Aquila Dodgson Collection

Thanks to the kindness of a contact at the Yorkshire Archaeological Society the Manchester Museum is hoping to acquire a small private collection of Egyptology. Campbell Price sent me details about the objects and I recognised a name from the past. Some of the collection originally came from someone called Aquila Dodgson. When I was Curator of Archaeology in Leeds some years ago I acquired a  small collection of Egyptology from a Mr Hepper whose family had got it originally from Aquila Dodgson.

Aquila Dodgson

Aquila Dodgson (1829-1919) was Secretary of the Leeds Philosophical and Literary Society and has been described as ‘one of the key players in the history of British Egyptology’ because of his support for people like Flinders Petrie and Amelia Edwards. Dodgson accompanied Sir Flinders Petrie to Egypt in 1891-2 and some of the bead bracelets/necklaces in his collection came from Petrie’s excavations at “Serabit”, i.e. Serabit el-Khadem in the Sinai. Aquila Dodgson had strong links with Leeds, and in fact Leeds Museums and Galleries acquired a few items from Dodgson’s collection in 1945 through a gift made by Dodgson’s son Walter.

Mr Nigel Hepper’s collection had come from Dodgson and consisted mostly of ancient Egyptian antiquities included faience amulets depicting the deities Anubis, Bes, Thoth, Taweret, Isis, Horus, Nephthys, Ptah, Osiris and Shu; Wedjat eye amulets and Djed pillar amulets, bead necklaces, some with amulets depicting the Four Sons of Horus; bronze figurines of Horus and Osiris; a Canopic jar lid of calcite (depicting the baboon-headed god Hapy), small alabaster cosmetics pots, a Predynastic black-rimmed jar a small painted wooden figure, shabti (several of which were fakes), a fired clay mould for making a wedjat eye amulet, several ancient Egyptian pots including two 18^th Dynasty jars; a winged scarab, bronze inlay from the eye from a statue, and a group of scarab amulets. Perhaps the most significant item was a wooden shabti of pharaoh Seti I, dated 1405 BC, which was originally collected by Amelia Edwards in 1887.

Mr Hepper published a note on the item in The Journal of Egyptian Archaeology (vol.86, 2000). Mr Hepper wrote that this shabti was one of the immense number once in Seti I’s tomb in the Valley of the Kings and was collected by Amelia Edwards and passed by her to Aquila Dodgson.

Display of the Dodgson collection in the former Leeds Museums Resource Centre

The Hepper collection was secured for Leeds Museums and Galleries thanks to a £6,000 grant from the Heritage Lottery Fund, a £1,000 donation from the Leeds Philosophical and Literary Society, and money from the museums’ own acquisitions budget.

This is not the first time Aquila Dodgson’s name has cropped up in conversation at Manchester, however. A few years ago, after coming to work in Manchester, I received an enquiry from an Australian researcher called Christine Elias. She was working on material in Queen’s College at the University of Melbourne antiquities collection and, guess what? She had found Aquila Dodgson objects! The University of Melbourne received the Egyptian artefacts from Revd James Dodgson, Aquila Dodgson’s brother. Christine Elias wrote her MA thesis on the collection.

We are now in the process of contacting Christine to let her know that more of this historic collection has come to light.

Predynastic Pots in Demonstration of Petrie’s Sequence Dating

Susan Martin & Suzanna working on Predynastic pots

Work on the new displays continues as we rapidly approach the opening in late October. Over the last few weeks we’ve had a couple of placements from the university’s archaeology department working with us. In this image Susan our curatorial assistant is arranging some Predynastic Egyptian pots with the help of Suzanna, one of the placements. This is a trial arrangement for one of the displays in the 1st gallery of Ancient Worlds.

In the new displays we explore various aspects of archaeology and on the first table we look at Manchester’s contribution to the story. Right from the start we wanted to show that archaeology and Egyptology, though separate collections in the Museum, are part and parcel of the same discipline.

The first table with its focus on Manchester allows us to highlight the fact that the fieldwork of famous Egyptologist, William Mathew Flinders Petrie (1853-1942) was financed in part by Manchester businessman Jesse Haworth (1835- 1921). We’re also trying to show how people find out about different aspects of life in the past and our rich collections allow us to show Petrie’s serial or sequence dating technique. You can get an idea of what we’re trying to do by looking at the diagram on the Petrie Museum’s website

Petrie knew that  the style and frequency of the objects he found in graves changed over time. His seriation technique enabled him to chart those changes and to tell whether any given grave group came earlier or later in the sequence. At the time he was working there weren’t techniques like radiocarbon dating so this relative dating method was useful, especially if the sequence was anchored by a later date.

In the case of the Predynastic pottery the material changed over the thousand years leading up to the unification of Egypt about 3100 BC. By laying the pots out in advance as an example of Petrie’s sequence dating we can test whether everything fits and get an idea of how things will look. Our thanks to Suzanna for helping us with this work.

An arrangement of Predynastic Egyptian pottery