I'm glad to say that the emergency which meant I had to leave London yesterday seems to have improved, though we aren't out of the woods yet. As I'm still unable to get back in time to present my poster this afternoon however, I thought I'd provide a summary here of the key points 🧵 - ThreadSky

egypto-lou-gist.bsky.social • 2 days ago

I'm glad to say that the emergency which meant I had to leave London yesterday seems to have improved, though we aren't out of the woods yet. As I'm still unable to get back in time to present my poster this afternoon however, I thought I'd provide a summary here of the key points 🧵

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egypto-lou-gist.bsky.social•2 days ago

My poster, 'Ancient Faces, New Perspectives: Mummy Portrait Panels on Display at the British Museum' focuses on the 1997 exhibition of mummy portrait panels which for all intents and purposes changed how we understand these artefacts. It displayed them alongside comparative archaeological evidence..

egypto-lou-gist.bsky.social•2 days ago

(highlighted below), and attempted to bring in scientific findings for the first time, framing these objects not as pieces of decontextualised art, but as distinctly funerary objects from Egyptian burial contexts. Why was this shift in perspective so important? Well, up until the 1990's, the...

egypto-lou-gist.bsky.social•2 days ago

majority of publications surrounding the portraits centred on their artistic value - they were catalogued, disseminated, listed, but all from an art historical perspective (and in the 1930s and 40s, used to justify extreme right wing views on race). Even when Ancient Faces opened, reviewers made...

egypto-lou-gist.bsky.social•2 days ago

comments about how the mummy panels were 'Greek in form but Egyptian in face', attempting to categorise the subjects through ethnicity when that is simply not possible. The reason for such an artistic focus stems from the dislocation of the objects from their original context - in 1888 and 1911...

egypto-lou-gist.bsky.social•2 days ago

WM Flinders Petrie chose to cut the portraits from their mummies for ease of transportation, and took many of their skulls for cranial analysis to justify his own eugenicist views. Of the mummies found at sites such as Hawara, only 1-2% of them contained a portrait, suggesting it was a rare...

egypto-lou-gist.bsky.social•2 days ago

practice confined to the elite, and only 30 or so portraits remain in the BM today, many of them having been transferred from the National Gallery where they were originally housed in the 19th and 20th centuries.

Ancient Faces displayed these portraits alongside Egyptian artefacts for the first...

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