One more dance?

March 19th marked the five-year anniversary of the start of the war in Iraq, and as you might expect, speeches were made, the dead were remembered, and most of us shook our heads at the enormity of the situation, if we did anything at all. It is hard to mark a milestone when the accomplishments are so unclear. Not that things haven’t changed in Iraq, after all, we have accomplished our main objective at the start of the war: Saddam is gone, and the world is safe from his Weapons of Mass Destruction.

I think that memorials are good, they force us to remember, and the things that are worth remembering endure, if this date is important, history will be the judge. I was watching the Ten Commandments with Charlton Heston last night, all those scenes of Egypt made me think of the Palette of Narmer. The Palette of Narmer is a great example of a memorial. Narmer, or Memes in Greek, is the first king to unite Upper and Lower Egypt, and the palette is a ceremonial cosmetic palette decorated to commemorate the event. The Palette is of principle importance because it establishes not only the history of the events of Narmer's victory, but because the palette itself becomes a blueprint for Egyptian art for the next 3000 years. The hieroglyphic writing that we associate with the art of ancient Egypt has it genesis in the stylization of the palette of Narmer. The Palette of Narmer literally becomes the blueprint for Egyptian art.

The palette contains the images of Narmer, his priests, and victims, but also images of Hathor, Horus, Lions, bulls, and the triumphal procession. It is a work of art that stands at the beginning of dynastic Egypt.

It reminds me of George Bush going to celebrate the fall of Baghdad on an aircraft carrier. This palette is a piece of propaganda, but it is also a celebratory cosmological object that would have been taken out on special religious or festival days and paraded as an object of adoration and worship. There is nothing like it in our culture, though we certainly have our venerated objects of admiration: the declaration of independence, the original copy of the constitution, the liberty bell; objects that we also revere and look upon with special significance, that we unfurl on the 4th of July or Memorial day and look upon and remember the past and our founding fathers.

Memorials are for us to remember, as our ideas of processing and storing knowledge grow and change so does our perception of the world around us. The Egyptians recorded their experience of the world around them, the connections they saw between heaven and earth, between land and river. Their rendering of the world in flat planes in relief in tombs and on temple walls was not simply the etchings of bygone civilization, but an approach that constituted a viable living breathing reality that determined the real life experience of the ancient Egyptians.

By the end of the old kingdom factions were tearing the country apart, as priesthood and nobles were at odds over power and station. Mortuary monuments like the pyramids became too expensive to build and maintain even as temples for the emerging priesthood began construction. Statues of aristocrats show alliances to both the nobility and the priesthood. This decline in centralized power was to last hundreds of years until the rise of Mentuhotep II at the beginning of the eleventh dynasty. The capital of Egypt is moved to Thebes and will remain there for a thousand years, with only a brief ten-year interruption during the reign of Akhenaton. The move to Thebes was mandated by the widespread unrest in the south of Egypt, as the country began to show signs of internal division. A change occurred in Egyptian art as well. Pharaohs were depicted with expressions of humanity as the prestige of the royalty faded, cracks in the armor of immortality began to appear. People want their leaders to be larger than life, but the faults of any leader even our president make them seem weak, human. I suppose it is inevitable, still I can’t help but wonder, when our leaders ask us to dance, haven’t we heard this tune somewhere, at least once, before?