Secret Egypt in Sydney – The Nicholson Museum

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Today I finally got back to see the Nicholson Museum at Sydney University, which houses Australia’s largest permanent collection of Antiquities (covering Egypt, Greece, Rome, Asia Minor and a few Celtic objects).

It’s a hodge-podge of stuff- essentially the collection is the result of the Victorian passion for collecting the unusual and the resulting “Cabinets of Curiosities” have ended up in the museum via bequests and donations.  It goes without saying that the Victorians were also passionate about taking things to pieces, which goes a long way to explaining the vast quantity of disarticulated bodyparts that look out from various cabinets.

The museum is also particularly notable in that entrance is free and (more amazingly) photography is permitted, even with a flash.

Below are a selection of photo’s which I took today.  They were taken on a Canon 400D and most a through glass with only the on-board flash for illumination (I didn’t have the patience to lug a tripod, although I may so do at a later stage).

 This is a small mummy of a young boy (originally thought to be a young girl).  A fragment of papyrus within the linen wrapping identifies him as “Horus”.  The mummy is beautifully wrapped and the cartonnage mask is mostly intact.

 This is a very small hand torn from a mummy and kept as a curio.  The fingers – so very fragile in mummified bodies – are carefully wrapped with a scarab amulet to ward off destruction and decay.  Proof against everything except Victorian collectors, alas.  There are several hands in the collection – one is completely unwrapped and others partly wrapped.

 

 Another curio – this is a mummified baby crocodile.  It is about 20cm in length and still retails some of its linen wrapping.

This is one piece that I was excited about – it is a small (about  1 metre along) piece of a frieze from Armarna – the destroyed city of the heretic pharaoh Akhenaten.  You can just make out a few rays of the Aten on the left decending to bless something.  According to the plaque, the cartouches of Akhenaten and Nefertiti are visible on this piece which makes it exceptionally rare – most traces of this strange ruler were deliberately obliterated after his death either by his mysterious successor Smenkhare (possibly Nefertiti) or his son Tutankhaten (who, upon his fathers death, changed his name to the more famous Tutankhamun).

Here is a close-up of the heiroglyphics.

 There are many well-preserved examples of heiroglyphics within the museum including a beautifyl papyrus scroll from the Book of the Dead.  The tablet below is an offering and, according to the plaque reads;

“Giving thanks to the Amun, doing obeisance to the lord of the gods, said the teacher of music Amenhotep, true of voice, and his mother Kekit.”

Here are a set of ivories (pity about the camera flash but the glass was a bugger to shoot through) that have an interesting story about their recovery.  According to the plaque, they were recovered at a dig that was conducted by the husband of famous novelist Agatha Christie.  According to the story, she took on the task of cleaning them and found that the best way to remove the dust and grime of ages was to clean them using some of her face cream as it gently took away the dirt whilst preserving the fragile material.  She complains that there was no cream left for her face but gives the wry observation that it shouldn’t matter as an archaeologist husband was the best thing a woman could have, as the older she gets, the more interested he becomes in her.  The ivories are Mesopotamian, not Egyptian, but I couldn’t resist the story.

There was a lot more to see there, of course, but these are the things that interested me the most.  Also of note were some lovely pieces of statuary, several mummy cases, a smattering of Roman items, and a very large amount of Greek blackware.

Also worth a look is the lovely Neo-Gothic buildings of the University – the Main building has a fantastic collection of gargoyles both in and outside and is well worth a look (take my advise and take a telephoto lens if you have one).  I shall post some photo’s of these very shortly.

(All images are copyright to Voodoo Kitchen – all rights are reserved.  However, if you want to use a photo or would like a larger resolution, please leave a comment here and I’ll get back to you ASAP).

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Filed under Ancient Egypt, Sydney, photography

Tags: Akenaten, Ancient Egypt, antiquities, Armarna, Egyptian, mummy, Nefertiti, papyrus, pharaoh, statue, tablet