There have been so many mummified cats found in Egypt that in the 19th Century they were shipped to the UK in their thousands to be ground up & used as fertiliser. There are still a lot of cat mummies that survived, and this is one that is now in the Liverpool World Museum. 🧵1/7 #Egyptology

The relief in this photo comes from the same site and time as the ram headed sphinx I posted about a couple of weeks ago – Kawa in Sudan during the reign of Taharqo of the 25th Dynasty. And it also depicts the god Amun, this time in a scene of the pharaoh offering to the gods. 🧵1/5 #Egyptology

This pot is of a type we call Decorated Ware which was made primarily during the Naqada II period of Egyptian history, around 5.5 thousand years ago. The name is self-explanatory & was invented by Petrie as part of his classification of pottery from ancient Egyptian sites. 🧵1/4 #Egyptology

This statue was found at a site called Kawa in modern Sudan (and ancient Kush) roughly halfway between the Egyptian border & Khartoum. It is very clearly Egyptian in style, and the Pharaoh it depicts is Taharqo (the penultimate king of the 25th Dynasty, who were from Kush). 🧵1/6 #Egyptology

I like this large fragment of a stela because of how neat and crisp the hieroglyphs are. This was made by someone who knew what they were doing, and took the time to do it well. And the person who commissioned it was therefore a person of status & wealth. 🧵1/6 #Egyptology

This is a delightful pot, painted with a drake (as in male duck, not dragon) as the centrepiece of the decoration. It’s about 16cm tall (a little over 6 inches) and was found at Abydos by the EEF (now EES) excavations in 1904. 🧵1/4 #Egyptology

This jar is nearly 5500 years old, and was found at a site in Upper Egypt called Mo’alla that is about 20 miles south of Luxor. It’s best known for the tomb of Ankhtifi who lived about 1200 years after this pot was made. 🧵1/5 #Egyptology

This toothy lady is Taweret, a protective household deity who looked after mothers & childbirth. She’s a composite creature but most of what we see here are the hippo aspects of her imagery, out of frame she also has the legs & paws of a lion and the tail of a crocodile. 🧵1/6 #Egyptology

This rather beaten up shabti once belonged to the Pharaoh Amenhotep III, who was king during one of Egypt’s greatest periods of wealth and prosperity. He was the ninth king of the 18th Dynasty in the New Kingdom, reigning from c. 1390 BCE to 1352 BCE. 🧵1/8 #Egyptology

This is a canopic jar belonging to a woman called Hathor who lived around 3000 years ago in a place called Sidmant near the Faiyum in Egypt. She was a Chantress of Herishef, and there was a temple to Herishef nearby in Heracleopolis Magna (modern Beni Suef). 🧵1/5 #Egyptology

Several (many?) cultures mark the construction of an important structure by burying something (or sometimes somebody) in or near the foundations. There’s more than one possible explanation for this, and we don’t always know what the reasons are. 🧵1/7 #Egyptology

This palette was found in the Main Deposit at Hierakonpolis, near where the more famous Narmer Palette was found. Both date to around the time that Egypt was first unified, c. 3100 BCE, when the art style had not yet standardised into the more familiar canon of Pharaonic Egypt. 🧵1/9 #Egyptology

I find these sorts of detached coffin or mask faces really rather striking, I think it’s the juxtaposition of the well modelled features of the face with the fact that there’s nothing else there (except in this case for a peg to attach it to the coffin). 🧵1/7 #Egyptology

To my eyes there is something jolly about this hippo, but to the original makers & owners it would’ve been rather more fearsome – somehow the hippo has made it into modern visual culture as a bit jovial or perhaps even cuddly, and this example seems to me to laugh in delight. 🧵1/5 #Egyptology

This little pot comes from the Faiyum in Egypt, and it dates to the Late Period around 2500 years ago. It’s made of clay, and is a little under 20cm (or just over 7 inches) tall. The face & arms turn it from an ordinary pot into a depiction of the god Bes. 🧵1/6 #Egyptology

This lovely little object is a bracelet, dating to the 1st Dynasty of Egypt around five thousand ago. It’s upside down in the view we have in this photo, each of the beads is a serekh (a palace facade motif, the rods) with a falcon (the smooth rounded bit) sat on top. 🧵1/6 #Egyptology

My first photo this week is of irrigated fields in modern Egypt, neat rectangles, with straight irrigation channels dividing these rectangles into smaller sections. Everything at right angles, everything organised and ordered. 🧵1/6 #Egyptology

These little hedgehog shaped pots are around 2,500 years old, dating to the Late Period of Egyptian history. They are a type of pot called an “aryballos” which (as the name suggests) originate in Greece around this time or a little earlier. 🧵1/6 #Egyptology

Nakhtefmut was a priest in Karnak around 900 BCE and this is a close up of a scene on the cartonnage coffin that he was buried in. It was found in the Ramesseum at the end of the 19th Century CE, and given to the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge where it now lives. 🧵1/6 #Egyptology

These are the last of my photos from my trip to Egypt in 2016, and I’ve got two small albums here from travelling back towards Cairo from Middle Egypt. First we visited a small set of tombs called the Fraser Tombs: photos.talesfromthetwolands.org/index.php?/c... 🧵1/5 #Egyptology

This is a piece of one of those busily decorated yellow 21st Dynasty coffins, with every bit of it covered in vignettes and protective symbols. It has no provenance, but it is now in the Ashmolean Museum (or at least it was when I photographed it in 2018). 🧵1/6 #Egyptology

This rather imposing looking gentleman was called Roy (or Roma-Roy) and he was the high priest of Amun during the later part of Ramesses II’s reign & into the reigns of the next Pharaohs. His brother Bakenkhonsu and his father Roma had been high priests before him. 🧵1/5 #Egyptology

I rather like the way the Ashmolean had this beaker displayed in 2011, it’s against a replica of a piece of Predynastic Egyptian art (from Hierakonpolis Tomb 100 I think) and lined up with gazelles of some sort surrounding the beaker with its central Barbary sheep. 🧵1/6 #Egyptology

Egyptian culture isn’t self-contained and isolated from the world, at various times it spills out into other nearby places and sometimes it sweeps back in from those places too. This vulture statue is part of that mixing and diffusing of cultures. 🧵1/8 #Egyptology

A few weeks ago I shared a photo of one of my favourite pieces of Predynastic pottery, a bowl with hippopotami on the rim. It’s not the only example of this sort of bowl, here’s one that’s currently in the British Museum (I photographed it in 2014 when it was on display). 🧵1/7 #Egyptology

This piece of relief might look Greek at first glance, but was excavated at Amarna by the Egypt Exploration Society in the 1920s & gifted to the Brooklyn Museum. It is therefore dated to the mid 14 Century BCE, roughly contemporaneous with the end of Bronze Age Greece. 🧵1/5 #Egyptology

I rather enjoyed this case of shabtis when I visited the Cairo Museum in 2016, I’ve no idea if it’s still there now but I do hope so. Part of what I like about it is the selection of several beautiful wooden & gilded shabtis (and the alabaster one that stands out by contrast). 🧵1/6 #Egyptology

This is a photo of a small part of the North Palace at Amarna. I’m standing taking the photo behind the back of the building zoomed in quite a lot, you can just see a bit of the barbed wire fence along the top of the shot, which is keeping passersby out of the archaeology. 🧵1/7 #Egyptology

I’ve posted pictures of this bowl previously, but it’s been a while so I think it’s time for another one. I like how from this angle you can see that the hippos have been modelled separately and then added on to the rim of the bowl, so he looks like he’s clinging on to it! 🧵1/7 #egyptology

When Akhenaten moved the capital of Egypt to his new build city in the desert at Amarna he made proclamations as to what facilities he intended his city to contain and where his tomb should be, and the text of these was carved into the cliffs around the perimeter of the city. 🧵1/7 #Egyptology

This photo is from the decoration of a tomb at Deir el Bahri, which belonged to a man called Nespakashuty who was vizier during the reign of Psamtik I around 650 BCE. The tomb was built next to a Middle Kingdom tomb, which had already been there for over 1000 years. 🧵1/7 #Egyptology

One of the problems with visiting Amarna as a tourist is that there’s not actually a lot to see. The various structures only exist as low mudbrick walls, and many are reburied after excavation with a covering of modern stonework to protect them. 🧵1/6 #Egyptology

This is the lower half of the outer coffin of a young woman called Henettawy, who lived around 1000 BCE during the Third Intermediate Period in the 21st Dynasty and was buried in a tomb that had once been used to bury one of Hatshepsut’s officials nearly 500 years earlier. 🧵1/7 #Egyptology

The Small Aten Temple in the Central City of Amarna is only small by comparison with the Great Aten Temple. This photo is taken from the front entrance, and you can see the little figures of people very small in the distance next to the columns in front of the sanctuary. 🧵1/7 #Egyptology

This is a rather unusual and enigmatic object. It is a stone disk, about 10cm wide, inlaid with other stones to make a rather nice geometric design. Next to it is a (wooden?) pin which fits in the hole and might be used to spin the disk. 🧵1/4 #Egyptology

I’m still working my way through the photos I took on holiday in Egypt in 2016, and the next set I’ve processed were taken in Amarna across two days. See them on my photo site: photos.talesfromthetwolands.org/index.php?/c... 🧵1/3 #Egyptology

The Brooklyn Museum has two of these very fine shabti figures, made for a woman called Sati who appears to’ve been nobody special according to her titles (just Mistress of the House) but clearly possessed of great wealth given the quality of the shabtis. 🧵1/6

I posted a close up of this stela four years ago, and it’s such a nice piece I thought I’d share another photo of it now. The people and other decorative elements are carved in raised relief, and the hieroglyphs are in sunk relief giving a a nice contrast between the elements. 🧵1/6 #Egyptology