BERLIN.- For the first time the exhibition at the Neues Museum will present ancient Egyptian and ancient Chinese artefacts side by side. Many exhibits from China have never been on show in Europe. Thanks to loans from the Shanghai Museum and the loan of a jade suit from the Xuzhou Museum, enriched by objects from the Ethnologisches Museum and Museum für Asiatische Kunst of the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, this exhibition will present these objects in Berlin for the first time. The exhibition features about 250 objects, including significant treasures from both civilizations, and covers a time span from 4500 BC well into the 3rd century AD.

Cooperation with the Shanghai Museum
The unusual experiment of drawing correlations between objects from ancient China and ancient Egypt for the first time could only succeed thanks to the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin’s cooperation with the Shanghai Museum, arranged in 2014 and sealed with a ‘Memorandum of Understanding’. This cooperation agreement formed the foundation for a close collaboration between the partner museums and the curators and organizers of this exhibition, and will also enable future collaborations. The realisation of this extensive and unique special exhibition in Berlin is the best testament to both partners’ mutual high regard.

Concept and Contents
Archaeological objects from China and comparable finds from ancient Egypt come together for the first time in this exhibition. China and Egypt. Cradles of the World traces the cultural developments that laid the foundations for great civilizations in these two regions. Although there was no direct contact between ancient China and ancient Egypt, comparison of the two cultures reveals a surprising number of similarities despite their differences. Each of the objects displayed both presents its own history in the context of its particular cultural environment, and also relates to objects of the other culture. The exhibition tells these stories through five thematic chapters.

Daily Life
In all cultures, around the world and throughout time, daily life presents common basic challenges. It is therefore not at all surprising to discover similar or comparable solutions, even in two civilizations that developed at such a great distance from each other. Houses, furniture, clothing, farming and animal husbandry, ceramics, jewellery, currency and items for barter, and weights and measures were all common in both Egypt and China, although they took quite different forms. The juxtaposition of objects of daily life from four millennia selected from two vastly different cultures indicates on the one hand how highly specialized and collaborative these cultures were, and on the other how similar life back then was to our lives today.

Countless objects that originally served as grave goods, for example a model of a house and duck coop from China compared with an Egyptian bakery, reveal much about the activities of daily life in ancient China and ancient Egypt. The exhibition also presents luxury goods, including opulent garnitures of Chinese lacquer tableware and ancient Egyptian glass. An ancient Egyptian set of scales and numerous Chinese coins illustrate the subject of ‘Measures, Weights, and Trade’. China is known as the first country to develop coinage.

Writing
The introduction of farming and animal husbandry and the development of larger settlements and a specialized, hierarchically organized society usually also led to the development of intensive trade. Trade and the transport of wares brought humanity the first written cultures, because complex economic systems cannot exist without documents containing inventories of the goods being exchanged or sold. Sophisticated systems of writing thus developed very early in the Near East, Egypt, and China.

The writing systems of both Egypt and China developed from pictorial symbols and abstracted pictograms, and originally reached astoundingly similar solutions. This process occurred around 3500 BC in Egypt and in China around 6600 BC with the Jiahu symbols. In both cultures writing took on a particular significance in religious contexts, as the earliest complex texts on Chinese oracle bones (around 1300 BC) and inscriptions from the time of Djoser (around 2700 BC) show.

Numerous examples, including significant Chinese oracle bones and Egyptian inscriptions from graves and temples, illustrate the early forms of writing in both cultures. The Egyptian inscriptions include a large temple architrave from the rule of Ramses II (1279–1213 BC), a foundation brick from the same period, and a hymn to the sun in hieroglyphs from the rule of Amenophis III (around 1360 BC) from an official’s tomb. Writing instruments, including Egyptian palettes and a particularly ornate Chinese ink stand, are also on display.

Death and the Afterlife
Ever since people began burying their dead in cemeteries they have also associated these burial sites with a wide variety of ideas about an afterlife. Burial practices are directly linked to the specific religious ideas of each culture and characterize particular conceptions of human identity and the various forms of the soul.

While cremation was common in many cultures, in Egypt and China the elite were buried in coffins and elaborate tomb complexes from the 4th millennium BC to 200 AD. Abundant grave goods provided for the needs of the deceased in the next world. While in Egypt mummification guarantied the preservation of the body and the dead entering into an Elysian afterlife, in China the admission of the deceased into the ranks of the ancestors played a central role. Here also bodies were covered with protective amulets and jade objects, or even entire suits of jade, which were believed to protect the dead.

Precious objects found in burial sites illustrate each culture’s cult of the dead, their rituals, and their burial practices. In China, jade was considered a stone of immortality. Chinese jade amulets were thought not only to protect the living, but also to serve the dead as a talisman on their journey to the afterworld. One spectacular highlight of the exhibition is the display of a Chinese jade suit from the Xuzhou Museum alongside a richly painted mummy case from ancient Egypt, brought together for the first time in Germany. Other exceptional features include the juxtaposition of an ancient Egyptian death mask with an elaborate multi-piece jade mask, and the display of numerous protective amulets from China and Egypt.

Religious Beliefs
The development of human civilizations is inextricably connected to the phenomenon of religious ideas and practices. No society has emerged without this fundamentally formative aspect of culture. In the past, humans saw themselves as helplessly subjected to the forces of nature and the threat of wild animals. In reverence to these incalculable powers people created the gods, spirits, and demons that allowed them to explain and control their world.

A wide variety of religious ideas developed in both China and Egypt. The ancient Greeks even called Egypt the ‘land where the gods live’. Gods permeated the world of ancient Egypt to an extent seldom seen in any other culture. Before the start of the Common Era religious beliefs in China cannot be directly compared with those of ancient Egypt. Along with the worship of cosmic gods, an extensive cult of ancestors and spirits characterized Chinese religion.

Multiple images of Egyptian gods, including an exceptional bronze Horus falcon, are contrasted with a depiction of the Queen Mother of the West on a Chinese bronze mirror. Other Chinese symbols for heaven and earth, such as the bi discs and rectangular cong tubes appear more abstract.

Government and Administration
Complex societies always need an organizing and administrative structure. In ancient civilizations a ruler, whether a king, an emperor, a pharaoh, or a chief, usually represented and controlled this structure.

In China various kings, rulers, and a wide network of noble families took on this role until the appointment of the first emperor and the introduction of the ‘Mandate of Heaven’. In spite of the religious legitimation of the emperor’s right to rule, Chinese bureaucratic society clearly took a more pragmatic view of this institution than would ever have been conceivable in the ‘divine monarchy’ of Egypt. The ‘failure’ of an emperor in China could be interpreted as a sign that the ‘Mandate of Heaven’ had been withdrawn, while in Egypt the deposition of a pharaoh could not be theologically legitimated. Violent coups did occur in Egypt, but the new rulers had a much harder time justifying their legitimacy there than in China.

Very little evidence of sculptures of Chinese rulers survives from the period illuminated by the exhibition. Instead, status symbols including bronze ding vessels represented the rulers’ power. A magnificent ding vessel stands in contrast to portraits of Egyptian rulers, including an exceptional head of the Pharaoh Sesostris III and a statue of a woman tentatively identified by her attributes as the deified queen Ahmes-Nofertari. The head and torso of a large statue of Ramses II showing the pharaoh holding the power-infused crook of the god Osiris is also particularly impressive. A yue battleaxe from the Museum für Asiatische Kunst is an exceptional Chinese masterpiece which also served to demonstrate power and sovereignty.