![]() ![]() The arrogance of anachronism is also reflected in such a political-administrative expression as “developing countries”. Hunting down anachronisms is a favourite pastime for nerds: Audiences make much out of discovering a Rolex watch in a gladiator movie, coffee in a medieval novel or Conan Doyle describing a streetscape in London with buildings completed a year or two after Sherlock Holmes passed that way. Quite unfairly, anachronism carries several undesirable associations, and is often used to define historical errors and misconceptions, merely describing something misdated or displaced due to ignorance or naiveté. "Through repetition, pastiche, reuse and intricate displacements, this productive model challenges straightforward concepts of chronology, originality, and authenticity."Īnachrony should not be confused with its relative, anachronism. Through repetition, pastiche, reuse and intricate displacements, this productive model challenges straightforward concepts of chronology, originality, and authenticity: ”The work of art when it is late, when it repeats, when it hesitates, when it remembers, but also when it projects a future or an ideal, is ’anachronic’”. These bewildering temporal displacements allow us to trace the contours of a liberating and strange historical phenomenon: the coexistence of different times in art and architecture, captured in a figure of anachrony. The scientists in their white coats became the cast in a kind of inverted science fiction story, thrown back in time as if in a time capsule with their modern scientific methods, to take care of a more than 3000-year-old body. Ramses II awoke after three millennia of protective sleep and was unsuspectingly catapulted into a fundamentally different contemporary world. The fascinating clash of temporalities may exceed even a pharaoh’s meticulously worked out plans for the afterlife. 2 On the contrary, the modern world of archaeology and ethnology desperately endeavours to repair what it destroys by means of a science that does not accept the hidden and invisible. It is not worms that cause mummies to disintegrate: “they die from being transplanted from a slow order of the symbolic, which masters putrefaction and death, to an order of history, science, and museums our order, which no longer masters anything”. ![]() “Our entire linear and accumulative culture collapses if we cannot stockpile the past in plain view”, Baudrillard claimed: thus the modern need to lift history from the invisible, to exhibit it in bright daylight and in glass coffins and as in the case of Ramses, to furnish it with military distinctions. The Ramses II event created panic in the western world with the realization that it may not be possible to breathe life into a figure which the symbolic order had effortlessly kept alive for more than 3000 years, out of sight, undiscovered, in situ. 1 The French philosopher points to the sacrifice made by science in order to save its own reality principle. ![]() Ramses II’s relocation in time and space naturally created quite a media stir, and Jean Baudrillard described the affair as a ‘hell of a paradox’: ”In order for ethnology to live, its object must die by dying, the object takes revenge for being ’discovered’ and with its death defies the science that wants to grasp it”. After two years of autopsies, electromagnetic radiation and cutting edge conservation and preservation, the mummy was declared fit and returned to Egypt. Factum arte piranesi full#Early in the 1970s it was discovered that the mummy was severely disintegrating, and France convinced Egypt to accept a full treatment, which had to take place in Paris. The tomb of Ramses the Great - the pharaoh of the Exodus, builder of Luxor and Karnak - had been discovered in the Valley of Kings in 1881 and the mummy transferred to the National Museum in Cairo. As the story goes, this guest of honour was met by president Giscard d’Estaing and a ceremonious reception at Le Bourget airport, and then attended to by a team of more than 100 scientists from various disciplines at the Musée de l’Homme. In 1974 president Anwar Sadat provided Ramses II’s mummy with an Egyptian passport (occupation: ”former Head of State“), and in September the same year his Eminence was transported to Paris on a French military aircraft. ![]()
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