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May 2013

“Mummies, Asps and Far Too Much Eye Make-up: Ancient Egypt in the Cinema” John J Johnston (EEG Meeting Talk)

I’ll admit I was a little dubious in advance of May’s Essex Egyptology Group meeting – I don’t really watch many films, so a whole talk about Ancient Egypt in the cinema had the potential to be completely incomprehensible or boring or both. Thankfully, it was neither 🙂 And this was down to the fact that the speaker, John J Johnston, was very entertaining and good at explaining what he was talking about even if you hadn’t ever seen the film in question. His talk had three main strands, which were those listed in the title – mummies, asps (i.e. films about Cleopatra) and far too much eye make-up (everything else). The first half concentrated on films about mummies. I knew there was a film called “The Mummy”, what I hadn’t realised is that there were several films with that name each of which came complete with sequels. Johnston took… Read More »“Mummies, Asps and Far Too Much Eye Make-up: Ancient Egypt in the Cinema” John J Johnston (EEG Meeting Talk)

EEG Trip to the Petrie Museum

On Saturday about 20 of us from the Essex Egyptology Group went to the Petrie Museum for a tour. We were shown round first by Tracey Golding, the Visitors Services Officer, who gave us an introduction to the museum. It is part of UCL and was founded to house the collection of items that Petrie dug up in his excavations in Egypt. There are 80,000 objects in the collection, of which about 10% are on display. To fit everything into the relatively small space that they have in the museum (about a quarter to a third of the space is shown in the first photo below) the cases are very full and the labels are pretty minimal. However every item is numbered and you can look them all up on the museum website and learn more about it. Golding pointed out some of the highlights of the collection including some… Read More »EEG Trip to the Petrie Museum