IMAN ISSA at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Ancient Egypt is not a location (a country based in the continents of Africa and Asia) or a time period (one separated from us now, in the early 2020s, by thousands of years). Ancient Egypt is a historical concept. And, like any historical concept, any attempt to pin it down—to speak of it as it might have been back then or there—goes against its very grain.

As a concept, ancient Egypt could be likened to a photograph. One that at first look appears to have captured an event, frozen it in time, laying it bare for someone to look at, to study, and extract knowledge from, but which on closer inspection reveals itself to be a ruse—a mirrored sphere with an infinite number of faces. It is a photograph continuously relating little to the one it just was, with what has been interpreted as its essence, its content, its punctum, seeming to have disappeared—either to have never been there or to have been replaced by a completely different essence, content, and punctum.

↱ Read more: metmuseum.org