Museums are much more than the sum of what is displayed in their galleries. They are spaces in which time and space are compressed, where complex and multi-layered histories are reassembled, lost, rediscovered and contested. This occurs not only through the mix and match of objects, but via the flow of people who become caught up in the lives of objects and collections. The Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology at University College London (UCL) is no exception. Despite its name, the Museum is a product of many more individuals than its famous founder, William Matthew Flinders Petrie (1853–1942), while the spatial and temporal parameters of its collection are far broader than the simple term ‘Egyptian Archaeology’ might popularly suggest.
There are more than 80,000 artefacts in the Petrie Museum. These have been amassed over the last 150 years through the happenstance of archaeological discovery, the opportunism of purchase, and the fortunateness of gifts and exchanges. The collection ranges from implements made hundreds of thousands of years ago to a twentieth-century tapestry woven at the Wissa Wassef Centre in Saqqara, and from tiny pieces of mosaics less than 0.05 mm thick to near-life-sized stone statues of lions. The objects in the Museum’s care come not only from Egypt’s Nile Valley and northern Nile Delta, but also from the Egyptian deserts and from elsewhere on the African continent and the wider Mediterranean and Asian worlds. To do justice to this material eclecticism, if that is even possible, would take a publication far larger than this. Instead, our aim in this small volume is to trace out some of the contours of this assemblage and relate just a few of the unusual stories and personalities behind the technical labels and the Egyptological references.
The Amelia Edwards Museum?
Today the Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology is most readily associated with the personality of Flinders Petrie, who transformed the practice of archaeology and made countless discoveries in both Egypt and Palestine. In recognition of these achievements Petrie was bestowed numerous accolades; not that he cared much for high praise. Take his pocket diary entry for 25 July 1923, for instance, which states simply: ‘10.30 Buckingham Palace. Knighted. Back by 12.’ Such a perfunctory writing style was characteristic of the man who once said that ‘I would rather do a week’s hard work, than assist in a day’s pleasure.’ It is testament to several decades of such an extraordinary work ethic that the Egyptian collection at UCL is so rich, diverse and textured with histories. Yet the Museum owes its existence to a much larger cast of characters who worked tirelessly with the objects now housed here, including Petrie’s wife – the archaeologist Hilda Petrie – his students, work-crews and successors. Indeed, the Museum would not be here at all were it not for the bequest of a charismatic Victorian novelist and artist who ‘made Egyptology a household word’.
Amelia Edwards (1831–92) was a resolute explorer, but her purpose in travelling to Cairo in the winter of 1873–74 had simply been on a whim, ‘for a month’s sunshine, warmth, and dry weather’. Her excursion, however, proved to be a turning point in her life and she returned to England a dedicated campaigner for the preservation of Egypt’s heritage, devoting the remainder of her life to this cause. Edwards was instrumental in the foundation of the Egypt Exploration Fund (which continues today as the Egypt Exploration Society) and her inspirational oratory ensured that it attracted loyal supporters and admirers both in the United Kingdom and abroad. Her passion for Egypt also extended to her personal collection:
‘… dearer to me than all the rest of my curios are my Egyptian antiquities; and of these, strange to say, though none of them are in sight, I have enough to stock a modest little museum. Stowed away in all kinds of nooks and corners, in upstairs cupboards, in boxes, drawers, and cases innumerable, behind books, and invading the sanctity of glass closets and wardrobes, are hundreds, nay, thousands, of those fascinating objects in bronze and glazed ware, in carved wood and ivory, in glass, and pottery, and sculptured stone, which are the delight of archaeologists and collectors’.
On her death in 1892 it was this ensemble of things that formed the foundation of UCL’s Egyptian collection. Edwards had chosen UCL as the home for her beloved antiquities because it was the only university in England which, at that time, awarded degrees to women on an equal basis to men. This bequest was also accompanied by an endowment that established the UK’s first Chair in Egyptian Archaeology and Philology. Edwards worded her bequest very carefully to exclude anyone working at the British Museum and, by stipulating that the post-holder be under forty years of age, she ensured that Flinders Petrie was the only possible candidate.
Petrie had also been amassing his own collection since 1881, by purchasing antiquities from dealers in Egypt, as well as by acquiring pieces from the excavations he directed for the Egypt Exploration Fund, for his private sponsors Jesse Haworth and Martyn Kennard, or through the British School of Archaeology in Egypt that he founded in 1905. For all these excavations he was dependent upon teams of Egyptian workmen, many of whom he had trained to dig carefully and who became some of the world’s first excavation specialists. The teams included men such as Ali Suefi from the village of al-Lahun, who Petrie described as ‘his best lad’ and who was responsible for the discovery of many of the artefacts now on display in UCL. The Egyptian excavators became known as ‘Quftis’, after the village that many originated from. Their descendants continue to work on archaeological sites to this day.
By 1910 these collecting activities had resulted in ‘a hoard which lay in layers piled on sheets of paper one over the other in the few cases at the College. Stores of larger objects had to lie in ever increasing soot and dirt.’ It was, Petrie lamented, ‘getting beyond my control’. At this point UCL agreed to formally acquire and take responsibility for the collection, and in June 1915 what had once been hidden away by Amelia and precariously stacked up by Flinders went on display for the first time.
The Egyptian Museum, University College
An account of the new Museum was published in 1915 and it paints a vivid picture of the layout of the original displays. The new cases occupied the upper level of a whole wing of the main University building, just south of the great dome, and had a floor area that was around 120 by 50ft (36.5 by 15m) wide. Despite the space there was still a clutter and jostle of objects: ‘the series of pottery’ alone, it was reported, ‘runs nearly the whole length of the room’. Stretched across this corner of UCL was the full span of Egyptian history, neatly lined up through sequences of beads, palettes, stone vessels, scarabs, flints, figurines, weights and measures, funerary figurines and wooden tools.
The Museum was explicitly not at this time intended to attract and interest general visitors; it was for study and teaching purposes. As Petrie himself was away for the better part of the academic year in Egypt, that teaching load fell to his assistant, the ‘small and energetic’ Margaret Murray (1863–1963), who was later famed for being a ‘white witch’ on account of her widely published interest in witchcraft. Despite all her responsibilities, Murray was instructed not to touch the artefacts in the Professor’s absence. Petrie alone was to be in charge of the organization and labelling of displays. That, however, is not the same as cataloguing and to the horror of his successor (Stephen Glanville, 1900–56), in 1934 there remained thousands of artefacts packed away in cupboards and drawers without any form of identification to show where they had come from. Petrie had extolled the virtues of systematic object registration in a paper he wrote for the journal Nature in August 1889, but he unfortunately did not put this into practice in his own Museum. It was Glanville who began the systematic registration of the Museum’s holdings. Beginning at UC001, he began by documenting one of the collection’s highlights – the striking art of the Amarna period, produced in the city of the so-called ‘heretic pharaoh’ Akhenaten and his wife Nefertiti. It would take another seventy years to complete the numbering and cataloguing. It will take several lifetimes more to further research, enrich and correct the 80,000 object records that underpin so much of the Petrie Museum’s daily work.
In the line of fire
There had been an urgency to the campaigns led by Amelia Edwards and Flinders Petrie to ensure the survival of the ancient past in the face of modern dangers within Egypt. But in relieving Egypt’s heritage from one set of threats, they soon – unknowingly – exposed it to another set of hazards in the Western world. Wars and natural disasters destroyed many relics acquired in Egypt and exported abroad. London was not immune to such perils, but it is thanks to the dedication of a few individuals that the Egyptian collection is still here after a tumultuous century in the UK’s capital city.
The Museum’s early-twentieth-century location beneath University College’s skylights was a vulnerable one, not least because of the vagaries of the ever-unpredictable British weather, but also because it posed a significant security risk. Petrie had been especially agitated during the zeppelin raids of the First World War, but UCL escaped unscathed and the collection continued to grow in size as ‘Petrie’s pups’ – the students he trained out in the field – took on their own excavations. Among this new generation of fieldworkers were Guy (1878–1948) and Winifred Brunton (1880–1959), as well as Gertrude Caton-Thompson (1888–1985), who all worked in the Badari region of Egypt revealing Neolithic (fifth millennium BC) material for the first time in the country. Even a young T. E. Lawrence – the famed ‘Lawrence of Arabia’ – joined a Petrie excavation in January 1912, describing the Professor as ‘easy-tempered, full of humour, and fickle to a degree that makes him delightfully quaint’.
During the Second World War the UCL campus was not so lucky and it suffered a direct bomb hit that gutted the Egyptology Department. Fortunately, as the clouds of conflict gathered across Europe, hasty plans had been executed to remove the most important artefacts out of London, while the majority of what remained had been boxed up in 160 tea chests and carried to the vaults by a band of loyal students and staff, including Elise Baumgartel (1892–1975) and Violette Lafleur (1897–1965). But even here, in the depths of the University, the ancient objects were still at risk and when firemen hosed down UCL’s burning central structure, waters flooded the subterranean floors and the sanctuary where the storage crates were held. With the rest of the staff called up for war duties, it was left to Lafleur to almost single-handedly conduct the continuous salvage programme that ensured the collection survived.
The Petrie collection remained in storage after the war, and heavy thunderstorms left several crates standing in water. It was not until 1949 that work started on ‘temporarily’ rehousing the collection in an old local department store’s stable (Shoolbred & Co) situated above the Malet Place boiler house. Seventy-five years later, the Petrie Museum is still in its cramped, temporary accommodation.
The bulk of the post-war labour associated with unpacking and redisplaying the collection became the responsibility of a new Egyptology lecturer at UCL – Anthony (Tony) Arkell (1898–1980). Management of museum collections was second nature to Arkell, who had set up the Khartoum Museum in Sudan in the 1940s. Setting up the Petrie was a mammoth task, but one that was duly acknowledged in Arkell’s Times newspaper obituary as being one of his many life’s achievements: ‘students of Egyptology’, it noted, ‘owe him a massive debt’. By 1953 a large part of the collection was set out in its new home, just in time for the celebrations of the centenary of Flinders Petrie’s birth.
The trauma of war had taken its toll on the objects in the collection and in 1953 a new technician, Martin Burgess, was hired to attend to the most vulnerable pieces. He was still fairly new to the post when a fire broke out in his laboratory, igniting highly flammable chemicals and consuming the wooden floors. In the smouldering chaos Burgess sifted through the debris for some of the material he had been working on, including a large stone vessel with the image of the goddess Hathor. Several sheets of papyrus were also soaked in the firemen’s rescue, but remarkably none were lost.
