At the Museums: Egypt in America - Archaeology Magazine Archive


At the Museums: Egypt in America	Volume 52 Number 6, November/December 1999
by Angela M.H. Schuster

A quartet of traveling exhibitions highlights the art of the pharaohs.

More than 250 Old Kingdom works, including sculptures in stone and wood, precious jewelry, painted murals, polychromed statues found in 1995 at the workers' cemetery at Giza, tools used in the construction of the pyramids, and a limestone block from Khufu's pyramid, the largest monument on the Giza Plateau, are on view in Egyptian Art in the Age of the Pyramids, which debuted at the Grand Palais in Paris and is now at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York through January 9. Arranged chronologically, the artifacts, fashioned between ca. 2650 and 2150 B.C., chart the development of pharaonic artistic traditions from the third through sixth dynasties. (Photo courtesy Metropolitan Museum of Art) [LARGER IMAGE]

Pharaohs of the Sun: Akhenaten, Nefertiti, and Tutankhamen, which opens at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, on November 14, explores the art of this prolific 17-year period with more than 250 works--statues, jewelry, clothing, tools, and furniture, and pieces of sculpture, including two colossal statues of Akhenaten from the Cairo Museum that have never before left Egypt. (Photo courtesy Museum of Fine Arts, Boston) [LARGER IMAGE]

Splendors of Ancient Egypt, which began a nationwide tour at the Florida International Museum in St. Petersburg in 1996 and is now at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond through November 28. Splendors of Ancient Egypt showcases more than 200 objects dating from the Old Kingdom to the seventh century A.D., on loan from the Pelizaeus Museum in Hildesheim, Germany, while that museum is undergoing renovation. Highlights include gilded and painted mummy cases and an 18-foot-long scroll bearing texts from the Book of the Dead. (Photo courtesy Virginia Museum of Fine Arts) [LARGER IMAGE]

Searching for Ancient Egypt, which is at the Birmingham Museum of Art in Alabama through January 16, also offers a wide variety of artifacts--statues, mummy cases, canopic jars, and architectural fragments--dating from the fifth millennium B.C. to the fifth century A.D., all on loan from the vast holdings of the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology in Philadelphia. (Photo courtesy Birmingham Museum of Art) [LARGER IMAGE]

Angela M.H. Schuster is a senior editor of ARCHAEOLOGY.

Click here for ARCHAEOLOGY's list of current exhibitions.