March 13, 2018 -- Penn Museum, part 4: Egypt

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Ancient mosaic, right in the floor, with no barrier to walking on it.  (I walked around!)

Egyptian.  (info below)

Wooden figurines.

The above is not a great pic, and I don’t find this work appealing.  But.

I took an excellent online archaeology class several years ago — Archaeology’s Dirty Little Secrets, with Sue Alcock. (If you google her and it, you’ll find video bits and pieces about and from the class.) Sue had a handful of colleagues who contributed to the class, each working in a different part of the world.

Every week there was a question each person answered for her/his area. One week the question was “What survives in the environment where you work?” In Guatemala (tropical, wet), basically only stone survives. In Egypt (you knew I’d get back to Egypt...) we were told everything survives. EXCEPT wood. (Some sort of bug eats it.)

Here we have not one but two wooden figurines. I glanced at these things, and then noticed the wood grain. And stopped in my tracks to appreciate the rarity of these objects.  This description is for the older of the two.

Appreciating the low relief carvings in the sideways light.

Eventually I get overloaded.

Time to head back to the hotel.  Looking back at the front of the museum.

Closer crop of the above -- snow on the ground, but fish in the "pond."  Koi, not just ordinary goldfish.

Using the zoom lens for one last look at the decoration on the front of the building.

Magnolia!

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