The British Museum’s first blockbuster exhibition in their new temporary exhibition gallery received plenty of publicity, mostly about the arrival of the longest Viking longship ever discovered – or at least, the 20% of its wooden frame that survives, plus a reconstruction of the rest – from Denmark. A new gallery, a giant longship, and Vikings! How could a group of Classicists resist…?
This is a review of an old exhibition tucked away unobtrusively at the back of Oxford’s Sackler Library. The Griffith Institute of Egyptology is the home of the complete Howard Carter archives, documenting the discovery and ten-year excavation of the tomb of Tutankhamun. In 2014 the Institute celebrated its 75th anniversary, and so the Ashmolean’s hosted an exhibition, Discovering Tutankhamun, that explored the excavation and its aftermath using material from the Griffith’s archives.
