Sometime in or about the year 2400 B.C., a wealthy Egyptian noblewoman rose from her bed in the ancient capital of Thebes, greeted the morning sun and donned a beautiful beaded-net dress — likely the best she owned — to wear to the year’s biggest festival honoring the sun god, Ra.
Now, some 4,400 years later, that exact same dress has traveled to the Columbia Museum of Art, painstakingly preserved as part of the exhibition Excavating Egypt: Great Discoveries from the Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology, which opens Sunday.
“When they found that dress, all that was left was a box of beads and shells since the string had long since decomposed,” says Todd Herman, chief curator at the Columbia Museum of Art. “It took researchers decades to figure out how it fit together, and it wasn’t until 1994 that the dress finally came together in the form it is now.
“The dress is really spectacular both because of how beautiful it is but also because of how it managed to survive for so long. You just don’t see things like this very often.”
See the above for the full story.
No comments:
Post a Comment