Stories of Egyptian mummies …… in conversation with Rosalie David ….. today on Radio 4

I thoroughly enjoyed and learned a lot from listening to Rosalie David talk about her work on the study of ancient Egypt today on Radio 4.

She was in conversation with Jim Al-Khalili on The Life Scientific which explores the contribution of scientist to our knowledge from the atom, to diseases and the physics of boiling water.

"Rosalie David is a pioneer in the study of ancient Egypt. 

In the early 1970s, she launched a unique project to study Egyptian mummified bodies using the techniques of modern medicine. Back then, the vast majority of Egyptologists regarded mummies as unimportant sources of information about life in ancient Egypt. Instead they focussed on interpreting hieroglyphic inscriptions, the written record in papyrus documents and archaeological remains and artefacts. Rosalie David proved that the traditionalists were quite wrong.

Rosalie tells Jim Al-Khalili about her journey from classics and ancient history to biomedicine, including some of her adventures in Egypt in the 1960s. She talks about some of her most significant research projects, and the 21st Century forensic detective work on the mummy of a young woman which revealed a gruesome murder 3,000 years ago...

Presented by Jim Al-Khalili

Produced by Andrew Luck-Baker*

And along the way I was reunited with mummy 1770 which my Wikipedia reminds "me was an ancient Egyptian female mummy. 

The specimen was found in a sarcophagus by Rosalie David, and was approximately 13 or 14 years old at the time of her death. The mummy's legs were not present, and were replaced by wooden planks. Her feet also consisted of sandals filled with mud and reeds, with the tips being substituted for toes. The fingernails and reed tips had golden coverings, which suggested that she lived in a wealthy family".

And any one who was in Manchester in 1975 with an interest in Egyptology will remember.

And that is it.

Location; Radio 4

Picture; faded poster on a wet day at Chorlton Bus Station, 2023, from the collection of Andrew Simpson

*Rosalie David on the science of Egyptian mummies, https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m002305z

**Mummy 1770, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1770_(mummy)

Sad mummy in the rain ……. bus stop art in Chorlton

It resides on a lamppost at the bus terminus in Chorlton and has done so since the exhibition opened in February.

And it advertise the Golden Mummies of Egypt.

We signed up for the event and on a day not unlike today wandered down in the rain to Manchester Museum. 

There were heaps of people, but entry was by pre-arranged appointments and despite the throng of interested visitors we got to see all we wanted.

I have just checked, and the exhibition goes on till December so I guess my mummy might not have been forgotten after all.

"After a hugely successful tour across the USA and China, this stunning exhibition offers unparalleled access to the museum’s world-class Egypt and Sudan collections.

Featuring more than 100 objects and eight mummies, Golden Mummies of Egypt presents a rich perspective on beliefs about the afterlife during an era when Egypt was part of the Greek and Roman worlds.

The exhibition is held in the museum’s brand-new Exhibition Hall, which has been created as part of our £15 million transformation".*

Location; Chorlton Bust terminus, Barlow Moor Road

Pictures; Sad mummy in the rain, 2023, from the collection of Andrew Simpson

*Golden Mummies of Egypt, February 18th to December 31st, 2023, https://www.museum.manchester.ac.uk/event/golden-mummies-of-egypt/

1922 ........ ten stories about a seminal year .... on the wireless

 Now, it might be seen as contrived history to pick a year and seek to argue that this was a seminal moment in time.

Tutankhamun, 2016

But that is what Matthew Sweet has done for the year 1922, arguing that it was a crucial year for modernism which still has an impact in many different ways right up to today.*

The series has been going out on Radio 4 all this week.

The subjects covered in no particular order, include The discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb, Noserfartu, The Shabolovka Tower, Louis Armstrong goes to Chicago, Bertolt Brecht’s play Drums in the Night and the Wasterland.

And I have to say it is the sort of radio the BBC do so well.

I discovered it by accident, have missed the odd one but have always found each 15 minute broadcast, an excellent listen.

Yesterday’s was on Nosferatu, and Modernist Horror, and the day before the Discovery of Tutankhamun and Egyptomania, and because as much as I like on Nosferatu, I have always found that Egyptian King most fascinating.

The Shabolovka Tower, 1979

“The tomb of Tutankhamun was discovered in 1922, and this fuelled the Egyptomania that swept across Europe and America, influencing diverse aspects of culture from dance to music to architecture. Grauman’s Egyptian Theatre opened in Hollywood in this pivotal year, and the craze for the Egyptian style can still be seen in many British buildings from cinemas to pubs. 

Matthew explores how this exemplifies Modernism’s fascination with the distant past, the roots of civilisations, and their relics - with the historians Debbie Challis and Roger Luckhurst. Also, Egypt gained full independence from Britain in 1922, and the disintegration of Empire was another catalyst of Modernism.

Producer: Eliane Glaser

Readings by Rebecca Crankshaw and Michael Begley”

Location; 1922

Picture; The funerary mask of Tutankhamun, Roland Unger, 2016, Egyptian Museum in Cairo, Roland Unger Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no Invariant Sections, no Front-Cover Texts, and no Back-Cover Texts. A copy of the license is included in the section entitled GNU Free Documentation License, and 32 kopeks postage stamp, USSR 1979, 50 years Radio Moscow, 1979, Postal Service of USSR, from  The Shukhov Tower, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shukhov_Tower

*1922; The Birth of Now, https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0013r19/episodes/player

Decoding the past ……. The Rosetta Stone ..today on the wireless

Now the Rosetta Stone  has fascinated me ever since I first came across it in a history lesson in junior school, and the rest as they will be a morning with its story today on Radio 4, with Melvyn Bragg on the In Our Time series.

The Rosetta Stone, 2007

“Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss one of the most famous museum objects in the world, shown in the image above in replica, and dating from around 196 BC. 

It is a damaged, dark granite block on which you can faintly see three scripts engraved: Greek at the bottom, Demotic in the middle and Hieroglyphs at the top. 

Napoleon’s soldiers found it in a Mamluk fort at Rosetta on the Egyptian coast, and soon realised the Greek words could be used to unlock the hieroglyphs. 

It was another 20 years before Champollion deciphered them, becoming the first to understand the hieroglyphs since they fell out of use 1500 years before and so opening up the written culture of ancient Egypt to the modern age.

The Rosetta Stone on show, 1874

With Penelope Wilson, Associate Professor of Egyptian Archaeology at Durham University, Campbell Price, Curator of Egypt and Sudan at the Manchester Museum, and Richard Bruce Parkinson, Professor of Egyptology and Fellow of The Queen’s College, University of Oxford

Producer: Simon Tillotson”.*

Location; Egypt

Pictures; The Rosetta Stone in the British Museum, 2007, © Hans Hillewaert, This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license, and Experts inspecting the Rosetta Stone during the International Congress of Orientalists of 1874, British Museum, Illustrated London News

*The Rosetta Stone, In Our Time, Radio 4, https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000s2qd

The Cult of King Tut ................ one to listen to ......... today on the wireless

Now this one is fascinating.

"As the largest collection of Tutankhamun's treasures to travel outside of Egypt goes on display in London, Patricia Clavin, Professor of International History at the University of Oxford, explores the cult of Egyptomania following the opening of King Tutankhamun’s Tomb in 1922.

Patricia visits the Griffith Institute in Oxford to view the original glass plate negatives of Harry Burton, who meticulously documented Howard Carter and Lord Carnarvon's archaeological excavations of the tomb of Tutankhamun. She notes how Burton set up and staged his photos to make them as dramatic as possible and how these images then flashed around the world in the new mass circulation newspapers, so that "everybody could have a bit of King Tut".

At the Clothworkers' Centre in London, Patricia looks at the V&A’s stunning hand-beaded gold lamé evening jacket, made in Paris in 1923, which uses generic Egyptian motifs of birds, snakes and lotus flowers: imagery that appeared everywhere in 1920s art deco design, as well as in mass-produced consumer goods, available to all.

The four statues of the goddess Isis, who guarded Tutankhamun's canopic shrine, are notably modern-looking. Their bobbed hair and shift dresses chimed with the style of the new 1920s modern girl, embodied in the "Jazz Cleopatra", Josephine Baker. From outside Baker’s haunt, the Folies Bergère in Paris, Patricia speaks to the musicologist Martin Guerpin about how her styling as a Garçonne and her dancing of the Charleston struck people as the epitome of the liberated woman after the First World War.

When Tutankhamun’s mummy was unwrapped in 1925, he was discovered to be a boy king, whose body carried multiple injuries. Patricia talks to Roger Luckhurst about how this captured the imagination of people after the First World War, many of whom were mourning their war dead. This culture of mourning and death also fed the King Tut curse stories which flooded through the Western press at the time.

Patricia concludes that Tut-mania was as much a global project of the imagination as it was about the history of the objects themselves. It connected people to an ancient place and to one another, including the ones they had lost. Through consumption of the past they were able to re-imagine themselves in a different and possibly better world.

Produced by Melissa FitzGerald

A Blakeway production for BBC Radio 4"*

Pictures; gold face mask, Roland Unger, 2016, Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no Invariant Sections, no Front-Cover Texts, and no Back-Cover Texts. A copy of the license is included in the section entitled GNU Free Documentation License, Tutankhamun receives flowers from Ankhesenamun. This image is on the lid of a box found in Tut's tomb.
Date 20 December 2006 (original upload date), Transferred from en.wikipedia to Commons by Closedmouth.

*The Cult of King Tut, https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0009r52

With Francis Frith on the Nile in 1859 and his legacy of fine pictures

I grew up with stories of pyramids, pharaohs, the odd burial curse and much more.

Even now it is a civilisation which draws you in whether it be Tutankhamen, the Great Pyramid or the lives of the ordinary work a day people.

And I suppose this may have been one of the reasons why Francis Firth, a 19th century photographer and explorer spent time there.

He travelled across the Middle East as well as Britain and recorded on film what he saw.

Many found their way onto his postcards and the company he established in 1859 prospered until the family sold the business in 1968.

Today the collection still exists as Francis Frith and contains over 365,000 photographs depicting some 7,000 towns and villages throughout Britain – all taken between 1860 and 1970.*

I have chosen just three which came from a description of the man and the company on Wikipedia.

All were taken during the 19th century and remain a vivid record of the country at the time.

The Francis Frith collection is a wonderful resource, and one that grows as people contribute their memories of the places photographed over the last century.

This I think makes it more than just a place to search for past scenes of buy old postcards.

So even if you are not interested in pyramids, boats on the Nile or the sand and camels there will be much to see and enjoy.











Pictures; by Francis Frith, from Wikipedia Commons

*Francis Frith, http://www.francisfrith.com/uk/