In a quest to try to harmonise the ever-disparate collection of technologies that we use to connect on the internet, Google have developed what may be the most comprehensive collection of typefaces yet. Under the umbrella name of Google Noto, the aim of the collection is to include every unicode symbol ever (for free).
They say:
Having completed its stint at Glasgow, the Animal Mummies Revealed exhibition opened on 14 October 2016 at the World Museum in Liverpool. I visited the exhibition when it was on at the Manchester Museum last year, and was really looking forward to following it up again at the World Museum and seeing how it looked in a different exhibition space.
Curator Ashley Cooke very kindly arranged for me to come in for a couple of hours while the exhibition was being set up to get a few behind-the-scenes photos to share with you all. It really was just a snapshot of a small part of a process that had taken several weeks, but what I saw was just fascinating.
When I first read about an exhibition at The Atkinson in Southport, recreating Egyptologist Anne Goodison’s house out of paper, I thought it would be a fairly small affair. But, when we visited The Atkinson this summer, I was pleasantly surprised by what I saw.
Friday, 13 May 2016 was Light Night in Liverpool; a night when the city of Liverpool comes to life with family events, late-opening museums, libraries and galleries, and a whole host of arts-based fun. For the past two years, the Garstang Museum of Archaeology taken part in Light Night. Last year, they welcomed the Garstang Mummy back to the museum after a sixty-year sojourn in the Department of Anatomy. This year, Light Night was the opening night of the exhibition, Meroë: Africa’s Forgotten Empire.
On 15 April I hopped on the train to Manchester to see and photograph the ‘Animal Mummies: Gifts to the Gods’ exhibition at the Manchester Museum in its last few days. I also met up with Curator of Egypt and Sudan and my old university buddy Campbell Price to find out how the exhibition has worked out.
Dr Robert Connolly is an anatomist at the University of Liverpool who assisted with the anatomical work done on the mummy of Tutankhamun back in the 1960s as a grad student, and has carried out a significant amount of research on Egyptian mummies since then.
Back in May 2015, I went to listen to him speak about his research on mummies over the years, as part of the Liverpool Egyptology Seminars at the University of Liverpool. It was a fascinating talk, and he’s a wonderfully witty speaker to boot. He talked about Tutankhamun, in particular the conclusions he drew on the circumstances of his death, from an anatomical point-of-view (he concurs with the theory that Tutankhamun fell out of a chariot and was hit front-on in the chest by the following chariot).
If I were to mention the name Faust to you, or perhaps the legendary blues guitarist Robert Johnson, you’d probably be familiar with the tales of them ‘selling their souls’ to the devil to achieve greatness in this life.
If I were to ask you about William Mackenzie, however, you’d just look at me blankly and say ‘huh?’, or perhaps get your phone out to consult Google.
Friday, 24 October 2014 – the opening of the new Egyptology gallery at The Atkinson in Southport, and a date which had been in my diary since it had been announced.
Southport is only a 25-minute ride on the local Merseyrail train service for me, so with my three-year-old in tow (my girls are beautifully enthusiastic about museum visits!) and camera with a full charge and a clean memory card, we hopped on the train then made the three-minute walk from Southport station to the Atkinson.
Over the past couple of years, the Garstang Museum of Archaeology at the University of Liverpool has been going through a major redevelopment, including a move from its place on the first floor of 14 Abercromby Square, to the ground floor, where the old archaeology library used to be. The museum is named after John…
As part of some research I was doing, I needed to find a picture of the plant represented in the j hieroglyph (see right), otherwise known as the ‘yod’ or ‘yode’ (M27 in Gardiner’s sign list). Unfortunately, I hit a snag. Some of my language books, such as Gardiner himself, describe it as a ‘flowering reed’. Other books, such as Collier and Manley in their How to read Egyptian Hieroglyphs and James P Allen in his Middle Egyptian tome refer to it as a ‘reed leaf’.
So, what was I to look up?