2023-12-22 05:36:00
Time.news – The Egyptian Museum of Turin is enriched with new spaces. The third floor reopens with the new layout of the Writing Gallery. It is a thousand square meters that host 248 finds, a journey in 10 sections to the origins of the writings of ancient Egypt, going back in time 4 thousand years. In the spotlight not only are hieroglyphics and the adventure that over the centuries led to their decipherment and the birth of Egyptology, but also hieratic, demotic and then Coptic.
The exhibition project was signed by three curators of the Museum: Paolo Marini, Federico Poole and Susanne Toepfer, the latter responsible for the Museum’s Papyrus Library, which houses one of the most significant collections of papyrus in the world. The Egyptian Papyrotheque, in fact, is a treasure chest of more than 800 manuscripts, whole or reassembled, and over 23 thousand fragments of papyrus, which document more than 3 thousand years of material culture written in seven scripts and eight languages and is a crossroads for international restoration and digitization projects.
From the very beginning, Egyptian writing had a strong figurative component and the hieroglyph, halfway between technique and art, reached us before on papyrus, on vase labels, or carved on the walls of temples or on tombs or on statues, taking on thus monumental and celebratory connotations. This is the case of the limestone Cartouche, dated between 1353 and 1336 BC, which opens the Gallery of Writing.
The “Writing Gallery” opens tomorrow, an entire floor of the museum dedicated to writing in ancient Egypt.
A permanent exhibition of 1000 square meters with 248 exhibits ready to tell you about writing as a lens for reading the entire society.
— Egyptian Museum Turin (@MuseoEgizio) December 21, 2023
Carved on a gigantic block, the hieroglyphics take on an almost sacred value and the name of the divinity Aten, reported in the cartouche, spans the millennia to reach the present day intact. Also on display is one of the first known meaningful sentences, contained on the fragment of a monument of Pharaoh Djoser, dated between 2592 and 2566 BC and which came to light in Heliopolis in the last century.
“Projected towards the bicentenary in 2024 – explains the president of the Egyptian Museum, Evelina Christillin – we will cross the finish line of one million visitors at the end of the year and we reopen the third floor of the Museum to the public. A new piece enriches the exhibition itinerary of the Egizio, which will change its face once again. Thanks to the attentive patronage of Consulta, with the Gallery of Writing we propose a sort of museum within the museum”.
For the director of the Egyptian Museum, Christian Greco “Text and image are mutually complementary and allow us to get closer to understanding 4 thousand years of Ancient Egyptian history”.
“How and why did writing develop – what role did it have in the formation of the State in all its articulations and in the development of religious discourse and the complex funerary cosmography? These are some of the questions we try to answer, with scientific rigor and at the same time trying to interest and excite visitors of all ages, also through multimedia and interactive media”.
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