Santa Fe exhibit reveals everyday life in ancient Egypt
Tweezers, razor and a tiny applicator for eye make. These everyday objects are part of the exhibit “Excavating Egypt”, on display at the New Mexico Museum of Art in Santa Fe, featuring the discoveries of Sir William Flinders Petrie, “the father of scientific archaeology.”
The 220-plus items in the show reflect the breadth of Petrie’s work over five decades in Egypt.
An Englishman who first headed to Egypt in 1880 - and promptly set up his hammock in an abandoned tomb - Petrie is credited with transforming archaeology into a science, in a time when tomb raiders where looting for ancient treasures.
“Petrie gathered and analyzed artifacts overlooked by others and used them to help reconstruct the past”, said Peter Lacovara of the Michael C. Carlos Museum at Emory University in Atlanta. “He was sort of like a crime-scene investigator. He realized that every piece of evidence would help to tell the story,” he said.
Lacovara organized the exhibit from the collection of the Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology at University College, London, the first time many of the items have been out of England since they were taken there from Egypt. Items in the exhibit - some of them dating back more than 5,000 years - include sculpture, ceramics, tools, weapons, writing utensils and texts, jewelry, glass, gaming pieces, dishes, bowls, jars and pots. Among the most remarkable pieces are a fishnet-looking, fitted dress of beads and shells more than more than 4,000 years old and a small limestone model of a pyramid that Lacovara calls “the world’s oldest architectural model.”
“Excavating Egypt” exhibit is on display in Santa Fe until Jan. 6. Then it heads to South Carolina, Florida, California and Kentucky, through mid-June of 2009.
More information here
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