A visit from international experts
Every year, the British Museum runs the International Training Programme for museum and heritage professionals from around the world. The aim is to develop skills, increase specialist knowledge and create a global network of colleagues sharing expertise and best practice. An essential part of the Annual Programme is time spent at another UK museum and Lincoln Museum has participated in this for a number of years, welcoming colleagues from all over the world.
This summer we were lucky to have a visit from Mamdouh Farouk, Director at the Imhotep Museum in Egypt and archaeologist Ali Demirkiran from the Ephesus Museum, Turkey. They were able to spend a few hours with the learning team whilst in Lincoln. It was a fantastic opportunity to talk with experts about our Greek and Egyptian artefacts and show them how we bring them to life through our workshops.
One of Ali’s specialisms is Ancient Greece so we were very keen to hear more about the artefacts we have on display at the museum. He helped us out with the pronunciation of tricky words like ‘Oinochoe’ (a wine pourer), which doesn’t rhyme with Orinoco! We were glad to hear that our interpretations of the objects matched with Ali’s explanations.
Mamdouh was a fountain of knowledge and very generously described many aspects of life (and death) in Ancient Egypt to us. It was great to have an expert on hand to help us understand what can be a very complex topic. We were very interested to hear more about the mummification process and the seven parts of the soul and he was impressed with the content of our mummification workshop.
We are really grateful to both Ali and Mamdouh for their interest in the learning team’s work and plan to keep in touch with them both. We’ll keep our fingers crossed for a visit to Egypt or Turkey one day!