An Australia-bound exhibition of Egyptian artefacts from the Louvre is about much more than pyramids and sphinxes, its curator tells Miriam Cosic.

Images from ancient Egypt — the pyramids and the sphinxes, the mummies, headdresses and loin cloths, the sacred scarabs and priestly cats — are plentiful in popular culture, but they are almost cartoon-like in their superficiality.

Our familiarity with them is misleading. The mind-set of these mysterious people is far less transparent to us than that of the ancient Greeks, whose classical civilisation flared comparatively briefly towards the end of the 3000-year reign of the pharaohs.

To walk from the Egyptian rooms in the Louvre in Paris, one of the great repositories of this material, into those of the Greeks next door is to leave the seemingly modern — large-scaled, brightly coloured and smoothly textured, dominated by text and brand-like pictograms — for the rough-hewn simplicity of a much more distant world...

Art of the Ancients, Miriam Cosic, The Australian, Australia, November 11, 2006.

Journey to the Afterlife: Egyptian Antiquities from the Louvre

• National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, Australia, November 17 2006 to February 25, 2007.
• Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, Australia, March 21 to July 01 2007.
• The Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth, Australia, July 20 to October 28, 2007.

From 17 November 2006 to 25 March 2007 approximately one hundred and fifty objects from ancient Egypt will be on display in the exhibition Objects for Eternity at the Allard Pierson Museum. This exhibition will show how intensively and carefully the ancient Egyptians prepared for the eternity they believed was in store for every decent person. The Allard Pierson Museum will show these glorious treasures — supplemented by a few objects from its own rich Egyptian collection — on their path through time, answering questions such as: How were they made? For whom? And why...?

The exhibition catalogue is entitled edited by Carol A.R. Andrews and Jacobus van Dijk, 2006, pp. 278. If the preceeding book link didn't work, please click the the picture.

Allard Pierson Museum: Objects for Eternity, Allard Pierson Museum, Amsterdam, Netherlands, November 17, 2006

On more than 20 visits Ian "Molly" Meldrum has seen Egypt from the back of a camel, the deck of a ship and any number of bar and restaurant windows. He thought he'd seen it all.

Then he looked at it through the lens of a camera. "It was like seeing it again for the first time," he said last week.

Molly has just returned from a 14-day trip through his favourite destination, accompanied by a producer and camera crew. The results will be seen on Channel 7 in a two-part Great Outdoors special, starting next Monday.

It was a trip which took him back to all the old haunts - his long-time home away from home, Mena House, which sits at the foot of the pyramids; a three-day trip down the Nile, restaurants, nightspots and any number of historical sites which, even with plenty of practice, he still finds hard to pronounce.

"I've never been on a film shoot in my life," he said. "I'm used to ad-libbing, not standing up and speaking to camera...

Molly walks like an Egyptian, Mike Colman, The Courier-Mail Australia, November 07, 2006.

"Amarna, Ancient Egypt's Place in the Sun," opens Sunday at the University of Pennsylvania Museum, one of the world's great centres of ancient Egyptology and ancient Egyptian artefacts.

Amarna was the new capital created in central Egypt by the man generally believed to be Tut's father, Pharaoh Akhenaten. Akhenaten — one of whose wives was the purported magnificent beauty Queen Nefertiti — changed his people's religious habits, claiming that instead of the many gods the kingdom had worshipped, there was but one god — the disk of the sun, known as the Aten.

"We believe that Akhenaten built his city in central Egypt near this wadi, a break in the cliff east of the Nile River, because it was a dramatic setting," said Josef William Wegner, an associate professor of Near Eastern languages and civilizations at the University of Pennsylvania, and a co-curator of the exhibit. "He must have thought it was a magical place, and that the sun god could be magically born out of this horizon."

To be sure, Akhenaten had ulterior motives in steering his subjects to this new religious belief. According to Wegner, Akhenaten said that he was the sole prophet of the new sun god, the only one who could interpret the sun's life-giving force...

The exhibition catalogue is entitled by David P. Silverman, Josef W. Wegner, and Jennifer Houser Wegner.

Sun shines on Egypt exhibit, Robert Strauss, Philadelphia Daily News, Pennsylvania, USA, November 10, 2006.

It’s a bit of a brain-twister. Tutankhamun accomplished little in his life. No expansion of Egypt’s borders, no triumphant victories like a run of pharaohs before him. Still, he is the most recognized and probably the most famous pharaoh, and the only one to have a nickname in pop culture, “King Tut.”

The boy king will be front and centre at a pair of world-class exhibitions coming to Philadelphia. “Amarna, Ancient Egypt’s Place in the Sun,” opens at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology on Nov. 12 [2006] offering a rare look at the boyhood home of ancient Egypt’s Tutankhamun. An extraordinary royal city, Amarna grew, flourished and vanished in roughly a generation’s time.

It is a complementary show to the travelling blockbuster exhibition “Tutankhamun and the Golden Age of the Pharaohs” that comes to the Franklin Institute beginning Feb. 3, 2007.

Dr. David Silverman, curator in charge of Penn Museum’s Egyptian Collections, is the national curator for the exhibition.

“The two exhibitions will dovetail nicely,” said Dr. Josef William Wegner, associate curator of Penn Museum’s Egyptian Section...

King Tut comes back, Terry Conway, Delco Times, Pennsylvania, USA, November 10, 2006.

King Tut will get the royal treatment from Pennsylvania.

The state has granted about $1 million to promote the exhibit "Tutankhamun and the Golden Age of the Pharaohs," which will open at Philadelphia's Franklin Institute on Feb. 3, the Greater Philadelphia Tourism Marketing Corp. said Thursday.

The exhibit, which will run through Sept. 30, is expected to draw more than 1 million visitors.

To date, 200,000 advance tickets have been sold, with 94 percent coming from outside Philadelphia...

State spending $1M to tout Tut, Philadelphia Business Journal, Pennsylvania, USA, November 06, 2006.

Forty-eight hours after his re-election and 24 hours after tickets for the blockbuster exhibition "Tutankhamun and the Golden Age of the Pharaohs" went on sale to the general public, Governor Edward G. Rendell stopped by The Franklin Institute box office to show his support.

Early indications are that the exhibition will be a success for both the museum and Philadelphia, as more than 220,000 advance tickets have been sold to date, a record for the museum and the exhibition tour. Ninety-four percent of all tickets sold are from outside the city of Philadelphia, an indication of the strong tourism impact the exhibition will bring. A grant from the Governor to support the exhibition through regional marketing will help draw visitors into Philadelphia.

Backing a Winner: Governor Edward G. Rendell Visits “Tutankhamun and the Golden Age of the Pharaohs” at The Franklin Institute in Philadelphia, Business Wire, USA, November 09, 2006.

The new issue of Minerva magazine is available now. It contains an article that may be of interest to Egyptophiles as follows.

• The Sphinx: Guardian of Egypt
  by Eugène Warmenbol

Minerva Magazine, London, UK, Volume 17, Number 6, November / December 2006.

Subscribe to Minerva Magazine via Amazon.com.

Minister of Culture Farouk Hosni is preparing to open yet another museum this month, this time in the beautiful coastal city of Rachid, where the Rosetta Stone was discovered by the French in 1799 and translated in 1822.

According to SCA head Zahi Hawass the LE 4-million , two-building complex will feature a three-floor historical construction dating back to the Ottoman era. In the 1960s, the building was turned into a small museum depicting Rachid’s role in the struggle against the British occupation.

The museum will display some 700 pieces, the most important of which are Umayyad and Ottoman gold and bronze coins.

Culture 101: Carved in Stone, Sherif Awad and Manal el-Jesri, Egypt Today, Egypt, Volume 27, Issue 11, November 2006.