No mummies, no pyramids: life and faith in Egypt after the Pharoahs

It is that near-forgotten history of living together, sharing spaces, labour and love, as well as the blending of craftsmanship and iconography, that the British Museum hopes to revive in its upcoming exhibition Egypt: Faith After the Pharaohs. The show shelves the familiar mummies and pyramids in favour of the 1,200 years that followed them, with the waxing and waning of Abrahamic faiths.

Starting in 30BC with the suicide of Cleopatra, the last pharaoh, and her lover Mark Antony, the exhibition explores the build up to Christianity becoming the state religion in the 4th century, and the arrival of Islam during the Arab conquest about 300 years after that. Jewish communities periodically flourish in between.

Through 200 objects it hopes to challenge a historical narrative that suggests the ages of the ancient and modern faiths were clearly defined. In fact, though they sometimes quarrelled, they often also borrowed — and continue to do so, as can be seen at Abu Haggag.

The reliefs here, carefully covered but not hidden, are in fact the tops of the intricately inscribed columns of Ramses II’s 13th-century BC Grand Colonnade. The towering pillars of ancient stone puncture different rooms of the mosque, which is built on top of the 3,400-year-old Luxor Temple, a mesh of ancient Egyptian, Greek, Roman, Christian and Muslim living spaces and shrines.

The entire muddled scene is exactly what the exhibition is trying to get at, says Dr Neal Spencer, the museum’s keeper of Egypt and Sudan, who is overseeing the show.

“We really foreground conflict between the three faiths across history but documentary evidence shows that communities were coexisting and had to have transactions, to share expenses, work and living spaces and so on,” he explains. “These are not distinct periods. There are continuities — in the landscape, buildings: churches, mosques and temples.”

This is only possible in Egypt, Spencer continues, because of the central role the North African country played in each of the major faiths. The arid climate also preserved everything from ancient statues to furnishings, clothes and even receipts.

At the temple we scrutinise a far plainer pile of stone blocks to the left of the colonnade. The rubble draws the skeleton of a 4th-century AD church — constructed shortly after Constantine declared Christianity the state religion of the Roman Empire, and thus Egypt. Built out of stolen pharaonic blocks, some still inscribed with drawings, it would have been hastily plastered over with rich Christian frescoes.

Most of the churches across Egypt are earlier structures that which were reused, Spencer says, and some like this one, were wedged into defunct cult temples. They shared similar basilica layouts to the pre-existing Jewish temples — with a nave and three rows of galleries either side. Again, borrowing rather than quarrelling.

Elsewhere at the Abu Haggag is another muddled chapel. Nestled at its back is a metre-wide fragment of a fresco showing Roman senators bowing to their emperor, whose face has been lost to history. The rich naturalism of the painting is a startling contrast to the severe ancient Egyptian reliefs that surround it — although they were produced at the same time.

It is dated to the time of Emperor Diocletian while Christians were still being persecuted, between the 3rd and 4th centuries. The imperial chapel would have been operating at the same time as the original Amun sun god cult next door. The mosque, built in 1244AD, is only the latest addition. In one space: ancient Egyptian, Roman, Christian and Islamic structures blend.

Though never the state religion, Judaism was not excluded from this melding. Some 200km south of this spot, in the deep south of Aswan, there is a similar history of coexistence.

Among a cache of communiqués featured in the exhibition is a 2,400-year-old letter from the 5th-century BC Persian king Darius, famous for tolerating the many gods of his time, including Yahweh. It records the observance of the Passover in Elephantine and was found beside two back-to-back temples: one Jewish and one dedicated to the ancient-Egyptian ram-headed god Khnum. It is documentary evidence that for nearly a century, worshippers — both Jewish and pagan — would have happily passed each other in the street en route to their temples, with their king’s blessing.

In modern-day Cairo, it is a different story. Police guard the capital’s only properly functioning synagogue, to which my taxi driver problematically, and inaccurately, refers as “that Israeli building”, in Arabic. The once thriving community of 70,000 Jews has been reduced to seven. After the first Arab-Israeli war in 1948, thousands were forced to flee, wrongly accused of colluding with Israel.

Sentries are also posted at the churches, dozens of which were attacked by angry supporters of Mohamed Morsi Islamic, in the bloody aftermath of his 2013 ousting as president of Egypt. Checkpoints, concrete blocks, barbed wire now snake across the city’s main squares and roads.

However, the city’s most famous religious sites, the Ben Ezra synagogue (dated 11th century AD), the Hanging Church (9th Century AD) and Africa’s first mosque Ibn Al-As (7th century AD) — all located within a mile of each other in old Cairo — still speak of tolerance and sharing. Passing through the bustling halls of the three buildings, it is clear architectural styles were not only borrowed, but that the same craftsmen were being used to create and embellish the buildings. The geometric inlaid wood panellings present in all three are indistinguishable from each other.

A few everyday objects discovered in the city and featured in the exhibition also highlight that borrowing. The earliest Muslim-era gold coins in Egypt were stamped with images of the Umayyad Caliph al-Malik and a hastily airbrushed Byzantine cross — Christian depictions that would now be considered idolatrous. A simple bowl, dating from the 11th century AD, with a metallic glaze and earthy colour palette evocative of Islamic art traditions in Syria, Iran and Iraq, surprisingly shows a Christian priest. The same workshops were pumping out monuments for all the religions.

Perhaps the best example, however, is the Geniza scripts: tens of thousands of documents dated 8th-19th century AD that range from rare early biblical texts to household bills, discovered in the geniza, or traditional storeroom, of the Ben Ezra synagogue.

In 1896, Solomon Schechter, a reader of Talmudic studies at Cambridge University, was in Cairo hunting for the origin of several extraordinary texts that had appeared in a local Cairo dealership. Tracing it back to the Ben Ezra synagogue, he spent months chatting up Lord Cromer — the consul-general of Egypt at the time — and wealthy Jewish families to get access to the tiny, dust-choked storeroom. There he developed severe respiratory problems and near-blindness, collecting 30 crates of 190,000 manuscripts.

There are 100,000 more such manuscripts scattered across the globe, but the main collection is at Cambridge. Several will appear in the exhibition, including a Koran and a receipt, which, says Spencer, “evoke a cosmopolitan world where people are coexisting and working together”.

On first reading, the 12th-century Geniza Koran appeared to be complete gibberish but, on closer examination, scholars realised it was colloquial Arabic written phonetically in Hebrew script.

“Arabic was what was spoken in everyday life, but Jewish children were able to write Hebrew. The excerpts of this Koran show that it was being read by the Jewish community, the kind of open sharing of ideas that we don’t expect today,” Spencer says. As for the receipt, dated 1060AD, it was initially labelled “rubbish” by scholars who were only interested in rare religious texts. It detailed a Jewish craftsman agreeing to lend his Muslim colleague his tools on the Sabbath, a day on which, for religious reasons, he could not work.

This practical tolerance was not always trouble-free. Under the Romans in the 2nd century, Jewish revolts led to the persecution of the Jewish community and the closing of synagogues. About the same time Christians, seen as newbies with a strange, made-up religion, were put to death and their buildings burnt. Then in the 11th century, the Islamic leader al-Hakim Bin Amir Allah, often referred to as the “mad Caliph”, destroyed the Ben Ezra synagogue and several churches in a rage.

The buildings were rebuilt and thrived. However, with the creation of the state of Israel in the 1940s, and the crackdown of Gamal Abdel Nasser, the second Egyptian president, the Jewish community was decimated. The rise of Islamic extremism and political spats with presidents in the late 20th century saw Christians subject to bombings and banishings. Most recently, after the ousting of Morsi, churches have been torched.

Nonetheless, the Abrahamic religions have constantly interacted with each other and their pagan ancient Egyptian and Roman past. The emblem of the exhibition is the bust of Germanicus: a very Roman portrait made in the 1st century, before Egypt became Christian, but graffitied about 300 years later with a cross.

“We can’t be sure exactly why. It could be that the cross was added to Christianise a member of the imperial family, [either] to celebrate it or as a form of criticism,” Spencer says. “The imperial family, during the persecution of the Christians, marked slaves with tattoos — so is this a way of marking Germanicus a slave of the God? Whatever the true motivations, the bust embodies the whole idea of transformation and transitions central to the exhibition.”

Every item in the show speaks of it. A will left by Bishop Abraham, who ran a monastery plonked on top of Luxor’s temple of Hatshepsut in the 7th century AD , stipulates that he wanted to be buried in the fashion of his country. That meant mummification which, as a Coptic monk, should have been outrageous.

Much later under medieval Islamic Egypt, manuscripts show that astrologers, rather than shunning their idolatrous ancestry, were busy documenting ancient Egyptian temples and customs in beautifully illustrated texts, one appropriately named the Book of Wonder. It is a far cry from the so-called modern Islamic State that claims to hark back to the “true” religion of the past by blowing up ancient sites.

That blind fear of coexistence or the unsavoury retelling of their ancestry is behind the pointless destruction of heritage sites like Nimrud, Palmyra and Karnak and the people who lovingly documented them. Never before has archeology been so firmly on the frontline of world conflict. It is clear that now more than ever the re-remembering of a collective past is needed. Egypt’s uniquely preserved shared histories could represent a blueprint for a brighter future for the entire region.

Egypt: Faith after the Pharaohs is at the British Museum (020 7323 8181), from Oct 29 to Feb 7. Exhibition supported by the Blavatnik Family Foundation. Bel Trew’s trip was supported by the Egyptian State Tourist Office