The Egyptian Collection At Norwich Castle Museum

The Egyptian Collection at Norwich Castle Museum represents the first full publication of this important collection which contains several outstanding objects. Part 1 begins with an outline of the acquisition history of the Egyptian collection and its display within Norwich Castle in 1894, when it was converted from a prison to a museum. The collection was largely acquired between the nineteenth and first part of the twentieth centuries. Its most prominent donor was Flaxman Spurrell, whose varied collection of flints, faience beads and necklaces as well as Late Antique cloths was obtained from Sir Flinders Petrie. Also prominent was the Norwich-based Colman family, most notable for its manufacture of mustard, whose collection was purchased in Egypt during the late-C19. Also included in this part are essays on several of the museum’s outstanding items – Ipu’s shroud, a rare early 18th Dynasty example with fragments also held in Cairo; the 22nd Dynasty finely decorated and well-preserved cartonnage and wooden lid of the priest, Ankh-hor; and the exceptional model granary of Nile clay painted with lively scenes, one showing the owner, Intef, playing senet. Part 2 is a detailed catalogue of the complete collection. It is organised into sections with objects grouped together mainly according to type – stelae, shabtis, scarabs, jewellery, amulets, vessels, flints, lamps, inscribed Book of the Dead fragments, metal figurines, and Late Antique cloths; and also according to function – such as cosmetics& grooming, and architectural & furniture elements. The inscribed materials have all been translated and individual entries give examples or parallels. Seventy colour plates illustrate each object.

Historical Dictionary of Ancient Egypt, Third Edition covers the whole range of the history of ancient Egypt from the Prehistoric Period until the end of Roman rule in Egypt based on the latest information provided by academic scholars and archaeologists. This is done through a revised introduction on the history of ancient Egypt, the dictionary section has over 1,000 dictionary entries on historical figures, geographical locations, important institutions and other facets of ancient Egyptian civilization. This is followed by two appendices one of which is a chronological table of Egyptian rulers and governors and the other a list of all known museums which contain ancient Egyptian objects. The volume ends with a detailed bibliography of Egyptian historical periods, archaeological sites, general topics such as pyramids, languages and arts and crafts and the publications of Egyptian material in museums throughout the world.

Early travellers to Egypt, Mesopotamia, Greece, Turkey and the Levant recorded and remembered their journeys by collecting or creating mementos of places they visited. This natural inclination took many guises, ranging from painting landscapes or, later, taking photographs to acquiring souvenirs, very often antiquities. The collection of antiquities, a controversial and usually illegal practice today, was in the 18th and 19th centuries not necessarily either, and many privately assembled collections now form the basis of major national museums. Souvenirs and New Ideas explores the human desire to retain the memory of a foreign journey, in a series of essays that examine the collections of a variety of travellers, from intrepid female solo voyagers to European royalty. Their acquisitions included souvenirs ranging from Egyptian mummies and ancient artefacts, to paintings and sketches of places visited, to the raw material for books written at leisure, both scholarly and popular. In their desire to share with those at home some of what they had seen, these voyagers contributed to an understanding of societies little known at the time, and the stories of their travels continue to entrance.

Over more than a century and a quarter of excavations the royal and administrative buildings in the city of Amarna have yielded the remains of many hundreds of statues that had been part of Akhenaten's visionary plan. But fragmentation and dispersal have up until now made the results almost invisible. Only a relatively small number of the original statues have been widely known, even to experts. The present publication brings together all these traces of the city's past to reveal the abundance, beauty, variety, and novelty of the statuary and to begin the process of reintegrating it in considerations of the temples and palaces of the city. The work is presented in two parts. The first volume presents extensive observations about the creation of the statuary, comprising chapters dealing with the range of materials and the methods of working them, a detailed explication of the novel creation of composite statuary, and an overview of the workshop buildings that have been identified so far at Amarna. In the second volume, the excavated fragments themselves, most of them previously unpublished, are catalogued in a series of chapters devoted to individual royal buildings. The original statues are envisioned and analysed for their contexts, resulting in new information about these buildings, the intentions and concerns behind them, and the evolution in those intentions.

The Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology ?rst opened its doors in 1915, and since then has attracted visitors from all over the world as well as providing valuable teaching resources. Named after its founder, the pioneering archaeologist Flinders Petrie, the Museum holds more than 80,000 objects and is one of the largest and finest collections of Egyptian and Sudanese archaeology in the world. Richly illustrated and engagingly written, the book moves back and forth between recent history and the ancient past, between objects and people. Experts discuss the discovery, history and care of key objects in the collections such as the Koptos lions and Roman era panel portraits. The rich and varied history of the Petrie Museum is revealed by the secrets that sit on its shelves.

This volume builds bridges between usually-separate social groups, between different methodologies and even between disciplines. It is the result of an innovative conference held at Swansea University in 2010, which brought together leading craftspeople and academics to explore the all-too-often opposed practices of experimental and experiential archaeology. The focus is upon Egyptology, but the volume has a wider importance. The experimental method is privileged in academic institutions and thus perhaps is subject to clear definitions. It tends to be associated with the scientific and technological. In opposition, the experiential is more rarely defined and is usually associated with schoolchildren, museums and heritage centres; it is often criticised for being unscientific. The introductory chapter of this volume examines the development of these traditionally-assumed differences, giving for the first time a critical and careful definition of the experiential in relation to the experimental. The two are seen as points on a continuum with much common ground. This claim is borne out by succeeding chapters, which cover such topics as textiles, woodworking and stoneworking. And Salima Ikram, Professor of Egyptology at the American University in Cairo, here demonstrates remarkably that our understanding of the classic Egyptian funerary practice of mummification benefits from both 'scientific' experimental and sensual experiential approaches. The volume, however, is important not only for Egyptology but for archaeological method more generally. The papers illuminate the pioneering of individuals who founded modern archaeological practice. Several papers are truly groundbreaking and deserve to circulate far beyond Egyptology. Thus the archaeologist Marquardt Lund tackles the problem of understanding the earliest known depictions of flint knife manufacture, those from an Egyptian tomb dated around 1900 BC. He shows the importance of thinking outside 'traditional', i.e. modern, knapping practice. Lund's knapping method, guided by the tomb depictions, is surprising but effective, and very different from that presented in manuals of lithic technology or taught in academic institutions.