Treasured seekers: A Mount Holyoke College exhibit celebrates the contributions of two pioneers in archaeology

By Phoebe Mitchell
Staff Writer

Published on March 02, 2007

When Amelia Edwards, a self-made woman and author of several popular books, traveled to Egypt in the late 19th century, she discovered that the methods used at the archeological excavations there were tantamount to grave robbing, with little thought given to any objects except those that were appealing or valuable. She was horrified at the damage and neglect.

When she returned to London, Edwards established the Egypt Exploration Fund, with an eye to promoting better excavation procedures. Later, the fund supported renowned English scholar William Flinders Petrie's extensive archeological digs and research, and established a system for distributing to museums and colleges around the world the objects he and others excavated - with the blessings of the Egyptian government - including those that were sent to Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley in the early 1900s.

Upon Edwards' death, she bequeathed her considerable fortune to the University College of London - then the only university in Britain offering degrees to women - to establish a chair in Egyptology. In 1892, after assuming that chairmanship, Petrie sold the antiquities collection, one of the largest outside of Egypt, to UCL. It eventually became the foundation of a museum named in Petrie's honor.

Drawn from artwork and objects amassed by the Petrie Museum, an exhibition now on display at the Mount Holyoke College Art Museum, "Excavating Egypt: Great Discoveries from the Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archeology, University College London," brings this story full circle, reuniting some 220 objects from the Petrie Museum with those in the college's permanent collection, all of them excavated by Petrie.

The show, which runs through July 22, includes one of the world's earliest surviving dresses, royal art from the palace of Pharaoh Akhenaten and his wife, Nefertiti, and items from the ancient Egyptians' daily life.

"We're really lucky to have it," said Diana Wolfe Larkin, visiting associate professor of art history at the college, during a tour of the exhibit last week. In fact, when Larkin learned that the show was touring the United States, her recommendation to the college was: "Grab it."

Petrie, she said, "was an important innovator in terms of archeological practice."

Preserving the past

In addition to being one of the first to document where objects were found at excavation sites, Petrie changed the emphasis of archeological research by showing that the mundane objects he uncovered were often as important as much grander monumental sculpture and architecture in illuminating the culture and history of a region, said Larkin. He was also one of the first to regularly publish his findings.

Despite Petrie's devotion to scientific methods - he is considered "the father of Egyptian archeology" by many in the field - his life sounds a little like an Indiana Jones movie. Home-schooled in an upper-middle-class English family, a somewhat sickly only child, Petrie taught himself how to read hieroglyphs and grew so skilled at coin collecting that he became a consultant for the British Museum while still in his teens.

After his father, who was a surveyor, sparked Petrie's interest in ancient systems of measurements, he set his sights on surveying the pyramids in Giza. A book chronicling his experiences dispelled many of the misconceptions about how they were built, said Larkin.

His work soon caught the attention of the Egypt Exploration Fund - and Edwards, who became Petrie's devoted patron on numerous subsequent excavations.

Edwards had herself described her journey through Egypt in her best-selling book "A Thousand Miles Up the Nile." She wrote this about the monuments she saw: "The tourist carves over (them) with names and dates ... the 'Collector' buys and carries off everything of value he can. ... Everyday more inscriptions are mutilated - more tombs rifled, more paintings and sculpture defaced."

As Wendy Watson, the museum's curator, put it, before Petrie there was "too much digging and not enough writing."

To raise money for the Exploration Fund, Edwards took her cause on the road, visiting the United States in the late 1880s. Her travels took her to Mount Holyoke, where she delivered a lecture in January 1890.

Ancient objects speak

The Mount Holyoke show is the only New England venue for "Excavating Egypt" and the only exhibition nationwide at a museum that was once a subscriber to the Exploration Fund, said Larkin. On view in the museum's main gallery and two smaller exhibition rooms, the exhibit includes a wide range of objects, including jewelry, funerary objects, statuary, toys, papyri, utensils, furniture and pottery.

Accompanying Larkin on the tour of the exhibit last week, Watson pointed to one of her favorite pieces, a carved stone torso of a woman in an elaborate wig. The size of a walnut, the statuette is a good example of an object that might have been overlooked by excavators before Petrie, said Watson, even though it illustrates the remarkable artistry of the ancient Egyptians.

Among the show's most striking objects is a gilded mummy mask that depicts a woman whose hair is styled in ringlets and who clutches a garland of red flowers. Larkin pointed to a gilded foot case, which covered the mummy's toes to keep them from curling.

Another interesting piece is an encaustic painting of a man, which was excavated by Petrie in 1888 and subsequently acquired by the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, where it was stored in a crate - and forgotten. It was rediscovered four years ago during an inventory and returned to the Petrie Museum.

The college's exhibit is instructive, said Larkin, because several objects that are illustrated in the funerary reliefs on display - a stone offering tray and a kohl pot (used to apply eye makeup) are two examples - are also on view in the flesh, so to speak. Other highlights? A ceramic rat trap, a miniature plumb bob, a reconstructed bead-net dress from 2500 B.C., and a pair of copper, gold and silver tweezers fashioned in the form of a gazelle chasing a hound.

A third room displays books by Petrie and Edwards, 19th-century newspaper articles about them, and hand-colored prints of Egyptian monuments from that time.

The college also will feature several lectures in conjunction with the exhibit, including "Distaff Discoveries: Women in Early Egyptology" by Catharine Roehrig, curator of Egyptian art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, on March 1 at 4:30 p.m. in Gamble Auditorium. A gallery talk, "Re-Imagining Ancient Egypt," by Diana Larkin takes place March 29 and April 12 at 4:30 p.m. at the museum.

Hours are Tuesdays through Fridays, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m.; Saturdays and Sundays, 1 to 5 p.m. The museum, which is closed Mondays and for certain college holidays, is located on Lower Lake Road in South Hadley. For more information, call 538-2245 or visit www.mtholyoke.edu/go/artmuseum.