Wrexham Museum – Windows on The World

Wrexham Museum and the British Museum have joined forces to bring the British Museum’s fantastic collections to the North Wales town.

Wrexham Museum will host a series of exhibitions which will explore aspects of the world’s greatest ancient civilisations as illustrated by British Museum’s unmatched collections.

The first exhibition will be about ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics and will include a number of objects such as sculpture, jewellery, pottery and funerary artefacts, all chosen to tell the story of the development and use of this ancient language.

Ilona Regulski, the British Museum’s Curator of Egyptian Written Culture said: “Ancient Egypt has produced an astonishing variety of written material representing indigenous as well as foreign languages. No other culture has yielded such a rich variety of inscribed objects and nowhere else have they been so well preserved.

The exhibition, WRITING FOR ETERNITY: Decoding Ancient Egypt, illustrates 4,000 years of writing in Egypt presenting ancient hieroglyphs next to Coptic, Greek, Arabic and Nubian, and even cuneiform documents. Familiar objects, such as papyrus and stone, alternate with surprising artefacts such as the scribe’s pen and pieces of jewellery.

Maria Bojanowska, Head of National Programmes at the British Museum added: “Building on a very successful partnership with Wrexham Museum and the hugely popular Mold Gold Cape spotlight loan, we are very excited to be working together again to explore the fascinating origins of writing in Ancient Egypt.

“This exhibition, which will start its tour in Wrexham, is part of the British Museum’s national programme of funded touring exhibitions and loans that showcase the best of the British Museum collections in museums across the UK.”

Councillor Hugh Jones, Lead member for Communities Collaboration and Partnerships said that he was delighted by the news: “Wrexham Museum has an outstanding track record of bringing our shared national collections to the town, this culminated in the display of the famous Mold Cape last summer, also from the British Museum, that brought over 16,000 visitors to the museum.

“This series of new exhibitions builds on that success and will be a fantastic addition to the museum’s exhibition programme.”

The exhibition will open on June 19 2015 and will run until September 5.

For more information, please contact:

Steve Grenter, Heritage Service Manager, 01978 297 460