Wednesday 9 June 2010Sacred and Profane
Sacred and Profane
Published on the opening of a dazzling exhibition at the Barber Institute, this volume displays a treasure trove of ancient Egyptian artefacts from the rarely-seen Myers Collection. Sacred and Profane: Treasures of Ancient Egypt from the Myers Collection, Eton College and University of Birmingham highlights over 80 objects, tracing two and a half millennia of life and death in ancient Egypt.
The Myers Eton College collection of Egyptian antiquities is not only one of the finest assemblages of ancient Egyptian decorative art worldwide but also a window into the distant world of travellers in 19th-century Egypt and the Middle East. Educated at Eton College and Sandhurst, Major William Joseph Myers (1858–99) started collecting in Egypt in the 1880s. On Myers’s untimely death in 1899 Eton College became the beneficiary of his collection, diaries and library. Sacred and Profane celebrates this extraordinary bequest discussing statuettes of mortals and gods, mummy masks, jewellery, pottery and papyri in a thematic way alongside Roman and Byzantine coins from the rich Barber Institute of Fine Arts collections.
The volume features five essays on travel, archaeology and collecting attitudes in the 19th and early 20th centuries, on travels to the beyond in ancient Egypt, on personal approaches to the sacred in Egyptian art, on papyri in Greco-Roman Egypt, and on the economy and art in Egypt from Alexander to the Arab conquest. Special focus is given to the stunning yet little known and under-researched Eton-Myers blue faience objects. It also contains a bibliography, a map, a timeline and an index.
“Britain’s finest private collection of Egyptian antiquities” Martin Bailey, The Art Newspaper
Exhibition details: The Sacred and the Profane: Treasures of Ancient Egypt – The Barber Institute of Fine Arts, University of Birmingham, 18 June 2010 – 18 January 2012
The Authors
Martin Bommas is Senior Lecturer in Egyptology, College of Arts and Law, University of Birmingham; Eurydice Georganteli is Keeper of Coins & Lecturer, College of Arts and Law, University of Birmingham; Maria Michela Luiselli is Honorary Research Fellow in Egyptology, Institute of Archaeology and Antiquity, University of Birmingham; Michael Sharp is Senior Editor in Classic and Byzantine Studies, Cambridge University Press
SACRED AND PROFANE: Treasures of Ancient Egypt from the Myers Collection, Eton College and the University of Birmingham
RRP UK£24.95 / US$40.00
Hardback
128 pages
270 x 205 mm (8 x 10½ in.)
Portrait
132 colour and 9 b & w illustrations
In association with the University of Birmingham and the Provost and Fellows of Eton College
ISBN 978-1-904832-80-5
Publication date: September, 2010
Publisher: D Giles Limited, London
Distributed in the UK and Rest of World (excluding US and Canada) by
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