Once we were full of good food and drink from our pub lunch, we piled back onto the coach and headed for the Petrie Museum to see items that were either sold or donated directly to this museum by the archaeologists who found them.
I have to admit that I am an Egyptian archaeology junky and always have been. I saw my first mummy at about age 7 or 8 and was hooked. It was fully wrapped and had a few items nearby, including its coffin. Since then, any museum that I visited that had anything Egyptian caught my attention.
What made this particular trip a “must do” included the brand new Grand Egyptian Museum and the National Museum of Egyptian Civilization (where 22 royal mummies are kept and shown to the public). Then there were the temples and experiences that I did not have during my first trip to Egypt back in 2008 – Sakkara, Dendera Temple, Esna Temple, watching Nubian dancers (and ending up dancing with them), visiting a Nubian Village, sailing on a felucca, and riding a motorboat on the Nile. The final piece that made me really want to do this was the pre-cruise tour involving all of the Egyptian stuff in London and Oxford.
Even when it came to the parts I had done before, back in 2008 I was just recovering from a two-year fight with an illness that had involved surgery and six months of chemo. I did not have my full energy back then and was also just getting used to living with hypothyroidism (that I had gotten from the chemo). I am actually in much better physical condition here in 2026 than I was 18 years ago. I could engage with what I was seeing, doing, and experiencing so much easier and more fully now. Plus being 60 pounds lighter now than before helped me to say, “Hey. I’m going to ride a camel.”
The Petrie Museum of Egyptian and Sudanese Archaeology is part of London’s University College Museums and Collections. It contains over 80,000 objects, making it one of the world’s largest collections of Egyptian and Sudanese material.
The museum was established in 1892 as a teaching resource for the Department of Egyptian Archaeology and Philology. In 1913, William Matthew Flinders Petrie sold his collection of artifacts from all of his years conducting major Egyptian excavations to University College. This created the Flinders Petrie Collection of Egyptian Antiquities and transformed the museum into one of the leading collections outside of Egypt.
At this point the museum was still for the use of students and academics. It was not yet open to the public. Over the years other archaeologists added to the collections housed at the Petrie Museum.
One of the significant holdings of the Petrie Museum is a limestone head of a king. Petrie thought it could have been King Narmer, based on the similarity to another head of Narmer that he had encountered. Others have thought that it is more likely to be the Fourth Dynasty King Khufu. Narmer had been an Early Dynastic king who was credited with the unification of Egypt. Essentially the first king of both Upper and Lower Egypt.
A garment called the Tarkhan Dress, from the fourth millennium BC, is considered to be the oldest known woven garment in existence. There is also a completely see-through dress made of beads. It was possibly worn over a linen dress like the Tarkhan dress.
In one case, I saw some figures of Isis and Horus as well as one of Isis with baby Horus. At that point, I did not yet know that I would end up playing the role of Isis in our Egyptologist’s explanations of Egyptian mythology. That would not happen until we were actually in Egypt and seeing the temples.
I found the collections at the Petrie to be quite amazing to see and highly recommend seeing them to anyone who, like me, really loves Egyptian archaeology and the objects it unearths.
Next – Sir John Soanes’ fascinating home by candlelight
