Turin’s Egyptian Museum held a three-day happening, called “Festival 200”, from November 20 to 22 to celebrate its 200th birthday, with free admission, lectures, and guided tours. Its distinguished guests were Sergio Mattarella, The President of Italy, as well as Italy’s and Egypt’s Ministers of Culture.
Although Turin’s collection is only the world’s 11th largest, with more than 37,000 artifacts, it is considered the world’s second most important after the Egyptian Museum in Cairo because of its vast variety of objects and because all periods of ancient Egyptian history from 4,000 BC to 600 AD-are represented in Turin’s holdings – not true of any other collection.
In fact, Turin had a connection to Egypt nearly 200 years before the Museum’s foundation, when in 1630 the Bembine Tablet or Mensa Isiaca arrived here, a bronze altar table in Egyptian style, but almost certainly created in Rome for a Temple to Isis there. Although not authentic, this exotic piece inspired King Carlo Emanuele III (1701-1773) to send in 1753 the University’s botanist Vitaliano Donati, also a renowned doctor and archeologist, to Egypt to buy exotic objects and plants. His 300 purchases from different areas of Egypt constitute the nucleus of Turin’s Museum.
The next group of artifacts were purchased in 1823 by King Carlo Felice (1765-1831) for the then astronomical sum of 400,000 lire from the wheeler-dealer Piedmont-born French consul in Egypt, Bernardino Drovetti (1776-1852). From 1816 Drovetti had offered his personal collection of c. 8,000 artifacts for sale to both Piedmont and France. When France turned him down, King Carlo Felice purchased some 5,268 artifacts and opened the Museum, where it is still located today at Via Accademia delle Scienze 6. That same year Jean-François Champollion used Turin’s newly-purchased collection of 170 papyri to test his breakthroughs in deciphering hieroglyphic writing.
A decade later in 1833 a Piemontese gentleman, otherwise unknown, Giuseppe Sossio donated his collection of over 1,200 artifacts in exchange for a job and lifelong pension, but undeniably the Museum’s mover-and-shaker was Ernesto Schiaparelli, Director from 1894 to his death. He made specific purchases and during his many excavation campaigns between 1900 and 1920 deliberately chose sites he knew contained artifacts that would fill in the Museum collection’s chronological holes, particularly Gebelein and Deir el-Medina. Thanks to Schiaparelli’s indefatigability, and that of his successor, Giulio Farina, the Museum’s artifacts tripled in number.
The Museum’s most recent addition was a gift to Italy from Egypt in 1965 to thank for help during the Rescue of Nubian Monuments during the 1960s: The Temple of Ellesyia.
Inarguably, the most unique of the Museum’s holdings are the entire contents (save for a single object which remained in Cairo) of the 18th Dynasty (1550/49 to 1292 BC) tomb of the architect Kha and his wife Merit. This undisturbed burial was found in 1906 by Schiaparelli in the necropolis at Deir el-Medina. The tomb contained both sarcophagi and many objects of the couple’s daily life: Kha’s tools, Merit’s wig and make-up, and food, for examples.
Other stars:
-The one-of-kind black granite statue of Rameses II from the Drovetti sale
-Although not Egyptian, the unique Mensa Isiaca
-The Temple of Ellesiya dating to 1430 BC
Other highlights are:
-A very rare statue (c.2800 BC) depicting a royal woman named Redit, which is the oldest sculpture in the Museum
-Fragments of a unique Predynastic (3500 BC) painted-linen funerary shroud, the oldest known painting in the world
-The numerous papyri, in particular “The Papyrus of Kings”, which lists in chronological order the names of the rulers of Egypt from the time of mythological gods down through the Second Intermediate Period (1782-1550 BC).
The main changes for the Museum’s 200th birthday are:
-A restyling of the building’s architecture transforming the courtyard into a covered piazza with an “Egyptian Garden”
-Three new state-of-the-art permanent exhibitions: “The Textile Gallery”, which features 732 fragile textile artifacts; “The Vase Gallery” which houses 5,000 fired clay vessels, and “Materials. The Shape of Time”, which explores the materials of ancient Egypt including wood, pigments, ceramic vessels, and stone objects: statues, stelae, ceiling fragments and stone vessel;
– A first-time display of The Temple of Ellesiya
-New layouts of the “Gallery of the Kings” and of Room 6 dedicated to the artifacts from Deir el-Medina
The Egyptian Museum, with nearly 1 million visitor a year for the past decade, is open from 9AM-6:30PM Monday-Saturday. I highly recommend booking your tickets in advance, but also knowing what you want to see because the Museum is enormous. Don’t go weekdays in mid-morning when it’s very crowded with school groups. Check out the various ticket prices on the Museum’s website: ti.oizigeoesum@ofni.
