British Museum "Hieroglyphics" exhibition, January 2022



We've visited most of the recent BM exhibitions, and mostly they have been good. Unfortunately, this one didn't really meet the same standard.

Partly, it was a problem of subject - most of the recent exhibitions such as "The World of Stonehenge" have been built around striking artefacts, which this simply didn't have - while many of the items on show were intellectually important, they were basically lengths of faded linen, and lacked visual appeal. There was also a certain split personality element, as it couldn't decided whether it wanted to be the story of the decipherment of hieroglyphics, or about what hieroglyphics can tell us about ancient Egypt.

There was also a problem of exhibit design - while most of the recent exhibitions have put text on the walls where it could be read by multiple people, a large part of this had artefacts and text in a long row of low cabinets, where one or two people reading the text blocked anyone else from reading it, and essentially turned that part of the exhibition into a frustratingly slow-moving queue, to the point we actually ended up skipping part of that section as we weren't willing to wait several minutes before being able to move to the next case, rinse and repeat.

Overall, there was some interesting stuff (notably about early Arab attempts to translate hieroglyphics, as early as the 8th century), overall I don't think it was worth the relatively high cost of attending (around £100 for the two of us) - in retrospect, we'd have got as much out of simply reading the exhibition book.

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