Communing with the dead; Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology, Malet Place, WC1

I thought that an exhibit of a complete human skeleton sitting upright in a giant earthenware pot, would leap out at me when I visited the Petrie Museum.  The museum is small, just two upstairs rooms in an old stable block on Malet Place in the UCL campus, just across the road from the Gower Street Waterstones. Despite its small size it still took me two complete circuits to locate UC14857, as the museums pre-dynastic Egyptian pot burial is officially known.  Part of the problem locating him is that he is placed inconspicuously in a side case at floor level making him easy for an adult to overlook, but at just the right level to startle small children.  To properly examine him anyone over three feet high has to crouch or squat by his glass case.  UC14857 is the mortal remains of a man buried in two large pots about 6000 years ago at what is now the village of Badari in Upper Egypt. Information about the exhibit is printed on a laminated card left propped up against the vitrine; if it had been placed inside the case anyone wanting to read would probably have to get down on their hands and knees to see it. The card says:

The village of Badari is now used to refer to a distinct predynastic civilisation called Badarian. Badarian sites were found by the Egyptian Ali Suefi in 1923 and published by English archaeologists Guy Brunton and Gertrude Caton-Thompson. It is thought to span 4400–4000 BC and is the earliest farming culture in Middle Egypt.

Brunton and Caton-Thompson described this as 'a large double pot burial, in excellent condition, of an adult female'. It is displayed in the position that it was found at North Spur Burial (59). The Petrie Museum also displays other items from Badarian civilisation, including black-topped pots and jewellery, that were often buried as funerary goods.

The skeleton was repaired after damage during World War Two, though some material was further damaged in 1985. In 1995, gynaecologist Mark Broadbent identified the skeleton as male on the basis of pelvis and femur length. He also thought the man was over 6 foot tall. 

This detail about gender and height helps transform the museum object into a real person who lived and breathed. Attitudes to the display of human remains in museums, whether skeletal or preserved (such as mummies), have changed over the last 20 years. Some people find such displays offensive or uncomfortable, while others think they are useful in explaining the past. Should we display the burial in this way?

Crouched in front of the glass, no more than a couple of feet away from UC14857's empty eye sockets, I do my best to reach out across the 6000 years that separate us, I try to connect with him, to humanise him, to visualise the man he once was. I fail dismally. My imagination lets me down and he stubbornly remains an articulated skeleton, a reassembled collection of bones, sitting in a pot. I know nothing about this man, and I know nothing about his world. I don’t know how he dressed, what he looked like, what sort of house he lived in, what he ate, did for a living, how he got on with his neighbours, whether he was married or a father. And I know nothing of the Badari culture to place him in any sort of social context. No real surprise then that I can’t conjure him up in my imagination.

There are more exhibits from Badari in the museum. I was surprised to see that many of them consisted of fine flint tools like scrapers and arrow heads, bone implements like needles and polished pebble beads. I assumed from what I saw that this was a neolithic culture, which seemed astonishing just a thousand years before the unification of Upper and Lower Egypt and the start of the first Pharaonic dynasty.  A bit of further research later revealed that the Badarian culture was Chalcolithic, it belonged to the Copper Age. None of the many objects sitting in their display cases helped me feel any closer to UC14857. Do many people find the sight of skeletons in museums offensive? I really struggle to understand why.

I decided to leave Badari man in peace and had a look at the rest of the exhibits. I was very taken with a display of a couple of hundred or so Shabti figurines, all densely packed into one large case. Apparently, the idea for showing so many of these small clay figurines together originated with Flinders Petrie himself, the display is meant to show the development of Shabtis over time. Shabti (also known as ushebtis or shawabtis) are figurines made from clay or carved in wood or stone that were buried with the dead to act as servants in the afterlife. The bright blue ones are made from faience, a glazed non-clay ceramic material, composed of crushed quartz or sand, with small amounts of lime and either natron or plant ash. The colour comes from a copper rich glaze applied before they were fired. They are very common objects and even now you can buy them for as little as £250.

Also interesting were the examples of funerary stelae, upright monuments set up above tombs. These look exactly like cemetery headstones, often with a curved top edge and carrying images and inscriptions, including the name of the dead. There is no connection as far as I know between the design of 17th century headstones and these ancient stelae, they alighted on the same basic design by chance.

The objects that impressed me most, and which quite unexpectedly gave me my moment of connection with the past were half a dozen Acheulean handaxes. These objects are far more ancient than anything else in the museum, they were made in Egypt almost half a million years ago not by modern humans but by Homo Erectus, our direct ancestors and the longest-lived homo species, they survived for at least two million years, In contrast modern man evolved around 300,000 years ago and we will be lucky if we don’t wipe ourselves out in the next couple of hundred. Hand axes are hefty tools, skilfully knapped from flint or chert, pointed at one end with chipped, sharp edges but smooth at the other to sit in the palm of the hand. No one can be sure exactly how they were used but it seems likely that butchering carcasses, cutting wood and digging were some of the activities they were handy for. I find it difficult not to imagine them being used to bash the brains out of some hapless foe but if Homo Erectus survived for two million years, maybe they weren’t as violent to each other as Homo Sapiens are? After all, very few other species are quite as blood thirsty as we are. It was staring at these ancient objects that I had my sudden moment of temporal vertigo, that half a million years collapsed in on itself and I had a clear vision of a callused hand with thick, strong fingers, and a dark-skinned muscled forearm gripping the hand axe. Maker or user I don’t know, but I felt closer to the hand that had once, 500,000 years ago, held that axe than I did to that member of my own species, the skeleton in the pot burial.