Fwd: What does a dusty receipt dated 1918 have to do with an ancient Egyptian party queen?

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Subject:	What does a dusty receipt dated 1918 have to do with an ancient...
Date:	Thu, 07 Jan 2016 09:00:24 -0500
From:	<Brooklyn Museum>

What does a dusty receipt dated 1918 have to do with an ancient Egyptian party queen? Back stories bring objects to life—every painting, sculpture or book has a history that can be discovered through the things that are associated with it, however small—whether a letter, a ledger entry, a short note, or even a piece of packaging.

Art objects, no matter how precious or aesthetically pleasing, become orphans when information about them is lacking. Providing this information is the heart of the mission of the Brooklyn Museum Libraries and Archives—information and, of course, the necessary connections that transform a set of facts into a story.

And what is the story of our objects? The receipt, dated August 15, 1913, was recently acquired by the Brooklyn Museum Library and shows a payment to the Egypt Exploration Fund from the Library of The Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences (the BIAS was the parent of the Brooklyn Museum). Our accession cards indicate that we were actively building our Library resources on Egyptology and adding volumes of the Memoirs of the Egypt Exploration Fund to our collection at that time.

The receipt belongs to an EES report that deals with the Eleventh dynasty temple at Deir el-Bahari. Vivid color illustrations of wall paintings from the tomb of queen Kemsit, wife of pharaoh Mentuhotep II of the 11th Dynasty's (found in the Deir el-Bahari temple complex), are included. The queen is shown preparing for a feast—getting her hair done by servants and pointing at and choosing food for the festivities.

A beautiful picture to be sure, and made much more meaningful by the history of its acquisition—traced through the family of objects that are together again in the collection of the #BKMLibrary!

Posted by Roberta Munoz