Discovering Ancient Egypt exhibition at the National Museum of Australia

The Discovering Ancient Egypt exhibition at the National Museum of Australia is almost finished its run. With recent trips to Perth and Penang we had not managed to find time to see it. This week we corrected that. The objects come from the collection of the Dutch National Museum of Antiquities (Rijksmuseum van Oudheden)

This a well thought out exhibit without too many distracting bells and whistles. By this I mean that sometimes multimedia interactive installations that are supposed to enhance the exhibit simple overshadow the objects. This was not the case here. Since one of the drivers of this exhibition was to illustrate new ways of thinking about ancient Egyptian culture made possible by another form of new technology, 3D-scanning, I was pleased to see their use of new ways to present museum displays was sensitive.

There were 200 objects on display, enough to think about for a few hours but not so much you hit overwhelm and walk out exhausted.

There are a number of highlights in the exhibition such as the some papyri ‘Book of the Dead’ scrolls, some really beautiful well crafted jewellery, coffins, mummified animals including a fish and a crocodile. There were many statuettes – one of a bin chicken (Ibis). Everyday items and things like a pen were interesting and of course this exhibit has some mummies.

Two pieces caught my eye and gave me food for thought as they both blended two artistic styles. The first was a Statue of Isis (304 BEC – 307 CE) that was carved in a typical Egyptian upright straight pose with one foot forward while the clothing and face was carved in a naturalistic style of Greek and Roman art. The mix of styles made for an odd piece. It demonstrated how other cultures had an influenced the making of this piece. It’s the sort of piece that when I was younger, at art school 40 years ago now, I would have never seen in an exhibition because it did not fit into a neat box of this style or that. This object would not have been included because it does not illustrate the overarching story of Art told at the time which emphasied the “Progress of Art”. Now we are much more interested in how cultures represent themselves, influence other cultures and mix and Art History has become far more interesting as a result.

The other piece that would have been equally marginalised 40 years ago in a Funerary Stela (100-200CE) that depicted a woman in an Egyptian stance, holding her arms held up wide apart wearing Greek clothing.

As always if photography is allowed I took numerous photographs without a flash. My eye noticed particularly the colour schemes, patterns and symbols on various coffins.

Another small area of the exhibition I found fascinating was how archeological data was collected, represented and classified. There were some drawings depicting tomb chamber motifs by Ippolito Rosellini, from I Monumenti dell’ Egitto e della Nubia (Pisa 1832-1834). The geometric tomb chamber motifs by Rosellini are very beautiful. As a side note, if you want to browse the rest of Ippolito Rosellini’s works you can find a public domain copy of I Monumenti dell’ Egitto e della Nubia in the New York Public Library digital collections

Rosellini is recognised for processing the data collected during the Franco-Tuscan expedition to Egypt which was made on behalf of the Grand Duke of Tuscany Leopold II. Rosellini and the famous decipherer of the hieroglyphs, Jean-François Champollion made the expedition in 1828. It took Rosellini 12 years to work through all the information gathered on that trip, producing three volumes of plates published to accompany nine volumes of text.

Discovering Ancient Egypt at the National Museum of Australia until 8 September 2024