A Trip Down Memory Lane…Sort of.

by Fay Picardi

 This past week, I was fortunate to visit the Cumner Museum in Jacksonville, Florida with my good friend and fellow poet, Bonny Sanders. There we found an intriguing exhibit called: Striking Power: Iconoclasm in Ancient Egypt. My first step in understanding this exhibit was to review a definition of iconoclasm. From the Oxford Dictionary:

Noun: 1) the action of attacking or assertively rejecting cherished beliefs and institutions or established values and practices. 2) the rejection or destruction of religious images as heretical; the doctrine of iconoclasts. Maybe not an exact fit to this exhibit, but close enough.

Here are some of the sculptures that were displayed. I found it somewhat amusing that grave robbers would destroy the noses of the “dead” so they would not be able to breath and therefore could not report them to the authorities. Below is a photo of the head of Hapshepsut.

  

This next sculpture is my favorite from an artistic point of view. I am thinking of doing a collage of it for the Pieces of Eight February challenge. Do you think the subject is a woman or a man?

I don’t know who this last guy is, but he certainly is the lucky one. His sarcophagus is untouched. Again, sort of.

After all this afterlife, it was time for some modern frivolity. A  circle twelve foot in diameter made of resin and dead flies. Makes quite a statement, even from a distance. The lights give it some pattern, but the circle is solid black in reality.