Egyptian Museum opens the Scripture Gallery: 248 artifacts to discover the origin of ancient Egyptian scriptures

After consolidation and restoration work, the Egyptian Museum of Turin reopens its third floor, expanding the exhibition with a new exhibit: the Scripture Gallery. One thousand square meters housing 248 artifacts through which the public can take a journey in ten sections to the origin of ancient Egyptian scripture.

Not only hieroglyphs and their decipherment, but also Hieratic, Demotic, and then Coptic. Telling the story of ancient writing, in its variations and evolutions, also means describing society, the articulations of the state and the figure of the scribe, keeper of the historical memory of ancient Egyptian civilization and repository of a savoir-faire, which has its origins in myth. The exhibition project is curated by Paolo Marini, Federico Poole and Susanne Toepfer, the latter of whom is in charge of the Egyptian Museum’s Papyrus Library.

From its beginnings Egyptian writing had a strong figurative component, and hieroglyphic writing, straddling technique and art, along with its cursive version, has come down to us before on papyri, on vase labels, or carved on temple walls or tombs or statues, taking on monumental and celebratory connotations. Opening the Scripture Gallery is the double limestone cartouche, dated between 1353 and 1336 BC. Carved on a gigantic block, the hieroglyphs take on an almost sacred significance, and the name of the deity Aten, given in one of the cartouches, spans the millennia to the present day.

Also on display is one of the earliest known complete sentences, contained on the fragment of a Monument of Pharaoh Djoser, dated between 2592 and 2566 B.C. and unearthed in Heliopolis last century.

Also among the globally significant papyri featured in the new Gallery are the Papyrus of Kings, the only Pharaonic-era royal list handwritten on papyrus that has come down to us, and the Papyrus of the Conjuring, a quasi-judicial chronicle text that reconstructs the trial and punishments meted out to the perpetrators of the assassination attempt against Ramesses III (1190-1077 B.C.) and returns to the Egyptian Museum’s display after years.

Also on display is a copy of the Treaty of Qadesh, a clay tablet documenting the peace made in the 13th century B.C. between Egypt and the Hittite empire (in present-day Turkey), written in cuneiform. The original tablet dates to 1259 B.C. and is preserved at the Museum of the Ancient Orient in Istanbul. It is the oldest known peace treaty and the copy was donated to the Museum by the Ministry of Culture and Tourism of the Republic of Türkiye.

The exhibition is enhanced by multimedia stations, some of which are interactive, made possible thanks to the support of the Turin Council for the Enhancement of Artistic and Cultural Heritage.

The Writing Gallery closes with a section devoted to the power, even salvific, of writing, with magical and protective formulas against crocodiles and the bite of snakes. Thus we return to the mythological dimension of writing, which came to humans as a divine gift: a dimension explored in depth in a showcase dedicated to the god Thot who, according to myth, devised and gave humans writing, becoming the patron of knowledge and scribes.

Egyptian Museum opens the Scripture Gallery: 248 artifacts to discover the origin of ancient Egyptian scriptures

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