makes a certain identification impossible. Isis and Nephthys had mourned and restored Osiris after his murder by Seth, and their protection could consequently be extended to every deceased person assimilated to him; Nut, as the goddess of the sky, received the setting sun into her body and gave birth to it again at dawn, providing an equally powerful model for the regeneration of the dead.
The significance of the image lay not simply in what it represented, but in what it was expected to accomplish. Egyptian funerary images participated in the rites they depicted, and, as such, the painted wing extended divine protection over the mummy just as an inscribed offering formula secured provisions for the deceased. Even in its present fragmentary state, the panel preserves the central action of the lost composition, in which the vulnerable human body was placed beneath the wings of a deity and incorporated into the repeated restoration of Osiris and the daily renewal of the sun.
Photography entered Egyptology at almost the same moment that the discipline acquired the means to read its principal sources. Champollion announced his decipherment of hieroglyphs in 1822; less than two decades later, the invention of photography offered what appeared to be an equally decisive advance in the recording of monuments. The first generation of photographers working in Egypt, among them Maxime Du Camp and Francis Frith, repeatedly contrasted the supposed accuracy of the camera with the subjectivity of the traveller’s sketch, establishing a claim to documentary authority that would remain central to archaeological photography. Yet their images were also shaped by the conventions of the picturesque, the practical demands of travel and a European market already familiar with Egypt through the Description de l’Égypte, antiquarian publications and Romantic literature.
Antonio Beato belonged to the generation that transformed this experimental practice into an established commercial industry. Having worked with his brother Felice across the Mediterranean and in India, he settled in Luxor, where his permanent studio placed him within easy reach of Karnak and the other major sites of Upper Egypt. His albumen prints were purchased individually or assembled into albums by travellers on the Nile, so that the same image could operate at once as archaeological record, commercial souvenir and evidence of a journey completed.
The two pillars photographed here were erected under Thutmose III, who ruled from approximately 1479 to 1425 BC, and stand in the Hall of Annals at Karnak. Carved with the lotus and papyrus, the heraldic plants of Upper and Lower Egypt, they gave monumental form to the union of the Two Lands under pharaonic rule and remain unique in Egyptian architecture as freestanding heraldic pillars (rather than columns intended to support a roof). Their position within the temple associated them with a broader programme through which Thutmose III recorded his military campaigns and represented the territorial extent of his kingship.
Beato’s photograph has acquired a documentary value its first purchasers could not have anticipated, since it preserves the appearance of Karnak before subsequent excavation and restoration altered both the monument and its surroundings. It should not, however, be treated as a neutral transcription of the site. The carefully chosen opening in the ruined wall isolates the pillars, while the inclusion of two Egyptian figures establishes their scale, devices that belong as much to the visual language of nineteenth-century travel photography as to archaeological record-making. The image documents an ancient monument, but it also documents the historical process through which that monument became portable, reproducible and readily available to a European audience.
By the later nineteenth century, the ascent of the Great Pyramid had become one of the prescribed experiences of travel in Egypt, repeated in guidebooks, travel narratives and the albums through which visitors organised the memory of their journey. Its apparent drama depended upon a well-established local economy: because the pyramid’s stone courses could approach a metre in height, travellers were pulled from above and pushed from below by teams of Egyptian guides whose knowledge and physical labour made the climb possible. Importantly, the image of solitary European achievement was, in practice, a managed collective performance.
The photograph is numbered, titled Ascension de la Pyramide and signed “J. P. Sébah” in the negative, placing it within the commercial catalogue of one of the most successful photographic firms of the Ottoman world. Pascal Sébah founded his studio in Constantinople in 1857 and opened a Cairo branch in 1873; following his death, the business was continued by his son Jean Pascal and, from 1888, in partnership with Polycarpe Joaillier. The difficulty of assigning some images securely to father or son reflects the structure of studio production itself, in which negatives remained commercial property and could be printed long after the original exposure, while the Sébah name functioned as a guarantee of authorship at the level of the firm rather than the individual photographer.
The ascent also belonged to the literature through which Egypt was made familiar to readers who had never visited it. Amelia Edwards began A Thousand Miles up the Nile, published in 1877, with Cairo and the pyramids before following the course of her journey south towards the temples of Upper Egypt. Her book combined the conventions of travel writing with increasingly serious archaeological observation, and the public success it achieved contributed to the foundation of the Egypt Exploration Fund in 1882. Tourism generated the encounter, literature transformed it into cultural authority, and organised excavation converted that authority into an academic institution. Photography occupied a central place within the same process, supplying images that appeared to confirm and stabilise what the traveller had seen.
Ascending the Pyramid is particularly striking because the labour normally subordinated to the traveller’s achievement occupies the centre of the composition. The European climber advances only through the coordinated actions of the men positioned above and below him, while further guides wait among the blocks and at the summit. The photograph therefore records two histories simultaneously: that of the Fourth Dynasty monument built for Khufu in the twenty-sixth century BC, and that of the nineteenth-century tourist industry that turned physical access to the monument into a saleable experience. Another impression in the Library of Congress attests to the image’s wider circulation, through which this highly organised encounter came to stand for the direct experience of antiquity itself.
