Study Day – Saturday 16 Feb 2019: The Two Brothers

The Two Brothers: Kinship in Ancient Egypt – Manchester Museum Day School

Full Programme and Abstracts here

The ‘Two Brothers’ tomb group has been an important part of the Egyptology display in the Manchester Museum for over a hundred years. It is one of the finest group of objects from a private burial of the Middle Kingdom and this year’s annual study day brings together experts to review this collection, examine the scientific investigations that have been carried out and the results of the latest DNA studies. The discussion will widen to consider kinship in general in ancient Egypt. Proceeds from this event will be donated to hellofuture – Manchester Museum’s new development project.

Venue – Lecture Theatre A, University Place (opposite Museum). Price – £35. Bookings can be made here: www.bit.ly/AEkinship.

Programme

9.15          Registration: tea/coffee

9.45          Welcome and Introduction

10.00          Interpreting the Two Brothers at Manchester Museum – Campbell Price

10.45          The Two Brothers: Health and disease – Rosalie David

11.30           – Tea/coffee break –

12.00          Were they brothers? The DNA evidence – Roger Forshaw 

12.30          Picture perfect and bad blood: Funerary evidence of familial relationships from the Ancient Egyptian necropolis at Saqqara – Iwona Kozieradzka-Ogunmakin

1.15            – Lunch – (please make own arrangements)                         

2.15      So what did it mean to be brothers in ancient Egypt? – Leire Olabarria

3.15             – Tea/coffee break 

3.40            Gladden her heart as long as you live: wealth, death and divorce in non-royal close-kin marriages in ancient Egypt – Joanne Robinson

4.30            Conclusion

 

Closure of Ancient Worlds galleries

It’s a Wrap as Manchester Museum closes its Ancient Worlds Galleries, Reopening in 2021

Manchester Museum, part of the University of Manchester, will be taking its much loved objects on tour over the next three years as the museum undergoes an exciting £13 million transformation, hello future. The museum will be building a new two-storey extension, which includes a partnership South Asia gallery with The British Museum, Chinese Culture gallery, Special Exhibitions Hall a new entrance and shop, making it more inclusive, imaginative and relevant to the diverse communities it serves.

During this time the museum will remain open, however its Ancient Worlds galleries will close on the 1^st of October until early 2021 in order to keep displayed collections safe while extensive building work takes place. Dr Campbell Price, Curator of Egypt and Sudan, said: “While this may seem disappointing for the many visitors that come to Manchester Museum to see its significant Egyptian collection, this is an exciting opportunity for the museum to take its objects out on the road to all sorts of new spaces and places, building new partnerships across the city and the world.”

Manchester Museum will also be lending Egyptian artefacts to a larger number of external exhibitions on a temporary basis such as Bolton, Liverpool, and Wakefield and at several venues around Europe. While the Ancient Worlds galleries are closed, access to stored collections will continue for researchers. Upon re-opening in 2021, a larger number of the museum’s Egyptology collections will be on display, including never-before-seen stonework.

On Thursday 20 September, 6-10pm, Manchester Museum is hosting a celebration to say goodbye to its Ancient Worlds galleries. The event, It’s a Wrap is an evening of music, poetry and performance. Come along to hear the hieroglyphs, handle never-before-seen objects and join Manchester Museum in raising a farewell toast to its much loved Ancient Egypt gallery, reopening in 2021. 

 

 

Deir el-Medina Double Lecture by Cédric Gobeil 07/04/18

“Life in the Royal Workmen’s Town of Deir el-Medina”
by Dr Cédric Gobeil, Director of the Egypt Exploration Society

Manchester Ancient Egypt Society and the Egypt Exploration Society
Join us for two lectures by EES Director Dr Cédric Gobeil about his excavations at Deir el-Medina and his research on the tattooed mummy recently identified at Deir el-Medina
Saturday 7th April 11am – 2pm
Kanaris Lecture Theatre, Manchester Museum
The University Of Manchester, Oxford Rd, Manchester, M13 9PL

10:30am – Doors open

11am – Introduction from Dr Campbell Price, Curator of Egypt and Sudan

11:10 – 12:00 Lecture 1

12:00 – Lunch

13:00-14:00 Lecture 2

14:00 – Close

 

Tickets £20
Booking form here: EES MAES booking form

Book Review – ‘Nefertiti’s Face: The Creation of an Icon’ by Joyce Tyldesley

Joyce Tyldesley’s new book concerns Ancient Egypt’s most well-known poster-girl: Nefertiti, or – more accurately – a painted limestone and plaster bust of her now in the Neues Museum in Berlin. Tyldesley has already written an excellent biography of the lady herself, and uses this opportunity to discuss her most famous representation – and how it skews our entire impression of who she was. The book follows the successful format of the biography of a single object adopted by Laurence Berman, curator at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, in his accessible study of the Late Period ‘Boston Green Head’. As a fellow curator, the idea of spending a whole book on a sole museum object is particularly appealing to me.

Now, I must confess personal bias here – Joyce is a friend and University of Manchester colleague, and we have discussed the content of the book extensively. Yet the finished product is one of the most important popular and accessible books now available in Egyptology. It chimes in with a welcome mood of reassessment of the history of Egyptology explored very provocatively – though sometimes in rather acerbic terms – in more academic works; the real value here is that, thanks to the popularity of her previous books and online courses at the University of Manchester, the general public are actually likely to read Joyce Tyldesley’s work.

Joyce and the Manchester Museum replica of the bust.

The book is divided into two parts: the ancient context of the bust and the importance of image production in ancient Egypt (a personal research interest of my own); and the modern reception of the object. The ancient archaeological setting is an especially fascinating one: a sculptor’s workshop at the centre of the production of a vast and still-experimental series of royal images. Nefertiti’s bust is rarely considered in the context of contemporary sculptural practice, which is surprisingly well-attested at Amarna. Tyldesley packs a lot in: notably, the vexed question of how the bust actually left Egypt, a convincing rebuttal of theories that it’s a fake, and the intriguing history of official replicas of the bust. From Adolf Hitler’s fascination with her beauty to the unlikely appropriation of its imagery for Sci-Fi movies, the bust of Nefertiti has had a powerful effect on Twentieth and Twenty-First Century popular culture.

A description, attributed to Hitler, expresses a populist tone that has a sinister and familar ring to it today:

“Oh, these Egyptologists and these professors! I don’t attach any value to their appraisals. I know this famous bust. I have viewed it and admired it many times….”

Who needs an expert to know anything? This reminds us that an object can mean many things to different people, whether or not we like those people is a different matter.

Most importantly, Tyldesley eloquently argues against an exception status for the queen herself. The one-in-a-million chance that such a (seemingly) exceptional piece should be so exceptionally well-preserved has vastly inflated our expectations of her role. As Tyldesley points out, the best comparison is with Nefertiti’s mother-in-law, Queen Tiye (who was actually more ‘famous’ before the seductive bust was found).

Ancient culture in general, and the Nefertiti bust in particular, is so over-loaded with modern meanings and significations that it is a wonder the queen’s slender, elegant neck hasn’t snapped under the strain.

 

‘Nefertiti’s Face: The Creation of an Icon’ is launched at Manchester Museum on Thursday 25th January, and will be on sale in our shop thereafter.

DNA confirms the Two Brothers’ relationship

Using ‘next generation’ DNA sequencing, scientists at the University of Manchester have confirmed a long-held supposition that the famous ‘Two Brothers’ of the Manchester Museum have a shared mother but different fathers – so are, in fact, half-brothers. This is the first in a series of blog posts presenting the DNA results, and discussing the interpretation and display of the Brothers in Manchester.

 

The ‘Two Brothers’ are among Manchester Museum’s most famous inhabitants. The complete contents of their joint burial forms one of the Museum’s key Egyptology exhibits, which have been on almost continuous display since they were first entered the Museum in 1908.

The Two Brothers’ inner coffins: Khnum-nakht (left) and Nakht-ankh (right), 2011

Central to public (and academic) interest have been the mummified bodies of the men themselves – Khnum-nakht and Nakht-ankh – who lived around the middle of the 12^th Dynasty, c. 1900-1800 BC. Their intact tomb was discovered at Deir Rifeh, a village 250 miles south of Cairo, in 1907 by an Egyptian workman called Erfai – a rare case where the non-European discoverer is named. He was working for Ernest MacKay and Flinders Petrie, the British archaeologists who wrote the reports and the names people usually remember. Unusually, the entire contents of the tomb – mummies, coffins, and a small number of other objects – were shipped to Manchester, rather than being divided among different international museum collections as was usually the case.

Once in Manchester, in 1908, the mummies of both men were unwrapped by the UK’s first female Egyptologist employed by a University, Dr Margaret Murray. This procedure, which mixed both science and spectacle, set the tone for more than a century’s worth of scientific investigation, exploiting the intact ‘time capsule’-like nature of the burial.

Margaret Murray and team with the remains of Nakht-ankh, 1908

Murray’s team –namely Dr John Cameron, an anatomist – concluded that the skeletal morphologies were quite different, suggesting an absence of a biological relationship. Although notoriously difficult to age such skeletal remains, the team suggested that Khnum-nakht had been around 40 years of age when he died and that Nakht-ankh had died at around the age of 60, perhaps around a year later than Khnum-nakht (based on year dates inked onto the bandages of both mummies).

Margaret Murray’s original publication of the tomb group

Hieroglyphic inscriptions on the coffins indicated that both men were the children of an unnamed local governor (thus, they were of the elite in society) and had a mother of the same name, Khnum-aa. It was thus that the men became known as the Two Brothers. Based on contemporary inscriptional evidence, it was proposed that one (or both) of the Brothers was adopted. Up until recently previous attempts to extract and analyse DNA from the Brothers’ remains had been inconclusive.

Therefore, in 2015, the DNA was extracted from the teeth, removed by Dr Roger Forshaw, a retired dentist, and analysed by Dr Konstantina Drosou, of the School of Earth and Environmental Sciences at the University of Manchester. Following hybridization capture of the mitochondrial and Y chromosome fractions, the DNA was sequenced by a next generation method. Analysis showed that both Nakht-ankh and Khnum-nakht belonged to mitochondrial haplotype M1a1, suggesting a maternal relationship. The Y chromosome sequences were less complete but showed variations between the two mummies, indicating that Nakht-Ankh and Khnum-Nakht had different fathers, and were thus very likely to have been half-brothers genetically.

The study, which is published in the Journal of Archaeological Science, is the first to successfully use the typing of both mitochondrial and Y chromosomal DNA in Egyptian mummies.

 

The Brothers pose a number of questions of interpretation, which – despite much interest in them – have not been fully explored. Some of the issues concerning their display and interpretation will be examined over the coming weeks on this blog.

Study Day 10/2/18: ‘Children in Ancient Egypt’

Annual Egyptology Study Day: ‘Children in Ancient Egypt’

Saturday 10th February, 2018

Kanaris Lecture Theatre, the Manchester Museum, Oxford Road

£30. Book here: http://estore.manchester.ac.uk/conferences-and-events/manchester-museum/egypt/children-in-ancient-egypt – All ticket sales will be donated to the Museum’s new capital project, to create a new improved Special Exhibition gallery and British Museum partnership gallery of South Asian Cultures.

PROGRAMME

9.15          Registration: tea/coffee

9.45          Welcome and Introduction

10.00          Sons of the King – Carving a Name for Yourself – Campbell Price

 10.30          Teething, Coughs and the Neshu Illness: Healing Remedies for Children in Ancient Egypt – Roger Forshaw 

 11.15          – Tea/coffee break –

11.45          A Rampart in my Heart: Royal Father-Son Relationships in the Early Ramesside Period – Nicky Nielsen

12.45          – Lunch – (please make own arrangements)

 1.45            Egyptology in Manchester – Campbell Price

 2.00            Lives short lived: What can we learn about the life and death of children in Ancient Egypt by studying their physical remains – Iwona Kozieradzka-Ogunmakin

3.00             – Tea/coffee break –

3.30            Pictures of a Life? Children’s Portraits, Playthings and Personhood in Graeco-Roman Egypt – April Pudsey

4.30            Conclusion

The abstracts for the study day are available here

Zahed Taj-Eddin’s ‘Shabtis: Suspended Truth’, 1 April – 30th June 2017

Zahed Taj-Eddin’s ‘Shabtis: Suspended Truth’ to feature at Manchester Museum

Responding to the current political debate on the subject of migration, Manchester Museum has commissioned a gallery installation by Syrian-born artist Zahed Taj-Eddin, which reflects on the Museum’s world-class Egyptology collection. Zahed Taj-Eddin was inspired particularly by Manchester Museum’s extensive collection of shabti figurines, which were placed in large numbers in tombs to act as servants for the afterlife. He has previously created 99 faience ceramic ‘Nu’ Shabtis for popular shows at the V&A, Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology and elsewhere.

Zahed’s new work places a multitude of his ‘Nu’ Shabti figures in new and unexpected contexts, many suspended as if floating in the main Ancient Worlds gallery space. The focus of the installation is to reflect the experience of migrants on a boat travelling across the Mediterranean towards a new existence.
Zahed said: “For this new installation I decided to suspend my ‘Nu’ Shabtis in the Museum
galleries. They are taking a new journey into time and space; suspended between the past and the present, searching for a new truth, different from the one they were made for. The display invites visitors to think about ancient and modern human issues such as the beliefs and actions that lead us to venture into the unknown and explore a better life beyond.”
Dr Campbell Price, Curator of Egypt and Sudan, said: “Our aim in working with Zahed has been to address contentious social questions through the lens of archaeological collections; to use seemingly familiar objects and provoke discussion of big contemporary topics. Zahed’s sculptures are both serious political commentary and enthralling objects in their own right.”
Zahed’s installation is accompanied by a display of more than 250 ancient examples from one of the world’s most important private collections of shabtis, many never seen on public display before.

Shabtis from the Kemehu Collection

‘Shabtis: Suspended Truth’ will be on view at in Manchester Museum’s Ancient Worlds galleries from the 1 st of April until the 30th of June 2017.

#MMShabtis

“If a crocodile has sex with her…” Lecture by Dr Luigi Prada, 13/1/17

To close our season of events in conjunction with the touring exhibition, ‘Gifts for the Gods: Animal Mummies Revealed’:

“If a crocodile has sex with her…”: Animals between magic, religion, and divination in Graeco-Roman Egypt.

Dr Luigi Prada, University of Oxford

2pm, Friday 13th January, Collections Study Centre, Manchester Museum

Book here

Animals played a huge role not only in the practical daily life of the ancient Egyptians, but also in their intellectual and spiritual life, especially in the Graeco-Roman Period.

Whilst we may be familiar with their overall role in Egyptian cults, there are aspects which remain often unknown outside the specialists’ circle–such as, for instance, the fact that sacred animals typically carried personal names (very much like our pets), that archaeological excavations revealed the existence of animal nurseries in Egyptian temples where, for instance, thousands of crocodile eggs were looked after to hatch, and many more such intriguing facts.

Greaco-Roman tunic from Egypt, with figures of animal divinities

Even more remarkably, animals in Graeco-Roman Egypt were seen as divine agents not only in a cultic milieu, but also in private magical and divination practices. Thus, we know for instance of numerous papyri, many of which are still unpublished, that discuss omens connected with animals. Some are dream interpretation handbooks, and discuss the meaning of dreams in which animals are sighted, explaining what this foretells with regard to the dreamer’s future. Other, even more remarkable texts (such as one known under its ancient title as ‘The Book of the Gecko’) focus instead on animal omens experienced in the waking state, interpreting a myriad of animals’ movements and behaviour as signs of events to befall the human observer.

This talk will introduce the audience into this fascinating and little-known material.

Dr Luigi Prada is Lady Wallis Budge Junior Research Fellow in Egyptology at the University of Oxford, a Theodor Heuss Research Fellow (Alexander von Humboldt Foundation and Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg) and a Trustee of the Egypt Exploration Society.

‘Mummies, Magic and Medicine’: New book honouring Rosalie David

Prof Rosalie David OBE is the UK’s first female Professor in Egyptology, and former Keeper of Egyptology at Manchester Museum, whose pioneering work at the University of Manchester on Egyptian mummies, magic and medicine has been of international importance.

The volume, published by Manchester University Press, celebrates Professor David’s 70^th birthday. It presents research by a number of leading experts in their fields: recent archaeological fieldwork, new research on Egyptian human remains and unpublished museum objects along with reassessments of ancient Egyptian texts concerned with healing and the study of technology through experimental archaeology. Papers try to answer some of Egyptology’s enduring questions – How did Tutankhamun die? How were the Pyramids built? How were mummies made? – along with less well-known puzzles.

Rather than address these areas separately, the volume adopts the so-called ‘Manchester method’ instigated by Rosalie David and attempts to integrate perspectives from both traditional Egyptology and scientific analytical techniques. Much of this research has never appeared in print before, particularly that resulting from the Manchester Egyptian Mummy Project, set up at the Manchester Museum in the 1970s. The resulting overview gives a good history of the discipline, illustrating how Egyptology has developed over the last 40 years, and how many of the same big questions still remain.

Rosalie David at Manchester Museum in 1974

Dr Campbell Price, Curator of Egypt and Sudan at Manchester Museum and senior editor of the book, said: “As the Museum’s Keeper of Egyptology for 30 years, Rosalie David has inspired many people, old and young, and has brought the collection and her subject to the widest possible audience. This book celebrates her work and a proud Manchester Museum tradition.”

The book, published in June 2016, is aimed at researchers and students of archaeology or related disciplines with an interest in multidisciplinary approaches to understanding life and death in ancient Egypt and Sudan.

‘Mummies, Magic and Medicine in Ancient Egypt: Multidisciplinary Essays for Rosalie David’ C. Price, R. Forshaw, P. Nicholson and A. Chamberlain (eds) Manchester University Press 2016.

Details, including Table of Contents, can be found at the Manchester University Press website: http://www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk/9781784992439/

Egypt in World War I: Manchester Histories Festival

To commemorate the WW1 Centenary, researchers from Cardiff University will hold a ‘roadshow’ at the Museum on Saturday 11th and Sunday 12th June exploring local links between Manchester regiments serving in Egypt and the Middle East and collecting memories. Items from the Manchester Museum archive relating to the Great War will be on display, with short tours by the Curator of Egyptology. A special presentation will take place at 11am on Saturday 11th June.

The team hope that visitors will bring photographs, postcards, stereoviews, lantern-slides, or any other items relating to wartime spent in Egypt and Palestine along to find out more about how they fit into a wider picture. Once loaded to the website copies of images will be available for all to see and so give a more comprehensive view of the First World War in Egypt than is presently available.

Please bring along any photographs etc. for the team to re-photograph or scan for uploading to the website – they are not looking to keep any original material, everything will be rendered virtually.

Views of an Antique Land – Imaging Egypt and Palestine in the First World War

Much of the commemoration of the First World War has focussed on the Western Front and so gives the impression that the war was entirely one of mud and trenches with very little movement. However, the war in Egypt and Palestine was much more mobile and often fast moving. It is a surprise to many that a great number of personnel served in Egypt and Palestine at some point during the war with units regularly being withdrawn from the Western Front to serve in the area before returning to Europe.  A new project offers a different perspective on the First World War using images taken in Egypt and Palestine during the period of the conflict.

Leading the project from Cardiff University are Dr Steve Mills and Professor Paul Nicholson of the School of History, Archaeology and Religion supported by project officer Hilary Rees.  The project, supported by the Heritage Lottery Fund, focusses on collecting and making accessible images of Egypt and Palestine as they would have been seen by people during the First World War.  To this end we are collecting not only military images but also those of the ancient monuments of Egypt and Palestine which have much to tell us about the presentation of archaeological sites at that time.

The aim is to collect photographs taken by service personnel, postcards, lantern slides and stereo-views. The project does not collect the actual views but rather scans of them which will be uploaded to a dedicated interactive website where anyone interested in seeing what their ancestors saw or who is interested in how the ancient monuments, cities, towns and villages looked during the First World War can get that information.

 

The website at http://sites.cardiff.ac.uk/ww1imagesegypt/ will be a perpetual online learning resource and archive offering new views of archaeological sites, military installations and cities as they appeared during the war.

 

The participation of members of the public at all stages of the project is very welcome. It is hoped that they will contribute by uploading relevant images and information to the site and in identifying images.  The project team can be contacted directly at ww1imagesegypt@cardiff.ac.uk