About this resource
Introduction to the Manchester Museum
Manchester Museum is part of the University of Manchester, and is home to some 4.5 million specimens of Archaeology, Anthropology, Botany, Entomology, Egyptology, Geology and Zoology. The Museum first opened in the 1880s and is now visited by around half a million visitors a year. The Museum holds some 18,000 objects from Ancient Egypt and Sudan, one of the most important collections in the UK.
Campbell Price is an Egyptologist and Curator of Egypt and Sudan at the Manchester Museum. Campbell first became interested in Ancient Egypt when he was around 5 years old, and visited a Museum with an Egyptian collection in his hometown of Glasgow.
When at Secondary School, he worked as a volunteer at Glasgow Museums, and went on to study Egyptology for 10 years at the University of Liverpool, receiving a PhD in 2011. Campbell has visited Egypt many times, and worked on archaeological sites and at the Egyptian Museum in Cairo.
Since 2011, Campbell has been a Curator at Manchester Museum. His job involves caring for the Egyptology collection, answering enquiries, encouraging research, planning exhibitions, and communicating Egyptology to the public. He has written many articles on ancient Egyptian material culture, edited a book entitled ‘Mummies, Magic and Medicine in Ancient Egypt’ (Manchester University Press, 2016) and written a book called ‘Pocket Museum: Ancient Egypt’ (Thames and Hudson, 2018)
The collection includes material from prehistoric times through to Roman, Christian and Islamic times.
Particular strengths include items from a pyramid-builders’ town and the palace sites of Gurob and Amarna; a unique group of ritual objects from a tomb in Thebes; twenty human and fifty animal mummies; and an outstanding collection of Roman Period mummy masks and painted panel portraits.
The objects in this resource come from the Egyptology store rooms of the Manchester Museum, and are not generally seen by the public unless they go out on exhibition loan.
In general, they come from archaeological excavations in Egypt, but some were acquired by British collectors. Manchester Museum has a rich range of objects from both tombs and temple sites, but also towns like Kahun – a settlement built for workers on a pyramid.
We are fortunate that the generally dry, desert conditions in Egypt have preserved objects –especially of delicate organic materials such as wood.
These objects give us an insight into the experiences of life in ancient Egypt as well as expectations about a life after death.
The creation of the collection in Manchester is largely thanks to a textile industrialist called Jesse Haworth (1835–1921). He financed the archaeological excavations of English Egyptologist William Matthew Flinders Petrie (1853-1942) and in return Manchester received a large number of Petrie’s finds.
LGfL was given unprecedented access to the archive at the Manchester Museum to ensure that many learners that will never have a chance to visit, will be able to explore and discover the artefacts anytime , anywhere online.
