THE EGYPTIAN MUSEUM OF TURIN – An interview with Director Christian Greco

With its 10,000 square meters and 40,000 artifacts, the Egyptian Museum of Turin is the second most important in the world after Cairo. Heading it since 2014 is Christian Greco: an Egyptologist, scholar, and lecturer trained in the Netherlands, with curatorships in Japan, Finland, Spain, Scotland, and of course, Egypt, to his credit.

Director Greco tells us about his museum as a work in progress in which antiquities speak to the present and the future, where physical artifacts and digital explorations expand the visitors’ knowledge, and in which the written narrative remains of central importance. It is a narrative made of hieroglyphs which, after millennia, have spoken to us again 200 years ago.

Mr. Greco, the Egyptian Museum in Turin has become much more modern and it has seen wider participation of visitors under your leadership. How is it possible to make a millennia-old heritage contemporary?

The line that inspired me and my staff is the only possible recipe: research. The first time we find the word ‘museum’ is in a quotation from Aristotle. We don't even know if there were artifacts or natural collections, but we certainly know that it was a meeting place for scholars to share and discuss their knowledge.

A museum is a place of disciplinary study - for us, archaeology is multidisciplinary - but it is also a starting point for excavations, for the analysis of material culture, its writings, the revelation of unpublished fragments, as well as the surfacing of anthropological and sociological aspects. The museum encapsulates the development of society and is a place for the community, in charge of preserving its memory. We are not strangers to society, we are an integral part of it, and memory is the basis of our work. I like to make a somewhat bold comparison with a person suffering from a degenerative disease that erases their memories: their identity is impoverished, and the person is unable to find orientation in the present and plan a future.

Civilisation without memory has no present and future. We preserve, we study in order to give adequate answers to the contemporary age we live in. This has allowed us to question material and social culture even thanks to digital help.

You recently celebrated 200 years since the deciphering of the Rosetta Stone. What did this achievement change in our knowledge of ancient Egyptian culture?

It was an epochal step that allowed us to 'listen' to Egypt, a culture that has always fascinated us. Just think about Homer talking about ancient Egypt. Or think about Herodotus, "the father of history," as Cicero called him, who dedicates the second book of his Histories to Egypt. Finally, Egypt was talking again.

It is a civilisation in which the written word played a predominant role. We had access to texts, silent for millennia, that became living words. Questioning the sources, reading the texts, discovering facts, names: all that was meant for posterity. Perhaps no civilisation has recognised the value and set itself the goal of handing down memories to future generations as much as this one.

We read texts but we lack a voice. We lack orality. Is there something we have failed to grasp?

This is a fundamental aspect. We find a very strong relationship between orality and culture in ancient civilisations: few people in ancient times could read and write. So when we talk about writing, we know that it is a partial narrative. Think about Tutankhamun, perhaps one of the best-known pharaohs. We have only a short inscription that says that he "is the son of his own royal flesh" but we do not know to this day whose ruler he was the son of. This is to give an idea of the complexity: we are aware that we are trying to reconstruct facts that lack orality.

Moreover, ancient Egypt spoke a Chamito-Semitic language, without vowels. We use an Egyptological pronunciation that adds a short "e" that allows us to read the words, but we do not know what the actual pronunciation was like, and that remains a problem.

In the collective imagination, the Museum is made up of large statues, sarcophagi, mummies, and funerary objects, but there is a lesser-known dimension that makes it the richest library of ancient Egypt. Should we consider these exhibits reserved for insiders, or is there a way to make them usable for the common visitor?

This is a significant effort we are engaged in on a double front. We have an online platform: TPOP (Turin Papyrus Online Platform), which won the Europa Nostra award for research in 2020. It is a study and dissemination tool that allows people to see the fragments of 17 thousand papyri and their transcription and translation. It is the first step in an ever-expanding circulation that will allow access to the museum's material even to those who will never physically come to the Turin museum. The modern museum is simultaneously physical and digital.

The second story of enhancement of our collections concerns a room dedicated to the history of the Egyptian Museum, where the great Yuefankh papyrus is on display, with a 20-meter-long infographic illustrating all the studies, some relevant themes as well as linguistic issues. Then we have the Deir el-Medina room, where there are important documents such as the erotic-satirical papyrus with infographics explanations. We can also mention the strike papyrus, the metropolis newspaper with the announcement of Rameses III's death, and the conspiracy papyrus: the full translation on the back allows anyone to read the documents.

For the bicentennial of the unveiling of hieroglyphics, the Egyptian Museum has set up an exhibit called The Gift of Thoth, an exhibit that will be moved to an area of the museum to become a permanent room dedicated to writing, with the objects in dialogue with the digital dimension.

How has the museum's layout changed in two hundred years?

In the beginning, it was an antiquarian museum. Seventy years later, with Ernesto Schiapparelli, there was an important leap, that is, it was decided to start excavating because it was not just the individual object that mattered, but its context. So, with Schiapparelli, there was a return to the concept of research. The archaeological activity enabled the acquisition of about thirty-five thousand objects. The pre-unification museum, then, became the first archaeological museum in united Italy. There is a strong link between the history of the country and the Egyptian Museum. In 1939, the collection exclusively related to ancient Egypt was spun off from the antiquities collection. After the war, under the good management of people like Scamuzzi, and Curto, who was also a university professor, the museum became collective and inclusive. The academic study gave the museum the opportunity to consolidate the activity and the preparation of professionalism, marking an international opening. The last important step in 2001 was a ministerial decree that allowed the opening to public and private management, and since 2004, the museum has been a foundation.

In this regard, you are a scholar, but you are also a Director. You plan, and then you have to make ideas concrete and operational, supporting them financially. How do you manage such a complex reality and what, in your opinion, is the support that the whole community, in Italy and in the world, can give to this Museum?

The community-museum link is powerful and fundamental. The economic participation of the foundation's members is now about 800 thousand euros against a need of about 15 million euros, to promote research and pay a very qualified and multidisciplinary staff of about seventy people. The difference in income is covered thanks to the affection and the participation of the community in Italy and abroad: the participation in initiatives, the tickets, the major events, the international consultancies that we offer, and the travelling exhibitions. This also supports our research. It is a beloved museum, and that is the most beautiful thing.

Photo credits:
museoegizio.it