LDUCE-UC7530
Object Category beads
Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology
So starts the beginning of the catalogue description for a tiny string of beads in the Petrie Museum at UCL that I looked at yesterday. They are remarkable objects in a museum of remarkable things. Nine beautifully polished perfect spheres of purple garnet are threaded together with a ‘Egyptian blue’ glazed ring. Stored in a tiny box with a handwritten white museum label attached on a green thread saying U.C.7530 – its museum object number. I noticed that they were surrounded by scraps of yellowed paper, torn perhaps from a catalogue, and on which was faint pencil writing. This scrawl looked like that of William Matthew Flinders Petrie himself: the archaeologist the museum is named after. I could make out baby. This was after all what I was here to look at – the objects and boxes of infant burials dating to the twelfth dynasty (1850-1700 BCE). In 1889 Flinders Petrie excavated wooden boxes that had contained the remains of bodies of small babies from under floor of houses in the pyramid worker town of Kahun (also known as Lahun). Unwilling to risk tearing the dry paper, I waited to show it to the curatorial assistant Lisa, who was as excited about this archival ephemera as I was.
She kindly straitened it out and put it in a special archival wallet to preserve the crisp-like paper so it was no longer scrunched up in a tiny box. Lisa agreed with me that it looked like Petrie’s handwriting. I took photographs and we both tried to make out what it said. The online collection catalogue states ‘According to an old label said to "be together with baby box and board of Hetepi Illahun. Bought"’. We could certainly see some of that, though the name Hetepi appears in hieroglyphs on the paper. Bought is scrawled clearly to the side. Bought from whom I wondered. One of Petrie’s Egyptian workers from Kahun, who he used again and again for excavations in this period and paid for significant finds or bought from a local dealer? In his book Hidden Hands, my former colleague Stephen Quirke pointed to the unseen Egyptian workforce responsible for the discoveries and objects in the Petrie Museum (and many others around the world). Quirke brought these names and people into the light through diligently tracing them in the notebooks and records of Petrie. Where these beads bought from the dealers Hasan Mabruk or Misid Hamada (Quirke, 2010: 160)? And where they actually from a baby box?
I had gone to my former place of work to see objects I had last seen when prepping for an exhibition on the heads of Jeremy Bentham and Flinders Petrie in 2017. I was responsible for a case on grief and remembrances, partly as mourning practices shifted at the time of Bentham’s death but mainly to ask questions about displaying and dispassionately looking at human remains and objects from burials in museums. These things from baby burials, that were unknown or at least undocumented in other periods of Egyptian history, seemed to me perfect for display. I recognised at the time that this was partly through my experience of having lost a baby and seeing the parallels with my box of things to remember the 8-day life and pregnancy of my daughter Emily. I wanted to see them again for a chapter I am writing on use of objects in practices of empathetic history and in recognition that shared experience is not the same as empathy.
I have already written about some of Petrie’s assumptions around infanticide and abortion being behind these burials related to his race and class prejudice in an article for the Bulletin of the History of Archaeology. Petrie called the babies in the boxes he found ‘unlucky’ as he assumed they had been killed or aborted. There’s little evidence for that and the physical remains that Petrie found were thrown away or buried by himself, though he valued the objects and boxes found with them enough to bring them to Britain. These ‘unlucky babies’ may have lost their physical remains in a burial in the desert, on the archaeological junk heaps at Kahun or possibly in museum store cupboards. But the things put away with them for their eternal life were taken away and scrutinised. The objects were valued more than the bodies they were placed with.
The historian Asa Briggs vividly described why things were important for understanding people from the past, yet he recognised that poor people frequently ‘had no access to them’ (Briggs, 1988: 12). Even a past seen through things rather than written evidence is still a past largely populated by wealthier people. And so, it is testament to the power of faith in an afterlife of some kind and the care with which a dead person was considered if valuable things were buried with them. I looked at beads in different shades of blue (object number UC7408) that were wound together with the fragile chords holding them still intact. Said to be from a baby box, it barely looks decades old, let alone millennia. Other beautiful beads usually on display in the museum attest to emotional care for the babies they were buried with.
Emily would have been 10 years old today. The shadow of her birthday has always loomed larger than her tiny self. The objects in Emily’s memory box speak to the people who loved her and our family at the time as well as the ephemera of a short-lived life. Only the things buried with these babies and the boxes in which they were placed give some voice to the people in Ancient Egypt who lived through the experience (Auslander, 2005: 1016). But were the tiny purple beads in a baby box? We’ll never entirely know, just like we’ll never entirely know why and how the babies in the boxes died. Now I am reflecting on how it matters – beyond historical fact – in understanding the past. A scrawled note on a piece of paper attests to a possible different history for these perfect purple beads and in my heart that hurts because I have invested these things with a personal emotional significance. It hurts but seeing and holding the beads, wrapped as they were in the paper, gave me that jolt of electricity from knowing and feeling the intangible through the tangible. A jolt that gives me life.
Leora Auslander (2005), ‘Beyond Words’, The American Historical Review, 110 (4), 1015-1045: 1016.
Asa Briggs (1988), Victorian Things, London: Batsford.
Fox, S. (2023) ‘Archival Intimacies: Empathy and Historical Practice in 2023’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 1, pp. 241–265.
Stephen Quirke (2010), Hidden Hands. Egyptian workforces in Petrie Excavation Archives, 1880-1924, London: Duckworth Press.
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