Cleopatra’s Underwater Kingdom

(from June 4) Cleopatra’s Underwater Kingdom

PHILADELPHIA — It may be best to dispel any illusions immediately. The only certain images we seem to have of the last queen of Egypt, Cleopatra VII, have no discernible resemblance to the painted faces of Elizabeth Taylor or Claudette Colbert or Sarah Bernhardt. Those visages can be contemplated with far more sensuous contentment than the Egyptian queen’s bulbous, knotty and eroded features stamped on gold coins from the first century B.C.

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Christoph Gerigk/Franck Goddio -- Hilti Foundation
“Cleopatra: The Search for the Last Queen of Egypt”: A statue of a Ptolemaic king in this exhibition at the Franklin Institute. More Photos »
But by the time we see the cinematic, romanticized faces of Cleopatra from films and paintings in the final gallery of the new exhibition “Cleopatra: The Search for the Last Queen of Egypt,” opening Saturday at the Franklin Institute here, we are prepared to acknowledge the virtue of at least some idealization. The wonder we feel is not at Cleopatra’s beauty (which Plutarch reports was “in itself not altogether incomparable”) but at the extraordinary cultural universe that preceded her and surrounded her before Egypt submitted to the Romans in 30 B.C. and Cleopatra — Egypt’s last pharaoh and the end of the Ptolemaic dynasty — committed suicide.

The exhibition is powerful. But that is not really because of Cleopatra; it is because a lost world is resurrected here. There are some 150 artifacts on display, and the vast majority were found buried in the silt and clay of the Bay of Aboukir, off the coast of Alexandria, Egypt. Since 1992 those waters have been explored by Franck Goddio and his European Institute of Underwater Archaeology. Using a nuclear magnetic resonance magnetometer, Mr. Goddio mapped the geographic fault lines beneath the clouded waters and has brought to the surface a small fraction of what lies below.

He has identified the relics and ruins as remnants of the ancient cities of Canopus and Heracleion, submerged by tidal waves, earthquakes and wars; he has also discovered palaces and temples of the nearby eastern port of Alexandria, the city that the Macedonian conqueror Alexander the Great made his capital, and that Cleopatra imagined could rival Rome. The first half of the exhibition shimmers in atmospheric blue light, the artifacts accompanied by videos of their excavation by red-suited divers maneuvering through opaque waters.

The sense of a lost and mythical world brought into the half-light would be irrelevant, though, if the resurrected objects didn’t live up to the promise — and they do. We are led through a sequence of discoveries, coming to learn along the way how the Ptolemaic heirs to Alexander’s conquest created a hybrid religion and culture, Greek styles overlaying Egyptian allusions, transformed gods worshiped in new temples, ancient ideas given fresh, sensuous form.

Here, for example, from Canopus, is a great life-size head of the god Serapis that was mounted in his most famous temple; the Egyptian god Osiris with his healing powers is transmuted into a Grecian deity, his eroded face framed by flowing locks. The glories of Heracleion can be glimpsed in two towering 16-foot figures of pink granite: images of Ptolemaic royalty. And, even if we are not prepared to testify to Cleopatra’s beauty, here is a third century B.C. statue of a queen, whose draped garment is sculptured to seem translucent, clinging to the textured stone flesh, posing an unmatchable challenge to even the most idealized image of Cleopatra.

Mr. Goddio has also put these objects into a geographic and cultural context, assisted by the University of Pennsylvania Egyptologist and guest curator David Silverman (who is also curator of the Egyptology section of the Penn Museum, which is offering a ticket tie-in with the Franklin show). Mr. Goddio has found stone pieces that nearly complete earlier finds (one of which was acquired by the Louvre in 1817). When fit together, as is shown here, they form a naos — a stone shrine or ark that once held the temple god. Their carvings contain what may also be the world’s first astrological chart, along with a creation myth not found elsewhere.

Mr. Goddio has also mapped the submerged harbors of these once thriving cities and found that a canal linking Canopus and Heracleion that, he suggests, would have been used in a ritual watery journey paying homage to Osiris’s powers, connecting the newer religious celebrations with older beliefs in the centrality of the Nile. This was the realm within which Cleopatra (along with Julius Caesar and then Mark Antony) moved.

But because this exhibition, like the King Tut show now in New York, is a production of Arts and Exhibitions International, which has specialized in large-scale cultural attractions, it is meant to attract big audiences both here and in other cities in the United States it is expected to visit after it leaves the Franklin Institute on Jan. 2; the National Geographic Society is also involved. So there is a certain amount of slick packaging that comes along with the substance. My biggest misgiving is a sense that Cleopatra herself is a lot less important to these discoveries than it seems here.

There are some traces attributed to her, of course, aside from gold coins with her less-than-sensuous profile. We see fragments of a papyrus, on loan from the Neues Museum in Berlin, that we are told shows Cleopatra’s own signature to a royal decree; she has written the Greek word “ginesthoi”: “make it happen.”

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Jerome Delafosse/Franck Goddio — Hilti Foundation
A diver encounters a sphinx during excavations in the Bay of Aboukir, off the coast of Alexandria. More Photos »

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Every visitor also gets an audio tour in which an actress speaking as Cleopatra recounts the oft-retold tale of her life and death while trying to explain the artifacts before us. Here too the temptation is to silence the story, which can end up distracting from the sights. It seems imposed on the actual objects rather than growing directly from their importance.

Cleopatra’s role also seems to be a bit overbearingly insisted upon in the last part of the exhibition, which is devoted to the excavations overseen by Zahi Hawass, the secretary general of Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities, whose patronage is required for any exploration of Egyptian antiquities.

Convinced by the arguments of the archaeologist Kathleen Martinez, Mr. Hawass says he believes that the tomb holding the remains of both Mark Antony and Cleopatra may lie not in Alexandria but in a temple near the city at Taposiris Magna. In a video he is far more definitive about the excavations there than the evidence we are shown fully justifies; more explanation is needed. But by that time there has already been enough justifiable excitement in the show, so suspicions of its inflation here do not really interfere. (Mr. Hawass may also be proven correct.)

Besides, though Cleopatra is the selling point, the catalog for the exhibition, along with Mr. Goddio’s discoveries, make it clear that notions of her beauty and power, and even Shakespeare’s imagining of her clasping the slithering poisonous adder to her breast, lulling her to sleep like a nurse sucking an infant, are representations not just of an individual but of something larger.

Cleopatra saw herself as the incarnation of a god, in this case of Isis, the sister of the murdered Osiris. She finds his body parts, which have been dispersed through Egypt’s waterways, pieces them together, brings him back to life, and ultimately gives birth to his child. It is an act combining creation, resurrection and procreation, and something of that creative spirit seems evident throughout the artifacts here. They are relics of an energetic hybrid culture that still inspires idealization.

In this show Mr. Goddio and his team have done something similar. Like Isis they have pieced together the scattered remnants of a long-lost world, resurrecting them from watery depths. In the process they have very nearly brought them back to life.