Grave Goods

On Sunday, I went to the Louvre. I know, it's about time. I went with the intention of perusing the Northern Painting wing, in the hopes that I would be able to copy a pose from one of those paintings for my current project. Instead, I played hooky by wandering through the Egyptian antiquities collection. Now, it's strange, in any kind of encyclopedic museum, to see items that really don't belong in that country. The Egyptian collections in most museums are subject to this sense of the bizarre, but in France it's underlaid with outrage at Napoleon's empire-building in North Africa, where he had no right to be.
There's one room where rows of sarcophagi are lined up in two rows of glass cases down the center of the room. It's really freaky to see all these people's coffins laid out for public entertainment. I should say that I support the archeology behind it, and that I think repatriation to Egypt is, at this point in time, fruitless. Nonetheless, I find these rooms really weird and kind of perverse.