Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology

The Petrie Museum of Egyptian and Sudanese Archaeology sits in Malet Place, a quiet corner of London’s Bloomsbury. It belongs to University College London and holds over 80,000 objects, making it one of the largest collections of its kind outside Egypt. The museum began in 1892 as a teaching tool for the new Department of Egyptian Archaeology and Philology. Amelia Edwards gave the first donation, and Flinders Petrie soon built the collection through his excavations. Petrie dug at major sites such as Hawara, Amarna and Meydum, uncovering early mummies and Roman portraits. During the Second World War the entire collection was moved for safety and later housed in a former stable. The museum’s holdings include Britain’s biggest group of Roman mummy portraits and some of the oldest textiles ever found. A linen fragment from around 5000 BC and the Tarkhan dress from the fourth millennium BC rank among its treasures. The Inscriptions Aisle displays tablets in hieroglyphics, hieratic, Greek and Arabic, arranged by material. Pottery, clothing, jewellery and shabti figures fill the galleries, set out chronologically. Behind the scenes, an archive holds Petrie’s excavation records, letters and photographs, along with distribution lists from his fieldwork. Visitors enter through a gallery that tells the story of the museum and its people. The main gallery upstairs shows small domestic items, mummy cases and the Inscriptions Aisle. A separate pottery gallery holds cabinets of everyday objects and funerary figures. A small gift shop sits near the entrance, and the whole collection has been digitised for online browsing. The museum still runs exhibitions and events for adults and families, continuing the work begun by Petrie and his successors.