UCL Museums & Collections Blog

The Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology has celebrated LGBT History Month every year since 2008. It is a mark of interest in ideas about sexuality and Queer Studies around antiquity that our two events on Sappho and Antinous this year are fully booked (though there may be returns on the night – take your chances). UCL Equalities also runs a fantastic programme for Diversity Month at UCL and there is loads going on in Camden and Islington.

A few years ago I gave a talk on the reception of the ancient poet Sappho’s poems and this year Sophia Blackwell is doing her stand up performance Sappho in Sainsburys. It’s not as good as seeing Sophia perform live but Megan Price made a short film a few years ago – part of which she has put on You Tube for us to use. Guidance: It does contain references to sexual acts.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hBqj3GZtIUk

'Portrait' of sappho from Henry Wharton's translation c. 1885.

One of the rare facts about Sappho that we know with any certainty is that she was a poet. By the time of the Hellenistic period (c. second century BCE), the Alexandrian scholars had collected her remaining poems by metre in nine books and of these books we have 1 extant poem, several longer poems and about 200 fragments. We know that she composed and sang in the sixth century BCE and was probably born at Eresos on Lesbos in c.620 BCE. She was part of an aristocratic family and went into exile to Sicily for political reasons around 600 BCE. She had a daughter and was married, but to whom it is not certain. She had three brothers, one of whom traded in Naucratis in Egypt and, when not in exile, she lived most of her life at Mitylene, the main town of Lesbos.[1] Lesbos was an important island for trade and agriculture throughout antiquity but there is very little evidence for life on the island in the 6^th century, or ‘Archaic’ period, of Greece. She signed herself as Psappho.

This is what we know of her life – derived in part from her poems and in part from what biographers have written. We also know that she was lyric poet, that is she sang her poems to a lyre and composed choral odes. Her poetry is rich and full, as Virginia Woolf puts it in ‘On Not Knowing Greek’, of ‘constellations of adjectives’.[2] It is also about love – mainly love for women – and invokes the fatal power of passion. Love in the Greek world was not a benign cuddly myth but a powerful force that wounded. She also wrote wedding songs and some poetry about her family. However, it was her expressive desire towards women that contributed to her ambiguous reputation, even in the ancient world, and various legends surrounding her were formed.

On Saturday 7 January artist Adele Wagstaff hung her exhibition Luxor: People and Places at the Petrie Museum and, having just returned from Luxor a few days before the hang, I thought I’d write a post with a similar name. It was my first time in Upper Egypt and Luxor,  having previously visited Cairo and Alexandria, and I was a tourist on holiday rather than doing work.

A pharoah smiting people on Medinet Habu Temple, Thebes. Petrie took casts from the prisoner heads as 'racial types'.

Although I did visit many sites that Flinders Petrie worked on 100 years ago, excavating, surveying or taking casts for his Racial Photographs project.

The week my husband and I went to Luxor was meant to be one of the busiest of the European tourist season, though the sites and Luxor itself was fairly quiet due to both a recession in Europe and concerns about continued demonstrations in Cairo. It was great, however, to see so many Egyptian people visiting the sites, particularly in Abydos.

Omar in his 'Reis' clothes

Visiting these places was sorted out for us by Omar Farouk Said and his cousin Alla. Omar is a descendent of one of Petrie’s Qufti workers, who still excavates today! He was currently working with an excavation organised by Memphis University in Dra abu el Naga.

I think Deir el Medina – the town where the artisans lived who worked on the tombs in the Valley of the Kings – was my favourite site in Thebes. Although I also loved the Rammesseum complete with Belzoni’s graffiti on the column.

Belzoni at Rammesseum

There is a myth that you go to Egypt today and see the ‘unchanged’ scenes from antiquity in the countryside and driving through the villages of Upper Egypt can seem like that. However, Belzoni’s name along with those of other European travellers dotting the monuments give the lie to this ‘unchanging myth’ and are a reminder of the politics that always surrounds ancient heritage.

On our last day I had a sherry in colonial mansion that is the Winter Palace Hotel; a place that seemed incongruously older than the ancient sites, even down to the picture of Tony and Cherie Blair on the wall of the corridor outside the bar.

It was an exciting time to be in Egypt. In the last few days we were there, elections were taking place in the

Drinking sherry in the Winter Palace bar

provinces. Many of the candidates for Qena, the capital city of the province Luxor belongs to, were staying in our hotel which made for chaotic scenes with TV crews and taxis when we left for Dendera early on 3 January.

There were election posters everywhere.  It was a completely different situation and feel to the atmosphere when I visited Egypt in 2008 where restaurants and roadsides had countless pictures of the former President Hosni Mubarak. The political graffitiand stencils were particularly moving. Stencils of ‘Egyptian martyrs’ who died in the cause of freedom dotted the streets of Luxor.  From Khaled Said, who died at the hands of the

Mina Daniel: 'We are all Martyr Mina Daniel'. Luxor Street

security forces in 2010 and was one of the first martyrs of the revolution, to this one of Mina Daniel, a young Copt who died when the military opened fire on a protest in October 2011; these images kept the continuing struggle for the election and free speech in public view.

I came home to Britain reflecting on the connections and differences between our own protests and riots over the past year and those that happened and are continuing in Egypt, and felt humbled.

There will be a screening of a documentary about how a cross section of Egyptian people in Upper Egypt were affected by the revolution, followed by a discussion on Wednesday 25 January in the Petrie Museum.

In April and May 2010 there was a massive food festival about all things edible – cooking, growing, history – inCamleyStreetNaturalPark, an oasis of green calm a few minutes walk behind St Pancras. Various people fromUCL Museumsand Collections took part in this foodie festival. For example, Mark  Carnall, Curator of theGrantMuseum, spoke about eating cats and I cooked some Roman food for a demonstration to dispel the perception that Roman cusine was all about stuffed dormice and vomitariums.

Cover of Food Junctions Cookbook

A year later there is a rather wonderful cookbook collating Mark’s and my efforts and much more besides. It is downloadable free online or a hard copy is only £14 from Amazon. If you are looking for Christmas presents people who care about food, I recommend it. I bought it for a friend of mine who is a chef and exponent of the slow food movement where she works up in the Scottish Highlands – she loves it!

The recipe I choose for the book was one of many that I tried for my house warming party earlier this year. My emphasis was on trying to cook the ‘bog standard’ Roman fare that was found at bars rather than fancy banquets. This meant barley based dishes, fennel and lemon salad, different breads and dips, roasted meats with a kind of pickled egg and dried fruits in fish sauce sauce that smelt disgusting but was surprisingly edible. (I told everyone to try it at their peril; amazingly it tasted great and went very quickly). As well as stuffed dates cooked in wine with pepper and honey cakes covered in sesame seeds. One of my friends even provided a ham in pastry – a whole gammon covered in in pastry. This last item was more upmarket than the food I was attempting!

In cooking this food I noticed two main things. Much of the food was cooked in a way that it meant it was somehow preserved – whether through baking, roasting, using lots of salt or salty substances – which would of course be necessary for a world without fridge-freezers or artificial preservatives. The other was how ‘strange’ combinations of flavours worked, for example dates boiled in peppered wine.

Some readers may remember that I visited Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek at Copenhagen in June to see curator Tine Bagh’s preparation for an exhibition of material excavated by Flinders Petrie. The exhibition opened last week and I asked Jan Picton, Secretary of the Friends, to give me some feedback on the exhibition. Jan writes:

View of the exhibition showing the excavation site showcases.

“Twenty eager Friends of the Petrie Museum let loose to explore the Egyptian collections of Copenhagen– best not to get in their way! It helps when the Curator of the exhibition ‘In the Shadow of the Pyramids’ at the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, Tine Bagh, is both a fan of Petrie and a Friend of the Petrie Museum. Tine invited us to the Private View of the exhibition and the Reception in the fabulous Winter Garden and then gave us a guided tour of the exhibition and the collection the following day. She also facilitated our visits to the National Museum and to Thorvaldsen’s Museum. We are very grateful for her kindness when she was so busy with the exhibition. (more…)

One of the occasional events that the Petrie Museum runs from April to October are lectures or walking talks exploring Ancient Egypt in London through Egyptianizing architecture and other monuments. Under the heading ‘Out and About with the Petrie Museum’ we have so far gone to Cleopatra’s Needle, looked at sphinxes in Crystal Palace Park, explored factories such as the Carreras Building in Mornington Crescent and the Hoover Factory in Perivale, as well as Kensal Green and West Norwood Cemeteries, and more besides. These tours are given by an expert in Egyptianizing architecture Cathie Bryan and on occasion, when about the Victorian period, by myself.

Twickenham Bridge

This summer Cathie proposed going to the west of London and exploring Egypt in Richmond. My colleague at the Museum of Richmond, Phillippa Heath, agreed to do a joint event as part of National Archaeology Week on 16 July 2010. Cathie’s programme was as ever ambitious and involved the various obelisks in Richmond and Richmond Park, a factory in St Margarets, and Twickenham Bridge. In May, Phillippa and myself joined Cathie for a reccie to check timings and so we could publicise the event properly. (more…)

Last week the Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology put about 50 of the ‘racial type’ heads that Flinders Petrie collected out on display for the first time as part of the exhibition Typecast: Flinders Petrie and Francis Galton. There are over 300 of these in the museum’s collection but this tray is actually labeled ‘racial heads’. They were part of Petrie’s ideas around race and identifying racial groups in archaeology. Petrie thought that these heads were expressly modeled by Greek artists of foreigners. He described them, in his publications as belonging to different ‘racial types’, such as this one UC48501 as being a ‘Kurd’:

The Kurd (73) has the crossed turban which belongs to the Central Asian and Kurd race, but not to the Semitic peoples. Mr Hogarth informs me that the type of the face agrees to that of the modern Kurds, who were well known to the Greeks as the Karduchi. This is the finest piece of modelling among all the heads; the delicacy with which the features are worked, the detail of the ear being pressed forward by the turban, wrinkling it on the inner side, and the spirit of expression put this in the front rank.

Memphis II, 17

Petrie only collected the heads and paid for the workers for heads, which means that not only is there little evidence about the rest of the terracotta but that they may also have created fakes for Petrie. Sally-Ann Ashton, Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, argued at an event last Thursday that this head was a good example of a fake head.

A postgraduate student Katherine Aitchison attended Sally-Ann’ s talk last Thursday and has blogged about the event here. Do pop along to the Petrie Museum and take a look for yourselves!

David Starkey’s comments that ‘whites have become black’ on the BBC2 programme Newsnight on Friday 12 August 2011 have been condemned in most of the media and by many politicians. There are a few who make the valid argument for freedom to say what we like, while others contend that Starkey was referring to a particular form of ‘black’ gangsta culture. The BBC has had over 700 complaints. The black MP for Tottenham David Lammy, whom Starkey described as sounding ‘white’, implied that Starkey should stick to Tudor history. The classicist Mary Beard has pointed out that any historian worth their salt should be able to apply their tools of critique to any period.  In this I concur.

David Starkey on Newsnight

Here I speak personally for myself and not for UCL or for any of my colleagues.

Starkey’s generalisations uncomfortably reminded me of Francis Galton’s letter to The Times on 5 June 1873 advocating that the Chinese move into Africa and take over from the ‘inferior negro’. Galton wrote: (more…)

Occasionally I leave the museum bunker to give talks about the museum, exhibitions and my research. A few weeks ago I went out to the lovely village of Claverdon in Warwickshire to give a talk on Francis Galton.

2011 is the centenary of the death of the scientist Sir Francis Galton. Last year the churchwarden Jonathan Evans got in touch with UCL Museums and Collections as they had received funding from the Galton Institute to clean up and conserve Galton’s grave in Claverdon church’s graveyard. (more…)

Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, Copenhagen

I have just returned from Copenhagen where I was work-shadowing my colleague Tine Bagh at the NY Carlsberg Glyptotek on an Erasmus grant while she is working on the exhibition In the Shadow of the Pyramids.  Tine’s work studying the excavation records of objects in the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek for The Petrie Project is the research underpinning The Shadow of the Pyramids exhibition, opening in November 2011.
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Statellite Map of Tanis

The use of ‘space archaeology’, a pioneering approach using satellite technology and infra-red surveying, in finding previously undiscovered monuments and towns from the ancient past in Egypt was illustrated on BBC1 last night (Egypt’s Lost Cities, BBC1, 30 May 2011). And very exciting it all was too as the group dashed from site to site, came up against problems with permits to dig, then got support from the supreme authority, dashed around some more sites, got other archaeologists to dig for them (with varying results) and then were embroiled in a democratic revolution.
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