Tag Archive
Egypt’s Hawass is no Mr. Nice Guy
Image via Wikipedia Around forty years ago, when King Tutankhamen’s first exhibition was held in the US, the artefacts were displayed at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Despite the fact that the museum made millions of dollars from donations and from the catalogues and souvenirs that were sold, Egypt made no financial profits from it. This... »
Tutankhamun’s Funeral at The Metropolitan Museum of Art
New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art presents the special exhibition Tutankhamun’s Funeral from March 16 to September 6, 2010. The installation features 60 objects used in the mummification and religious rituals associated with the boy-king’s burial. Most of the artifacts are derived from the museum’s permanent collection. The museum’s installation is greatly enhanced by the... »
Met Museum former director Thomas Hoving dies at 78
Image via Wikipedia Thomas Hoving, the charismatic showman and treasure hunter whose tenure as director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art from 1967 to 1977 fundamentally transformed the institution and helped usher in the era of the museum blockbuster show, died on Thursday at his home in Manhattan. He was 78. The cause was lung cancer,... »
Metropolitan Museum returns artifact to Egypt
New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art will return to Egypt a fragment of an ancient pharaonic shrine it purchased from a collector. The Supreme Council of Antiquities said that a piece of a red granite shrine, known as a “naos,” was purchased from an antiquities collector in New York last October so that it could... »
Evidence of madder dye found on 4,000-year-old Egyptian artifact
Refining a technique that allows the study of microscopic bits of pigment, Marco Leona of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York was able to analyze the color of a fragment of leather from an ancient Egyptian quiver. The discovery that the color was madder is the earliest evidence for the complex chemical... »
Recession hits the Met
Image by wallyg via Flickr Ninety-six staff members of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NY accepted an offer of voluntary retirement, part of a wider staff reduction that also will cut employees by layoff and attrition and bring the payroll down by 357 positions, to 2,200. Many had served the museum for decades, and all... »
Retired curator Virginia Burton dies at 90
Image via Wikipedia The only child of a dentist and his wife, Ms. Lucille Virginia Burton was born in St. Louis but moved to Richmond as a child. After graduating from Barnard College, she worked in public relations for the Metropolitan Museum and eventually landed a position in the Egyptology department of the Brooklyn Museum. She returned... »
A call for a new era of reconciliation and cultural exchange at the MET
Image via Wikipedia Sharon Waxman, author of “Loot: The Battle Over the Stolen Treasures of the Ancient World”, is calling upon Thomas Campbell, new director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, to move the museum away from its murky past of treasure plundering to a new era of transparency where this noble institution can set... »
Exhibition: Beyond Babylon: Art, Trade, and Diplomacy in the Second Millennium B.C
Image via Wikipedia The Metropolitan Museum of Art has assembled another spectacular examination of Middle Eastern history, this one filled with some 350 objects made of gold, silver, lapis lazuli and other precious materials, including a haul of 3,400-year-old luxury goods found in the wreck of the oldest seagoing vessel ever discovered on the bottom... »
Gods we could hold in our hands
For the ancient Egyptians, metals had a range of implicit associations: the use of gold was equated with red but also with parts of the body. Gold and silver were flesh and bone, sun and moon; certain deities, like Hathor, were associated with night and therefore cast in silver. Coloration could also be achieved... »
