Glory of ancient Egypt shines again

CAIRO, Egypt - In a corner room of the Egyptian Museum, away from the hordes of tourists surging toward the King Tut exhibit, Christian Eckmann patiently picks through fingernail-size pieces of an ancient copper jigsaw puzzle.

More than 4,000 years have passed since anyone saw this life-size riddle restored.

Eckmann, 43, a German metal-restoration expert, is salvaging the world's oldest known, human-scale metal statue. Egyptologists believe it is a representation of Pepe I, a pharaoh from the Sixth Dynasty of the Old Kingdom who ruled Egypt in 2300 B.C. The Old Kingdom was the era of the great pyramid-builders of Giza.

'Today, it wouldn't be possible to do this anymore using these kinds of techniques,' Eckmann said of the ancient handwork that created the statue. 'We lost all this knowledge. This is real craftsmanship.'

To the right of Eckmann's work table, copper legs shrouded in a plastic sheet lie on top of stacked wooden boxes. A copper head with lifelike eyes rests on top of a glass showcase containing the mummy of Pharaoh Ahmose I, dating from 1580 B.C.

Around the room, 17 glass showcases and wooden sarcophagi hold royal mummies thousands of years old. Yellowed teeth leer from shriveled brownish-black heads topped with wisps of reddish or gray hair.

The separated copper body parts, scattered amid flesh-and-bone mummies, look a little Frankensteinish. Eckmann, oblivious to the regal bodies, continues to work.

British archaeologists excavated Pepe I in 1897 in ancient Hierkonopolis. He was discovered inside a Middle Kingdom temple built on top of an Old Kingdom temple in southern Egypt, near the town of Edfu along the Nile.

In one of the temple's five chambers, the archaeologists found an intricate gold hawk's head, now on display in the museum. In an adjacent chamber lay Pepe I's statue. A corroded copper plate, bearing his inscription in hieroglyphics, lay folded across its chest.

When the statue was carried to a workshop, a smaller copper statue was found in the sand that filled the torso.

An Italian archaeologist briefly worked on Pepe but, lacking today's tools, couldn't clean the statue. When the copper plate was separated from Pepe's torso, it crumbled. The broken plate and the statue's disassembled head, arms, legs and torso were boxed up and crated off to the then-new Egyptian Museum in 1915.

Modern life was less forgiving than centuries of entombment. Pepe corroded rapidly because of carbon dioxide, humidity and airborne salts, flaking away into a green powder.

'Compared to 4,000 years under the ground, it took only 100 years to bring greater danger,' Eckmann said.

The project to save Pepe is a partnership between the Roemisch-Germanisches Zentralmuseum in Mainz, Germany and the Egyptian Museum. For Eckmann, who spent part of his childhood in Egypt, returning here in 1996 to work on Pepe was like 'traveling back to the past.'

In the cluttered room filled with mummies - even a few cat and dog mummies wrapped in cloth or rush strips, with painted faces - and stacked chest-high with boxes and restoration equipment, Eckmann became an archaeological detective.

First, he had to determine if the statue was hammered or cast. Understanding how Pepe was made was important, he explains, because it provided an idea of the technology of the time.

X-rays showed that ancient craftsmen molded the statue from copper sheets and hammered these in place with copper nails, giving Pepe a stitched-together look. Using copper nails was 'quite rare,' Eckmann said.

The most difficult task was cleaning the statue, centimeter by centimeter. Green flecks of copper oxides developed on Pepe during his desert burial and afterward, converting the pure copper sheets into corrosive grit and dust.

'I cleaned it with ultrasonic tools similar to what a dentist uses to clean teeth, only more powerful,' Eckmann said.

Pepe's hips are missing because that part of the torso most likely was a pleated royal skirt, reaching down to mid-thigh. In the style of the day, the skirt would have been made of plaster-covered wood topped with gold leaf. Some of Pepe's fingernails and toenails show vestiges of gold leaf.

His eyes are inlays of limestone and obsidian - a dark, glassy rock formed by lava - which give his face a lifelike impression.

A peek inside the hollow torso reveals how Eckmann bonded the broken statue.

After carefully piecing it back together, Eckmann used resin - not unlike that used to repair rust holes in a car - to hold the fragments together. His work is so painstaking that the statue's copper sheets appear as a smooth, unbroken surface on the outside.

Pepe I, one of the last great pharaohs of the Old Kingdom before an intermediate period of economic and political upheaval, stands in mid-stride at 5 feet 9 inches. The smaller statue, which Eckmann also restored, is 2 feet 6 inches. It already is on display on the museum's first floor.

The copper plate bearing Pepe's name may help Egyptologists determine the identity of the smaller statue. Such plates, traditionally found at the base of ancient statues, bear a ruler's many honorific titles. For nearly a century, this one's tiny pieces remained in a box in the museum's basement, gathering dust.

With more than 100,000 objects in the basement alone, Cairenes joke that archaeologists will have to excavate to determine what rests there, forgotten and unmarked.

For a year and half, Eckmann and others scoured the crates in the basement.

'We searched through hundreds and had to wipe off the dust to see what the date was,' he said.

Finally, they found 1,200 fragments of the base plate and other pieces of the smaller statue in a small wooden box. Eckmann pieced together many of the fragments, then made wax casts to assemble the rest.

Some Egyptologists believe the smaller statue is Pepe I's son and heir, Merenra. Eckmann, however, points to the base plate's hieroglyphics. Since only Pepe's name, not Merenra's, is there, he theorizes, the smaller statue also is Pepe I.

'But this is now for Egyptologists to debate,' he said.

Working on Pepe led to a few sleepless nights for Eckmann.

'Everyone was afraid at first about the conservation,' he said, 'and there was a lot of pressure that it has to be good.'

But the opportunity was worth the stress.

'Who has the chance to work on one of the most important metal objects in the world• ... It is like a Rembrandt - you won't have this chance very often,' Eckmann said.

His next step is to connect the head, torso and legs. The statue will be unveiled to the world later this year.

Still, Eckmann will not be done. He found other boxes in the museum's basement containing fragments of a copper tail for the golden hawk, which he excitedly describes as a cult image, 'one of the masterpieces of art in the Old Kingdom.'

So his work will continue among the mummies of Tutmosis III and other royalty.

'I got used to them,' Eckmann said, shrugging. 'They are my friends now.'

Betsy Hiel is a Cairo-based correspondent for the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review. Her articles from the region can be read online at tribLIVE.com, and she can be reached by e-mail at hielb@yahoo.com .