Celebrating 100 years of the Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology at UCL
On 7th June the Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology celebrated one hundred years since first opening its doors at UCL. To honour this milestone year the museum will be hosting a number of special events focusing on the characters behind this world class collection. Leading the celebrations is the publication of 'The Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology: Characters and Collections' by the newly formed UCL Press and launch of the accompanying exhibition, 'Characters and Collections' on 1st July. Both the book and exhibition focus on the stories behind the Petrie Museum's unique collections and the extraordinary characters whose lives are caught up in the museum's rich and varied history. The characters highlighted include the adventurous Flinders Petrie, from whom the museum takes its name and who was once described by Lawrence of Arabia as "enormous fun"; Margaret Murray, an Egyptology lecturer at UCL and a significant influence on the development of Wicca; and Ali Suefi, Flinders Petrie's Egyptian right-hand man and discoverer of many of the museum's most prized objects. The Petrie Museum houses more than 80,000 artefacts and is one of the largest and finest collections of Egyptian and Sudanese archaeology in the world. Some of the objects featured in the centenary book and exhibition include; prehistoric beads made from meteoric iron, funerary figurines recovered by Flinders Petrie from a dark, flooded burial chamber and texts from Sudan's ancient Meroitic civilization which no-one has been able to translate.
