Egyptian Treasures: Art of the Pharaohs

More than 250 Egyptian artefacts, including jewellery, sculpture and intricately decorated coffins, will be showcased at the Australian Museum this month. Many of these antiquities, which date from the Predynastic Period of 4,000 BCE to the 1st century CE, have never been on public display until now.

"The collection comes from the highly ranked Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, and they've never travelled before," says exhibition curator, Elizabeth Cowell. "We're very lucky to have this exhibition in Australia, and the Australian Museum is the only place in Australia that it is coming to."

On display from the 13 September, the exhibition will feature more than 30 towering limestone and granodiorite statues. "We've got a really magnificent statue of the goddess of war, Senet. She is almost two metres high and a very imposing figure," Cowell says. "There's also a forepart of a sphinx, which was only recently purchased by the Vienna Museum, and it's really quite stunning."

There will also be a burial room featuring a number of funerary items, including Canopic jars (used to store and preserve organs for the afterlife), amulets (ornaments believed to endow the wearer with magical properties) and shabti - figurines placed in tombs intended to act as substitutes for the dead, should they be called upon to do manual labour in the afterlife.

Perhaps the most intriguing of all the artefacts are the mummy coffins. "We've got some extraordinary coffins and we're going to be able to show some of the inner sections of them," Cowell says. CT scans and X-rays will peer through 2,500-year-old layers of linen bandaging to offer a glimpse into the life of the person behind the mummy. "The scans are done horizontally, so you don't destroy the fabric. You don't have to unwrap the mummy or anything like that; it's non-invasive. And we now know a little about the buried people inside. We know, for example, that one of the mummy cases contains a woman pregnant with twins."

A plethora of Egyptian art will feature in the exhibition. Of particular note is a bowl made of faience (a glassy ceramic), which remains a deep, rich blue, despite its age. Cowell explains the significance of colour for the ancient Egyptians: "Green and blue were the colours of plants and water and sky, but they also symbolised fertility and prosperity. Gold is the colour of the sun and and it was likened to immortality. Whenever you see these colours they have another depth of meaning."
 
The antiquities will be displayed alongside contemporary works by Dinosaur Designs, John Balint, Avital Sheffer, Simon Murray and Kamila Shepherd. Cowell hopes that this will illustrate the ways in which ancient design aesthetic continues to inspire. "If you place the pieces side by side, the ancient and the modern, there's a silent dialogue going on. We really want visitors to compare the shape, the material, the process or the use of these items. There are some amazing similarities."