Week Two
This week I continued researching Tutankhamun's life, family, egyptian lifestyle, religion and his death.
I had two tutorials with Andy this week; the first one Tuesday was a group tutorial and the second on Friday was one-to-one. The group tutorial wasn't the most sucessful as I proposed that I would make either the gold canopic shrine, the magic lamp or the two coffins containing the baby princesses. I was a bit all over the place during the tutorial and I hadn't had time to print any photos or find the measurements so it was difficult for Andy to advise me on what artifact would be fesable to make; so I went away to do some more research and to make my mind up on which one I would create. I decided I will re-create the gold canopic shrine containing four coffins with king's organs inside; however, considering how vast and detailed the gold canopic shrine is, I will probably re-create it on a smaller scale and won't be creating the canopic chester or four coffins inside (containing the organs) as this will be too difficult to produce to a high standard in the time limit I have.
When researching what was in the pharaoh's tomb I came across a great series of short videos showing replicas of the objects within his tomb. The one I found most useful (from 2:21 onwards) is below .
Once decising on creating the shrine I printed the images I could find online out and brought them to the tutorial on Friday; I still couldn't however find the measurements of the shrine, but from various videos and images of it, could see it was roughly 7ft tall and about 1.5ft wide. Andy and I spend some time researching to see if we could find the exact measurements, to no avail.
At the end of the week I went to London to visit the Petrie museum and the British museum to do some research. Both museums were useful to see real artifacts from ancient Egypt. I went to the Petrie museum as Petrie was Carter's mentor and has found many interesting artifacts; I bought a magazine, Ancient Egypt, here as it was an issue (no. 93) all about Tutankhamun's tomb. I went to the British museum as I'm aware they have a complete section dedicated to ancient Egypt; I saw some incredible historical statues and objects, however was disappointed to find there wasn't a replica of the shrine - which I was really hoping there would be so I could photograph and measure it. I spoke to a staff member at the museum, just in case I couldn't find it or they had any information on the shrine, but unfortunately they couldn't help. After looking around the museum I bought a book - Discovering Tutankhamun by Zahi Hawass - to hopefully help accurately inform my research as I have found some websites have contridicted each other so I need published sources to be certain on the information I have found.
Once I got home I went through this book and some others that I had got from the library and managed to find some really useful images of the shrine, measurements of it and the canopic chest fitted inside the shrine. This was really beneficial as I need to know exactly how these objects fit inside one another to be able to make them correctly.
