After
three years, six cities, 650,000
visitors and tens of thousands of traveling miles,
the 155 pieces that comprise the traveling exhibition “Searching for Ancient
Egypt: Art, Architecture and Artifacts from the University of Pennsylvania
Museum” have come back to Philadelphia.
The
idea behind the traveling exhibition was to study and conserve pieces
that had been in storage and to show them to a national audience, noted
Dr. David Silverman, curator of the museum’s Egyptian section. As it turned
out, the exhibition raised enough money to pay for the conservation, and
more than two dozen of the artifacts were installed in the museum’s galleries
soon after returning in October. The returning pieces include the bronze
statue of a cat (circa 800 B.C.); a gilded funerary mask (circa 300 B.C.);
the monumental doorjamb from the palace of Merenptah (circa 1200 B.C.);
the head and torso of the lion goddess Sekhmet; and a limestone sarcophagus
lid (circa 380-30 B.C.). Another 26 will also be installed over the next
couple of years. Half of a 16-ton tomb-chapel has been preserved; the
other half, now in a climate-controlled storage area, still awaits conservation
(and conservation funds).
“The exhibition
went to Dallas, Denver, Seattle, Birmingham, Honolulu and Omaha,” noted
Silverman, who is also professor and chair of the Department of Asian
and Middle Eastern Studies, as he watched workmen muscle some of the massive
artifacts into the museum’s Lower Egyptian Gallery. “Over 650,000 people
saw it during that time—many of whom were Penn alumni. We got lots of
e-mail from Penn alums saying that they had been here for anywhere from
four to eight years and had no idea that the museum had such a beautiful
collection.”
When the objects
came back, he explained, “the choice was to put them back in storage where
most of them came from” and just exhibit those that had already been on
display at the museum. “But rather than put everything back in storage—and
since we had specially made cases for these things—we decided to keep
as many things out now on exhibit as we possibly could.” One is the unique
standing statue of Sekhmet, which will be “looking down on you, at the
entrance into the Upper Egyptian Gallery, as you come into it from the
Chinese Rotunda.”
Another
bronze figure of a king that was “sort of buried in a case has now come
back,” Silverman added casually. A few years ago, a scholar from the Metropolitan
Museum of Art in New York determined that it was none other than King
Tutankhamun. “He now has his own case, and he will be in a prominent position
upstairs,” said Silverman. “It’s the only statue of its time known of
the king, and it has inlaid sections of solid gold.”
The
huge doorjamb of the Pharaoh Merenptah (son of Ramses II) is part of the
same royal palace as the massive columns, doorways and windows currently
in the Lower Egyptian Gallery. If all goes according to plan, all of the
pieces will be moved to the Upper Egyptian Gallery in a couple of years.
“In
the reinstallation, all of this will be put together upstairs,” said Silverman.
“Because no other palace has survived, Penn will have the only palace
in the entire world that people can walk into and see. We’re going to
have to do a lot of reconstruction, but the atmosphere is going to be
fantastic. Instead of having statues in cases—disembodied in a large open
space—we will have the statues where they belong, in the palace-style
structure where they would have been placed.”
