Connections: Survival

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Curator of Egyptian art Dorothea Arnold marvels at the survival and preservation of cultural artifacts in today's culture of obsolesence.

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00:00:00:0000 I'm Dorothea Arnold from the department of Egyptian art at the Metropolitan Museum.

00:08:20:200 As we live today, we constantly throw things away,

00:13:30:210 so it is even more astonishing that things survive.

00:18:30:210 Since I'm dealing a lot with objects that are at least three thousand and even

00:23:40:100 then four thousand and five thousand years old the question, “how does all

00:29:40:100 this survive?” comes up again and again. “How could it survive for so long?”

00:35:40:100 Textiles that are in such prime condition that you could use them for your

00:40:40:100 bedding. And this is only possible because of the very dry climate in Egypt.

00:44:40:100 Natural disasters like Pompeii which was covered by the eruption, then excavated. And this

00:53:10:190 beautiful bed chamber is in a condition almost like it must have been when people used it.

00:59:10:190 If there was human destruction like in the case of the female pharoah Hatshepsut

01:04:40:100 whose sculpture was completely smashed on the commission of

01:08:30:150 her successor, thrown into a quarry for several centuries

01:12:30:150 discovered and painstakingly reassembled.

01:18:20:200 Or there is the famous piece in the attic. The piece that has been neglected,

01:22:20:140 and that somebody comes, sees what it is, and it comes back to light.

01:27:20:140 Another important cause is that pieces go from generation to generation. So for instance this

01:35:20:200 famous painting by Rembrandt was originally commissioned by somebody from the Rufo family in

01:43:20:200 Messina in Sicily, and went then from generation to the next generation to the next generation.

01:51:20:200 And for a museum especially many, many collectors are involved

01:54:20:140 in the survival of the works of art that we see here.

01:58:20:140 There is one item in this history: people. There must have been people who

02:10:20:500 preserved bodies in ancient Egypt. Wrapped them up, adorned them, put them

02:16:20:500 into coffins. So this kind of pious treating was absolutely necessary.

02:22:20:500 But it's not only the physical pieces that survive, there's something important and

02:24:20:200 that is the survival of the images. Images have a tenacity that is quite astonishing.

02:31:20:200 For centuries the original Three Graces has been lost. What we have are copies from Roman times

02:38:40:160 and then when these sculptures were found in Renaissance Italy and around the Mediterranean

02:46:40:160 there was a new revival of appreciations by the use of that image.

02:54:50:230 The Sphinx as an image became almost a symbol of ancient

03:00:00:240 Egypt and so it became a symbol of ancient Egyptian thinking.

03:04:00:240 This superhuman being was a kind of sign of survival through time.

03:12:30:210 This memorial was for a very young dying sculptor

03:18:00:180 and you see what he was sculpting was a sphinx. Here we have the

03:23:00:180 survival of the Egyptian sphinx image into the nineteenth-century.

03:28:00:180 Because it is the sign of the Egyptian deep thinking about death and about survival. So this

03:46:00:900 is a very good example that an image has suddenly that power and spreads and just doesn't

03:53:00:900 die.