UNFOLDING HISTORY. WRITING IN ANCIENT EGYPT An exhibition exploring the origins of writing, featuring papyri from Elephantine that had been stored in the Brooklyn Museum since 1916 and have never before been put on public display. These texts are accompanied…
Having explored herbal pain-killing remedies in the last issue of AE, Ira Rampil now looks at the physical and magical interventions used to relieve pain.
Hilary Wilson shows how the ancient Egyptians were paid in food and drink.
An exhibition exploring ancient Egyptian funerary texts and traditions returns to the Getty Villa Museum.
A cache of 22 Third Intermediate Period painted coffins containing mummies has been discovered by an Egyptian mission at Qurna, on Luxor’s West Bank. During excavation work in the courtyard of the Tomb of Seneb, a rectangular rock-cut chamber was…
Dr Joseph L Thimes traces the development of the postal system in ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia.
Gerrit zur Hausen explains the difficulties of studying cancer in ancient populations, and how such research may help in our fight against the disease today.
New research published in the British Dental Journal (240, January 2026: 45-50) reveals that, although limited, ancient Egyptian and Graeco-Roman dentistry was surprisingly inventive. Prescriptions recorded in the medical papyri provide a fascinating glimpse into how dental care was approached…
What can the famous papyrus corpus tell us about the ordinary people of late-ancient Egypt? Richard J Britton investigates.
Andrew Fulton ends his series exploring this famous Book of the Dead with a final scene featuring Hathor and Tawaret.
TOMB OF THE PHARAOHS This new 3D, immersive, and interactive experience of ancient Egypt recreates scenes of royal tombs including those of Ramesses IV, Sety I, Tutankhamun, and Nefertari, featuring more than 300 museum-grade replicas. CAIRNS AQUARIUM ANNEX, 122B Lake…
New light on Danish sun stones Hundreds of stone plaquettes from two Neolithic enclosure sites on the Danish island of Bornholm have been linked to the eruption of a volcano almost 5,000 years ago. The plaquettes, which are commonly engraved…
Campbell Price describes a statuette in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and considers what it meant to its owner.
UNRAVELLING THE MYSTERIES OF ANCIENT EGYPT FROM BROOKLYN MUSEUM A selection of 150 masterpieces from the Brooklyn Museum’s ancient Egyptian collection, including sculpture, coffins, jewellery, pottery, papyri, and human and cat mummies. MORI ARTS CENTRE GALLERY, Roppongi Hills Mori Tower,…
REVIEW BY SARAH GRIFFITHS This latest narrative by Toby Wilkinson is written in his usual engaging style, drawing on the usual Greek and Roman sources, but also some 50 archives of papyri unearthed in Egypt. The three centuries between Alexander…
REVIEW BY HILARY WILSON Amandine Marshall’s book, originally published in French in 2015, is a companion to her Childhood in Ancient Egypt (AUC, 2022). In the foreword to this English-language edition, Salima Ikram suggests that, despite limited source material, Marshall’s…
PHARAOH In association with the British Museum, this exhibition celebrates 3,000 years of ancient Egyptian art and culture through more than 500 individual pieces from the British Museum’s permanent collection, curated specially for Melbourne. Highlights include a carved green siltstone…
REVIEW BY MICHAEL TUNNICLIFFE During the Twenty-seventh Dynasty (c.525-404 BC), Egypt was part of the sprawling Persian Empire. Material survivals from this time are scarce, and the Persians themselves left few documents relating to Egypt. One important exception comes from…
A team at the Grand Egyptian Museum in Cairo has just published the results of their research showing that a traditional condiment for Japanese sushi can be used to conserve papyri. Wasabi, extracted from the rhizome of a radish, has…
A collection of 600 ‘magical’ texts written in Coptic has been published following five years of study by researchers at the University of Würzburg. Papyri Copticae Magicae (published by de Gruyter) includes writings found on papyrus, parchment, paper, and ostraca.…
The intricate symbols that adorn Egyptian monuments and papyri stood mute for millennia, their secrets locked away in a forgotten language. Hieroglyphs, with their captivating blend of pictorial and phonetic elements, had tantalised explorers and scholars for centuries, their enigmatic…
The Spanish mission that is excavating a series of rock-cut tombs at the ancient site of Oxyrhynchus (el-Bahnasa, Minya) has discovered two more mummies with gold tongues, and several terracotta figures of Isis-Aphrodite – the first to be found in…
Rosalie David and Roger Forshaw consider the contribution made by ancient Egyptians to the development of surgery, and the extent to which their knowledge was transmitted to later civilisations.
Roger Forshaw investigates this intriguing institution and its role in ancient Egyptian society.
Ancient Egyptians used honey in cooking, especially to sweeten dishes in the absence of sugar, and in medicine, for its healing properties and to soothe coughs. They also used it for more unusual purposes, as Amandine Marshall reveals.
More than 2,000 mummified rams’ heads have been discovered by an American Mission excavating near to the Ramesses II temple at Abydos, inside a newly discovered storage room in the northern area of the temple. Alongside the rams’ heads, the…
Roger Forshaw explores the transgressions of the ancient Egyptian priesthood.
PHARAOH: KING OF EGYPT An international touring exhibition of more than 120 objects from the British Museum, exploring the ideals, symbolism, and ideology of Egyptian kingship, and the realities of life in ancient Egypt. The exhibition is organised by the…
How did Egypt build the pyramids? It is a question that has excited the imagination of scholars and visitors for millennia. Now papyri documenting work on the Great Pyramid are revealing fresh insights into construction work. Pierre Tallet and Mark Lehner told Matthew Symonds how combining text and archaeology can expose the secrets of an extraordinary building project.
Egyptian expeditions MUSÉE ART ET HISTOIRE, BRUSSELSParc du Cinquantenaire 10, 1000 Brussels, Belgiumwww.artandhistory.museum31 March-1 October 2023 Telling the story of 200 years of discoveries in Egypt and the formation of the museum’s Egyptian collection, the exhibition will include nearly 200…
An Egyptian team excavating at Gerza (ancient Philadelphia) in the Fayum has discovered a large Graeco-Roman funerary building with coloured tile floors, and a number of complete and partial mummy portraits. The team also found a number of anthropoid and…
Review by Miroslav Bárta. The Old Kingdom papyri count among the rarest of finds. For several decades, the Abusir papyri archives from the pyramid complexes of the Fifth Dynasty kings Neferirkare and Nyuserre and queen-mother Khentkaus were among the earliest…
Review by Aidan Dodson. In 2013, a remarkable discovery was made at the site of Wadi el-Jarf on the Egyptian Red Sea coast. It comprised a group of papyri, which not only proved to be the oldest inscribed examples of…
Review by Barbara E Borg ‘The real essence of an age is better revealed among trivial and commonplace things than among prominent monuments and great leaders.’ The opening sentence of this book captures succinctly its underlying principles. Following two chapters…
At Home in Roman Egypt offers the first full-scale investigation of life as experienced by the ordinary people of Roman Egypt in the 1st to 4th centuries AD. It approaches the subject by looking at the life course, following people’s…
The power of the Vindolanda and Bloomberg tablets to evoke our Roman past has made them justly famous, but just how widespread were writers in Roman Britain? Hella Eckardt reveals what inkwells can tell us about the arrival of literacy.