Manchester Museum holds one of the UK’s largest Egyptology collections. What’s the story behind this fascinating collection?

This talk coincides with the return to Manchester Museum of a major international touring exhibition, ‘Golden Mummies of Egypt’. With the expert help of Dr Campbell Price, we will examine the emergence of interest in Egyptology in Manchester in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries.

Which key figures kick-started the collection’s creation?

Cotton industrialist Jesse Haworth became fascinated with Pharaonic culture after reading Amelia Edwards’ book ‘A Thousand Miles up in the Nile’, in the late 1870s. He subsequently visited Egypt in 1880.

Inspired by what he saw, he invested significant sums of money into excavations in Egypt. These excavations were led by British archaeologist William Matthew Flinders Petrie. And this partnership shaped the rich collection of Egyptian antiquities that formed at Owens College. – which later became the Manchester Museum.

Petrie’s excavations at the important site of Hawara, near the Faiyum lake in Egypt, were instrumental in setting tastes and expectations among the museum-going British public. Hawara was a major cemetery site of the Graeco-Roman Period. During this period, Egypt was ruled successively by Greek kings called Ptolemy and Roman emperors.

The funerary art of this time, between around 300 BCE and 300 CE, shows a multicultural attitude to death. The objective of mummification was more about the transformation of the deceased into a god, rather than simple preservation of the flesh, as so often assumed.

A heady combination of gold, art, sex and death ensured the continued popularity of the Museum’s displays for over a century. In this talk, Dr Price’s closer examination of reactions at the time will reveal more about us than about the ancient Egyptians.

Discover more about the incredible life of the ‘unofficial’ leader of the British women’s suffrage movement in the later 19th Century.

In the 1868 general election women achieved a victory: a legal loophole allowed up to a thousand women across the country to cast their vote. This surprising event occurred due to the feisty and single-minded dedication of Lydia Becker.

It gave rise to the belief amongst campaigners that women would soon be enfranchised. But in fact, it would be another half-century before that goal was achieved. Lydia’s life became a series of triumphs and setbacks. For over twenty years she was the moving force behind ceaseless campaigning and publicity.

Brought up near Manchester in a middle-class family as the eldest of fifteen children, she broke away from convention, remaining single and entering the sphere of men by engaging in politics. Although it was considered almost immoral for a woman to speak in public, Lydia addressed innumerable audiences. Not only on women’s votes, but also on girls’ education, the position of wives, the abuse of women, and their rights at work. She kept countless supporters all over Britain and beyond informed of the many campaigns for women’s rights through her publication: the Women’s Suffrage Journal.

In every area there were setbacks. But relentless battling did begin to move society and politics towards a new perception of women by undermining the accepted orthodoxy of ‘separate spheres’.

Steamrollering her way to Parliament as chief lobbyist for women, Becker influenced MPs in a way that no woman had done before. In the 1870s giving women the vote was compared in the Commons to ‘persuading dogs to dance’; it would be ridiculous and unnatural. By the time of Lydia’s death in 1890 there was a wide acceptance that the enfranchisement of women would happen sooner or later.

But she did not live to see the achievement of her goals. The torch was picked up by others who built on the foundations she had laid. These included Lydia’s younger colleague on the London committee, Millicent Fawcett, and a woman she had inspired as a teenager: the iconic Emmeline Pankhurst.