Dramatic tales from old Egypt

Stolen corpses, murdered fathers, incestuous families, and a tiny drowned kitten disguised as a powerful sacred cat. The Egyptian treasures from the British Museum which opened this week at the Hong Kong Museum of Art go way beyond simple 'curses of the mummies' in terms of murder, intrigue, embalming and just plain fascinating stories of a sophisticated culture that took off 5,000 years ago, and faded about the time of Cleopatra, 3,000 years later. Taking advantage of the British Museum's renovation of its Egypt galleries, Hong Kong is hosting a 10-week show with more than 100 ancient artefacts in the third Provisional Urban Council Treasures show. The first - of Chinese antiquities - last year broke records for Hong Kong museum attendance, with nearly a quarter of a million visitors. The second - of Chinese scientific treasures - is now at the new Museum of History, and is getting a poorer attendance, partly because fewer people know where it is (100 Chater Road) and partly because it is more academic. This third is the first significant show of Egyptian antiquities in Southeast Asia: a quarter of the pieces have never left Britain since they arrived last century. It started in 1996 when Carol Andrews, assistant keeper in the Department of Egyptian Antiquities at the British Museum, was in Egypt guiding a tour group, which included several Friends of the Hong Kong Museum of Art. 'They said nothing in Hong Kong had prepared them for the treasures of Egypt. And I said, didn't they know that the British Museum has a loan programme?' said Ms Andrews. She has worked with Egyptian antiquities since before the Tutankhamun show in London in 1972, when Egypt lent items from the tomb of an 18-year-old Pharaoh, suspected to have been murdered in 1327 BC. When, in November 1922, Englishman Howard Carter uncovered Tutankhamun's resting place, it was the only tomb of a Pharaoh found intact in modern times - now joined by the tombs of Tanis. Every other royal tomb was looted thousands of years before. This show is attractively presented, with a bright educational room for children (print your own hieroglyphs) and is organised logically into sections like 'writing', 'burial' and 'the afterlife'. As well as a catalogue, there is an audio guide for the show, and plenty of wall panels giving general introductions to ancient Egypt. But after being given a tour by Ms Andrews, it seems a terrible waste that the captions should tell us only the date and a brief description. How much more enjoyable it is to know that a chiselled-out hieroglyph on a temple statue is the vandalised name of Queen Hatshepsut - one of three women Pharaohs. Her nephew Tuthosis III got rid of her as soon as he grew to adulthood, and then banned her name from inscriptions as well. And how interesting to realise that the hieratic writing (hieroglyphs were just for stone - papyrus needed something a little more cursive) is a witness's account of an assassination, Hamlet-like, with the dead king telling his son 'I am a good man betrayed: trust no man, not even your brother.' It was a favourite piece of prose 3,500 years ago and this specimen was homework practice by a learner scribe. Ms Andrews pointed out how a teacher had looked over the assignment and said 'that's not a good crocodile - it should look like this' - and drawn the better version over the top. Founded in 1763 the Egyptology Department is one of the oldest in the British Museum. Collecting artefacts was popular in the 18th and the 19th centuries among colonising European nations whose archaeologists followed close behind the infantry. Many of these pieces were collected 'for Britain' in a race against the French. Others came from digs in the 1880s. 'Now we would never deal in anything that we couldn't trace back 100 years. Usually we couldn't afford them anyway,' Ms Andrews added, wryly. A wooden coffin, decorated with masked denizens of the underworld, was the result of a 19th century buying spree, in which the 'experts' were diddled by the dealers. Inscriptions suggest the body was of an incense bearer working in the temple at Thebes, in around 800 BC. However, when the mummy was X-rayed it was found to be a woman, not a priest.' Sometimes, Ms Andrews said, people would usurp burial equipment but this seems unlikely in this case. 'She would have chosen a coffin that was a better fit - she's jammed in so tightly we would never dare try to get her out.' The likely explanation is that the Egyptian dealer, learning that the buyers from the British Museum wanted a body as well as a coffin, stuffed in the first mummy he came across - and fooled them for a century or so. Embalming was important for the ancient Egyptians, who believed a body had to be intact to allow it to progress to the afterworld. First the stomach, intestines, lungs and liver were removed through incisions in the left side. Each organ was put in a separate urn, decorated with motifs of the four sons of Horus - jackal-headed Duamutef, falcon-headed Qubhsenuef, baboon-headed Hapy and human-form Imsety respectively. The heart - which they believed was the seat of intelligence and the repository for memory - remained in the body, to be measured by the gods at the weighbridge to heaven. If you had been good - or if you wore a protective heart-scarab amulet to quieten the guilty admissions of a wicked heart, then you would go to heaven. The body was dried in salt for 70 days, stuffed, and anointed before being wrapped in more than 400 metres of linen, and left - they hoped - for eternity. The other dead star of this Hong Kong show is a cat mummy. Cats were sacred and whole hunting packs of the mummified felines would accompany people to the afterlife. The British Museum has lent Hong Kong their textbook example of cat-wrapping, and it was only when Ms Andrews was preparing the notes for this touring show to Hong Kong that she realised something extraordinary: the cat was the wrong way round. Even if the legs had been crushed, a real cat could not have fitted. 'So I had it X-rayed, and look . . . it wasn't a cat at all.' The X-ray picture shows a tiny kitten, curled up beneath the chest of the mummy, with its tongue sticking out. 'Cats were sacred, but it is amazing how many cat mummies had their necks broken,' Ms Andrews said. The exhibition shows the Egyptian notion of the afterlife - which looked very like their normal life, with its hoeing, harvesting and building - 'in fact, an eternity of back-breaking labour'. A painted box of tomb statuettes - strikingly similar to the much later Tang Dynasty relics, an echo with China that can be detected in many areas of this exhibition - demonstrates how shabti, or tomb servants, could be employed to help dead Egyptians. With 365 pottery shabti, you could be excused from afterlife work duties every day of the year. There are plenty of examples of jewellery. Tucked among the solid gold signet rings used as seals in a civilisation that had no locks, is a cheap blue ceramic ring, marked with Tutankhamun's name. 'There's no way he would have worn this,' Ms Andrews said. Rings like this were made in bulk, to be thrown out in handfuls from the young Pharaoh's carriage, during street festivals that would have been 'a mix between mardi gras and an Arab wedding'. And although this exhibition is full of references to death, it is the sense of the celebration of life in that ancient culture that comes most forcefully through these beautiful works of art. The exhibition costs $20 (concessions $10) although with a ticket stub from the Omnimax show Mysteries Of Egypt adults get in for half price. The $8 million cost of bringing this show to Asia is shared with Singapore, which will host the exhibition after it closes here on January 17.