The Penn Museum
June 21st, 2010 by admin received No Comments »On Sunday morning I went to my favourite Philly junk food place, Naked Chocolate, for a sipping chocolate and to read the book I bought Saturday before the Penn Museum opened at 1. The museum is only open 1-5 on Sundays, and I wanted to make sure I took advantage of all of my time, so I arrived a couple of minutes before 1.
One of the Penn Museum's courtyards
The museum was not crowded, which kind of surprised me, because it was the weekend, but it was also Father’s Day and 90+ degrees with humidity (and it’s not really in an area where tourists who aren’t affiliated with one of the University City schools go—I think they tend to stay in Old City, but I’m not exactly sure). This was my second trip to the museum; I actually didn’t know it existed when I was living here, but I discovered it when deciding what to do—and that hadn’t been on last summer’s goals list—during my brief visit here in January, and I was excited to return to the museum, because it is huge and has very extensive collections; today I spent four hours walking through Egyptian, Islamic/Ottoman, and Ur exhibits, none of which I had seen in January (I did make a stop in one special exhibit that I saw in January first, though). I didn’t see nearly everything in those exhibits, and I am already thinking that I will try to return this summer so that I can see other exhibits that I missed entirely.
I first returned to a small special exhibit that I visited in January that was actually based on an ethnographic study of homeless people in San Francisco. After looking through that, I went to the lower and upper Egyptian galleries, and they were very impressive! The galleries had many very well-preserved artifacts, including huge sarcophagi, sphinxes, columns from buildings, as well as mummies (of humans but also cats and alligators), religious sculptures and amulets, pots, and coins. In addition to the extensive collections, I was very impressed by how much detailed information the museum gives visitors to read—for example, timelines of time periods throughout Egypt’s history, details about where the artifacts were found, as well as who owned them and/or why they were important and where the pieces or people fit into the history of the empire. I also liked reading the translations of hieroglyphics. I took a picture (below) of my favourite pieces in the Egyptian galleries; the large columns and entry way remind me of a very scaled-down version of the Temple of Dendur at the Met.
One of the Egyptian galleries
After spending two about 2.5 hours going through the Egyptian galleries, I visited a small gallery of both architectural details (doors, entry ways, window screens, sunken fountains, etc.) and dishes and jewelry from the Middle East and Ottoman Empire. Those pieces, as did the Egyptian pieces, spanned a wide range of time—I saw pieces in the Middle East room from as early as the 8th century and as recent as the 18th.
After looking through that room, I walked through a large atrium of Buddhist sculptures and tapestries to an exhibit of pieces from Ur (in modern Iraq), which archaeologists from the Penn Museum and British Museum discovered in the 1920s. Surprisingly, this was the first room I had been to in the museum so far that was indeed air conditioned. I kind of rushed through the exhibit, because I only had about half an hour before the museum closed, but I did see a couple of lyres from the site as well as a queen’s headdress and some jewelry and coins. When I make my return, I certainly need to spend some more time in that exhibit and read more carefully.
The queen's headdress in the Ur exhibit
After I had to extricate myself from the museum, I waited in the heat and humidity for a train from University City and then caught my train back to my apartment. Even though the first two museums I visited this weekend were small, I still went to four museums (!) over two days, and I did much walking both inside the museums as well as outside. And after a second trip to the Penn Museum, I think that I can call it one of my favourites in Philly because of the size of the collections and the amount of information about the collections they give visitors. I’m very much looking forward to returning again soon!
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