The toolbar along the top of this page enables you to see expedition photos, diaries, and the maps and plans made by the expedition. You can also undertake ‘video walkthroughs’ of the site, and access a database of objects found by the expedition. Be sure to visit the site when you have plenty of time available, as it can be addictive.

The Manchester Museum

www.museum.man.ac.uk

The Manchester Museum, which has one of the most important Egyptological collections in the country, supported the excavations of Sir William Flinders Petrie at the end of the nineteenth Century. As such its collection is unusual in that it contains a large amount of provenanced material gained from actual excavations undertaken at settlement sites – such as the Middle Kingdom village of Kahun. It also has an excellent collection of mummies, both animal & human, the most famous of which is the Middle Kingdom tomb collection (and bodies) of ‘The Two Brothers’, Khnum-Nakht & Nekht- Ankh.

An overview of the Egyptian collection can be accessed by clicking on ‘Ancient Egypt’ under the ‘Galleries’ heading on the museum homepage. If you instead click on ‘Ancient Egypt’ under ‘Collections’ you are given more detailed information. The ‘Search the Collection’ facility enables you to review Egyptian history under ‘Egyptology History’, or access the inventory of some twenty thousand Egyptological objects if you select the ‘Search the Collections’ option instead. The ‘Search the Collection’ page gives you several alternative searches to choose from, such as ‘Mummy Portraits’, ‘Daily Life Gallery or ‘Death & the Afterlife Gallery’ but unfortunately many items still need to be added to these databases. One major drawback of the web-site it is that there is no ‘Highlights of the Collection’ option available for prospective visitors, and so many of the masterpieces of the museum’s collection are hidden away, submerged in the minutiae of the collection’s database of thousands of objects. This makes it extremely difficult to find the prominent pieces on display in the galleries. On my search even the ‘search facility’ failed to find important pieces on display, such as the Riqqeh pectoral or the remains of the female mummy 1770, both key pieces in the collection. At the bottom of the Museum’s Homepage you will find the link to the ‘Virtual Kahun’ web-site situated at http://kahun.man.ac.uk/

Click on the wooden door to enter the site which then provides options to look at the ‘Excavations’ themselves, and how two different museum ‘Collections’ came into being, one based in London whilst the other is in Manchester. This site also offers a virtual tour of the village of Kahun using digital reconstructions based on the plans and excavation reports of the site. If you click on the ‘Search the Collections’ option, on the left, you are taken to a unique collaboration between Manchester Museum and the Petrie Museum of UCL. Both these museums have objects from Kahun, excavated by Sir William Flinders Petrie, and so by clicking on the ‘Petrie Kahun Web-Site’ link http://www.kahun.ucl.ac.uk you now have the opportunity to view a combined database of all the objects from Kahun, even though they are now physically in two entirely different museums, hundreds of miles apart. This idea, of digitally uniting collections, pioneered by the Manchester and the Petrie Museums, may eventually lead the way in allowing museums to display items from the same tomb, or excavation, even thought they are now scattered in several different locations, in museums across the world. Would that Egyptological research could become so easy. Who knows what archaeological discoveries remain to be made in the reserve collections of distant museums?

Victor Blunden

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