FROM ANCIENT EGYPT TO RENDITION AND RADICALISATION: CHECK OUT THE DAUGHTERS OF DAY

October 18, 2015 / Glen Reynolds

“Over the last 10 or 15 years in scholarship, there has been growing interest across the disciplines in looking at the way religions interacted, rather than just in isolation,” said Elisabeth O’Connell, a keeper in the museum’s Department of Ancient Egypt and the Sudan and a co-curator of the exhibition. “It is becoming clear that a lot of religious history has been founded on our modern distinctions simply being projected back.”

Proof of this borrowing can still be seen today, said O’Connell, thanks to the objects being exceptionally well preserved for centuries in the peculiarly protective, arid climate of Egypt.

Two hundred of these troublesome objects, many deliberately ignored by scholars in the past, have been gathered together to challenge the conventions of religious history. From architectural fragments, jewellery, paintings, gravestones and toys, to the paraphernalia of religious worship, they are all subversive evidence that faiths were once amalgamated in a way that was accepted by the ordinary people of Egypt, regardless of their birth-race or family’s religion.

“If you only take the work we have from Dioscorus of Aphrodito, it blows apart these distinctions,” said O’Connell. “He was a lawyer and poet, who lived in Egypt and wrote in Greek, although he was a Christian Copt.

“He is a great example of what was going on widely, because he used biblical sources and also wrote Homeric verse, one of them dedicated to a man with a Christian name, Matthew.”

The exhibition is the first major international show to deal with this 1,200-year period of Egyptian history, examining the transition to a majority Christian population after Roman rule and then a majority Muslim population that often coexisted alongside thriving communities of Jews.

Credit to:  http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/oct/18/ancient-egypt-exhibition-british-museum-shows-how-religions-borrowed-from-each-other?CMP=fb_gu

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