Akram Zaatari: Father and Son

Father and Sonis the title of a performative gesture that once aimed to reunite the sarcophagi of King Tabnit, currently at the Istanbul museum and that of his son, King Eshmunazar II, currently at the Louvre museum in Paris. The two sarcophagi were originally brought from Egypt into Sidon before 500 BC, re-purposed by a Canaanite family of kings to bury its royalty. These are typical anthropoid sarcophagi from the late Egyptian period, sculpted in black Amphibolite stone under the XXVI dynasty in Egypt. Once in Sidon, the outer surface of the cover of Eshmunazor's sarcophagus had been shaved entirely, erasing what would have been normally a funerary text in ancient Egyptian, before it was re-inscribed with twenty-two lines in Phoenician. The ancient Egyptian inscription covering Tabnit's sarcophagus was found intact, but a short text in Phoenician was inscribed at the sarcophagus foot. 

The two sarcophagi were discovered as a result of two distinct excavations led in different locations in Sidon, at two different dates. The excavations were separated by 32 years. They took place before and after the introduction of the Ottoman antiquity law of 1884. This is why the export of the sarcophagus of Eshmunazor II, found by Alfonse Durighello in 1855, was perfectly in line with the laws of its time. The sarcophagus of his father was found in 1887 inside a tomb discovered by a local mason named Muhamad al-Sharif (Mehmet Sherif), who had reported coming across archeological finds to the wilayet officials. 

This is how Osman Hamdi Bey, artist and founder of Müze-i Humayun in Constantinople, came to Sidon with a mission to excavate and ship the finds. The unearthing of the sarcophagus of Tabnit has provided the world with important clues as to how Eshmunazor's sarcophagus might have looked like before it had been shaved.  

Father and Son: A Mother's Voice brings together, metaphorically, the sarcophagi of father and son in a setup that narrates their current displays in Paris and Istanbul. The installation is a sort of an “informed object” that commemorates a mother’s attempt to inscribe herself into history, through the funerary text of her son and turns the perception father/son lineage into a trinity. 

Moment 1 

18.04.24 

 The title Father and Son brings up lineage, continuity, and male to male transfer of knowledge, heritage or power. It nevertheless implies the existence of a third figure crucial to reproduction; that of the mother, who was not mentioned in Tabnit's inscription, but who was highlighted in her son’s funerary text, which she might have entirely authored or commissioned herself. Emashtart, priestess of Astarte, must have played an important role in insuring that her husband and, later, her son were buried according to their wishes. But after them, she lost power and Bodashtart, Tabnit’s nephew, became king. The funerary text of Eshmunazor II proposes that she had played an increasingly influential role since the death of her husband including leading war and erecting a temple for the Canaanite divinity, Eshmun. The guess is that Emashtart was buried inside an incomplete black sarcophagus that was found, without any inscriptions, in the same hypogeum as Tabnit’s tomb. 

This first phase of installation is a representation of the sarcophagus of Eshmunazor II, inspired from its 1997 display, standing at the Crypte Marengo, at the Louvre Museum, 3212 km away from Sidon. It is represented schematically highlighting the scratch at the lower eyelid, which makes the facial expression carved into black rock look like crying while the important inscription in Phoenician is displaced, mirror-imaged, into its shadow. A mirror, cut in the shape of the silhouette of Eshmunazor’s sarcophagus shows an ultrasound backlit image in its centre, making sarcophagus look like carrying a human fetus. The mirror helps also reading properly the Phoenician script built into the shadow. 

Moment 2 

20.05.24 

The second moment of this installation celebrates the finding of the sarcophagus of King Tabnit thirty-two years following the finding of that of his son. The sarcophagus is on display today at the Istanbul Museum, lying down horizontally, 969 km away from Sidon. Its installation thirty-two days following (moment 1) points, schematically, at the passage of thirty-two years. Tabnit is represented in as a bas relief, lying horizontally on the floor behind the sarcophagus of his son, in such a way that the two cast a single shadow, with the Phoenician inscriptions found on both sarcophagi. Given their presences in two national museums that inherited a lot of the frictions between France and the Ottoman empire, namely the Louvre and Istanbul Museums, this specific installation of the two sarcophagi is an attempt to overcome their impossible reunion in real. The two sarcophagi are here united through a single shadow that fuses them in an imagined space, in which the mother has a place so that the whole is perceived as a trinity.