Stop 1612

[Ting of finger cymbals, Middle Eastern sounding flute plays]

Female Narrator: This metal plate, intricately carved with Egyptian gods and goddesses, is not, in fact, Egyptian. Here’s University of Copenhagen and University of Oxford Egyptologist Luigi Prada, who says the plate is an example of “Egyptomania”...

Luigi Prada: Roman Egyptomania, and so this, despite looking // Egyptian, does not count to Egypt. This artifact in all of its history probably was never in Egypt.

Female Narrator: It was probably made in Roman Italy for a temple to the Egyptian goddess Isis. We usually associate Egyptomania with the craze that swept Europe and the U.S. in the 1920’s after Tutankhamen’s tomb was discovered.

Luigi Prada:You know, cocktail evening dresses for // 1920s ladies, and they're covered in hieroglyphs and look very Egyptian...

Female Narrator: But the West didn’t invent Egyptomania; the Ancient Romans did, in the first century BC,

Luigi Prada: //when Egypt [00:19:00] //became a province of the Roman Empire.

Female Narrator: The Egyptian-ness of this object is actually, well, fake.

Luigi Prada: For instance, it contains // hieroglyphs. However when //Egyptologists look at them, they actually make no sense [00:22:30] whatsoever. //Clearly the Roman artist // knew what an Egyptian god and goddess should look like //, but had no idea of how to write and read hieroglyphs, so just put in, like, hieroglyphs more or less at random.

Female Narrator: Art historians have known about this object since the Renaissance, but they thought it was Egyptian until 19th-century Egyptologists learned to read hieroglyphs.  

Luigi Prada: And actually some of the early attempts at deciphering Egyptian hieroglyphs were made on this artifact, which is particularly ironic and frustrating since they could have never cracked a //hieroglyphic script based on this since these are fake hieroglyphs, and [00:25:30] yet they tried.