Yesterday.

[swestrup]

Went to the Eternal Egypt exhibit yesterday with kyotto and joenotcharles. After showing up at the wrong spot, I quickly got turned around and joined kyotto  in line to get in. The last time I had been to the Museum of Fine Arts, the current entrance didn't exist yet, and so I had just automatically headed for the old entrance.

It was a very short wait to get inside and buy our tickets, but we then had a longer wait before joenotcharles showed up. Show up he did though, and we went in to see the stuff. First though, we had to climb stairs. OMG miseri is right and those are probably the worst designed stairs I have ever seen. I am positive they are not up to code. I have to wonder if someone can't sue the Museum for reckless endangerment or (at the least) complain to the city that they aren't to code.

Once we had successfully climbed 2 flights of stairs-of-doom, we got to another line to get into the actual exhibit. It also moved fairly fast and a few minutes later we were looking at Egyption stuff! I'm not going to bore you all with details, but there were a few highlights (for me):

• I finally got to see some papyrus up close! I've always wanted to see that.
• It turns out that heiroglyphics are usually made by first drawing a grid line, then drawing the glyphs, then carving the glyphs and finally erasing the grid. They had tablets in all stages of construction.
• There were turtle-headed demons in Egyption mythology! Not turtle-head headed, mind you, but the whole turtle (shell and all) formed the head!
• I got to see a statuette of Bes. I've only ever heard of him from the AD&D Deities and Demigods, and had wondered if he was made up (and not by the Egyptions).
• I started to get an idea of the Egyption concept of magic by studying the various amulets and such. Some of it is applicable to the game I'm running on Saturdays.
• I had never heard of cube statues before. They're neat.

My only disappointment was that, hard as I looked, I found no hidden alien technology and I was granted no strange superpowers by ancient magical artifacts. Am I a geek, or what?

Comments

[skjalm.livejournal.com]

Is it the Tutankamon (or whatever spelling is popular these days ;-) exhibition?

Saw it in Bonn around New Year's and enjoyed it a lot. There's something awesome about seeing something you know is thousands of years old - but hand crafted by an actual person. Yes, maybe by a slave. But still... human hands made that.

I tend to take a look around and imagine people far out in the future picking up whatever random note I've got lying around. "Yes, we see that in the early 21st century it was common for people to store each others' addresses by hastily scratching them on small pieces of paper."

[swestrup]

Nah, it wasn't the King Tut exibit. That one is far better. (I saw that one many years ago in Toronto.) This is an exhibit from the British Museum, but it was still well worth going to.