Beads forming part of a dress from 2345BCE-2494BCE - 5th Dynasty (Now on loan abroad until early 2009).
Shruti Ganapathy continues her investigation of Egyptian art and artefacts in the capital, with a tantalising glimpse into the remarkable collection at the Petrie Museum.
Only a hundred yards away from the current exhibition of Egyptian textiles at the Brunei Gallery is the Petrie Museum located on the University College London (UCL) campus. Here you will find a collection of Egyptian antiquities that covers the vast funerary legacy of Ancient Egypt.
Named after William Matthew Flinders Petrie, the first professor of Egyptian Archaeology, the museum was originally set up to help train students of Egyptology at the university.
One of the oldest artefacts in the museum: a string of beads from the Paleolithic period
Walking into it feels like gaining access to an Egyptian Pandora’s box. Numerous objects are displayed with labels and barcodes but for the uninitiated there is no text or explanation stating what they are, where they were found or how were they used.
Pots and pans, earthenware, jugs and vases, clothes, letters on papyrus, examples of hieroglyphs, tombs, conical flasks and burners are just a fragment of the treasures on show. You will also find beakers, hair curlers, hair pins, coral necklaces, weighing measures, stone tablets – everything you would associate with Ancient Egyptian culture.
The museum houses more than 80,000 objects but only displays around five per cent of them due to space constraint, yet what you can see in the museum still feels like a wonderful cabinet of curiosities
A painted mask, possibly from the early middle Kingdom Early Middle Kingdom (1850BCE-2025BCE)
You might find yourself asking many questions of these fascinating objects although in fairness all these items are catalogued and on display on the Petrie Museum website along together with a lot of background history. The site is bilingual in Arabic. The Petrie is mainly used for research and many people who come here prefer to draw their own conclusions about the items on display.
The Petrie is also currently working with historians from Egypt and Sudan to interpret the artefacts housed with the Petrie and to give their opinions and perspectives on what these things mean to them back home.
A woolen textile from the Coptic period (300 - 1000CE)
The objects illustrate life around the Nile Valley from the time of the pharaohs, the Ptolemaic, Roman and Coptic times to the current day Islamic period. Certain articles highlight the world’s largest collection of Roman period Mummy portraits and the collection of ancient clothing includes a pair of socks from Roman Egypt.
But more than these highlights, the collection at the Petrie Museum is important because much of it comes from documented excavations - providing insights into how people have lived and died in the Nile Valley.
The museum is likely to shift venue in the next five years to a larger place where they will be able to have their entire collection on display for the first time.
A four-and-a-half thousand year old linen tunic
I was lucky enough to be given a sneak preview of some of the Coptic textiles by the museum manager. Beautifully woven, colours carefully used and designs extremely intricate, each colour had a huge significance in the Egyptian culture and they were never used out of context. They had great meaning when they were used.
A flint flake toy hippopotamus from Dynasty 12 - 1795BCE-1985BCE
A journey to the Petrie Museum gives you a fascinating insight into an ancient civilization allowing you to glimpse a time and civilization that flourished thousands of years ago on the Nile Delta. It seems that people then were as greedy as now, people then were as vain as now, people then needed as much comfort as now and people enjoyed as much as now.
In a sense this exhibition portrays that although times have changed significantly, human nature has not changed much.
