The daughter of a wealthy family in ancient Egypt has been preserved in the Reading Public Museum for decades, but a key part of the exhibit has been in storage until now.

More than 2,000 years ago Nefrina had a mask made to protect her face. And Wednesday the mask was delivered to the museum.

Nefrina came to the Reading Public Museum in 1930 but her mask didn’t. She’s been waiting 82 years.

For four months people at the University of Pennsylvania, who own Nefrina’s mask, restored it.

The Reading Public Museum has unwrapped many of the secrets of Nefrina’s life, from how she died to what she looked like.

Now what was meant to protect her face in the afterlife has been returned.

69News

Egypt was an exotic land to nineteenth-century European artists. Painters, writers, and photographers traveled to Egypt to explore, document, and interpret its civilization and its newly discovered antiquities. Technical advances in the young art of photography encouraged direct observation and the advancement of knowledge.

Forever in a Moment: Nineteenth-Century Photographs of Egypt, on view through April 10, 2012, at the Museum of Fine Art captures this wonderful sense of discovery. The exhibition of more than 40 images complements Ancient Egypt – Art and Magic: Treasures from the Fondation Gandur pour l’Art/Geneva, on display from Dec. 17 through April 29, 2012.

The majority of these photographs, donated from The Ludmila Dandrew and Chitranee Drapkin Collection, are mainly European. Many spotlight ancient monuments and sites.

Frequently, figures were included to show scale and also to introduce elements of daily life. Many of these photographs were designed to satisfy the burgeoning trade in travel photographs and albums.

TBN Weekly

“Ancient Egypt – Art and Magic: Treasures from the Gandur Arts Foundation,” is the newest exhibit at the Museum of Fine Arts in St. Petersburg, featuring 101 striking antiquities. The exhibit includes a carved ram’s head, a bronze mirror, papyrus fragments, temple reliefs and life-sized coffins.

The exhibit’s theme — art and magic — explores the decorative, or artistic, as well as the symbolic, or magical, meaning of 4,000 years of Egyptian art.
“The works in the exhibit span the entire period of Pharaonic Egypt, from the pre-dynastic period all the way up to the Ptolemaic period, roughly from 4000 to 30 B.C.,” explained Dr. Robert Steven Bianchi, the exhibit’s guest curator and the curator for the antiquities division of the Foundation Gandur, from which all the works came.

“What we’re explaining is how the objects functioned in ancient Egypt, how they connected people with the natural world and the divine world,” said museum director Kent Lydecker.

The exhibit is set up in five galleries of the museum which are ordered purposely to explain the ideas of function, art and magic.

Tampa Bay Online

Sensable announced that its Freeform(R) 3D-modeling and organic design solution helped put a face on two high-profile Egyptian mummies in displays that just opened this month. The Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History exhibition, “External Life in Ancient Egypt,” displays a new 3D-printed bust of a Freeform-designed facial reconstruction performed from the computed tomography (CT) scans of a 3-year old mummified boy. The child is the subject of extensive research by noted physical/forensic Smithsonian anthropologist Dr. David Hunt. In a separate case with a mummy owned by the Spurlock Museum of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Freeform helped reconstruct the face of an 8-year old child mummy, revealing greater detail on facial features, and even showing a small one-sided ponytail.

Facial reconstruction formerly required physically sculpting on casts taken from the skeletal remains, a painstaking, time-consuming process that is potentially destructive process to 2,000-year old mummies. Freeform allowed Joe Mullins, a Washington DC-based forensic artist, to work from new-era CT scans, input them into Freeform, and then with digital speed and accuracy, define precise layers of muscle, skin and soft tissue following skeletal lines to depict the children with startling realism.

Freeform is the 3D-modeling and design solution of choice for experts in facial reconstruction worldwide among archeologists and forensic artists at such institutions as the British Museum, Manchester University, the University of Dundee, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, and numerous law enforcement organizations. Freeform’s rich set of organic modeling tools and unique ‘digital clay’ design paradigm, allow technicians to feel the model as they reconstruct and sculpt features using clues from the scans and skulls — and to work faster and more iteratively, during reconstruction than if working in physical clay.

Market Watch

Conceived in 2008 as a celebration commemorating Howard Carter’s archeological success in unearthing Tutankhamun’s tomb, this year’s festival will celebrate Egyptian culture in its entirety. Hosting contemporary art, literature, music, film and stand-up comedy, the festival will run until April 2012 with every month hosting a different set of writers, filmmakers, artists, musicians and comedians.

The purpose built hall in which the entire six months event will be hosted ispans 4,000 square meters, seamlessly organized, with audio books that are wirelessly connected to that which they are explaining. The space is complete with a cafe and bar, as well as a gift shop with merchandise ranging from books and stationary, to masks and toys.

The simulation rooms offers something that the real tombs, relics and even museums worldwide can’t: the chance to see ancient Egyptian artifacts the way the archeologists found them and, more importantly, the way they were left by the ancient Egyptians.

Preceding the ancient Egyptian section of the festival is the contemporary Egyptian photography exhibition titled “To Egypt with Love.” Hosted by Safar Khan Gallery in Zamalek, and curated by its owner Mona Said, the current collection at Frankfurt features the best works assembled of two exhibitions of the same titles. The artwork is the photography of artists Alaa Taher, Bassem Samir and Hossam Hassan, complimented by a video by Khaled Hafez.

The event will continue to host brilliant Egyptian talent across the board, with yet another traveling Art exhibition hosted by London’s Mica Gallery titled “From Facebook to Nassbook,” as well as the highly anticipated “Egyptian Art Today” by Safar Khan Gallery, which will include original art works by Nermine Hammam, Khaled Hafez, Marwa Adel and Ahmed Kassem to name a few.

Excerpted from an article by Mariam Hamdy for Daily News Egypt

Image via Wikipedia

The ancient Egyptian animal mummification industry was so large it put some species in danger of extinction. But as a new exhibit at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History in Washington DC shows, the Egyptians believed they were doing the animals a great honor.

The Egyptians believed that animals held a unique position in the afterlife. They could keep the dead company, they represented the gods, and they were well received as offerings by the gods.

Such was the enthusiasm for animal slaughter that experts say it contributed to the extinction in Egypt of at least one bird species. The Sacred Ibis were mummified in the millions because they were sacred to Thoth, the god of wisdom and writing, says Selima Ikram, professor of Egyptology at the American University in Cairo.

Others, including hawks and falcons, saw their populations dwindle.

At the exhibit, visitors can see a range of mummified animals, including the Sacred Ibis, and gain an insight into the industry that became a driving force of the economy of ancient Egypt.

When animals in the wild started dying out, extensive breeding programs were launched by the temples and surrounding villages.

While many animals were bred specifically to be killed on demand, others were worshiped as deities themselves.

The museum has a rare bull mummy which, as a manifestation of the sun god Re, would have been allowed to live out its life in luxury. During its life the bull would have received daily massages and paraded through adoring crowds while priests studied its movements and tried to divine messages from the gods.

When the bull died of old age – probably after 20 years – it was mummified, placed in an immense sarcophagus and put into a catacomb.

Another species killed to the point of extinction in Egypt was the baboon.

When none were left, the Egyptians manufactured fake baboon offerings, creating mummies that looked real on the outside but which CT scans have recently revealed to be elaborate forgeries.

Excerpted from an article by Jane O’Brien for BBC News, Washington

“Lost Egypt: Ancient Secrets, Modern Science” will reveal how archaeologists use technology to uncover and understand the long-gone civilization.

A few highlights include forensic facial reconstructions and a life-size prototype of a mummy in a stage of “unwrapping.”

Through those authentic artifacts, high-tech science and hands-on discovery, Emilee Richardson, spokeswoman for the Des Moines facility, says visitors will be able to unearth the mysteries of Egypt, its culture and its people. “There’s an interactive display that shows how the sands move around the different pyramids and structures and can bury history,” Richardson says. “There’s an exhibit where you can actually pull on blocks of stone and see how heavy they were and imagine constructing the pyramids.”

The exhibit opens November 25th.

Learn more about the new exhibit at: www.sciowa.org/lostegypt

Radio Iowa

A small team of conservators at the Ashmolean Museum are finishing their painstaking work to restore and preserve dozens of Ancient Egyptian artefacts in time for the grand opening of the new £5m galleries next month.

The new galleries of Ancient Egypt and Nubia will open to the public on Saturday, November 26, and set to boost visitor numbers to new record levels.

Many of the items have not been conserved since the 1950s and 1960s, and previous work has previously damaged the ancient artefacts.

And the work has also thrown up new discoveries. As conservators worked on the mummy of a woman from Hawara dating from 130AD, they found tiny fragments of leaf tucked under the linen ribbons.

According to keeper of antiquities Susan Walker, they came from the myrtle tree, which was used to make wreaths given to women on their wedding day. If she had been buried with one, it could show she was of marriageable age, or she may have died in childbirth.

The mummy of the Theban priest Djeddjehutyiuefankh, dating back to 770BC, was sent up to the Churchill Hospital in Headington for a CAT scan using their hi-tech medical equipment.

The scan revealed that unlike many mummies, Djeddjehutyiuefankh’s organs were intact and showed no sign of either injury or arthritis which could have explained how he died.

Oxford Mail

Three beautifully restored mummy portraits of well-off young people – an enigmatic, beguiling young woman and two handsome men – will go on permanent display at Oxford’s Ashmolean museum next month as part of the second phase of its redevelopment.

The oldest, on linen, is of a young woman dating from 55-70AD, excavated by Flinders Petrie – the founding father of Egyptology in the UK – at the Roman cemeteries of Hawara in Fayum, south-west of Cairo, in 1911.

Petrie had to do some immediate field conservation which involved him heating up paraffin wax in a double boiler and pouring it over the portraits he found.

It was a method that provokes only a slight shudder from Mark Norman, head of conservation at the Ashmolean. “We may or may not agree with what he did, but it worked,” he said. “If he hadn’t done it, we wouldn’t have the objects.

That she looks so fresh and luminous is the result of work by the museum’s paintings conservator, Jevon Thistlewood, who also worked on the mummy portraits of the two men, which date from around 100 years later.

The Guardian

Image via Wikipedia

When it comes to “oldest,” the sport of wrestling now is showcasing some ancient documentation to make its case.

Written in Greek on an 18-inch wide fragment of papyrus and dated to between 100 and 200 A.D., it is a list of instructions on how to wrestle.

The Greek word “pleckson” is seen throughout the text. According to a translation published in 1987 by Yale University Press, that word translates to “fight it out.”

Here of some of the translated instructions:

•”Stand to the side of your opponent and with your right arm take a headlock and fight it out.”

•”You underhook with your right arm. You wrap your arm around his, where he has taken the underhook, and attack the side with your left foot. You push away with your left hand. You force the hold and fight it out.”

•”You stand up to his side, attack with your foot and fight it out.”

The wrestling instruction document is on display at the Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Columbia University.

USA Today