Fascinating work by my museum colleagues in Natural History. We’ll be bottling our own Ancient Egyptian perfume before long, no doubt!

Biology Curator

The new Ancient Worlds gallery opens in October at the Manchester Museum, and though it will focus mainly on archaeology, natural history specimens do play an important role because the animals and plants ancient cultures encountered tell us a lot about their way of life.

One of the cabinets needs a backdrop that illustrates what plants Ancient Egyptians used to make perfume. More about the actual specimens themselves can be found here. Botany Curator Rachel Webster, myself and my fellow volunteer Veronica took photographs of combinations of plant specimens that were relevant to the creation of Egyptian perfume. Here are some of our efforts and photos of us at work:

<img src=”http://biologycurator.files.wordpress.com/2012/07/dscf1566.jpg?w=1024″ alt=”” title=”DSCF1566″ width=”1024″ height=”768″ class=”alignnone size-large wp-image-287″ />

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