Ancient Egypt by torchlight

Ancient Egypt by torchlight – Mummies, monuments… and mystery!

Thursday 26th January, 6.30-9.30pm.

Join Curator Campbell Price at 7.15 & 8.45pm for a guided torchlight tour of the highlights from the current Ancient Egyptian Afterlife gallery before it closes for redevelopment at the end of February.

 http://events.manchester.ac.uk/event/event:y1o-gv2kktw0-lzwyz5/

Salford EA7 on display in Caracas

Spurious theories about Pharaonic trans-Atlantic voyages aside, it would have been neigh on impossible to make such a trip in 300 BC. In fact, Sheri-ankh’s knowledge of the world beyond Egypt would have been limited. In the age of the early Ptolemies, when Sheri-ankh lived, we may reasonably expect her to have known about places around the ancient Mediterranean. Her trip in 2011 AD would therefore have beyond her wildest imaginings.

Yesterday, conservators checked up on the condition of Sheri-ankh’s mummy and her finely painted and gilded coffin. Both were given to the Manchester Museum by Salford Museum in 1979, and bear their original number: EA7 . They have just returned from a loan to Caracas in Venezuela. Accompanied by conservator Jenny Discombe, the crated mummy and coffin landed in Caracas via Frankfurt  in May 2011. Once it arrived, the crate had to be winched – using a crane – up the side of a 4-storey building to join other exhibits in the display.  All of this took place under Jenny’s watchful eye – in darkness, at 2am. Quite an adventure – for both courier and ancient priestess!

A crane winches Sheri-ankh in Caracas

‘How Did Ancient Egyptian Statues Work?’

SATURDAY 28TH JANUARY, 10 AM-4PM, THE GARSTANG MUSEUM OF ARCHAEOLOGY, 12-14 ABERCROMBY SQUARE,UNIVERSITY OF LIVERPOOL. L69 7WZ.

As part of the HLF Skills for the Future programme, the British Museum, together with five regional partner museums, is looking for five ambitious and creative people to take part in this paid work-based training initiative. Trainees will spend a total of 18 months at two UK museums; six months at the British Museum and 12 months at a partner museum. Through formal training and on-the-job experience, each trainee will acquire specific collections knowledge, an extensive range of curatorial and transferable skills, and a large network of professional contacts, invaluable for laying the foundations for a successful career in the sector. The programme welcomes applications from a diverse range of people and backgrounds to apply for this unique trainee opportunity to build skills and knowledge for a career in the Museum sector.

The traineeship will begin in June 2012, with recruitment open 11th January – 17th February 2012.

The five positions we are looking to fill are:

Trainee curator in Ancient Egypt and Sudan

Trainee curator in Ethnographic Collections

Trainee curator in Far Eastern Culture

Trainee curator in Late Medieval Europe

Trainee curator in Islamic Art and Culture

We will be holding an Open Evening in the Kanaris Lecture Theatre at Manchester Museum from 5.30-7pm on 24th January. This will be a great opportunity to hear an introduction to the programme, meet some of the curators at the Museum, and ask any questions you might have. The team will be there at 5.30pm for anyone who would like an informal chat, and the formal presentation about the programme will start at 6pm. Places for the open evening are limited, and we will allocate on a first come first served basis. Those who wish to attend are asked to RSVP to qin.cao@manchester.ac.uk.

To find out more about the programme, visit http://www.britishmuseum.org/about_us/skills-sharing/future_curators.aspx or e-mail futurecurators@britishmuseum.org

Loretta and some Lahun pots

A useful way to get to know the collection is by facilitating access to objects for visiting researchers. Before the visit last week of Loretta Kilroe, an Oxford University student and native of Manchester working on Middle Kingdom pottery from Flinders Petrie’s excavations at Lahun, I hadn’t known about the distinctive potters’ marks on many of these vessels. Researchers like Loretta are able to throw new light on objects often packed away in storage, as here. We hope, however, that much more of this material – and results from the research of Loretta and others – will feature in the new Ancient Worlds galleries.

Photography for guidebook

Photography is now complete for the Egyptian objects set to feature in the Museum’s souvenir guidebook, currently in preparation. The photography by Paul Cliff will highlight both some hidden gems, and bring out new aspects of well-known favourites. Here Paul is getting the lighting just right to capture the colourfully painted eye-panel of the box coffin of Nakht-ankh.

Finally, it is now possible to follow everything Egypt and Sudan at Manchester on Facebook. This new page allows a platform for swift, easy updates and will provide more images than are possible here. Click ‘like’ to find out more.

© Paul Cliff / Victoria Hayden

Each month I hope to highlight an individual object that will feature in our new Ancient Worlds galleries. Many of the objects in the collection have incredible stories behind them but, due to an inevitable lack of space, these cannot be included fully in gallery labels or text panels. We aim to tell some of these stories – or “object biographies” – in digital content to accompany the new displays.

This small cup is only 6.75 cms in height but is made of eye-catching bright blue faience, or glazed composition ceramic. The hieroglyphs name Nesi-khonsu, wife of the Twenty-first Dynasty ruler Pinedjem II. She is given the title “first in charge of the musical troupe of Amun” (tA wrt-xnrt tp n imn) – a group of female musicians who entertained the deity in his temple at Karnak.

This piece belongs to a set of such vessels from Nesi-khonsu’s burial, intended to contain oils for use in rituals, and now scattered across several museum collections. For example, four cups from the set are in the Myers Collection of Eton College (below). Other examples are in the British Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the National Archaeological Museum in Athens.

Nesi-khonsu cups in the Myers Collection, Eton College

Our cup entered the Manchester collection from a 1922 Sotheby’s sale of objects collected by the Rev. William MacGregor. The accessions register lists its provenance as “Deir el-Bahri”, without giving any more detail. In fact the cup derives from one of Egyptology’s most spectacular discoveries: tomb DB320, the cache of royal mummies at Deir el-Bahri. The tomb was the family sepulchre of Nesi-khonsu’s husband, Pinedjem II of the Twenty-first Dynasty, but also contained the mummies of such famous rulers as Ahmose, Amenhotep I, Tuthmose III, Ramesses II and III. Their tombs had been robbed, so their bodies had been collected together, rewrapped and re-coffined during the Third Intermediate Period.

Funerary objects from the Deir el-Bahri cache (tomb DB 320)

DB320 officially came to light in 1881, after objects from it had appeared on the art market and raised Egyptologists’ suspicions of a major find. The infamous Abd er-Rassul family of tomb robbers had known about the tomb for over a decade and only grudgingly gave up their personal treasure trove to the antiquities authorities. Once officially cleared, the tomb yielded a mass of funerary equipment of the original occupants – including Nesi-khonsu’s libation vessels. Two are shown on this photo, taken soon after the discovery.

As part of the redevelopment of our Ancient Worlds galleries, the Museum has been consulting local community groups. A week into the job, I accompanied our Curator for Community Exhibitions on a visit to a group of older people called ‘Forever Young’, who meet regularly at Fallowfield Library. This was a superb opportunity to get a local perspective on our plans and explore expectations for the galleries. Interest focused on the precise age of the objects, their materials, and how they could be tied into Egyptian history. A particular fondness emerged for our Graeco-Roman mummy portrait collection, which I’m sure will be satisfied by our new displays.

Work on the Ancient Worlds galleries themselves continues apace, and I have been busy selecting object images for digital resources from the thousands taken by photographer Paul Cliffe. However, one of our most exciting recent discoveries concerned some very old photos. Lynsey Halliday, a student volunteer at the Museum about to begin a Masters in Museum Studies at Leicester, happened across a box containing dozens of old photographs of Egypt. They were mainly taken by the Zangaki brothers, who are known to have been active in Egypt between 1870 and 1890. Others are by contemporaries Antonio Beato and P. Peridis. A range of scenes are recorded, including both pharaonic remains and intimate studies of contemporary people. Monuments are often depicted still half-buried – the very situation encountered by important figures in the formation of the Manchester Egyptology collection – such as W. M. F. Petrie, Amelia Edwards, and Jesse Haworth – when they themselves first visited Egypt.

Lynsey has repackaged and scanned each of the images, and thanks to her careful work digital versions are now available to view in a Flickr gallery. Perhaps you own or have seen similar images? We’d be very keen to find out!

My undergraduate and masters studies were in Egyptology at Liverpool, where I developed a focus on material culture. I undertook an AHRC-funded PhD on the function of non-royal statues during the Egyptian Late Period (c. 750-30BC), examining a partially unpublished corpus from the Karnak Cachette. My research interests focus on how the ancient Egyptians interacted with objects such as statues, and how modern experiences – especially in museums – affect our perceptions. Egyptian culture during the First Millennium BC is of particular interest to me, and I worked with Karen on the interpretation of material from this period for the new Ancient Worlds galleries.

I am also the Director of the Glasgow Museums’ Saqqara Geophysical Survey Project, the only mission active in Egypt from my native Scotland. The team uses a range of geophysical techniques to map subsurface features at Saqqara, one of Egypt’s most significant religious sites throughout the Pharaonic period. This work has revealed many previously unknown structures, and improves our understanding of the sacred landscapes created at Saqqara.

Since starting at the end of November I’ve hit the ground running at the Museum, where work on the Ancient Worlds redisplay is well underway. I’m very excited by the prospect of redisplaying such a rich collection and am taking every opportunity to get to know the objects, their history and ways of bringing them to wider audiences. More posts about everything Egypt (and Sudan) will appear here soon.