Most museum exhibits of artifacts from Ancient Egypt are carefully arranged in spacious cases where individual objects are curated with associated descriptions. The Petrie Museum within University College London (UCL) is not quite like that where an astonishing number of artifacts are contained within a remarkably small exhibition area. The museum is for the most part a quiet space – visitors infrequently find their way to its attractions – but are rewarded in doing so. A solitary member of staff hardly glances up from her desk – no words are spoken as if not to break the spell of the silence of the ages. Most of the artifacts on display have been recovered by the famous Egyptian Archaeologist Flinders Petrie from archaeological sites in Egypt and where various of the items appear to communicate aspects of the personality of their owners. One astonishing exhibit was a linen dress with pleats still visible and which I recall was 5000 years old. This was obviously an artifact handled with extreme care and which had the effect of making the ancient culture come to life. Whose garment was this? What had been the life’s story of the one to whom it had belonged?
I had earlier that day attended a meeting and had come prepared with a resourceful compact Canon camera and was able to take a significant number of images of the collection through the protective glass if the display cabinets. The question did arise as to how controlled was the air quality within the cabinets to maintain preservation of the artifacts.
Along a corridor in the collection was set out a series of what could be described as Ancient Egyptian weights and measures that would presumably have been used in one application to weigh grain of the Ancient Kingdom. These weights were mainly carved from dense black stone – possibly granite. It could be imagined the absolute care taken to fashion such weights to a set value – probably set by a single reference stone of ancient lineage. There would of course have been official overseers of such a system of weights by which trade and commerce would have been conducted. No doubt Petrie himself would have attempted to establish the absolute values of such measures and possibly even check how consistent they were across the Ancient Kingdom.
(More images to follow when I locate the camera chip of images of my visit to the museum.)
