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The Petrie Museum houses around 80,600 objects, making it one of the largest and most important collections of Egyptian and Sudanese archaeology in the world.
About the Petrie Museum
The Petrie Museum collections represent all facets of life along the Nile Valley: pharaohs and ordinary people, children, craftspeople, animals, and plant life, across millennia. Its collections are large in number, small in scale, providing a deeply intimate way to engage with a vast amount of human, shared, history.
The export of antiquities from Egypt and the Sudan is now illegal and the Museum’s collection has ceased to grow. Its importance was officially recognised in 1998 when it was designated by the UK government as "of outstanding importance". With the help of government funding the Museum has made the entire collection accessible in an online catalogue.
Highlights
The collection is full of "firsts":
- Oldest woven garment – the Tarkhan dress.
- Earliest representation of weaving.
- The earliest example of metal from Egypt: the first worked iron beads.
- The earliest "cylinder seal" in Egypt (about 3500 BCE).
- One of the earliest pieces of linen from Egypt (about 5000 BCE).
- The oldest wills on papyrus paper, the oldest gynaecological papyrus and the only veterinary papyrus from ancient Egypt.
- The largest architectural drawing, showing a shrine (about 1300 BCE).
Costume is another strength of the collection. In addition to the "oldest dress" there is a unique bead-net dress of a dancer from the Pyramid Age, about 2400 BCE, two long sleeved robes of the same date; a suit of armour from the palace of Memphis, as well as sandals and knitted socks from the Roman period.
The collection contains outstanding works of art from Akhenaten’s city at Amarna: colourful tiles, carvings and frescoes, and from many other important Egyptian and Nubian settlements and burial sites. The museum houses the world’s largest collection of Roman period mummy portraits (first to second centuries CE).
More than these highlights, though, the collection is uniquely important because so much of it comes from documented excavations. The large typological series of objects (amulets, faience, objects of daily use, tools and weapons, weights and measures, stone vessels, jewellery) provide a unique insight into how people have lived and died in the Nile Valley.
Learn more about our Museum highlights.