New Egypt Centre Store!

During the past week there has been a lot of excitement at the Egypt Centre because of construction work taking place in our new storage facility. While work on this facility has been ongoing intermittently for the last year, work has increased considerably in recent months. This included the addition of the security doors, the building of a new wall, and the removal of the carpet (fig. 1). All this was in preparation for the roller racking shelving, which have now been installed. The facility comes with an air conditioning unit, which controls both the temperature and humidity. This is particularly important in safeguarding the objects.

Fig. 1: New store awaiting shelving (29 July)

Following a very competitive bidding process, we decided to go with Rackline, a company that has delivered museum storage systems for the past quarter of a century with clients including nationally recognised institutions. Our new storage facility now has both static and mobile shelving units (fig. 2), which will be used to accommodate our reserve collection of approximately 4,000 objects. This includes human and animal remains, large quantities of pottery, and a complete coffin from Tarkhan. Work on transferring our objects to the new facility will begin in earnest and is expected to to take many months to complete.

Fig. 2: Store with shelving installed (2 Aug)

Moving the objects to the new facility provides an ideal opportunity check the contents of our boxes. For the past two weeks I have been assisted by Jiayun, a Leicester University Museum Studies placement student, who has been carrying out condition reports on the objects. While checking one box last Thursday we came across a bag labelled “snake bones” (EC532). A closer inspection revealed that the bag contained sand, some bandages, and lots of broken snake skeletons. In total, the bag contained at least nine snake heads (fig. 3), which have now been put on display next to the mummified snake (EC308) in our animals case. This week we were also able to identify a kohl stick as coming from Amarna, two tools belonging to model funerary figures from the Reverend William MacGregor collection, and three kohl pots from the collection of Robert de Rustafjaell.

Fig. 3: Nine snake heads (EC532)

Stay tuned for a blog post by Jiayun, towards the end of her stay next month, on her work with the Egypt Centre!