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Established | 1892 |
---|---|
Location | London |
Coordinates | 51°31′25″N0°7′59″W / 51.52361°N 0.13306°W |
Collection size | Over 80,000 objects |
Website | Official website |
The Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology in London is part of University College London Museums and Collections. The museum contains over 80,000 objects, making it one of the world's largest collections of Egyptian and Sudanese material. [1] It is designated under the Arts Council England Designation Scheme as being of "national and international importance". [2]
The museum was established as a teaching resource for the Department of Egyptian Archaeology and Philology at University College at the same time as the department was established in 1892. [3] The initial collection was donated by the writer Amelia Edwards. [4] [5] The first Edwards Professor, William Matthew Flinders Petrie, conducted many important excavations, and in 1913 he sold his collections of Egyptian antiquities to University College, creating the Flinders Petrie Collection of Egyptian Antiquities, and transforming the museum into one of the leading collections outside Egypt. The collection was first put on display in June 1915. [6] Petrie excavated dozens of major sites in the course of his career, including the Roman Period cemeteries at Hawara, [7] famous for the beautiful mummy portraits in classical Roman style; [8] [9] Amarna, the city of king Akhenaten; [10] and the first true pyramid, at Meydum, where he uncovered some of the earliest evidence for mummification. [11]
The collection and library were arranged in galleries within the main building at the university and a guidebook was published in 1915. Initially, the collection's visitors were students and academics; it was not then open to the general public. Petrie retired from University College London (UCL) in 1933, [12] though his successors continued to add to the collections, excavating in other parts of Egypt and Sudan. During the Second World War (1939–1945) the collection was packed up and moved out of London for safekeeping. In the early 1950s it was moved into a former stable, where it remains adjacent to the DMS Watson science library of UCL.
The museum is at Malet Place, near Gower Street and the University College London science library. Admission is free. [13] The museum has an exhibitions and events programme for adults and families. [14] There is a Friends of the Petrie Museum charity that supports the museum. [15]
The museum is split into three galleries. The main gallery (housed above the old stables) contains many of the museum's small domestic artefacts, mummy portraits and cases, and the Inscriptions Aisle. The Inscriptions Aisle displays tablets, including Pyramid Texts, written in hieroglyphics, hieratic, Greek, and Arabic, and organised according to material type. Another gallery (the pottery gallery) contains many cabinets of pottery, clothing, jewellery, and shabti figures, arranged chronologically. A new entrance gallery was refurbished in 2019 [16] which provides an insight into the history of the museum, its collections, and notable figures.
The entire collection has been digitised and the catalogue can be browsed and consulted online. [17]
The museum contains over 80,000 objects [23] as has been designated as a collection of national and international importance by the Arts Council England. [2]
There are significant holdings of Egyptian costume, including a piece of Egyptian linen from around 5000 BC, one of the earliest known, [24] and the Tarkhan dress from the fourth millennium BC, the world's oldest known woven garment as of 2016 [update] . [25]
The collection also includes material from the Ptolemaic, Roman and Islamic periods. [26] This includes Britain's largest collection of Roman period mummy portraits. [27]
There is a substantial archive held in the museum, including excavation records, correspondence and photographs relating to excavations led by Flinders Petrie.[ citation needed ] There are additionally documents relating to the distribution of finds from fieldwork to museums worldwide between 1887 and 1949. [28]
In 2007 Left Coast Press published Living Images: Egyptian Funerary Portraits in the Petrie Museum, edited by Janet Picton, Stephen Quirke, and Paul C. Roberts. This book is on the Roman mummy portraits from the Fayum and details their conservation work.
In 2014 Bloomsbury Press published Archaeology of Race which "explores the application of racial theory to interpret the past in Britain during the late Victorian and Edwardian period." [32] The book, written by Debbie Chalice, specifically focuses on how Flinders Petrie applied the ideas of Francis Galton on inheritance and race to the discipline of archaeology.
In 2015 UCL Press published a multi-author compilation of articles, The Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology: Characters and Collections, which is available in both print and via a free open access download. [33] It is edited by Alice Stevenson.
Nefertiti was a queen of the 18th Dynasty of Ancient Egypt, the great royal wife of Pharaoh Akhenaten. Nefertiti and her husband were known for their radical overhaul of state religious policy, in which they promoted the earliest known form of monotheism, Atenism, centered on the sun disc and its direct connection to the royal household. With her husband, she reigned at what was arguably the wealthiest period of ancient Egyptian history. After her husband's death, some scholars believe that Nefertiti ruled briefly as the female pharaoh known by the throne name, Neferneferuaten and before the ascension of Tutankhamun, although this identification is a matter of ongoing debate. If Nefertiti did rule as pharaoh, her reign was marked by the fall of Amarna and relocation of the capital back to the traditional city of Thebes.
Mummy portraits or Fayum mummy portraits are a type of naturalistic painted portrait on wooden boards attached to upper class mummies from Roman Egypt. They belong to the tradition of panel painting, one of the most highly regarded forms of art in the Classical world. The Fayum portraits are the only large body of art from that tradition to have survived. They were formerly, and incorrectly, called Coptic portraits.
Sir William Matthew Flinders Petrie, commonly known as simply Sir Flinders Petrie, was a British Egyptologist and a pioneer of systematic methodology in archaeology and the preservation of artefacts. He held the first chair of Egyptology in the United Kingdom, and excavated many of the most important archaeological sites in Egypt in conjunction with his wife, Hilda Urlin. Some consider his most famous discovery to be that of the Merneptah Stele, an opinion with which Petrie himself concurred. Undoubtedly at least as important is his 1905 discovery and correct identification of the character of the Proto-Sinaitic script, the ancestor of almost all alphabetic scripts.
The Egypt Exploration Society (EES) is a British non-profit organization. The society was founded in 1882 by Amelia Edwards and Reginald Stuart Poole in order to examine and excavate in the areas of Egypt and Sudan. The intent was to study and analyze the results of the excavations and publish the information for the scholarly world.
The Edwards Professor of Egyptian Archaeology and Philology is a university professorial chair held at University College London.
El Lahun. It was known as Ptolemais Hormos in Ptolemaic Egypt.
Winifred Mabel Bruntonnée Newberry was a South African painter, illustrator and Egyptologist.
The Department of Ancient Egypt is a department forming an historic part of the British Museum, with Its more than 100,000 pieces making it the largest[h] and most comprehensive collection of Egyptian antiquities outside the Egyptian Museum in Cairo.
Bolton Art Gallery, Library & Museum is a public museum, art gallery, library and aquarium in the town of Bolton, England, owned by Bolton Metropolitan Borough Council. The museum, Bolton Museum, is housed within the grade II listed Le Mans Crescent near Bolton Town Hall and shares its main entrance with the library, Bolton Central Library, in a purpose-built civic centre.
Tarkhan is an ancient Egyptian necropolis, located around 50 km south of Cairo on the west bank of the Nile. The cemetery was excavated in two seasons by Flinders Petrie. Tombs of almost all periods were found, but most importantly many belonging to the time of Egyptian state formation, the Early Dynastic period around 3100 BC. Petrie found more than 2,000 tombs, most of them simple holes in the ground belonging to common people. However, there were also several mastabas of the First Dynasty, decorated with a palace facade.
Percy Edward Newberry was a British Egyptologist.
Stephen Quirke is an Egyptologist. He is the current Edwards Professor of Egyptian Archaeology and Philology at University College London. He has worked at the British Museum (1989–1998) and since 1999 at the Petrie Museum in London. He has published several books, some of them translated into other languages.
Gianluca Miniaci is an Italian Egyptologist, currently Associate Professor at the University of Pisa.
Hilda Mary Isabel, Lady Petrie, was an Irish-born British Egyptologist and wife of Sir Flinders Petrie, the father of scientific archaeology. Having studied geology, she was hired by Flinders Petrie at age 25 as an artist, which led to their marriage and a working partnership that endured for their lifetimes.
Kate Bradbury Griffith was a British Egyptologist who assisted in the early development of the Egypt Exploration Society and the Department of Egyptology at University College London (UCL). Bradbury was born in Ashton-under-Lyne, near Manchester, UK, to Elizabeth Ann Tomlins and businessman Charles Timothy Bradbury.
Violette Lafleur was a Canadian conservator and curator for the Department of Egyptology and Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology, University College London.
The Tarkhan Dress, named for the Tarkhan cemetery south of Cairo in Egypt where it was excavated in 1913, is an over 5000 year old linen garment that was confirmed as the world's oldest piece of woven clothing.
Alice Stevenson is a British archaeologist and museum curator. She is Professor of Museum Archaeology at UCL's Institute of Archaeology and a specialist in Predynastic and Early Dynastic Egyptian archaeology.
Jessie Mothersole was an English archaeologist, artist, and author.
Winifred 'Freda' Nest Hansard was an English Egyptologist. Trained as an artist, she produced drawings replicating inscriptions in Egyptian tombs.
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