Category:Egypt

By: Gabrielle Niu

The Penn Museum’s Egyptian Mummy exhibition will soon include a new display highlighting the museum’s shabti collection. Shabtis – small, funerary figurines, either mummiform or in civilian dress – were important components of Egyptian funerary culture from the New Kingdom (ca. 1550 – 1070) onwards. Shabtis were believed to help perform labor for the tomb […]

By: Gabrielle Niu

Ostrich eggshells have had a long history in the art and commerce of Africa. Back in 1987, David Conwell from Penn’s Classical Archaeology department published an article in the Penn Museum Expedition Journal about the implications about Libyan trade drawn from analysis of ostrich eggshell fragments. Conwell suggests that the shell fragments give us a […]

By: Amy Ellsworth

Please write my caption here or here!

By: Jennifer Houser Wegner

Visitors to our Lower Egyptian gallery are struck by the colossal scale of the architecture on display there.  Towering columns, massive doorways and an enormous gateway entrance – all of which speak to the power of the Egyptian pharaoh.  One is impressed when looking at this monumental architecture, but very detached. There’s a reason for […]