#Egyptology is an active hashtag on Bluesky. In the last 30 days, 25 people shared 78 posts with it — around 3 a day. Activity is down 61% versus the previous week, peaking on Jul 31 with 8 posts.

Posts with #Egyptology

Greg Jenner (Historian)

@gregjenner.bsky.social

over 1 year ago

There’s a lovely new exhibition at the V&A Museum in London that aims to inspire kids through the aesthetics of #Egyptology — Having cowritten my own children’s book about Ancient Egypt with Dr Campbell Price, I spoke to the exhibition’s curator, Benjamin Hinson, for this month’s V&A magazine

ALL THE FUN OF THE PHARAOHS
V&A MAGAZINE - SPRING 2025

The 1999 film The Mummy, contemporary fashion, DC superheroes and 2.000-year-old artefacts all feature in a new exhibition Making Egypt at Young V&A this month. The show aims to give creative inspiration to kids by exploring how ancient Egypt has influenced visual culture.

Also aimed at young people is Greg Jenner's new book series, Totally Chaotic History, launched last year with its debut book Ancient Egypt Gets Unruly! The podcaster and long time consultant for the BBC's award-winning Horrible Histories series, Jenner is adept at getting people excited by the past - his BBC Radio 4 history podcast You're Dead to Me pairs academics with comedians and fully supports pop-cultural references. He shared a video call with Benjamin Hinson, an Egyptologist, curator in the V&A's Asia department and lead on Making Egypt, to explore how pharaohs fascinate us

Their conversation has been edited.

GREG JENNER: “Tell me
about the exhibition's inspiration and its genesis.”

BENJAMIN HINSON: “The V&A has always had a big collection of ancient Egyptian material; it was set up to inspire artists and designers, and ancient Egypt was considered the origin of a lot of the crafts that the museum was concerned with.
So the starting point for the exhibition was: how do we tell a story about Egypt that is both uniquely "V&A* and that captures young minds?
We wanted it to be a jumping-off point for young people who might want to become a fashion designer or a jeweller, to see these amazing examples of creativity inspired by Egypt and hopefully come away with ideas of their own.”

GREG: “And the ancient Egyptians are amazingly exciting, exotic and glamorous, and they have this beautiful stuff. In the UK curriculum, you study them at the age of seven. So they're your first entrance to history; your gateway drug to the past. But it is also this extraordinary civilisation that defies logic - it's so vast and long. One fact that always blows people's minds is that Cleopatra is closer to the
iPhone than she was to the pyramids: she lived around 2,000 years ago and the Great Pyramid is 4,500 years old. here were 25 dynasties and countless pharaohs but this huge canvas often becomes essentialised into three or four names such as Hatshepsut or Tutankhamun. Ramses the Great and Cleopatra are around 1,200 years apart - it's like saying Lady Gaga and Alfred the Great are contemporaries!

BH: “Explaining this has been one of the interesting challenges for us because it isn't a social history or an archaeology show. We didn't want to rely on those few famous names to get people through the door but, in a show aimed at eight to 12-year-olds, how do you still get across that these are objects from a vast swathe of time where society and style changes? That's partly why we start the exhibition with the Nile: it is one constant across this huge period. We explore the importance of water in stories and the idea of creation and the meaning that the Egyptians gave to different associated with the river. The importance of water socially and religiously never really changes.”

GJ: “My book is telling the story of ancient Egypt at 100 miles an hour, to give a sense of all the discontinuities and ruptures because the way that we teach Ancient Egypt is homogenised,
generalised and compressed It takes Egyptology seriously; the joke is that I'm getting confused and lost. And my co-author, Egyptologist Campbell Price, is in the margins, scribbling on my homework and correcting me.”

GREG: “the human body and animals were represented and also the use of colour: gorgeous turquoises, the gold; that notion of Egypt as a land of sand and soil, the dark earth and the water. It's this incredible palette that lends itself so easily to artists, creatives, Hollywood stylists, fashion designers. It catches your eye immediately and yet has a kind of elegance to it.

GJ: And actually there are several periods in this history where we as historians don't really know what's happening.
There are civil wars, you've got the Sudanese influence coming in; there's the
Babylonian period. But it's just not in our brains or in our culture. You only make sense of ancient Egypt when you start at the beginning and understand where things came from and why they were created or by whom.
Why was linen the go-to fabric? Well, it's strong, clean and simple to manufacture. It's pure, too, so it's used in religious and death ceremonies as a symbolic thing, It has functionality but also meaning.

вн: This show explains why objects are how they are, and acknowledges that they can have multiple functions - practical and religious. Just because this is an exhibition for children, that doesn't mean you should patronise or simplify. There haven't really been many exhibitions on ancient Egypt specifically targeted at young audiences and we felt we had a real chance to think, for instance, how do you introduce decolonisation to an eight-year-old? There will be a trail based on the Osiris myth (the god's body was dismembered). Visitors have to find his limbs throughout the gallery and at each point learn a fact about excavation, why objects are in museums, how they left Egypt. Young people know and care about these issues because they hear them in the news and are increasingly switched on.

Gj: The thing I really wanted to do in my book is explain to kids why we historians have changed our minds: why do we no longer think Hatshepsut was a bad queen? Why have we come around to a new way of thinking? Campbell has a theory that mummification was about transformation rather than preservation.
Each generation of historians comes with fresh questions to the same evidence.
And sometimes the world we live in now inspires us to look again at what we think
we knew about the past. I think it's wonderful that your exhibition is going to set kids off on that journey.

6 48 366

David Mihalyfy

@mihalyfy.bsky.social

26 days ago

"[A]t the Ain el-Sabil site, located in the Dakhla Oasis... a fully articulated residential city dating to the Byzantine period... [and] about two hundred ostraca with inscriptions in Coptic and Greek..." #Egyptology #Classics #AncientBlueSky www.labrujulaverde.com/en….

www.labrujulaverde.com

A Complete Byzantine City Discovered in the Dakhla Oasis in Egypt

The Egyptian archaeological mission under the Supreme Council of Antiquities operating at the Ain el-Sabil site, located in the Dakhla Oasis, has succeeded in uncovering a fully articulated residentia...

0 45 193

Zoli Aswad Osaze

@zaswadosaze.bsky.social

4 months ago

amentenofre Egyptian Religious Calendar - 22 April 2026 It is the 6th day of “the Month of Khonsu” (𓐍𓈖𓇓 , Ḫnsw), the ninth month of the Egyptian Lunar Calendar. The Deity Who presides over today is “Soped the Lord of the East” (Edfou XV, 56, 25) #ancientegypt #egyptology #kemetic #gods #falcon

1 23 154

The Alchemist 🇨🇦

@alchemistsstudio.bsky.social

over 1 year ago

Tiamat's Talisman Tiamat roars, the old world cracks, Chaos rises, no turning back. From fractured times, a new world gleams, Born from struggle, shaped by dreams. Never stop dreaming of a better world! ❤️🧡💛💚💙💜 #art #sciart #hope #egyptology

A raku pottery vase called 'Tiamat's Talisman' with various colours and textures, including blues, greens, coppers and reds.

3 18 151

Global Museum

@globalmuseum.bsky.social

4 days ago

Egyptian singer performs a song in the language of ancient Egypt. Egyptian singing dates back to around 4500 BCE, with music playing a central role in rituals, religious, royal and everyday. @UnearthedHQ #globalmuseum #music #singing #Egyptology

2 7 25

School of Archaeology

@unioxarchaeology.bsky.social

5 months ago

🚨Job alert: A fixed-term lectureship in #Egyptology (2 years) at Oxford, to cover the sabbatical leave of two members of staff, Richard Parkinson (2026-7) and Elizabeth Frood (2027-8); see www.jobs.ac.uk/.../depart…. or search for 'Departmental Lecturer in Egyptology' on: jobs.ox.ac.uk

1 25 114

Kate Innes

@kateinnes.bsky.social

6 months ago

Egypt - day one 🌞 The Grand Egyptian Museum truly lived up to its name. But in the midst of the monuments & bling I found a few more natural, humble inspirations. Animals were crucial part of Egyptian mythology, religion and artistry - as they are across the world. Tongues out! 😛 #Egypt #egyptology

0 14 110

John J Johnston

@johnjjohnston.bsky.social

over 1 year ago

Well, it would appear that, after more than a century, we have a newly discovered XVIIIth Dynasty royal tomb, belonging to Tuthmosis II, the prematurely deceased husband to Hatshepsut and father to Tuthmosis III. Congratulations to the excavation teams! #Egyptology www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

www.bbc.co.uk

Thutmose II: First pharaoh's tomb found in Egypt since Tutankhamun's - BBC News

It is the first royal tomb to be found since King Tutankhaman's over a century ago.

2 20 102

Manel Vinuesa

@mvinuesa.bsky.social

10 months ago

#Inside the Funerary Complex of Djoser, Saqqara, Egypt #BlueSkyArtShow #Egypt #Egyptology #necropolis #saqqara #travels #EastCoastKin #BlueSky #blueskyphotography #photography

1 6 94

Xander's Skyscape

@wellmanneredxs.bsky.social

over 1 year ago

gouged out, suggesting the value of onyx. In many lovely finds that season, the eye was by far the most compelling. There was something very emotive about seeing the living reflected in that dark surface... Thanks for posting, @drnwillburger.bsky.social! #Egyptology #Archaeology #AncientBluesky

The complete eye-inlay of an Egyptian coffin held between my finger and thumb, It reflects the sun and the team members behind me. The busy excavation site and Egyptian archaeological workers are in the background. Photo by Xander Sable.

2 8 81

Xander's Skyscape

@wellmanneredxs.bsky.social

over 1 year ago

The Goddess Seshat came up in chat over on the #Egyptology feed, so let's celebrate the world's first woman in STEM! An integral participant in temple building, Seshat engineered temple sites and structure with the king by 'stretching the cord', ceremonially bashing in stakes tied to a cubit- 1/

The goddess Seshat and Ramesses II conduct the 'Stretching of the Cord' ceremony together to found Ramesses' extension for his father's mortuary temple at Abydos (Dynasty XIX, ca 1300 BC), bashing in long stakes with clubs a bit like baseball bats. Photo by Xander Sable

3 20 79

Carrie Arbuckle

@archaeocarrie.bsky.social

over 1 year ago

It’s up! You can download a PDF of ARCHAEOLOGICAL WOOD AND WOODWORKING for free until March 31! Tree science, dendrochronology, tool marks, and Egyptian coffin case studies! #Archaeology #Dendrochronology #Egyptology doi.org/10.1017/9781...