Gravely goods and the cogstones of history at Bowers

VIC LEIPZIG AND LOU MURRAY

Memorial Day is a time when we Americans honor our dead. This weekend

seemed an appropriate time to see the new “Mummies: Death and the

Afterlife in Ancient Egypt” exhibit at the Bowers Museum of Cultural

Art in Santa Ana.

Apparently a lot of other people thought so too, because a sizable

crowd meandered through this spectacular new exhibit.

Vic had final exams to grade, so I enjoyed the museum on my own.

The Bowers has a new display of Native American artifacts in the

permanent galleries that I also wanted to see to gather additional

information for the Native American panels for the Shipley Nature

Center Interpretive Building. I thought the comparison between the

artifacts left by the Egyptian cult of the dead and the artifacts

from the native people who lived here so many thousands of years ago

would be thought provoking.

The Bowers Museum Egyptian exhibit, on loan from the British

Museum, is stunning. I hadn’t expected the extensive interpretive

text, the fabulous array of lovely artifacts and the gripping layout

that engaged the visitor.

The mood was set at the entry by bowls of fire burning above

massive columns. In reality, these orange flickers were plastic wisps

set in motion by a fan to simulate fire. But the effect transports

visitors back in time to a mysterious tomb in Egypt.

The amount of labor and skill the ancient Egyptians put into

producing the art and artifacts for their grave goods was amazing.

Artifacts ranged from jewelry for the dead to carved wooden boats to

intricately painted “stele” representations of doors to the

afterworld. Some of the coffins had portraits of the deceased painted

on flat wooden panels.

These paintings were thousands of years old, yet they stared back

at visitors with lifelike realism. Modern medical imaging techniques

allowed visitors to see inside the coffins and wrappings to view the

skeletons of the mummies inside. The displays were splendidly

artistic and grotesquely creepy at the same time.

I’m sure the dead Egyptians had no concept that they would be on

display halfway around the world thousands of years after their

deaths. They thought they were headed for a rendezvous with their

gods Osiris and Ra.

The Egyptians believed that they needed a proper resting place for

the body, adequate grave goods to sustain them in their afterlife and

an offering place where priests and mourners could practice a

funerary cult. They even had effigies of servants, called “shabtis,”

buried with them so they wouldn’t have to engage in agriculture and

till the fields of heaven in the hereafter.

The exhibit includes beautifully preserved artifacts that range

from more than 5,000 years old to 2,300 years old. After that, the

great Egyptian cult of the afterlife died.

By then (about 300 B.C.), Alexander the Great had stormed through

and pretty much wiped out the culture. By 2,000 years ago, Egypt was

part of the Roman Empire. Egypt became an Islamic country about 1,250

years ago.

By modern times, the Egyptians had many mummies left over from

their distant past and no cultural connection with them. Incredibly,

they used these plentiful mummies as fuel for locomotives in the

early part of the 20th century.

I could have stayed in the Egyptian exhibit longer, but I wanted

to see the permanent galleries too. I reluctantly skipped over the

Mayan culture gallery and went straight to the Native American room.

I was pleased to find a large display of cogstones, early Native

American stone artifacts that were generally made of basalt. These

artifacts were made by people that lived in this area from about

7,000 years ago to 4,000 years ago.

The cogstone exhibit featured styles I hadn’t seen before. Some

looked like fish vertebrae. Others resembled sea urchins and bat

stars. Most looked like gears, but these stones have no wear pattern

that would suggest any type of use other than religious or

ceremonial.

Most cogstones are three to four inches across, about an inch

thick, with or without a hole in the center. If a “gear” was broken

off, it was reattached with asphalt, probably brought from the tar

pits in Los Angeles. Some have been found buried in caches near the

ocean or streams that flow into the ocean. Their purpose has been

lost in antiquity.

Cogstones have been found along the Southern California coast from

Malibu to La Jolla, and as far inland as San Bernardino. That is

probably the geographic range of the long-dead culture that made

cogstones. The only site of manufacture that has ever been located is

the Bolsa Chica mesa.

All that these people left behind to tell us about their culture

were cogstones and a few other stone artifacts. We know they hunted,

fished and gathered acorns and shellfish here for thousands of years.

We know they decorated their bodies with shell jewelry. One wonders

what rituals they developed, what rites they performed for their dead

and how they viewed their afterlife.

The new Native American exhibit also contained spectacular feather

headdresses from more recent California native cultures, carved

soapstone effigies and intricately woven baskets, some from the

collection of our local Mary Newland.

As closing time neared, I toured the Rancho/Mission galleries and

ducked into the plein-air art exhibit upstairs. The Bowers Museum has

a true talent for bringing the past alive.

* VIC LEIPZIG and LOU MURRAY are Huntington Beach residents and

environmentalists. They can be reached at [email protected].