Faces and Places Big Saturday at Manchester Museum

Anna, Campbell and Jamie at the recent faces and Places Big Saturday

Yesterday (16th November 2013) Campbell Price and Anna Garnett, volunteer, Jamie Skuse, and I helped out at the Faces and Places Big Saturday  at Manchester Museum. The aim of the event was to promote the Koma figurines from Ghana that are now displayed in the Museum’s third floor temporary exhibition space. The faces of the figurines are very expressive and Vicky in Public Programmes set out tables in the Discovery Centre so that visitors, especially families with young children, could make their own figurines out of modelling clay. We selected objects from the Egyptology and Archaeology collections with the intention of inspiring the children’s imaginations to make figurines but they were also a popular talking point with other visitors.

Egyptian faces on the handling table

Campbell and Anna brought out some objects from the Egyptology collection: facial reconstructions of the Two Brothers, a replica of an encaustic protrait, similar to those on display in the Museum’s dedicated gallery, the lid from a Canopic jar depicting the ancient Egyptian god Imsety, busts from Alexandria and a shabti (above).

Heads from the Archaeology collection

For my part I brought out some head related objects from the archaeology collection including a late Iron Age/Romano-British stone head from Tyldesley near Manchester, a tricephalic piece from Standedge Tunnel, some replica carved stone  heads and some rather handsome carved wooden head made for an earlier Lindow Man exhibition. I suspect they are copying discoveries from the important votive deposit at the source of the River Seine at Sequana in Burgundy, France, as well as some stelae found at Rochdale (see above). Keith Sugden, the Museum’s Curator of Numismatics, kindly entrusted us with a selection of coins showing Roman emperors.

Head inspired by one of the Koma Land figurines

It was great fun recognising some of the figurines that visitors made and displayed on the table outside the Discovery Centre.

‘Sanctuary’ or ‘shrine’ showing off the clay figurines made by visitors

As part of the day I showed members of the Museum’s branch of the Young Archaeologists’ Club the facial reconstruction display in Ancient Worlds. There was even time to join Maxine’s inaugural ‘Women in Ancient Worlds’ tour which explored the topic of women and the contribution of women archaeologists and Egyptologists in the new displays. Maxine, who is a Visitor Assistant and  member of the Museum’s Front of House team, showed us the copy of Amelia Edward’s A Thousand Miles up the Nile, the Etruscan terracotta womb votive in the archaeology gallery as well as exhibits in the Egyptology gallery of Ancient Worlds.

Maxine with visitors on the Women in Ancient Worlds tour

We saw over a hundred people at our handling table and gathered some really useful feedback about how interesting visitors had found it. Jamie’s contribution went well beyond the call of duty when he kindly posed for a photograph with one of  the carved wooden figurines (below). What a trooper! As well as being a brilliant Movember photo opportunity, this makes me think there might be some mileage in a future photographic  project comparing the profiles of Roman emperors and empresses with those of modern day visitors. A great time was had by all as they say. A big thank you to everyone who gave up their Saturday to help with the event.

Jamie and carved wooden head

Reconstructing a Soldier from Roman Egypt

Encaustic portrait of soldier from Roman Egypt in the Manchester Museum collection (accession no. 11306)

This is the encaustic portrait of a man who lived in Egypt when it was a province of the Roman Empire. Unfortunately we don’t know his name. It is one of a large number of encaustic or mummy protraits – the total lies in the hundreds Campbell tells me – from Greco-Roman Egypt.

It was the basis of a reconstruction illustration by the talented artist, Graham Sumner, who used to work for the Greater Manchester Archaeology Unit. Graham Sumner’s article ‘Painting a Reconstruction of the Deir el-Medineh Portrait’ can be found in Marie Louise Nosch (ed.) Wearing the Cloak Dressing the Soldier in Roman Times (Oxbow Books, 2012), pp. 117-127.

Graham Sumner’s reconstruction of the Roman soldier from Egypt whose encaustic portrait is in the Manchester Museum collection

This is  how Graham Sumner has portrayed the anonymous man in a reconstruction. His work is featured in a new exhibition of paintings of Roman soldiers at the Museum of Lancashire in Preston which opens on 17th August. In the image above you can see that the man is wearing a sword. The pommel of the sword handle sticks up under the right armpit and there is a rather uncomfortable looking belt decorated with studs running from the left shoulder and under the right arm. Graham’s caption to his reconstruction painting says it prevented the fabric of the tunic interfering with the sword.

So far as encaustic portraits are concerned, it was the custom in Greco-Roman Egypt to put a portrait of the dead person in position over the face of the mummy. William Flinders Petrie found a number of encaustic portraits at Hawara and they caused a sensation when they were first shown in the UK. However, they tended to be seen like European paintings as works of art and shown in art galleries. Once divorced from the context of the mummy, the portrait lost vital information such as the name, status and rank of the dead person.

Manchester Museum is very fortunate in that it has three mummy portraits that are still in their original postiion on the mummy, which makes them very important indeed. They represent a small but nonetheless significant percentage of the less than a hundred mummy protraits that still survive in situ. They offer an independent and objective means of checking  how accurate a portrayal of the deceased has been made as the original appearance of the dead person can be recovered by making a facial reconstruction.

But what of the soldier himself? Unfortunately because many of the encaustic mummy portraits were treated as art objects, less attention was paid to the portrait as a vital piece of funerary evidence telling us the name and status of the deceased. Very likely some of these associations had already been lost by the time of recovery. Whatever the reason, sadly we don’t know this man’s name. However there are some very good sources, in the form of papyri, that shed light on the life of soldiers in Egypt. Some ancient Egyptian manuscripts found in the university library in Michigan provide a vivid impression of the kind of life that our soldier might have lived.

In 2003, a student of Classical Archaeology at the University of Michigan, Rob Stephan, discovered more than a dozen unpublished texts in the Papyrology Collection. The University collection contains more than 12,000 individual fragments of papyrus. The papyri Rob found were originally uncovered during an excavation of the Egyptian town of Karanis during the 1920s and ’30s led by Prof. Francis Kelsey. Kelsey had worked at Oxyrynchus with B.P.Grenfell and seen for himself how much documentation was lost by ignoring the Greco-Roman contexts on ancient Egyptian sites. He sent the papyri back to Michigan at the end of the excavation for further study. Apparently the papyrus documents that Rob Stephan were not previously known. They were found under a stairway in a house during the excavation of Karanis.

From our point of view what is really interesting about this discovery is that the letters were written to a retired Roman soldier, Tiberianus, who settled in Karanis in Egypt, about 200 miles south-west of Cairo, during the early second century AD. Admittedly this was some time earlier than the time when the man on our encaustic portrait was alive but essentially this archive correspondence allows us to reconstruct a social context for our soldier.

The archive consists largely of letters he exchanged with a number of other individuals, in particular Claudius Terentianus who refers to himself as Tiberianus’ son. The relationship isn’t necessarily a biological father-son relationship, however. Another man Ptolemaios is also described in the Karanis archive as father of Terentianus. Was Tiberianus something like a guardian to Terentianus? Both men have Roman names and were stationed in Egypt during the Roman occupation. However, the letters are written in Greek, the everyday language used by non-Egyptian communtiesin Egypt, not Latin.

Like the famous Vindolanda tablets from northern Britain, the letters reveal the everyday realities of life in the Roman world, particularly for a soldier in the Roman army. For example, the young soldier wrote home to ask for boots and socks to keep his feet warm during a cold winter and to ask his father for permission to marry his native Egyptian girlfriend. Terentianus also tells how he is being sent to Alexandria to quell riots. Tiberianus, was clearly well-read because one of the papyri is a fragment of Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War. In other words, Tiberianus, could read Greek literature, suggesting that he came from an educated family, and could read several different  languages. He was must have been part of the social elite in the community of Keranis at the time.

In drawing upon the wonderful archive of letters from Keranis to provide a biography for the soldier who appears in the encaustic protrait displayed at the Manchester Museum, I have taken a lead from the inspiring work carried out at the John Rylands library. That project brought together the library’s papyrus collections with portraits from this museum. The students of Thomas Whitham Sixth Form College, Burnley, were invited to ‘voice’ a particular person based on what was known about his or her life, their family relationships and standing in society, working under the guide of academics and graduate students from Classics, and Religions and Theology at the university. You can see the short film about this work at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bd-OJkLBTww

I have tentatively linked Graham’s reconstruction of the Museum’s encaustic protrait (no.11036) with the letters of Terentianus from Karanis as a way of giving him a plausible social context but it would only be fair to point out that Graham has also painted a dedicated reconstruction of Terentianus. It can be seen on page 118 of Graham’s article in Wearing the Cloak (see above for reference). You’ll also find a short account of Terentianus in Richard Alston’s Soldier and Society in Roman Egypt (Routledge, 1995).

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.

One Hundred and Counting: Ageing and Health in the Ancient World

Delegates to the recent conference on Ageing, Retirement and Health in the Ancient World (courtesy of Prof.Tim Parkin)

A few weeks ago I had the great pleasure of supporting a research workshop about Ancient Perspectives on Ageing, Retirement and Health organised by Professor Tim Parkin in Classics & Ancient History here at the university.

Tim asked me to get out some of the Museum’s objects relating to the topic. Some were obvious, like the Pythonesque votive offering in the shape of a foot from northern Italy (30075), and another, of triangular shape, said to represent the lungs, heart, diaphragm, stomach, etc (accession number 1987.71). Is that the heart at the top of the triangle and the gall bladder at the bottom? Is it the right way up?

Votive offering depicting lungs, stomach, diaphragm in the archaeology collection

A clay representation of a woman’s uterus or womb is on display in the Discovering Archaeology gallery. I also found a selection of bronze probes that, according to our documentation system, were thought to have a medical use. I also put in a figurine depicting a woman breast feeding and an ancient Greek pyxis with a charming scene showing a woman dandling a child upon her lap.

Ancient Greek pot known as a pyxis showing a woman holding a child in her lap (accession number40096).

Discussion about whether the bronze toilet implements were indeed medical and it was reassuring to learn that one of the delegates had said that they had had this discussed during the workshop and the consensus was that they could be used for a variety of purposes. So medical as well as toiletry. One of ours came from Angel Court, London (accession number 1986.16).

Workshop in the Collections Study Centre

Added to which this is the one hundredth Blog posted about Ancient Worlds. A modest achievement perhaps but one worthy of a little celebration I would hope.

Ehenside Tarn

Ehenside Tarn (photo courtesy of Paul Brown)

A few weeks ago I received an enquiry from Paul Brown asking whether we had any artefacts from the famous site at Ehenside Tarn in the archaeology collections. Students of archaeology, particularly wetland archaeology, will be familiar with this site, which is situated in low hills overlooking the Irish Sea in south-west Cumbria. When the tarn was drained in 1869, archaeological material including flint and other stone implements and wooden artefacts were exposed. R.D.Darbishire subsequently investigated the site. What was particularly astounding was the discovery of a greenstone axe complete with its beechwood haft (see Bryony and John Coles’ People of the Wetlands, 1989).

I found a grindstone or quern from the site in the Museum a few years ago. Although it wasn’t on our documentation system, it had been given the number O.1787. I went to the ‘O’ number catalogue and there was the reference “Grindstone (No.17) Ehenside Tarn”. This enabled me to to trace its modern accession number in a concordance volume.  I found that O.1787 had been renumbered as 22283 on the documentation system. I searched on the computer and there it was, except that it was documented as ‘unprovenanced’ or without a locality. I had a result!  With the help of information contained within the record I quickly located the grindstone in the archaeology store. It had been donated by R.D.Darbishire. I also updated the record with the locality details. Terry Manby, who knows more about prehistory and prehistoric collections in museums in the North of England, told me this is a grindstone for finishing axe heads rather than for grinding grain to make flour.

Grindstone from Ehenside Tarn on display in Ancient Worlds (Darbishire Collection).

R.D.Darbishire had excavated the site for the Society of Antiquaries in 1871. But who was R.D.Darbishire? The next time I went to the Local History Library in the city centre I checked the biographical index and found a whole host of references to R.D.Darbishire.

Robert Dukinfield Darbishire (1826-1908) was a solicitor and one of three legatees of the estate of Sir Joseph Whitworth. Darbishire took a particular interest in the Whitworth Park and Institute (the Whitworth Art Gallery) but clearly had wide-ranging interests. He was a keen conchologist or collector of shells. In 1868 he was involved in the acquisition of the collections of the Manchester Natural History Society Museum by Owens College (the forerunner of the University of Manchester). The collection had previously been offered to and declined by the Manchester Corporation. Darbishire played a similar role in the acquisition of the collection of the Manchester Geological Society so Darbishire was a “founding father” of the Manchester Museum. A painting of R.D.Darbishire wearing his characteristic black skull cap by Mr T.B.Pennington used to be on display in the entrance to the Whitworth Art Gallery. Darbishire was made an honorary freedman of the city on October 6^th 1899.  Towards the end of his life Darbishire’s large collection of prehistoric stone and flint artefacts was transferred to the Museum.

It remains to be seen whether any other artefacts from the famous Ehenside Tarn remain to be identified within the lithics collection of The Manchester Museum.  They would certainly be of considerable historical significance.

There the matter rested until Paul Brown’s enquiry. In return for providing him with a photo of the grindstone, Paul has very kindly allowed us to use photos of Ehenside Tarn. Some time ago the drainage outlet became blocked and for a short time the tarn looked something like its appearance when the discoveries were made in the 19th century.  It’s a great thrill to see them and share them with a wider audience and the Museum is very grateful to Paul for allowing us to use them in this way.

Ehenside Tarn (photo courtesy of Paul Brown)

Wood-turning in Manchester and Ancient Egypt

Student volunteers Jamie and Suzanna talk to visitors about flint and obsidian tools.

The Manchester Museum’s Big Saturday event on 9th February was about skills in archaeology. My job was to show visitors how to draw Roman pottery, whilst Jamie Skuse and Suzanna Haddow from the Archaeology Department (who both kindly gave up their Saturday to help) talked to visitors about flints and obsidian.

A whole family of budding pottery illustrators!

Meanwhile in the foyer area Rachel from the Botany Collection had arranged for Geoff Killen to do a wood-turning demonstration. This is part of a project to explore trees and the use that we make of different kinds of wood and other materials that come from trees. It transpires that the equipment Geoff uses is very similar to that used in ancient Egypt. Yigal Sitry, a researcher who lives in Israel, visited the Museum in November 2011 to see some pieces of iron of Assyrian date that were excavated at Thebes in Egypt. There are two of them and they look a bit like snakes. The long shank was embedded in a wooden block and two were used to hold a length of wood or some other material (perhaps ivory?) that rotated around the point of the head of each bracket.

Wood turning tool from Thebes in ancient Egypt

Yigal kindly sent us photos of him and his son using the reconstruction he made.

The reconstructed wood turning lathe in operation. Yigal’s son Uri is pulling on the ropes to make the lathe turn.

Close-up showing the wood turning. You can see the iron brackets at either end of the piece of wood being carved. Each bracket is embedded in a block of wood

Yigal also kindly sent copies of an ancient Egyptian tomb painting showing wood turners. You have to remember that the image is showing something happening in the horizontal plane rotated through 90 degrees so it looks as though it’s vertical. The image is from Lefebvre G., 1924 (or 1932) Le Tombeau de Petrosiris  Vol 1,2 (Cairo).

Ancient Egyptian wood turning

We filmed the wood-turning to use in an exhibition about trees that will be held at the Manchester Museum. As we now know – thanks to Yigal – that we have ancient Egyptian wood-turning equipment of Assyrian date we could display the objects and perhaps commission a reconstruction to be used in the exhibition. We often find – and this was very much the case last Saturday – that visitors are fascinated by how people in the past made things. Often we can only replicate those objects by using industrial machinery. Of course these lathe brackets are machinery. The wood to which they were attached has long since rotted away but the iron has survived thanks to the dry climate of ancient Egypt. It’s brilliant when research on the collection comes together with a collecting proposal and an exhibition to create something that has cross-disciplinary appeal.

Flying Visit to Ancient Worlds

Ancient Worlds – archaeology gallery

A number of colleagues are taking leave following the opening of Ancient Worlds last Thursday but I called in this morning to meet Joyce K. from Victoria in Australia who is visiting the Museum today. Joyce and her colleagues are planning new antiquities displays and she was naturally interested to see how we had approached Ancient Worlds. We’ve been talking to Joyce for a little while now and she timed her visit to take advantage of the opening.  It’s gratifying to know that the new displays are attracting international interest within days of the opening.

Joyce K. looking at the new displays with Campbell, Curator of Egypt and the Sudan earlier today

For me it was fascinating to see how the visitors were reacting to the new galleries. There seemed to be a real sense of engagement with the displays. Whereas before visitors tended to walk through the old displays despite the quality of the exhibits, now they seem to be stopping and looking at things, reading the labels and looking up information using the codes attached to each label.

Joyce talked about displaying material in an art gallery context and Campbell and I couldn’t wait to show her the third gallery with its stunning displays of Egyptian shabtis, lamps, glass and other material.

Shabtis and lamps in the 3rd gallery displays

I also realised belatedly that visitors can read this blog on the gallery. Within seconds of me clicking the button visitors will be reading this and looking at the photos. I can’t think of anything that makes the curatorial input to the museum going experience more immediate. And if you don’t read the blog there’s always some spectacular images on the large screen at the end of the gallery.

Scan of Egyptian mummy in the 3rd gallery of Ancient Worlds

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

Ancient Worlds filming

Over the last couple of days Luke Lovelock and I have been filming interviews with contributors to our Ancient Worlds displays which open on 30th October this year. We are putting short audio-visual presentations in the galleries.

In the first gallery a number of guides or characters introduce the various archaeological themes, topics and material. The guides aren’t people who show you round but contributors to the displays who talk about their work and the exhibits illustrate what they say.

This morning Luke and I went across to Geography and recorded an interview with Prof. Jamie Woodward. Jamie has been working in the Nile Valley in northern Sudan. Together with a team from the British Museum, Jamie has been exploring how human settlement of the landscape changed in response to the changing environment.

His work shows that in the Neolithic period about 5-6000 years ago communities were quite widely distributed but in the thousand year period in which the city Kerma flourished, about 4-5000 years ago, settlements were located along the channels of the River Nile further to the east than the present course of the river Nile.

Jamies’s work involves taking samples with relatively low-tech equipment like short lengths of scaffolding poles and square containers. Jamie can tell whether the samples were wind-blown or deposited by water in the laboratory. Using a technique called Optically Stimulated Luminescence (OSL) he can date the samples.

This provides a fascinating picture of changing human settlement in the Nile Valley over thousands of years. The settlement pattern shifted over time depending on whether water ran in the channels.

Aerial Photo of the River Nile in Northern Sudan showing irrigated farmland

Thanks to Jamie we’ll be able to show this and explain it in a filmed interview and a series of diagrams in the Ancient Worlds displays. It is very interesting that Kerma did well when water was flowing in the eastern channels but the Egyptian civilisation further north entered a period of decline. The annual Nile floods that irrigated that part of northern Sudan seems to have done so at the expense of the Egyptians. Deprived of Nile floods of sufficient height the Old Kingdom entered a period of decline. When the river channels shifted Egypt recovered and Kerma declined. The picture that is emerging is only possible because of inter-disciplinary work involving archaeologists, geographers and other specialists.

Kawa Temple at Dusk, 2008, now a dry environment in northern Sudan

Luke captured a lot of material this morning and it will be a challenge to edit it down to 2 minutes. However, people will be able to download longer pieces from the web. We’re very grateful to Jamie and the laboratory technician, John, for allowing us to film an interview over in Geography.

Tutankhamen Exhibition Raises Money for Ancient Worlds

Over 1,100 people attended The Museum of Museums fundraiser event at the exhibition Tutankhamun – His Tomb and His Treasures on 27 Feb. The event raised over £7,500 in ticket sales, raffle tokens and catering, which was then generously rounded up by exhibition producers Semmel Concerts to make a fantastic £10,000 for the Manchester Museum’s Ancient Worlds project.

Tutankhamun exhibition raises funds for Ancient Worlds

Christoph Scholz, Chief Producer of the Tutankhamun Exhibition said ‘It was such an honour to be able to hand over a check for £10,000 to the Museum. On behalf of the Tutankhamun – His Tomb and His Treasures team, we’d like to thank all of those who came along and supported the Museum of Museums evening and the Manchester Museum.’

The fundraiser was held in aid of the Manchester Museum’s planned Ancient Worlds Galleries initiative. Last refurbished over 25 years ago, the Manchester Museum’s much loved Ancient Worlds galleries are now in urgent need of updating to make the most of the incredible artefacts. The funds raised will go towards a complete redisplay of three major new galleries to mark the 2012 centenary of the opening of the Museum’s first ancient Egypt galleries. The three galleries will highlight the best of the Manchester Museum’s collections from Manchester and the North West, and from ancient civilisations such as Egypt, Greece and Rome. The original ancient Egypt galleries were funded by local cotton merchant Jesse Haworth and created the first permanent home for one of the UK’s outstanding ancient Egypt and archaeology collections.

Nick Merrima,  Director of the Manchester Museum, said: ‘On behalf of the Manchester Museum and its entire staff we’d like to thank everyone in attendance and Semmel Concerts for their support and this generous donation. It will go a long way towards achieving our funding target for the new Ancient Worlds Galleries. Everyone in Manchester will have been to visit our current Ancient Egyptian galleries when they were at school, the refurbishment of these galleries will allow us to continue our great work with children for a great many years to come.’

Hosted by Real Radio presenter Darren Parks, those in attendance were treated to an exclusive book signing by the creator of the acclaimed Horrible Histories children’s books; Terry Deary who made a special trip to Manchester to view the exhibition and support the event, in addition to a number of talks from the Manchester Museum curators and a range of entertainment including performances from Northwest guitar virtuoso Neil Campbell and singer Perri Alleyne Hughes.

Younger visitors were kept entertained with Egyptian style face painting, jewellery crafts and wig making, and a selection of original artefacts from the 18th Dynasty – the period including Tutankhamun’s reign – were on display, courtesy of the Manchester Museum.

One of the highlights of the evening was the Grand Prize Draw in which one luck visitor won a copy of the spectacular book, ‘A Secret Voyage’ by world renowned Egyptologist, Dr Zahi Hawass. The stunning collection of photography, history and notes is a limited edition and usually retails at £2600!

‘Tutankhamun – His Tomb and His Treasures’ based at the Museum of Museums near the Trafford Centre, Manchester, was recently extended by four weeks and will now close on Saturday 26th March. This awe-inspiring exhibition carries visitors on a captivating journey through time into the lost wonders of ancient Egypt and reveals the epic story of the discovery of the forgotten tomb of the ‘Boy King’, giving visitors the opportunity to look through Howard Carter’s eyes and experience the amazing moment of discovery for themselves. Over 4,000 square metres of exhibition space, replicas of 1,000 burial artefacts and state-of-the-art multimedia technology brings to life the story of Tutankhamun and the fascinating cultural and spiritual world of ancient Egypt. Visit
http://www.tutankhamunmanchester.com for more info.
For more info about Manchester Museum, visit: http://www.museum.manchester.ac.uk
For more info about Museum of Museums, visit: http://www.museumofmuseums.org.uk