Materials & Making
That brilliant blue is more than a colour: meeting Egyptian faience
A bright surface can hide an unexpected material. Learn what Egyptian faience is, then use a simple looking exercise to notice more.
FROM THE JOURNAL
Three doors into the past
Objects & Beliefs
Small figures, a larger belief: asking better questions about shabtis
A funerary figure becomes easier to understand when its purpose, inscription and surviving condition are considered together.
Reading the Past
A bird is not always just a bird: looking beyond the pictures in hieroglyphs
Recognising a picture is only a beginning. Egyptian writing used signs for sounds and meaning in ways that a simple picture code cannot explain.
Objects & Beliefs
A Scarab Small Enough to Miss: Reading One Museum Record Closely
Look closely at a small faience scarab in The Met’s collection and learn how dimensions, material, date and motif each answer a different question.
Materials & Making
Papyrus Is a Writing Surface, Not the Name of a Script
Separate the material papyrus from the scripts written on it, then use a museum record to ask clearer questions about an ancient Egyptian document.
Objects & Beliefs
An Egyptian Amulet Needs More Than a Shape to Tell Its Story
Explore why material, decoration and archaeological context matter when reading about an Egyptian amulet, instead of assigning a meaning from its outline alone.
Imaginary AI illustrations, not photographs of archaeological finds or ancient inscriptions.