The expanded and redesigned Ancient Egypt gallery at Liverpool's World Museum, refurbished at a cost of £1.8m and reopened at the end of April 2017 after a year and a half of closure, is now the largest exhibition of its kind in the UK outside of the British Museum in London. The gallery space has tripled in size to around 1000m². The expansion allowed for the display of objects that had never been shown before, or that had been in storage for decades, and although the plan promised to triple the number of objects on display, it remained at around 1300. The gallery space, themed "Ancient Egypt: A Journey through Time", is divided into 7 chronological and thematic sections:

 

• "5,000 Years" outlines the time scale and introduces the key themes.

• The focus of the "River Nile" zone is a late predynastic female tomb excavated by John Garstang at Kostamneh in Nubia, now submerged under Lake Nasser.

• The People of Egypt section focuses on daily life, religion and art.

• the "African Kingdoms" section outlines the dominance of various powers over time and includes Nubian, Meroitic and

• Greek and Roman material.

• The highlight of the 'Afterlife' section is a 4 metre long Ptolemaic Book of the Dead papyrus of Djedhor, son of Tapes, preserved on 5 leaves in both hieroglyphic and hieratic scripts, displayed for the first time alongside 150 shabtis, a 127 centimetre high wooden statue of Osiris, animal mummies and decorated coffins.  

• Liverpool Discovery, a circular area, illustrates Liverpool's importance as a conduit for Egyptian artefacts to England.

• The 'Mummy Room', flanked by a pair of Sekhmet statues, contains 9 mummies, some of which are suspended above the coffin basins on multi-level supports, with each level illuminated by LED tubes.

 

I visited the galleries in the summer of 2015 during a trip with P.A.D.E.S. - Plymouth and District Egyptology Society - with 5
other members of the Egyptian Society Taunton, on whose committee I serve as webmaster. In the Liverpool galleries I photographed 6 objects originally from Deir el-Medina which were on display at the time. The museum currently holds a further 4 objects whose provenance is now known to be Deir el-Medina - these are added to the list below. In order to make this list complete, I have also added 2 additional objects which were unfortunately destroyed during the 1941 bombing and are therefore no longer part of the museum's collection.

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It is interesting to note that the majority of the objects listed below - 8 out of 12 - are from Deir el-Medina and were part of Joseph Mayer's original collection with which he opened his Egyptian Museum in 1852. This was a very early date for objects from the settlement, as no scientific excavation of the site had yet been undertaken. The objects must have been either illicitly excavated by the locals in the early 19th century and/or collected by Bernardino Drovetti, the French Consul General, or Henry Salt, the British Consul General, in the 1810s, or by John Gardner Wilkinson, the pioneering English Egyptologist, who recorded information on several tombs at Deir el-Medina in the 1820s. Mayer had acquired the collection in 1839 from Joseph Sams, a Darlington bookseller, who himself had acquired it between 1830 and 1838 as part of the Egyptian collection of Charles Bogaert, a Bruges businessman (see Sams, Joseph: 'Ancient Egypt: Objects of Antiquity forming part of the Extensive and Rich Collections from Ancient Egypt, brought to England by, and now in the possession of, J Sams", London, 1839, pl.22,2). It has also been suggested that Bogaert received his collection as repayment of a debt from Jean-Baptiste de Lescluze, a Belgian shipowner and merchant who had collected the material in Egypt between 1824 and 1825 (NML,2018).
The remaining 4 objects were part of a large donation of some 200 objects from the Trustees of the Wellcome Institute in
1973.

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I would like to thank the Liverpool World Museum and its staff, in particular Dr Ashley Cooke, Head of Antiquities & Curator of Egyptology, for kindly allowing me to include the museum's finds from Deir el-Medina on my website and for providing me with high quality images of the objects, and Maureen Smith, PA to the Director of the World Museum, for her assistance.
All images © National Museums Liverpool
Photography by Lenka Peacock and National Museums Liverpool