Museums

Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology

Eighty thousand Egyptian and Sudanese objects in two dim rooms of wooden cases, free, with the oldest dress in the world among them.

Free

The Petrie is a teaching collection that became one of the great Egyptian museums by accident. The novelist Amelia Edwards left University College her antiquities and the money for a chair in 1892, and its first professor, Flinders Petrie, the man who turned Egyptian digging from treasure hunting into archaeology, sold the college his own finds in 1913. The result, first shown in 1915, is 80,000 objects from his excavations and others: the painted mummy portraits from the Roman cemeteries at Hawara, pieces of Akhenaten's city at Amarna, the earliest evidence of mummification from the pyramid at Meydum, and above all the ordinary things, beads, tools, toys, combs and rows of pots, that Petrie cared about because they date a site. The Tarkhan dress, a pleated linen shirt from about 3000 BC, is the oldest woven garment in the world. It is shown as it always was, in tall wooden cases in two crowded rooms, and it is free.

Where

Malet Place, WC1E 6BT

Nearest station

Euston Square · 4 min walk

Hours

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