Inset, The Antikenmuseum inBasel, Switzerland. General viewof the Museum’s Egyptian Hall.

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EGYPT ON THE UPPER RHINEi n B a s e l , S w i t z e r l a n d

by Lucy Gordan-RastelliPhotos courtesy of the Museum

ocated in northwest Switzerland on the River Rhine where the Swiss, French andGerman borders meet, Basel — with a population of less than 200,000 people — isthe third largest city in Switzerland, after Zurich and Geneva, and the nation’s onlycargo port. Thanks first to its Mittlere Bridge, built in 1225-26 and for centuriesthe only way across the Rhine south of Cologne, and then to the Roman Churchcouncil held there from 1431-1449, Basel has been a commercial and cultural cen-ter for several hundred years. Its university, the first in Switzerland, was endowedin 1459 by Sienese-humanist Pope Pius II, who reigned from 1458-1464 and is the

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only pope ever to have written his autobiography. There such no-table scholars as the Dutch humanist, priest and theologian Eras-mus of Rotterdam (1466-1536) — known as “the crowning glory ofthe Christian humanists” — and the Swiss Renaissance physician,botanist, alchemist and general occultist Paracelsus (1493-1541)taught. During this same time-period, apprentices of Gutenbergintroduced the new craft of printing to the city. The Schwabe pub-lishing house was founded in Basel in 1488 by the German typog-rapher Johannes Petri (1441-1511) and is the oldest publishinghouse in the world still in continuous business.

Today the city is also home to over three-dozen museums,which together with the city’s trade fairs account for Basel’s wellover 1,000,000 visitors annually. Their contents cover a diversespectrum of subjects: the largest collection of teddy bears in Eu-rope; the history of pharmacy, complete with ancient Egyptianamulets, alchemistic laboratories and obsolete medicines; Judaismin Switzerland; caricatures and cartoons; a hands-on paper milldating from the Church council and still in use, where visitors canlearn the trades of paper manufacture and typography; the BaselCathedral Treasury; musical instruments; a zoo (Switzerland’sfirst [1874]), world-famous for its breeding of endangered species;

one of the oldest botanical gardens in the world; natural history;and architecture, to name just a few.

This high density of museums compared to other cities ofsimilar size is the result of closely interwoven private and publiccollecting and promotion of the arts and culture going back to theSixteenth Century. For example, the Kunstmuseum Basel — thencalled Amerbaschsches Kabinett — was opened to the public in1661 and is the world’s oldest public art-collection in continuousexistence. Since the late 1980s various private collections havebeen made accessible to the public in new purpose-built struc-tures, like the Beyeler Foundation, designed by Renzo Piano fromGenoa; Italian-Swiss Mario Botta’s Tinguely Museum; and Cali-fornian Frank Gehry’s Vitra Design Museum.

Directly across the main downtown street, St. Alban-Graben,from the Kunstmuseum Basel, and housed in several “pro-tected” small landmark Nineteenth Century houses, is the

Antikenmuseum Basel und Sammlung Ludwig (<http://www.anti-kenmuseumbasel.ch> <www.antikenmuseumbasel.ch> Phone +41(0)61 201 12 12. Hours Tuesday-Sunday from 10 a.m.-5 p.m.).Founded in 1961 and opened in 1967 — thanks (Continues p. 34)Kmt 30

Above, 5th Dynasty tomb relief with adesert hunting scene, BSAe 1092.

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Background, Another generalview of the Egyptian galleryof Basel’s Antikenmuseum.

Predynastic ceramic vessel in the form of a hippopotamus, Nagada I/II, 3500 BC, LgAe BDE 1.

The Museum’s recreationof a Nagada-era burial ,with objects typically in-terred with the naturallydessicated deceased, in-cluding a slate palette,ivory bracelet & ceramicvessels.

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from p. 31 — to the support of manylocal scholars, businessmen and collec-tors — and then enlarged in 1981, be-cause of the generosity of Germanchocolate magnate and voracious artcollector Peter Ludwig1 and his wifeIrene. It is the only Swiss museum de-voted exclusively to the ancient civi-lizations of the Mediterranean region,with artifacts from the Fourth Millen-nium BC to the Seventh Century AD,most dating from 1000 BC to 300 AD.

In the summer of 2001, this BaselMuseum of Ancient Art — untilthen devoted to the art of ancient

Greece and Rome — opened a depart-ment of ancient Egyptian art. This newwing, built below ground under theMuseum’s courtyard — thanks to thepersonal interest of Marcel Ospel, thenthe Chairman and CEO of UBS, and agenerous donation of around 5,000,000Swiss francs in 1999 by his bank —gives “an exhausting insight into the pri-vate and public collections of ancientEgyptian art in Switzerland,” Dr. AndréWiese, Basel-born curator of the Muse-um’s Egyptian collection since 1997,told me during my recent visit to Basel’sAntikenmuseum, made possible bySwiss Tourism in Italy and Basel Tour-ism. “There are older public Swiss Egyp-tian collections, dating back to the Nine-teenth Century, at Musée d’Art et Histoire

in Geneva and at the Musée d’Ethograph-ie in Neuchâtel,” continued Wiese, “butours is the first in German-speakingSwitzerland. Inspiration for this collec-tion began in 1997, with an exhibition Iorganized as a consultant, called ‘Egypt:Moments of Eternity. Unknown Treasuresin Swiss Private Collections.’ Its 80,000visitors convinced our director, ProfessorPeter Blome, to create a permanent Egyp-tian collection here. The next year I com-piled a preliminary first catalogue calledÄgyptische Kunst im AntikenmuseumBasel und Sammlung Ludwig. NeueLeihgaben, Schenkungen und Erwer-bungen (Egyptian Art in the Antiken-museum Basel and Sammlung Ludwig.New Loans, Donations and Acquisi-tions), which was updated and expandedwhen the collection opened three yearslater, but only published in German.”

Basalt head ofKing Montuhotep II, 11th Dynasty (ca. 2000 BC), BSAe III 8397.

Below, Blue faience hippopotamus with a butterfly on its back. Middle Kingdom,ca. 1800 BC, LgAe BBL 6 .

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“Today here at the Museum,”Wiese said, “which is an art, not an ar-chaeology, museum, and should best becalled “The Museum of Art of the AncientMediterranean World,” we have 3,741ancient Egyptian artifacts. About sixtypercent — or 2,224 objects — are ourown property. The remaining forty per-cent are on long-term loan; but all of

Right & detail above, Painted-ceramic vesselwith bull-calves-in-marsh motif, 18th Dynasty,reign of Amenhotep III, BSAe 1119.

18th Dyn. granodiorite statue of the temple servant Ptahankh, BSAe 1031. Right, 18th Dyn. wooden ointment-spoon with Syrian-woman motif, BSAe 1022.

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them have been here since my first exhibi-tion in 1997: 1,051 make up the Depositof the ‘Foundation of a Swiss OrientalMuseum’; another sixty-four items comefrom other public collections in Switzer-land; still another sixteen masterpieces ofEgyptian sculpture dating to the MiddleKingdom, New Kingdom and Late Dynas-tic Period — some of them of largesize — come from the storage of theBritish Museum2; and 386 items, ortwenty-five percent of the forty percent onloan, are from private persons. I requestedmany of these long-term loans to fill inchronological holes in our permanent col-lection.”

The some 800 objects on dis-play — which cover all periods ofancient Egyptian art, from Predy-

nastic to Coptic — are shown inchronological order (with an explana-tion for each in German) and then bytheme within each historic period.Some of the artifacts were originallyloans, which were then later donated.Others were acquired, at the suggestionof Wiese, from persons who had origi-nally lent or donated artifacts. The col-lection’s most-recent acquisitions —made possible in 2010 by private dona-tions — were a bronze khepesh swordwith dagger, a bronze incense burner, aterracotta statue of the God Bes, and asmall bronze furniture mounting of thegod Hapi.

According to Wiese, the high-lights of the collection listedhere in chronological order are:

Nine hundred scarabs, seals and am-ulets from the Friedrich von Bissingcollection, ranging in date from the OldKingdom to the Ptolemaic era3;

Predynastic: a terracotta hippopota-mus-vessel, on long-term loan from thefamous Elsa Bloch-Diener collection inBern; a little toad made of limestonewith fossil corals; a slate palette in theshape of a ram, from the collection ofSheikh Saud al Thani in Qatar and Lon-don; and a large Thinite vine-jar madeof calcite, from the former RudolfSchmidt collection;

Old Kingdom: a limestone reliefshowing a desert-hunting scene; a

18th Dyn. ivory hand-clappers with heads ofHathor, BSAe 990 a, b.

Fragmentary limestonehead of Nefertiti, on long-term loan to the Basel Antik-enmuseum from the collectionof Sonja & Hans Humbel,LgAe HHS 1.

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small bust of King Menkhare, the son ofKhafre and builder of the smallest pyra-mid at Giza; a rare life-size granite headof an official, early Fifth Dynasty; and alimestone false door from Sakkara;

Middle Kingdom: a basalt head ofMontuhotep II; a faience hippopotamusdecorated with butterflies; a magicalrod made of hippopotamus ivory; anintact female cartonnage mask, onlong- term loan from the Sonja andHans Humbel collection in Zürich;

New Kingdom: ivory clappers depicting the face of Hathor and a granodior-ite statue of the official Ptahankh fromMemphis, both dating to the Eigh-teenth Dynasty; golden falcon headsfrom a necklace; a limestone fragmentof the head Nefertiti on long-term loanfrom the Sonja and Hans Humbel Col-lection; a vase with polychrome paint-ed bulls dating to the reign of Amenho-tep III; the recently-purchased khepeshsword dating to the Nineteenth dynas-ty; and a ushabti box from Deir el Med-ina, on long-term loan from the Hum-bel collection;

Third Intermediate Period: the

painted-cartonnage coffin from Akh-mim of the priestess Tahai;

Late Dynastic Period: a cube-statueof the priest Peftjauemauiaset fromSais, on long-term loan from the Hum-bel collection;

Ptolemaic Period: a large bronzestatue of a lion-headed goddess; a veryrare, recently purchased bronze incenseburner in the form of an arm with ahand, which once belonged to a formerdirector of the Louvre; and a papyrus ofthe Book of the Dead of the Priest Nes-min.4

“Our strength is that we have ondisplay artifacts from all periods of an-cient Egypt, as well as all types of ob-jects, like sculpture, stelae, wall paint-ings, shabtis, bronzes, toiletries and wea-pons, etc., etc. Most special are our ob-jects concerning magic and daily life, for

Above, l & r, Two-sided 19th Dyn. limestonestela decorated on the front by the treasurerSeti and on the reverse by the military ad-ministrator Minmose, BSAe 1080. Left, Fai-ence statuette of deified Rameses II as Hor-us, BSAe 1096.

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example cosmetic utensils from the NewKingdom, not to mention an impressivecomplete Roman mummy5 and severalbeautifully painted coffins. The weak-nesses of our collection,” continued Dr.Wiese, “are three: (1) that our beautifulcatalogue is in German only; (2) thatsome of our artifacts are still loans; and(3) that, since most of our artifacts were

bought by collectors during the Nine-teenth and early-Twentieth centuries, wedo not know their provenance, although Ihave traced about twelve artifacts to salesmade by the British archaeologist Petrieto collectors who then later sold, donatedor lent them long-term to us; and so weknow where Petrie excavated them. Be-sides Petrie, other identifiable artifacts

come from the excavations carried out byEdouard Naville,6 Gustave Jéquier7 andCecil Firth, plus others.”

Switzerland was never a colonialpower, so, unlike France andEngland,8 none of its Egyptian ar-

tifacts were carried off as war booty.Most are small sculptures or artifacts of

Above left, Polychrome wooden stela dating to the Third Intermediate Period, BSAe 1138. Above right, Painted-cartonnage coffin from Akhmim of the Lady Tahai, also of Third Intermediate Period date, BSAe III 129.

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Black-granite cube statue ofthe priest Peftjauemauiaset,dating to the 30th Dyn. (340BC), LgAe HHS 5.

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the Afterlife. The collections in Genevaand Neuchâtel owe their existence tothe French-speaking pioneers of SwissEgyptology: Edouard Naville (1844-1926) and Gustave Jéquier (1868-1946);but the majority of private Swiss collec-tions can be traced to the large numberof Swiss expatriates who lived in Alex-andria or Cairo during the Nineteenthand first half of the Twentieth centuriesand brought their small treasures home,when they or their descendants wereexpelled from Egypt by Gamal Nasser.

One such collector was AchilleGroppi, the son of Giacomo Groppi, apastry maker from a humble Ticino(Italian Switzerland) background, whohad immigrated to Egypt in 1884 at agetwenty-one. Achille was the subject ofWiese’s most-recent temporary exhibi-tion in 2008: “Delicacies from Cairo.The Egyptian Collection of the Confec-tioner and Coffee House Owner AchilleGroppi (1890-1949).” Groppi’s ancient

Egyptian artifacts, which he collectedfrom the 1920s until his death, aremostly small objects, in particular mo-saic glass beads from the Ptolemaic era.His mosaic-bead collection was not on-ly the largest and most significant, butthe first of its kind. Besides beads, Grop-pi also collected amulets, scarabs, andsmall stone, bronze, faience statues.

In 1949 Groppi died childlessof a heart attack and bequeathed hiscollection to his sister, Georgette Bian-chi-Groppi, who divided it later amongher three sons in Switzerland. Unfortu-nately, the family sold significant partsof it at an auction in London at Chris-tie’s in 1993. No one knew it was theGroppi collection because it was listedunder a pseudonym, the “Per Neb Col-lection”; thus much of the unique glasswent to museums and private collec-tions worldwide, including the MihoMuseum in Japan and the collections ofBolivian-born Geneva resident George

Ortiz and of the already-mentionedSheikh Saud al Thani of Qatar, the Emir’scousin and former Minister of Culture.

“It wasn’t hard to organize theGroppi exhibition here,” Wiese explain-ed, “because all three families of Groppi’sdescendants, now named Bianchi, stillown much of their uncle’s collection. Theylive in Lugano and were very happy tolend us the some 160 artifacts on publicdisplay for the very first time ever. Wehad 30,000 visitors and the cataloguesold out immediately. I have only my per-sonal copy.”

Wiese tries to organize one ma-jor temporary exhibitionevery second year, all so far

with audio guides in German, Frenchand English. Before the Groppi exhibi-tion, Basel’s Antikenmuseum had host-ed two other major exhibitions of an-cient Egyptian art. In 2004 it was thefirst venue of “Tutankhamen. The Gold-

Counterclockwise from left,Late Period basalt baboonstatuette with inlaid-glasseyes, BSAe 1103; FaienceHathor sistrum dating to the26th Dyn., BASe 1125/26;Ptolemaic (3rd Cent. BC)gold bracelet with two Besheads, LgAe SSOM 3; Detailof large bronze statuette of alion-headed goddess, also ofPtolemaic date, BSAe 994.

Opposite, inset & detail, In-tact Roman-period malemummy, with painted por-trait-panel, from Antinoopo-lis, dating to the 2nd Cent.AD, BSAe 1030.

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en Beyond. Tomb Treasures from theValley of the Kings,” which countedover 650,000 visitors in four months;and in 2006 it hosted “In Pharaoh’sTomb: The Hidden Hours of the Sun,”which attracted 35,000 visitors. Forthis exhibition Thutmose III’s burialchamber was reconstructed by Factum-Arte — a company, based in Madridand directed by Adam Lowe — whichproduces digital reconstructions in twoor three dimensions for artists, muse-ums and special projects. The artifactsdisplayed in this exhibition came fromthe Antikenmuseum’s own collectionand on loan from the August KestnerMuseum in Hanover, Germany, andconcerned the Amduat and the ritualssurrounding burial, mummificationand rebirth. Included were coffins fromthe Third Intermediate Period, stelae,bronzes of gods of the Afterlife, as wellas a Book of the Dead and royal funerarytexts from the New Kingdom.

This year, 2011, from March25-July 31, will be the turn of “Egypt,Orient and Swiss Modern Art. The Col-lection of Rudolf Schmidt (1900-1970).”“Dr. Rudolf Schmidt from Solothurn, themost beautiful Baroque city in Switzer-land about twenty miles north of Bern,was another world-famous collector,” Dr.Wiese told me. “Like Ludwig, his exten-sive art collection, now dispersed, in-cluded works from ancient collections, aswell as landmark paintings of Swiss mod-ern art. On the fortieth anniversary of hisdeath, the Antikenmuseum will host forthe first time a wide-ranging selection ofSchmidt’s collection: stone vessels fromancient Egypt, now property of his twonephews; seals from the ancient NearEast, now in Fribourg’s Biebel und Ori-entmuseum; ancient bronze figurines fromLuristan (Iran), now in the Rietberg Mu-seum in Zürich; ancient Greek and Ro-man sculptures, now in a private collec-tion; and modern works by FerdinandHodler, Giovanni Giacometti, and CunoAmiet, all divided between his twonephews.”

Notes1. Born in Koblenz on July 9, 1925, PeterLudwig was an artistic maverick, whosetastes included Picasso, Russian avant-gardepainters and Pop Art, in particular, as wellas South American gold trinkets and Med-

ieval German manuscripts. The only for-eigner on the Board of Trustees of The Mu-seum of Modern Art in New York, and animportant influence on cultural policyworldwide, his artistic tastes were highlyeclectic. For example, he opened the Lud-wig-Institut für Kunst in the German Dem-ocratic Republic in 1984; but he also col-lected the work of Hitler’s favorite sculptor,Arno Breker. Ludwig donated modernworks of art to over thirty museums andfounded several others, specializing in mod-ern art: in Aachen (where he died of a rup-tured colon on July 22, 1997), Cologne,Vienna and Budapest. He also donated hiscollection of 200 ancient Greek artifacts toBasel’s Antikenmuseum, but he certainly ex-pected that his foundation’s generous en-dowments be matched by public invest-ments in the arts.2. “The most-impressive artifacts on loan fromthe British Museum,” said Wiese, “are eye-catchers, objects found nowhere else in Swit-zerland.” Examples: part of a granite monu-mental head of Amenhotep III, a granodior-ite statue of lion-headed Sekhmet, seated ona throne (Eighteenth Dynasty) and a gran-odiorite statue of a vizier also EighteenthDynasty), excavated by Edouard Naville atTell Basta in the Delta, between 1887 and1889, in cooperation with the Egypt Explo-ration Fund. “The loans from the British Mu-seum are on a three-year renewable contract,”Wiese explained. “They’ve been here for nineyears already and we’ve just renewed the con-tract for another three.”3. A Prussian aristocrat, Von Bissing was aprofessor of Egyptology at the University ofMunich. He was perhaps most noted for hiswork at Abu Ghurab at the turn of theTwentieth Century, where he excavated thesun temple of King Niuserre. He later be-came an early Nazi sympathizer, because ofhis friendship with Rudolf Hess, but wassoon expelled from the party.4. Like his father and many paternal ances-tors, Nesmin was a priest of the gods Minand Khonsu. He pursued his duties in Mid-dle Egypt at Akhmim. His coffin and hismummy are the cornerstone of the collec-tion at the Rhode Island School of Design’sMuseum of Art in Providence, Rhode Is-land.5. Basel’s Egyptian collection has five hu-man mummies: three females and two males.One of the latter dates from the Third Inter-mediate Period; the other is the completemummy (with shroud) from Roman times.One female mummy is Predynastic; the sec-ond, still wrapped in her cartonnage, datesto the Third Intermediate Period; the thirdfemale is a child of the Roman era. The col-

lection counts around fifty or sixty animalmummies. 6. Édouard Naville was born in Geneva in1844 and died there in 1926. He first ven-tured to Egypt in 1865, and published themyths of Horus from the temple at Edfu in1870. In 1882 he began to work with theEgypt Exploration Fund in the Nile Delta.However, by far the most important of hisarchaeological achievements was his workat the Temple of Queen Hatshepsut at Deirel Bahari, during the seasons 1893-1896.His most-important publication is the edi-tion of the Book of the Dead in German,which remains a standard reference eventoday. 7. Gustave Jéquier was born in Neuchâtel,Switzerland, in 1868, and died in the samecity in 1946. He studied in Paris and Berlinand began his career under the guidance ofEgyptologists Gaston Maspero and Jacquesde Morgan. Jéquier specialized in the Pre-dynastic Period and excavated sites at Sak-kara, where he cleared the pyramids of PepiII, Aba and two kings of the Middle King-dom, plus the so-called Mastaba Faraoun ofShepsekaf. He also worked at Dashur, Lishtand Mazghuna, as well as explored pyra-mids of the Old and Middle kingdoms. Hiswork on the Pyramid Texts was significantto the understanding of these.8. The first European in modern times tovisit the ancient city of Petra in Jordan andto arrive at the great Egyptian temple atAbu Simbel, was not an archaeologist. Hewas Swiss traveler and Orientalist JohannLudwig Burckhardt, who learned Arabic flu-ently and later converted to Islam, took thename Sheikh Ibrahim Ibn Abdallah andwore Arab dress. Born at Lausanne into afamily from Basel on November 24, 1784,he died of dysentery in Cairo on October15, 1817. Accredited as the discoverer ofPetra in 1812 and Abu Simbel in 1813, hebequeathed his collection of 800 volumes oforiental manuscripts to the library of Cam-bridge University. Three books about histravels in Nubia (1819), in Syria and theHoly Land (1822), and in Arabia (1829), aswell as his Arabic Proverbs, or the Mannersand Customs of the Modern Egyptians (1830),and Notes on the Bedouins Wahabys (1831)were all published posthumously. Katha-rine Sim published Desert Traveller: The Lifeof Jean Louis Burckhardt in 1969 (paperbackedition, 2001). In 2012, to celebrate the 200thanniversary of Burckhardt’s discovery of Pe-tra, Basel’s Antikenmuseum will put to-gether an exhibition. It will include loansfrom the National Museum in Amman andfrom Petra and include a section on Burck-hardt’s life.

About the Author Lucy Gordan-Rastelli is aRome-based free-lance journalist & Kmt’s

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European correspondent.