Gazing out along the tree-lined brick wall that borders the east side of the park, sidewalk opens up in front of the Museum, trumpet player blows a tune for the lunchers sitting on the steps eating food cart fare as the circle fountain dances in patterns of water pressure, child touches a cold jet, screams, and runs back to nanny behind a stroller. Shift gaze to the north of the building, sun ra through the latticed window wall where the tranquil Temple of Dendur stands in pale sandstone reconstructed, reflecting in the shallow pool that surrounds its base with papyrus fronds engraved, recalling its original home on the side of the Nile where reads swayed and worshipers prayed to the holy trinity of Ancient Egypt: Isis, Osiris, and Horus. Isis gave birth to her son in a papyrus thicket along the great river, conceived by bringing his father back from the dead for one night, and so she influences the regenerative and fertile flooding that the river brings each year, and is therefore the deity to whom the temple is dedicated. Commissioned by Augustus as he rebranded himself a benevolent ruler after Octavian’s bloody conquests to concentrate power, which he achieved off the coast of Actium, destroying Antony and Cleopatra’s fleet while simultaneously ending the Roman Republic and Ancient Egypt. The temple commemorates two sons of a Nubian ruler who both drowned in the sacred Nile, deaths deemed appropriate for deification, and the temple itself would have been submerged and lost to the river as well if not for international efforts to save and relocate it when a dam was raised to help control the flooding in the 1960s, which made the preceding section of the river swell into a lake and spill into ancient inner sanctums. Largest partage contribution to saving the ancient temples came from President JFK at the behest of Jackie, and so Dendur was gifted to the United States. After her husband’s death, Jackie wanted the temple to be placed in Washington as a memorial, but you can’t deify the leader of a secular state, only promise prominence in posterity, so instead it was transported to the archive, one ton brick by one ton brick across the Atlantic and into the Sackler wing, named for the family that profits off of percocet overprescribed into epidemic of addiction, morally launder their names like Koch and Lehman through benevolent donations to the arts, and special thanks to the Rocketfuellers for their oil money, but nothing deceives Sakhmet, daughter of Ra and goddess of disease and disaster, who watches over the temple with black stone eyes while plagues of pestilence, wild fire, flood, and famine increase on earth until we divest from white collar criminals who endeavor to keep humanity in their servitude for the price of…
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