- The Priest, the Prince, and the Pasha by L. M. Berman
A beautiful, small (four inches high), and highly polished green stone (“graywacke”) head is studied here by its curator at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, but it would be a pity if his book were to be read simply for the history and explanation of the head. Berman offers a highly readable account of the West’s rediscovery of ancient Egypt, from Napoleon on. Egypt lost the Rosetta Stone and many more antiquities to the West (mainly France and Britain), but after Napoleon the Ottoman rulers of Egypt encouraged both French and British exploration and did not seriously impede export. The Frenchman Auguste Mariette ran an antiquities service for Egypt. It was he who found the green head in the cemetery at Saqqara in 1857, and a later Napoleon (“Plon-Plon,” by nickname) installed it in a “Pompeian House” that he had already built in Paris. The head then mysteriously disappeared until 1903, when it was found, labeled “small head of an old man, smooth face,” in the collection of Edward Perry Warren at Lewes House in England. From 1895 on, Warren started “feeding” the Boston Museum with antiquities and works of later art, becoming its major benefactor and the virtual creator of some of its departments, notably the classical. The head itself is handsome, bald, broken from a figurine of a well-known type, commonly representing pharaohs or priests. There is no little realism in its carving, but Egyptians did not need to learn realism from Greece; it was simply that they preferred the stylization that had been perfected by their artists over centuries. But the head belongs to a period when Greek realism was introduced to Egypt, after Alexander’s conquest and the establishment of the “Ptolemaic” dynasty, and this development may have played a part in the appearance of the head and many similar semirealistic statues and statuettes. Berman has made his account of the head’s “life and afterlife” as exciting as it is instructive. [End Page 514]
Sir John Boardman is Lincoln Professor Emeritus of Classical Art and Archaeology at Oxford University and a fellow of the British Academy, which awarded him the Kenyon Medal in 1995. Editor of the Oxford History of Classical Art, his other books include The Greeks in Asia; The Diffusion of Classical Art in Antiquity; The Greeks Overseas; The Triumph of Dionysos; The History of Greek Vases; and The Relief Plaques of Eastern Eurasia and China. He received the inaugural Onassis International Prize for Humanities in 2009.
