Volume 21 / Issue 2

The Past

By: David O'Connor and David Silverman

Introduction “Do not reproach someone older than you, for he has seen the Sun before you.” The Instruction of Amenemope, ca. 1400 B.C. The story of Egyptology at the University Museum is fundamentally that of the men and women who for over 80 years staffed the Egyptian Section and were responsible for the major contributions […]

By: Chester Beatty, IV

Not many men would, some sixty years after their death, be celebrated by a great research institution, but Eckley B. Coxe was to the University Museum, what, on a more opulent scale, John D. Rockefeller was to the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago. The Museum owes a great debt to Coxe, for it […]

The Director Writes

By: Martin Biddle

In the last issue I wrote about the great size of our collections, the invisible nine-tenths—if not ninety-nine hundredths—of the iceberg which constitutes the reserve collection in storage: our greatest challenge and our biggest responsibility. Here I want to explore the strategy which might inform our displays. This issue of Expedition is the place to […]

Museum Institute for Conservation Archaeology (MICA) The Museum Institute for Conservation Archaeology (MICA) has been formed at the University Museum, University of Pennsylvania, to act as a center for the investigation, preservation and manage­ment of historic and prehistoric proper­ties. MICA specializes in contracting for services required by the terms of the National Environmental Policy Act of […]

The Egyptological achievements of the University Museum owed much to the generosity of Eckley B. Coxe, Jr. and to the professionalism of the Museum’s Egyptological curators and field-directors. However, equally large is its debt to the Egyptian Antiquities Organisation (already referred to, p. 11) which is primarily responsible for safeguarding, maintaining and making accessible the […]

“To be a good (archaeological) finder one needs a peculiar quality which is not altogether erudition—the hog which is most lucky at finding truffles is not always the fattest, best eating hog—on the contrary.” Sara Yorke Stevenson Sara Stevenson’s sense of humor, of which the above is a good example, enlivens her correspondence and publications. […]

The University Museum-Yale Expedition

By: David O'Connor

The provincial centers of ancient Egypt were vital elements in its political, eco­nomic and religious systems and their re­mains reflect the continually changing pattern of the interaction of national and local influences. One component of these remains—the cemeteries generated by such centers—is in middle and southern Egypt, usually accessible and relatively well pre­served (being on […]

The Egyptian collection of the University Museum came into being during the last decade of the 1800’s. It was then that Dr. William Pepper, Provost of the University, backed by Dr. Charles C. Harrison, Chair­man of the Ways and Means Committee, had “conceived the idea of drawing wealthy and prominent Philadelphians who were interested in […]

By: William Kelly Simpson

The story of the Pennsylvania-Yale Project at Giza takes us back to the be­ginning of American archaeological work in Egypt. In December 1902 the Egyptian Government granted concessions for archaeological work at Giza to three uni­versities, one of which was the University of California (the other two were German and Italian). The University of California […]

By: Donald B. Redford

Scholarly study of the reign of Akhena­ten, pharaoh of Egypt (ca. 1375-1357 B.C.), has focused with justification on the last thirteen years of his life and the new capi­tal he founded in Middle Egypt at Amarna. Investigation of this latter site is rendered difficult, however, by the fact that the city was almost completely razed […]