The British Museum, very kindly, has granted us a Private View of this new exhibition. Our Private View is at 6pm on Thursday 1st February 2023.
No trip to the British Museum is complete without a stop at the Rosetta Stone, the slab of granodiorite that unlocked the mystery of Egyptian hieroglyphs.
But how did it come to exist? And how did a French and English scholar figure out how to crack the code? It’s this millennia long story that’s told through The British Museum’s densely curated Hieroglyphs exhibition.
The exhibition does a great job showing us how language evolved in Ancient Egypt. Conquered by Alexander the Great, Greek became integrated into the Egyptian language of the time, while the introduction of reeds and pen and ink paved the way for a move to writing in script, rather than the pictorial approach of hieroglyphs.
There’s a strong finish to the show, with a four-metre-long beautifully illustrated excerpt from The Book of the Dead, featuring the Gods passing judgement on souls entering the afterlife, a remarkably well preserved cartonnage with mummy inside, and a monumental plaster cast of King Seti I of Egypt slaughtering the Libyan chief in battle and trampling his people under his chariot. Like all the best shows, Hieroglyphs brings its subject matter to vivid life.
Private View – update
On Thursday 10th February we had a Private View of the Hieroglyphics Exhibition in the British Museum. This was due to the kindness of the Keeper of the Ancient Egypt and Sudan Collection, Mr Daniel Antoine and Ms Ilona Regulski, Curator, Egyptian Written Culture who had helped put the exhibition together and who welcomed the visitors with a short introduction.
We had over 100 attend the viewing, 40 of which were students kindly sponsored by the generosity of our Patron and Founder Member, Dr. Ahmed El Mokadem.
The exhibition was enjoyed by everyone, and particularly pleasing was a comment by one of the students from Riddlesdown:
“I just wanted to say a massive thank you for the trip tonight. It was honestly one of the best trips I’ve been on and was interesting throughout. It was also the first time I’ve been to a museum, and been able to focus on what I was reading or what I was looking at without feeling rushed or overstimulated, as I was able to look at each piece in my own time and absorb it better than in a museum with literal flocks of people. Thank you, so so much for such an amazing evening”
As a Society, we focus on cultural events and it is of importance that we reach outside our membership to students and the young and do our best to instil in them a love of Egypt’s amazing history. Since our creation, the Keeper of the Ancient Egypt and Sudan Collection at the British Museum has been on our Board. This gives the board additional depth and we are eternally grateful for the warm reception we receive always from the British Museum. From time to time we sponsor curatorial students visits from Egypt to the Museum and long may we continue to do so.
