Archive
The outstanding collection of Egyptian antiquities held by the
Department of Ancient Egypt and Sudan is well-known to the general
public. The amount and variety of archival material relating
to the collection is less
well-known. A purpose-built, dedicated archive room and
plans to catalogue and conserve the material, are making it more
accessible for study.
The core documents relate to the acquisition
of objects in the museum collection. These records were kept
in a series of bound register books which contain lists of groups
of antiquities either donated or purchased. Unfortunately, at
present, it is very difficult to access this material, except
through the year of entry. To complicate matters the acquisitions
were not always even consistently entered year by year.
The department holds lists which detail some of the major
collections of antiquities which entered the museum in the
nineteenth century, including those of Henry Salt (1780-1827),
Joseph Sams (1784-1860), and Giovanni Anastasi (the
Swedish-Norwegian consul-general in Egypt between 1828 and 1857,
whose objects were purchased in 1839). There is also
information on the Earl of Belmore's collection, acquired by the
museum in 1843, and on objects from the collections of W.R.
Hamilton (1777-1859), A.C. Harris (1790-1869), and the Egyptologist
J.G. Wilkinson (1797-1875).
Some information also exists on collections which were offered
to the museum but not actually purchased. There are even earlier
papers from the eighteenth century relating to the bequest of Col.
William Lethieullier in 1775. He had visited Egypt in 1721 and he
and his nephew gave the museum its first two mummies.
Other material from early Egyptologists and travellers includes
two notebooks belonging to William John Bankes (1786-1855),
describing his travels and discoveries in Egypt and Nubia in
1818-19. Bankes brought back an obelisk from the Temple of Philae
which he erected in the garden of his Dorset house. He and his
companions copied inscriptions, both Greek and hieroglyphic, and
were the first travellers to draw the interior of the Great Temple
at Abu Simbel.
The archive also holds a travel journal of the trip up
the Nile into Nubia made by John Shae Perring (1813-1869). Perring
assisted Howard Vyse in the surveying and recording of the pyramids
of Giza in 1837. Information from the documents of early
travellers and excavators can be hugely valuable because, when
describing or drawing monuments or copying inscriptions, they often
preserved evidence of details and structures which are now damaged
or entirely lost. Their journals may sometimes reveal the
previously unknown provenance of objects now in the museum. At the
time when many of the antiquities were removed from their sites in
Egypt and Nubia it was not yet realised how important it would be
to note the exact place and context in which an object had been
discovered.
The entries describing individual antiquities made by Samuel
Birch, Keeper of Oriental Antiquities from 1860, are another early
source of information on the collection. These manuscript notes,
known as the Birch slips, are now bound into numbered volumes
and are regularly consulted and used as a research tool
for curators.
The earliest records of Museum administration, and
correspondence concerning Egyptian antiquities, are held in the
museum's Central Archives.
Although the Museum was founded in 1753, a separate Department
of Antiquities was not founded until 1807, and it was not until
1860 that there was a three-way division of the Department of
Antiquities into a department for Greece and Rome, a department for
Coins and Medals, and the Oriental Department (comprising Egypt,
Assyria, British and Medieval Antiquities and Ethnography).
In 1886, the Oriental Department was renamed Egyptian and
Assyrian Antiquities, and it was not until 1955 that the department
split into the Department of Egyptian Antiquities (now renamed the
Department of Ancient Egypt and Sudan) and the Department of
Western Asiatic Antiquities (now the Department of the Ancient Near
East). This rather complex history has meant that the Egyptian
correspondence, for a time, was bound yearly with the Western
Asiatic material, and these papers are now held in the library of
the Department of the Middle East. The letters are arranged
alphabetically within what are mainly single volumes for each year
from 1826.
The rest of the archive material is amazingly diverse
and defies neat classification. It includes the personal
papers and diaries of former keepers, curators and excavators,
early nineteenth-century photographs and heavy wooden boxes of
glass negatives, early drawings and watercolours, and an important
set of 'squeezes', made by J.G. Wilkinson. These were impressions,
on specially treated paper, of ancient reliefs and
inscriptions.
There are also early x-rays of various mummies, and memorabilia
from the Museum's blockbuster Tutankhamun Exhibition held in 1972.
The Museum keeps records of its displays and exhibitions, and the
original artwork for its catalogues. All museum records are part of
the public records of the nation and preserving them is
strictly regulated.
Alongside the rare and early printed works in the
department library, the archive holds some bound volumes of
unpublished manuscript material and drawings, scrapbooks and
photograph albums. Two of the most important manuscript volumes are
the text and illustrations for his planned work on the pyramids,
written by Henry Salt, British consul-general in Egypt from 1816
until 1827. This work was never published. The Atlas volume,
containing the illustrations, holds Salt's accomplished and
beautiful original drawings for the book.
Many of the rare books in the library have been annotated or
inscribed by early Egyptologists, such as J-F. Champollion. It is
his brilliant decipherment of the hieroglyphic script
that our knowledge of ancient Egyptian writing is based.
Among an assortment of other idiosyncratic items are the firman,
or permission, with its exquisite calligraphy, by which Henry Salt
was granted his diplomatic privileges from the Porte, the seat of
the Ottoman rulers of Egypt; the ancient typewriter, now almost an
antique in its own right, which belonged to Egyptologist, Professor
Percy Newberry (1868-1949), part of whose library was presented to
the museum; and personal possessions belonging to Howard Carter,
who discovered the tomb of Tutankhamun.
Our archive material has now been unpacked from its storage
crates and arranged in its new home. We hope, shortly, to begin
both to catalogue and conserve the material which constitutes both
an important record of the history of Egyptology in the Museum and
an important research tool for the future. All our archives are now
recognised as being of potentially great value to curators and
researchers and we will be among the many institutions who,
subject to the availability of staff resources, hope to open up
their archives more fully to the public, and to make them more
widely and easily available.