Museum display unveils Pharaohs’ ancient treasures
Dec 5 2008 by Richard Down, Liverpool Daily Post
Ancient Egypt at World Museum Liverpool _320
* CLICK here to see the Ancient Egypt gallery
ONE of the finest collections of Egyptian tombs, mummies and artefacts in the world will open its doors in Liverpool today.
Among the 1,500 exhibits on show is one of the world’s great treasures – a vividly-coloured belt of the last great Pharaoh, Rameses III – which is on display for the first time since before the Second World War.
Amazingly, the exhibition owes much to legendary nurse Florence Nightingale and the real-life explorer and author who helped spawn the Indiana Jones character.
Curator Ashley Cooke, whose PhD in Egyptian tombs comes from the University of Liverpool, said: “No other civilisation in world history has captured the imagination quite like Ancient Egypt, the first nation state.
“Today their wonderful, haunting tombs and all they left behind continue to exert an endless fascination. The World Museum Liverpool is in a prime position to tell the story as we have one of the finest collections anywhere.”
The collection come from some odd sources.
A substantial number of the artefacts at the museum once belonged to Lady with the Lamp Florence Nightingale.
In 1949, the museum was trying to get its collection together again after a World War Two bomb wreaked havoc on the building.
An appeal was answered by those in charge of the pioneering nurse’s collection that she had obtained about 100 years earlier.
Other items are part of the legacy left behind by Sir Henry Rider Haggard, the swashbuckling author and tomb raider behind King Solomon’s Mines and the fictional character that spawned Indiana Jones.
Grippingly, the exhibition includes the mummy said to have inspired Sir Rider Haggard’s classic fantasy adventure She, about a beautiful queen who lives 2,000 years waiting for her lost love, before shrivelling up into a pile of dust.
* ANCIENT Egypt is at World Museum Liverpool, William Brown Street, now and admission is free.
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