Antiquities Exhibits

This exhibition uses mummies from the collections of the Manchester Museum (England) to allow visitors to examine life for the wealthy in multicultural Roman Egypt, where diverse Egyptian, Roman, and Greek communities and cultural influences were blended. The exhibition journey traces expectations for the afterlife and introduces cultural constructions of identity, strikingly demonstrated by haunting painted panel portraits. The practices of preservation and decoration of the body, and the transformation of the deceased into a god, are explored by the mummies on display. Eight gilded mummies  and more than 100 related objects are presented in the display, including papyri, jewelry, ceramics, and artworks depicting deities that connect the daily lives of these Greco-Roman Egyptians to the religious world of the gods in a series of lavishly illustrated thematic sections covering the period from 300 BCE to 200 CE. The youngest of the preserved individuals is a 2 or 3 year-old child wr...

Silver panel, perhaps from a parade chariot or piece of furniture, overlaid with electrum and decorated in repoussé relief with two riders, perhaps taking part in a horse-race, with a fallen comrade below, Etruscan, 540-520 BCE, found in the Castel San Mariano near the city of Perugia. Perguia, first called Perusia in the ancient sources, was one of the 12 confederate cities of Etruria.  The league was mostly an economic and religious league, or a loose confederation, similar to the Greek states.  The historical Etruscans had achieved a state system of society, with only remnants of the chiefdom and tribal forms used by surrounding Italics. The government was viewed as being a central authority, ruling over all tribal and clan organizations and wielding the power of life and death. The gorgon was revered as an ancient symbol of that power, and frequently appeared as a motif in Etruscan decoration. The individual referred to as a "fallen comrade" in this Archaic period relief ...

Sasanian silver plates were usually hammered into shape and then decorated using a variety of complex techniques.  Gilding was often used to highlight the hunter, usually the king, and sometimes extra pieces of metal were added to create high relief. The king as hunter became a standard image on silver plates during the reign of Shapur II (r. 310–379 CE). The motif symbolizes the prowess of Sasanian rulers, and these royal plates were often sent as gifts to neighboring and vassal courts.  Some plates included inscriptions with the king's name and the plate's weight.  With other plates, art historians must attempt to identify the king by his distinctive apparel or shape of the crown he wears.  Each Sasanian king wore a different personal crown, which became more and more elaborate during the four centuries of the dynasty. Fortunately, the different crowns have been identified from coins or sometimes compared with existing rock reliefs with inscriptions such as those a...

Competition among the elites of Rome in both the political and military spheres is well known. It was also used by one of Rome's most fiercesome opponents as well.  In Carthage, command was sometimes shared between two or even three generals and sometimes commanders were expected to seek approval from the council of 104 and the two suffetes (roughly equivalent to Rome's consuls) for  important decisions such as declaring a truce, to sue for peace, or withdraw from a conflict altogether. Furthermore, punishment of command officers was draconian (in every sense of that word!). It ranged from large fines to crucifixion of the offending general.  Even the families of those committing suicide were not spared humiliation.  Ancient sources record that the council crucified the corpse of one commander named Mago (out of the many men named Mago in the history of Carthage) in 344 BCE.  Scholars think these severe punishments rather than simply a  loss of command may ...

 In 2016, I had the opportunity to photograph some of the collections of the Neues Museum in Berlin, Germany. Their collection of Egyptian mummy masks included some of the most meticulously conserved examples I have encountered in my travels.  TourEgypt's comprehensive article on mummy masks does an excellent job of explaining the evolution of this form of funerary art.  An excerpt: Funerary masks had more than one purpose. They were a part of the elaborate precautions taken by the ancient Egyptians to preserve the body after death. The protection of the head was of primary concern during this process. Thus, a face covering helped preserve the head, as well as providing a permanent substitute, in an idealized form which presented the deceased in the likeness of an immortal being, in case of physical damage. Those of means were provided with both a mask with gilt flesh tones and blue wigs, both associated with the glittering flesh and the lapis lazuli hair of the sun god. ...

Ancient Egypt: Ancient Culture Modern Technology now open at the Boonshoft Museum in Dayton Ohio. This interactive exhibit features CT scans and a 3D printed skull of a female mummy named Nesiur originally excavated in 1922 at El Badari by the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The museum presented the mummy to J. Morton Howell, American Consul General to Egypt from 1920 to 1927. Howell, originally from Dayton, Ohio donated the mummy  along with his Egyptian artifact collection to the city in 1926. His collection included sculptures, funerary art, a beautiful gilded cartonnage mummy mask and Nesiur, a woman who lived during the 25th dynasty about 700 BCE. Images: Facial Reconstruction and 3D printed skull of Nesiur, a woman of the 25th dynasty of Egypt and a gilded cartonnage mummy mask at the Boonshoft Museum in Dayton, Ohio courtesy of the museum.

Gilded cartonnage of a Romano-Egyptian woman and man, possibly from Hawara, Egypt, 1st century CE on display at the Brooklyn Museum in Brooklyn, New York. This gilded mummy mask of a woman, thought to be from Hawara, Egypt, and a man were created in the 1st century CE during Egypt's Roman period. It is created of linen, gilded gesso, glass, and faience. Hawara is an archaeological south of the site of Crocodilopolis, its Gree k name, or Arsinoe, its Ptolemaic Period name, at the entrance to the depression of the Fayum oasis. The first excavations at the site were made by Karl Lepsius, in 1843. William Flinders Petrie excavated at Hawara, beginning in 1888, finding papyri of the 1st and 2nd centuries CE, and, north of the pyramid, a vast necropolis where, in 1911, he found 146 portraits on coffins dating to the Roman period now known as Fayum portraits. Some of the mummies discovered in Hawara, though, were covered with a cartonnage mask rather than a painted portrait. Carton...

Ancient Egypt at the Museo Egizio in Turin, Italy. The Egyptian antique collection of the Egyptian Museum, one of the largest in the world, includes about 40,000 artifacts, most of which comes from the purchase of the Bernardino Drovetti collection in 1824 and from the excavations conducted by Ernesto Schiaparelli in Egypt from 1903 to 1920. Thematic exhibits include the parity of women in ancient Egypt. In a room dedicated to  Merit, a woman who lived around 3,400 years ago during Egypt’s New Kingdom period are boxes that contained her toiletries and other possessions painted with images of a confident woman side by side with her architect husband, Kha, giving offerings to the gods and greeting visitors.The variety of expensive goods she was buried with—a large wig made of human hair, loaves of bread, jewelry, toiletries, clothing—attests to her importance. In the same room is a white limestone statue of a woman — Nefertari — and her husband, Pendua. They are the same size, sa...

Archaeological collections from Egypt and Sudan - Ongoing at The Petrie Museum in London, United Kingdom. The Petrie Museum houses one of the largest archaeological collections in the world, some 80,000 objects, for Egypt and Sudan. It is named after William Matthew Flinders Petrie (1853-1942), appointed in 1892 as first University College London Edwards Professor of Egyptian Archaeology and Philology. Over three-quarters of the material comes from excavations directed or funded by Petrie, or from purchases he made for university teaching. Here you can see the Tarkhan Dress, the world's oldest surviving woven garmet, a v-neck linen shirt  radiocarbon dated to the late fourth-millennium BC. Gilded cartonnage mummy mask from the Roman Period. 5th Dynasty bead-net dress Roman period mummy portrait from the Fayum region

Ancient Art of the Mediterranean Basin. Ongoing. At the Legion of Honor Museum in San Francisco, California.  Late Ptolemaic period gilded cartonnage mummy mask and pectoral. 150-50 BCE. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons user Fastily. Ancient art objects on view at the Legion feature a wide gamut of sculptures, figurines, vessels, jewelry, and carved reliefs made of diverse materials, such as marble and other stones, bronze, gold, ivory, terracotta, wood, and glass from Egypt, the Near East, Greece, and Rome. Notable works include an Assyrian stone re lief and carved ivories from the ancient site of Nimrud, an Achaemenid Persian wall relief from the palace of Darius in Persepolis, Egyptian mummies, coffins, and a 4,000-year-old carved wood figure of Seneb, the Egyptian royal scribe, as well as classical marble sculptures and painted vases.