The Royal Pump Room Museum in Harrogate is one of many regional museums in the UK with a collection of Egyptian antiquities. In July 2022, Egypt Centre volunteer Sam Powell visited Harrogate to examine a wooden tomb figure (HARGM7673) as part of her ongoing PhD research. During discussions with Harrogate curators, Sam told them about the Egypt Centre, the museum’s object-based learning approach, and our collaboration with colleagues teaching Classics, Ancient History, and Egyptology at Swansea. Sam also showed them our online collection catalogue, which is hosted on the Abaset platform she created. As most of the Harrogate Collection had not been studied in detail (research and analysis of a selection of objects had been previously undertaken by Professor Joann Fletcher and Dr Stephen Buckley), the curators thought that this might be an opportunity to send it to Swansea on loan.
In February 2023, 813 objects arrived in Swansea on a three-year loan. The collection, called ‘Rediscovering Egypt’, will be researched, displayed, and presented online, thus making the objects more accessible to Egyptologists and the wider public. Three temporary exhibitions are planned, each running for approximately six months. The first, which opened in October 2023, is entitled Causing their Names to Live. It takes its inspiration from a common vivification formula found on statues, stelae, and other objects. In fact, one of the statues on loan (HARGM10634) is dedicated by Nebamun to his daughter Senetra ‘in order to cause her name to live’.
To document the Harrogate loan, a series of 11 videos were produced by Katie Greenhalf and Gary Lawson of This Film Production Ltd. These videos help to record some of the stories relating to the Harrogate Collection that were uncovered in the first few months of the loan, and they can be viewed here: https://bit.ly/44DQ97u.
The return of nature