Egyptian collection finds home at last

The UCL Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology, one of the world's biggest collections of ancient Egyptian artifacts, has been "temporarily" housed at UCL since 1953.

But its 80,000 objects are finally going to have a permanent home. Groundbreaking began this month on a new building on UCL grounds, to open in 2010.

The museum is named for Egyptologist William Flinders Petrie (1853-1942), whose excavations provided a wealth of objects from daily life such as pottery, lamps, and jewelry ranging from prehistoric times to the Islamic period. …

Andreas Effland of the University of Hamburg in Germany says that the collection is "really fantastic" because it allowed him to fit together fragments of artifacts unearthed during recent German excavations at Abydos with pieces that Petrie found 100 years ago.

Photographs from the collection are at www.petrie.ucl.ac.uk/index2.html.

'Science Magazine'