History of the Collection at the Royal Pavilion & Museums
Like most ancient Egyptian museum collections, The Royal Pavilion & Museums has a mixture of donated and excavated material. The unusual aspect is the strong connection to one of the leading figures in Egyptology, Professor Francis Llewellyn Griffith who lived in Brighton.
Griffith was able to join William Matthew Flinders Petrie's excavations in Egypt as Petrie had secured funding partly through the support of Henry Willett, a founder of Brighton Museum & Art Gallery whose own collections (including some Egyptian objects) are held by Royal Pavilion & Museums. Through subscription to the excavations, Brighton Museum & Art Gallery continued to receive objects from British-led expeditions until the 1920s.
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Statue of Min-Rose |
Today the collection is one of the largest held in a local museum in the United Kingdom. It is significant both for its close ties to the history of Egyptology through its connection with Griffith and for its high proportion of excavated objects spanning much of the history of British expeditions in Egypt during this key period.
The collection also contains a number of key pieces from private donations. These include a cartonnage coffin with the only known ancient Egyptian representation of a three-headed god and a small statue of Min-mose, the royal scribe of the pharaoh Ramesses II.
In addition, only about two dozen museums in the UK hold excavated Sudanese artefacts. Fewer still contain material from Griffith's noteworthy excavations at Faras and Sanam.
Read more about the Sudanese Collections at the Royal Pavilion & Museums. |
Frances Llewellyn Griffith
From a Brighton family and with a brother who was an Alderman and a solicitor, Griffith's heart was in Egyptology, particularly in the study of ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, but he was torn between pursuing his love and the more pragmatic choice of interning with his brother's law firm. Through Petrie's persistence, funding was eventually found through the support of Willett and Brighton Museum & Art Gallery.
Griffith was appreciative of the support given by the museum. He ensured it received objects spanning his entire field career, from his first work with Petrie and with the Egypt Exploration Fund to his own expeditions for the University of Oxford. In turn, the Museum demonstrated a long-term commitment to supporting expeditions to Egypt, sponsoring not only the work of Petrie but also of the British School of Archaeology, an institute Petrie set up when he became professor of Egyptology at UCL.
Both Petrie and Griffith are recognized today as leading figures in the history of Egyptology. Griffith, who twice married affluent women and had no children, went on to endow what is now the internationally recognized Griffith Institute of Egyptology archives at the University of Oxford. The Institute has become a major repository for Egyptological archives, including Griffiths own.
By drawing on the Petrie Museum and Griffith Institute of Egyptology , we can re-unite original documentation with the excavated artefacts Royal Pavilion & Museums holds in the Ancient Egypt Galleries.
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Face of painted mummy case (cartonnage)
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Ancient Egypt Galleries
The main gallery explores the excavation and background of artefacts, and displays the collection focusing on the lives and beliefs of the ancient Egyptians. In the smaller gallery, visitors can delve more deeply into the environment and technology of ancient Egyptian life, and learn more about the excavation of some of the objects.
The displays focus on daily life, the afterlife, technology, environment and the wider world, which encompasses Graeco-Roman Egypt and Nubia, an ancient area located in modern times within the southern part of modern Egypt and northern Sudan.
Read more about the Sudanese Collections at the Royal Pavilion & Museums.
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