OSCARS, BAFTAS AND EGYPT’S GIANT GEM
- Graham Walker
- 9 hours ago
- 6 min read
With this November marking a huge landmark in Egypt’s long history, the 4th November was the day on which the tomb of Tutankhamun was discovered back in 1922, only 3 days after the start of the excavation season on 1st November. Yet this day has now acquired even greater significance as the official opening date of the GEM, the spectacular Grand Egyptian Museum.
Rightly described as "one of the most ambitious cultural projects in modern history", the GEM covers an astonishing 120 acres making it the largest archaeology museum in the entire world. And as a fittingly pharaonic building within which to house some of the world’s greatest treasures, the recent opening ceremony was suitably spectacular, attended by numerous heads of state and televised and streamed across the world. So it was an enormous honour to be asked for interviews by Egypt’s national channel Nile News and France 24, major Middle Eastern newspaper El Watan and the weekly magazine Akher Sa’a (‘The Last Hour’), launched in 1924 and one of Egypt’s longest-running publications (below).
And as the crowds flock to this new icon on the Giza Plateau, “the pyramids have a new neighbour; not a rival, but a reverent heir… For Egypt, the Grand Egyptian Museum is more than a building; it is a national revival. It signals an Egypt that honours its past while shaping its own narrative anew as well as a country reclaiming its cultural identity not as nostalgia, but as vision” (according to https://x.com/egyptomuseum/status/1984550364977213718).
So it was obviously fitting that the opening extravaganza for this ‘global showcase’ involved the same massed ranks of performers, fireworks, lasers and light shows that have accompanied so many of Egypt’s recent cultural events, now continuing across the city with Cairo’s 46th International Film Festival. Held every November and the only internationally accredited film festival in the Arab world, the event’s highest award is the Golden Pyramid for Best Film (below right), with the Silver Pyramid presented to the Best Director and a bronze version for Best New Director.
Yet Egypt’s influence on the world of film awards would seem to reach far beyond the Middle East, the golden masks so closely associated with ancient Egypt of course also finding echoes in the BAFTAs, the British Academy Film Awards. With the first BAFTA ceremony held in London in 1949, it’s been broadcast on the BBC since 1956, when the glamourous star-studded event was hosted by the sublime actress Vivien Leigh aka Scarlett O’Hara whose stellar career also included her role as Cleopatra, in the plays of both Shakespeare and George Bernard Shaw (below left).
Yet the BAFTA awards themselves had been created in the North, in the garage-turned-workshop of American sculptor Mitzi Cunliffe then based in Didsbury Manchester (https://the-modernist.org/products/mitzi-cunliffe-an-american-in-manchester). And with Cunliffe’s iconic bronze award affectionately known as ‘Jason’ and inspired by the theatrical masks of ancient Greece, each one is still produced ancient-Egyptian style by pouring molten bronze into sand moulds (https://www.johncsilcox.com/behind-the-mask) (below).
And it was certainly a massive honour when one of these iconic BAFTA masks (below left & centre) was awarded for our documentary ‘Mummifying Alan: Egypt’s Last Secret’, following our rediscovery of the actual way the Egyptians had mummified their royals during the dynasty of Tutankhamun (https://www.kcl.ac.uk/lsm/centre-for-education/museums/gordon-museum/the-modern-mummy). And in that same year 2012, we also won the Association of International Broadcasting Award and a Royal Television Society Award, which again features a golden mask but this time in profile and very Art Deco in style (below right).
Yet the most famous film awards are of course Hollywood’s Academy Awards (below left). Better known as ‘the Oscars’ claimed by some to represent Egypt’s ancient creator god Ptah, this became particularly apparent during our most recent study day at Bolton Museum when handing over a heavy bronze cast figurine of the god during the handling sessions (below centre). And with participants pointing out its uncanny likeness to the famous film award, no less a source than the Hollywood Reporter recently led with the headline ‘Was the Oscar Statuette Modelled and Named After Ancient Egyptian Gods?’.
Adding that “the iconic prize was designed almost a century ago by MGM art director Cedric Gibbons, and bears a striking resemblance to ancient depictions of Ptah, the Egyptian god of artists and craftsmen”, the usual explanation is that the Oscar represents a stylised knight gripping a crusader's sword. Yet it also does resemble Ptah holding his ‘was’ sceptre combined with the ‘ankh’ sign of life and the ‘djed’ column of stability, with some even claiming that the much-disputed name 'Oscar' actually derives from 'Sokar', another Egyptian deity associated with Ptah and worshipped in the Memphis region where Ptah held greatest power.
Yet regardless of its true origins, the Oscar award, created in 1928 in gold-plated bronze, was first presented in 1929 during the decade it took to clear the tomb of Tutankhamun of its 5,398 objects, one of which was the splendid Ptah figurine (above right). First brought to light during the clearance of the tomb’s ‘Treasury’ side chamber (which could only begin late in 1926 after the burial chamber had first been emptied), images of the tomb’s glittering contents appearing regularly in the world’s press certainly maintained the craze for all things ancient Egypt.
And with the existing Egyptomania dating back beyond Georgian times (http://egyptomaniamuseum.co.uk/) ramped up into even more extreme ‘Tutmania’, the 1925 Parisian exhibition ‘Arts Décoratifs’ took Egypt’s ancient influence into the stratosphere. Characterised by Egypt’s sleek lines, geometric forms and stylized ornamental patterns affecting everything from fashion and jewellery to furniture and architecture, the impact on the numerous ‘picture house’ cinemas then springing up was especially profound.
With the most important of these picture houses Grauman’s Egyptian Theatre, this “changed the world of cinema” by hosting the first movie premiere, introducing the original red carpet and establishing Hollywood as the world’s movie capital. Built in Hollywood Los Angeles in 1922, the theatre’s front courtyard featured Egyptian stone columns and pharaonic wall scenes (above left), its equally lavish interior adorned with sphinxes, winged scarabs and a huge ceiling sunburst.
And with such ‘Egyptian Theatres’ then copied right across the US and Europe, these glamorous venues were the perfect place in which an eager public could enjoy such epics as Cecil B.de Mille’s 1923 silent film ‘The Ten Commandments’ (below left), partly set in ancient Egypt against a backdrop of tombs and temples much like several more Biblical epics in silent movie format.
Yet the very first ‘talkie’ to feature ancient Egypt was ‘The Mummy’ of 1932 (above right), complete with the tag line ‘It Comes to Life!’. Starring Boris Karloff as the reanimated linen-wrapped Imhotep and his modern incarnation the sinister Ardath Bey, his love interest ‘Ankhesenamon’ (sic) was named after the wife of Tutankhamun, since the film’s screenwriter John Balderston had been one of the original newspaper correspondents reporting on the Tutankhamun tomb discovery ten years earlier.
And Balderston certainly had a track record working on such early horror movies, the year before having worked on both ‘Frankenstein’ based on the famous story by Mary Shelley, and adapting ‘Dracula’ from the equally famous novel by Bram Stoker.
Set partly against the atmospheric backdrop of Whitby on the Yorkshire coast, Stoker had followed up his 1897 vampire classic with ‘The Jewel of Seven Stars’, his take on Egypt’s ancient dead which we’ve found has links to Whitby too. And eventually made into the 1971 cult classic ‘Blood from the Mummy’s Tomb’ about which we’ve just been interviewed as part of our long-term research into Stoker’s work, that whole Egyptomania-meets-Gothic-Horror really is a heady blend, directly linked to Yorkshire’s dramatic coast yet rooted firmly in Egypt’s epic past.
Jo is back on BBC2 at 9pm on 1st December in ‘Civilisations’ episode 2: ‘the Egypt of Cleopatra’, with more Cleopatra news to follow...
