The Petrie Museum houses around 80,600 objects, making it one of the largest and most important collections of Egyptian and Sudanese archaeology in the world. The collections represent all facets of life along the Nile Valley: pharaohs and ordinary people, children, craftspeople, animals and plant life, across millennia. Its collections are large in number small in scale, providing a deeply intimate way to engage with a vast amount of human, shared, history.
The Petrie Museum’s importance was officially recognised in 1998 when its collections were designated by the UK government as ‘of outstanding importance’. With the help of government funding, the Museum has made the entire collection accessible in an online catalogue available at https://collections.ucl.ac.uk/search/simple
The collection is full of ‘firsts’ including the world’s oldest woven garment (the ‘Tarkhan Dress’), the oldest wills on papyrus paper, and the first worked iron: 3 meteorite beads from Gerzeh. In addition to the Tarkhan Dress, there is a unique bead-net dress of a dancer from the Pyramid Age, about 2400 BC, two long sleeved robes of the same date; a suit of armour from the palace of Memphis, as well as sandals and knitted socks from the Roman period. The collection contains outstanding works of art from Akhenaten and Nefertiti’s city at Amarna: colourful tiles, carvings and frescoes, and from many other important Egyptian and Nubian settlements and burial sites. The Petrie Museum houses the world’s largest collection of Roman period mummy portraits.
More than these highlights, though, the collection is uniquely important because so much of it comes from documented excavations. The large typological series of objects (amulets, faience, objects of daily use, tools and weapons, weights and measures, stone vessels, jewellery) provide a unique insight into how people have lived and died in the Nile Valley across millennia.
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