More re: Treasures – World's Cultures from British Museum in western Canada

Thanks to Stan Parchin for this contribution. I am highlighting Ancient Egypt but the exhibit features a lot more.

The exhibition features 309 artifacts and works of art from a premiere collection that trace the development of civilization.

The sprawling 52,000-square-foot exhibition at Victoria’s Royal British Columbia Museum in western Canada runs from May 1 to September 30, 2009. A smaller version of the show, attended by 1.3 million people, toured nine Asian cities. This incarnation includes an additional 150 items, some specifically chosen to illustrate Vancouver Island’s First Nations history. The objects displayed provide a vast panorama of human creative expression that began some 1.5 million years ago.

There are at least 18 ancient Egyptian works in the exhibition, including jewelry, statuary and papyri.

Egyptian civilization is introduced by a scale replica of the Rosetta Stone (196 B.C.), excavated in 1799 by Napoleon’s troops. The granodiorite monument’s combination of hieroglyphic, demotic and Greek scripts aided in the 1822 decipherment of ancient Egypt’s language by French philologist Jean-François Champollion (1790-1832).

Artifacts describe Egyptian history, culture and funerary practices. Principal among them is the Ptolemaic Wooden Anthropoid Inner Coffin of Djeho (305-30 B.C.). Embellished with gold leaf, the painted sarcophagus was designed for a man of high social standing. Beneath the lid’s large amuletic collar is a representation of the sky goddess Nut, her wings protectively outstretched. Under the deity is an image of Djeho’s mummy atop four canopic jars that stored his preserved stomach, intestines, lungs and liver. The coffin’s vertical inscriptions safeguard the deceased in the afterlife.

Related posts:

1. British Museum Treasures at Royal BC Museum
2. Penn Museum to share cultural treasures via internet
3. "To Live Forever: Egyptian Treasures from the Brooklyn Museum" at the Ringling Museum of Art in Sarasota, Florida
4. The new Nebamun Gallery at the British Museum
5. The Galleries of Tutankhamen's Exhibit at the Dallas Museum of Art

Tags: British Columbia, Royal British Columbia Museum

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 14th, 2009 at 3:16 pm and is filed under Exhibitions. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.