by   JUAN JOSÉ CASTILLOS

I attended as a special guest lecturer this meeting in the beautiful Brazilian city of Curitiba. I must thank Prof. Moacir Santos of the Campos de Andrade local university and his assistants, who organized this Symposium, for all the kindness and support they offered me, all which made my sojourn a very pleasant, although quite hectic, experience.

More than 100 people, scholars and students from many Brazilian universities and interested members of the general public, attended this event and actively participated with comments and questions after most papers.

The facilities at this university were very convenient and satisfactory for this kind of meetings and the main lecture hall could hold many times the public that was present, which means that as things develop, it will be able to absorb any surge in academic and public interest as the ambitious short and long term goals of the organizers materialize.

During the event I could visit the local Rosicrucian Museum which has many good and average reproductions as well as an authentic Egyptian mummy, which has been the object of lengthy research by local scholars.

Although I personally have a certain rejection for institutions that uphold esoteric views, I was pleasantly surprised when I saw that everything was quite factual in this nice museum, every object is thoroughly explained, the wall decorations have been done with good taste and accuracy and many groups of young people led by their teachers visit this museum, making it a very good first approximation to ancient Egypt, free from any ideological connotations of any kind. At another hall a very good and impressive reproduction of an Akhenaten colossal statue is displayed. It was made by local scholars with all due attention to detail and should perhaps be located in the museum, as one of its major exhibits.

What follows is a summary of what I could gather from the papers read at this event, which should convey a brief and rough approximation to the main ideas and subjects that were discussed. I was informed by the Dean of Humanities of the university that the Proceedings of this Symposium will be published in 2008.

M. Schneider - Politics and religion in the art of the pharaohs - The pharaoh had a dual nature: his function as such and himself as a special being. The former was of a divine, sacred nature and the latter had a human connotation, the Horus or falcon god and the living Horus, the king. Then the speaker discussed the mythical foundation of ancient Egyptian royalty having to do with this god. In the beginning Ra created the world, according to the heliopolitan cosmogony, with the divine dynasty represented by Ra - Shu - Geb - Osiris, power was passed on from father to son. Osiris was then murdered thus breaking up this divine dynasty, a kind of celestial coup d'état. By means of Horus the royal succession interrupted by Set is retaken and continued. Then he spoke about the various sources for this subject, for instance, among them, the Coffin Text 148 and the Chester Beatty Papyrus, in which Horus appears as predestined to be raised to the throne of Egypt. The speaker dealt extensively with the proceedings of the tribunal of the gods in which in spite of the opposition of some of them, Horus is reivindicated as the legitimate successor of Osiris. According to other sources it was Geb who granted Horus the right to rule over a part of Egypt and Set over another, which iconographically reflects the unification of the country by these two gods, but other sources depict Geb as granting Horus the right to rule over all Egypt and he is shown as king of Upper and Lower Egypt. Later on, Set will be identified with the forces of chaos, foreigners and rebellion against the divine order and images of his had to be ritually destroyed. The triumph of Horus was thus that of the cosmic order over the forces of usurpation and chaos, making the Horus myth a justification for the monarchy. Then ancient Egyptian art expressed in many ways this fusion and identification between the god Horus and the king and many examples of this were shown by the speaker.

J. J. Castillos - Further research on the origin of class stratification in early Egypt - So far most of the evidence for the birth and development of inequality in predynastic Egypt has involved studies of the many cemeteries of that age that provide abundant data on the subject and even allow us to determine approximately when these changes in those early communities started to happen on the way to greater social complexity. But it is not wise to dwell on funerary data alone in order to draw conclusions because although in the case of ancient Egypt there is a long history of correlation between the worlds of the living and of the dead, it is desirable to confirm our interpretations with other complementary evidence from the contemporary settlements. Here is where the picture is unfortunately very incomplete since we know very little of predynastic villages and cities, however the little we know compared with evidence from other people at a similar stage of social development in other parts of the world can considerably improve our understanding of the situation in Egypt at the time. The reasons for the changes in social, economic and political organization in early Egypt that brought about the significant step of the appearance of powerful hereditary chiefs have been assigned by scholars in the past to foreign invasion, to something described as oriental despotism, to spontaneous developments due to the need for a centralized government in order to control, rationalize and expand the irrigation, thus assuring the country' s prosperity, to demographic pressure, to growing circumscription and warfare, to other sources and constraints of an ideological nature, none of which appear to be satisfactory to account for the significant changes observed in the archaeological record. The speaker then described his own interpretation that assigns to the activity of ambitious, power hungry and resourceful individuals, called aggrandizers in the modern anthropological literature, the role of social transformers, giving examples of work recently carried out outside Egypt but that could offer useful research guidelines for scholars working in Egyptian predynastic settlement archaeology in order to try to identify such trends and determine how they compare with similar results from elsewhere within the same basic process of change towards greater social complexity. The speaker declared that in his opinion this approach is original and new applied to predynastic Egypt, since he has been unable to find it in papers or books written by his colleagues which he is acquainted with, and it would perhaps be profitable for scholars working in this field to determine how well it accounts for and explains contemporary developments during the Badarian - Naqada transition in Upper Egypt.

A. Martins Filho - Everyday life in wartime ancient Egypt - Military history has been in the past a heroic, legitimizing history and in historiography scholars have ignored the fact that in the beginning history was essentially military history. There are usually not many spaces nowadays for military history, but my presence here, for instance, is perhaps a small step in the right direction. In spite of the fact that many assume that primitive ancient societies were egalitarian and therefore there should not have been reasons for warfare, modern archaeology has shown that war is a common phenomenon in even the most ancient societies. In the case of Egypt warfare assured the continuity of that society as it was established and when the military capability of the country declined, it was conquered and absorbed by other empires. Then the speaker dealt extensively with the evolution of military organization in Egypt from the Old Kingdom to the Late Period (conscriptions, mercenaries, professional and permanent army). The word the ancient Egyptians used for our term army described not only the groups of soldiers trained for warfare but also those destined to escort and protect expeditions and caravans which brought valuable goods into Egypt. The hyksos period implied a profound transformation in Egyptian military organization, weapons and tactics as they adapted improvements introduced by those foreign rulers. At the end of the XVIII dynasty military commanders grew in power and influence to the extent of becoming pharaohs themselves. The speaker concluded his paper providing many textual and iconographic examples contemporary with every period covered by his studies.

G. Chapot - The lord of ritual action, a study of the pharaoh - offerings relationship during the Amarna period - Divine offerings were basically the same all over ancient Egypt, they only varied in the degree of ostentation and wealth according to the different temples. The regular ceremony of feeding the gods enabled them to carry out their creative functions. The priests during the ceremonies transferred some of their vital energy or force to the divine images. Thus food and other services rendered to the gods were exchanged for wealth, prosperity and stability for Egypt. In Amarna these actions were concentrated in the person of the pharaoh, who by carrying them out propiciated the Aten and assured prosperity for himself as king and for his country. In the contemporary iconography we can see Akhenaten adopting similar attitudes and actions to those of the heliopolitan priesthood. Many textual sources were mentioned and discussed to emphasize the points made by the speaker.

T. de Almeida - Analysis of animal mummification in ancient Egypt by means of experimental archaeology - Animal mummification, although it involved a process similar to that of human beings, was somewhat more complex in the sense of its several meanings. This project implied experiments carried out with small animals, three tilapia fish, using natron. At given stages of the process the samples were weighed and measured. Another more recent work involved two other samples of this kind of fish. To begin with, the internal organs were removed and washed with water and returned to the sample. At the end of the process it was observed that the natron was stuck to the body of the fish being difficult to remove and special care had to be devoted to the internal organs that after desiccation were extremely fragile. The time to complete the process was nine days and the samples lost more than half their original weight. There is little information on the time it took in ancient times to mummify animals and these ongoing projects attempt to fill such gaps in our information.

M. Mazzillo - The divine monarchy in ancient Egypt, a textual reaffirmation during the reign of Kames - The texts discussed in this paper were meant to prop up the concept of the Egyptian monarchy during the hyksos episode and its aftermath. Foreigners must submit to the power of the pharaoh or be exterminated. The rhetoric strategy consists of speeches by the pharaoh addressed to the usurping foreign king, who appears as not replying to such admonitions. Ahmosis I manipulated the records to appear as a victorious king and conqueror of Avaris, but other texts challenge this royal historical fiction, which is common in all the ancient Egyptian history showing splendid victories by the pharaoh where there was actually no such thing.

F. Frizzo - Antonio Gramsci and ancient Egypt, theoretical hypotheses for analysis - Although it is a thorny subject trying to relate ancient and modern categories and themes, it is possible with all due caution to handle and compare concepts such as ideology and (social) class. Gramsci thought that ideologies and world views became religions and his principle of hegemonical power could be applied to ancient civilizations such as the Egyptian. These studies using Gramsci' s principles can lead us to a better understanding of ancient people, for instance, the expansion and building activity of ancient pharaonic Egypt in the south, into modern Sudan. J. J. Castillos pointed out that the absence of a similar activity in Syria and Palestine could be puzzling rather than illuminating from the same perspective of hegemonical power. Perhaps, after all, modern categories and concepts cannot and should not be transferred to ancient societies.

M. Santos - Animal mummification in ancient Egypt, between the faith of the pilgrims and the bad faith of the priests - The ancient Egyptians had the reputation of being the most religious people in the ancient world and what follows is related to that notion. We have to thank the emperors Pedro I and Pedro II for the acquisition by Brazil of the best Egyptian collection in Latin America. It includes mummies of several species of animals that were studied by the biologist Martha Locks and by the speaker. Among the species represented we can find crocodile, cats, ibis and fish. This paper seeks to understand the purpose behind animal mummification in ancient Egypt. For instance, a mummy that in the catalogue prepared by the National Museum under the supervision of K. Kitchen was described as that of a small child was in fact that of a cat. According to classical sources like Herodotus, cats and other animals received a special treatment by being mummified and buried because they were sacred. The iconography shows priests in the same stela in one register worshiping one of this live animals, as a symbol of the god they represented or were associated with, and in another the priest worshiping the god depicted with a human body and with the head of the sacred animal. There was a great variety of such animals, sometimes representing different gods, such as for example the Apis, Bukis and Mnevis bulls. In these cases the animals that were the living manifestations of these gods were mummified and buried without any trace of violence, having died of natural causes. Another category is that of votive animals that symbolized certain gods but because they were not living manifestations of those gods, could be sacrificed, mummified and sold to pious pilgrims, almost an assembly line kind of arrangement in the temples conceived to satisfy such a demand. There were more sophisticated varieties such as animal mummies put inside a wooden coffin shaped like the animal it contained and other less expensive ones in which the mummies were put inside pots. Other kinds of animals were also mummified as pets, gazelles, monkeys, cats and dogs were the most frequent species. Some of them were even mentioned in inscriptions as "the Osiris...", like human beings were. In places like Tuna el Gebel kilometres of galleries were found were the mummies of animals were buried, piled up all together in careful and sensible arrangements. The catacombs at Sakkara, on the other hand, were better organized by species. The bad faith of the priests can be detected in the many examples of fakes that were identified by archaeologists in modern times when such so-called mummies were analyzed and found not to be such. The speaker showed several graphic examples of these practices.

L. Coelho - Public and private life in a city of the XII dynasty, everyday events among the inhabitants of Kahun - This city, situated near one of the canals that carried water towards the Fayum, was founded in the Middle Kingdom and was also inhabited in graeco-roman times, but it flourished as a city in the earlier period. It was built to provide housing for the people who worked in the Lahun funerary complex as well as for the officials and priests who were somehow involved in those projects. Our houses today are private dwelling places but in Kahun in many of the smaller houses different activities were also carried out, both private and public, in the same spaces, while in the larger houses there were private and public places, in the latter bread, beer and other products were made, but such spaces were well defined and separated from the private ones. The tools, domestic artefacts and other items that could be recovered from the site are also useful for these studies. Then the speaker outlined the methodology used in order to identify those spaces in each case, largely based on Barry Kemp' s approach to the subject. Not only the remains of the city are helpful for these purposes but also the papyri found therein throw light on the everyday life of those people.

S. Bley - Lady of the House, the rights and duties of wives in the Middle Kingdom - This study is part of a major project she is carrying out on the degree of social and legal equality between women and men in ancient Egypt, this paper dealt with the situation in the Middle Kingdom. All available sources, both textual and iconographic, were used for the purpose. She mentioned the different words used to refer to different kinds of women such as Lady of the House, Dweller in the City and Property Owner, as well as to the Wab Women who were involved in activities with priestly connotations. They had the right to litigate without any need of assistance or representation from their father, husband or guardian and even in some case they took legal action against her own father who had appropriated and given away to others some of her property. In other documents the right to own property was established. The Teachings of Ptahhotep advised men to avoid women and admonished men on how to behave with their wives and concubines, implying that the latter also had certain rights by law as long as they lived with a man. The position in society of women was according to their rank (royal family, officials, workers and craftsmen, peasants) and their status usually reflected the position and offices held by their husbands.

M. T. David - The funerary literature in the Middle Kingdom, the Coffin Texts - Many egyptologists speak of a "democratization" of immortality in the passage from the Pyramid Texts to the Coffin Texts, the latter being modified and abridged versions of the former. Such a description is in fact an anachronism because there was no such thing, since only a very limited section of the ancient Egyptian population at the time had access to and could make use of these texts. Contemporary coffins besides being meant to receive the mummy of the deceased, were also conceived as a house to be inhabited by him and also as a symbol of the universe, as their decoration and inscriptions imply. It was also a symbolic version of the womb of the goddess Nut which would give new life to the deceased. Then the speaker dealt with the purposes of the decorations placed outside and inside these coffins and of the texts, so that the dead would not die again, to achieve a celestial position, to be able to live in the Osirian netherworld, to be resurrected in the tomb and also providing guides for the other world. As to the causes for this wider use of these texts, previously a royal privilege, she mentioned the crisis that the First Intermediate Period brought about, the changes that took place in the late Old Kingdom and the decline of the VI dynasty involving overgrown bureaucracy, hereditary provincial governors, changes in the distribution patterns of economic surpluses, an increase in the practice of provincial burials rather than around the royal funerary complexes in Memphis and the concentration of wealth among the local elites.

S. Girardi - Food for the dead, representations of offering tables in Middle Kingdom stelae - The purpose of this research was an effort to determine whether the food for the dead depicted in these funerary stelae were similar or not to the usual consumption by the living ancient Egyptians at the time. For the purpose 33 stelae belonging to nobles have been considered. Detailed graphs and tables were shown by the speaker indicating that according to her studies the most frequent items were bread, poultry, onions, other kinds of meat, beer, fruit, meat procured by hunting, etc., roughly in this order. The results so far obtained show that funerary food had a rather more symbolic meaning than being attempts to reflect the everyday consumption by people at the time.

M. Bakos - Conceptions and misconceptions in egyptomania - At first the speaker outlined the beginning of her interest in this subject, from her graduation in local history to her postgraduate studies in the UK, her discovery of the many expressions of egyptomania in Brazil and her attempts to understand and describe its nature, purposes and different manifestations. It all led to an ongoing academic undertaking at her university (PUCRS, Porto Alegre) which she leads and guides, and which explores the depth and width of this phenomenon abundantly represented all over Brazil, although without confining herself to her own country, since she and her assistants have been able to trace manifestations of egyptomania in many other South American countries. Her approach follows that of Humbert and distinguishes between egyptophilia, egyptomania and the more proper discipline of egyptology. Emperor Pedro I bought in 1826 the first ancient Egyptian objects that came into Brazil, items that went through Argentina and Uruguay first without finding interested buyers, then awakening the emperor's interest so as to justify their acquisition. Later on, Pedro II visited Egypt and brought with him more ancient objects that considerably enlarged the imperial collection. She conceives the study of egyptomania as a comparative analysis, both qualitative and quantitative, it is a transculturation phenomenon which modifies and adapts the original images and monuments and finding inspiration in ancient prototypes, has expanded all over the world. The many manifestations of egyptomania in Brazil have convinced her that it is not a phenomenon linked to any social class since its expressions cross all boundaries and it can be best described as a state of the soul or as an expression of the human mind. The speaker then proceeded to show many examples involving monuments, shops, motels, funerary architecture, other buildings, the use of ancient Egypt by various media for commercial purposes, and her research which is mainly concerned with clarifying a number of subjects like who produces these examples, for whom they are produced, the objectives and their visual or other impact on society. She then gave a detailed description of the typology she has conceived in order to classify and analyze this phenomenon.

V. Valim - Getting to know and recreating ancient Egypt, a case study of visitors to the Rosicrucian Egyptian Museum (Curitiba) - This paper dealt with the experiences of visitors to that museum and how exposure to the many objects of different times from the predynastic to later periods affects those who are exposed to these exhibits, who had previously acquired their precarious and superficial knowledge of ancient Egyptian civilization through films and newspaper news and articles. A lot of work has gone into preparing such an exposure by means of artefacts of many kinds, stelae, statuary, everyday objects, etc., accompanied by accurate and lengthy graphic and textual explanations.

M. de Brito - Ornaments of memory, use and abuse of obelisks in Brazil from the XIX to the XXI centuries - This is an ongoing project towards a master thesis. Obelisks can be monuments that undeline one's identity, accomplishing the contextualization of man and his environment. They are officially usually ignored, confused with other monuments and the information on them is accessed with some difficulty, officials do not even know quite well the purpose of the monument, all of which makes this research rather difficult. She has so far identified 189 obelisks in 20 different states of Brazil and their detailed study is part of her project. They are part of the construction of the national history and illustrate the collective memory of people and events.

K. Lima - Elements of ancient Egyptian history in satires and caricatures in Brazilian newspapers - The subject of this paper was mainly the expressions of what could be called sphinx-mania in the local press. It was arranged in several subdivisions such as the true ancient nature and purpose of sphinxes in Egypt, how they are depicted in ads and TV commercials, how they are used with the purpose of satire relating to prominent politicians, one early example is an image of the emperor Pedro II shown as a sphinx, lost in admiration of ancient monuments and visiting that country while his own was in the midst of a serious political and economic crisis, all in a grotesque and exaggerated way as something foreign and exotic that helps bring ridicule to the object of their criticism.

L. Coelho - Ancient Egypt in modern literature, an analysis of the mummy characters in books aimed at children and young people - The ways in which mummies and the mummification process are depicted in six such books published in Brazil were studied. They proved to reveal widely different perceptions, in some cases implying that having anything to do with mummies was dangerous, being representations of Isis, the ideal mother, disturbing their sleep and having dealings with the demons of ancient Egypt could bring about disaster. In one case they write about a mummy who had never had a birthday, thus trivializing the story. Another of those books shows some girls disguised as mummies for Hallowe'en and then they have to submit to the judgement of Osiris, in another there is a mummy who is found to speak French and the story leads to social criticism, but one of them at least is more didactic in its aim by telling the adventures of a girl whose mother is an archaeologist and both go to Egypt, the work the mother carries out gives a more accurate description of what mummies were and how we should understand them. As a rule, these books convey distorted views that unfortunately many of those young people carry with them into adult life.

J. Gralha - The representations of Cleopatra - Twenty-two classical authors mention Cleopatra VII of Egypt, mainly because of her importance for a period of ancient Roman history. The most prominent of these sources are Plutarch and Cassius Dio. The views by these authors of this queen differ substantially, one of them praises her beauty while the other does not, one writes of her intelligence and political skill which take her to the Egyptian throne while the other thinks that she got there through acts of love, for having known how to seduce some of the great statesmen of her time. In Renaissance paintings she appears depicted as a languid and seductive woman, of generous proportions, as it was customary at the time, or as a suffering victim in the act of letting a snake bite her naked breast or her arm. In the XIX century many artists painted her but all this is parallel to the birth and development of egyptology, so her looks change into those of a seductive prostitute or femme fatale displaying her charm or alternatively, as a dying woman, but always attractive even in her last minutes on earth. There are however other artists who emphasized her aspect of being an intelligent and powerful woman. In contemporary sculpture she often appears pensive and devoid of much of her sex appeal. The cinema presented her from its very beginning and the rule is to portray her as a seductive and manipulating person, devoid of any moral principles in her thirst for wealth and power.

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