Ancient Egypt
Part of the Ancient Egypt gallery at World Museum Liverpool.
You can trace the history of the Liverpool collection right back to an individual called Joseph Mayer, who built a private collection of ancient Egyptian artefacts, which he opened to the public in 1852 in an Egyptian museum which was a success from the very opening.
Then in 1867 he donated his entire collection to the museum, which formed essential the nucleus of that collection. But it was in 1901 that John Garstang, Professor of Egyptology at the University of Liverpool, founded The Liverpool Institute of Archaelogy. His mission was to go out to Egypt to excavate the cemeteries and other sites and record what he found there and the Egyptian government would allow him to bring a share of his finds back to Liverpool.
So we also subscribed to similar organisations and systematically built up a very representative collection of ancient Egyptian culture, making us one of the finest collections in the country.
Particular favourites of the museum are usually the mummies. We thought very carefully about the display of mummies in the gallery and decided to display mummies.
The public are very interested in seeing mummies when the visit the museum and mummification is such an integral part of ancient Egyptian culture, that we thought not to display the mummies would be denying people access to this information.
In the new gallery we have been very keen to represent people that wouldn't ordinarily be known about from ancient Egypt. These are the people that made the objects that you see on display here and worked for the members of high society .
In one case we have an area that demonstrates how people protected themselves through magic, appealing to the dead and their Gods and it's to hopefully to get people to understand a little bit more about the more private and personal rituals that went on within ancient Egyptian homes rather than the temples of Ancient Egypt.