This weekend, our family went to Chicago and visited the Field Museum. We were mostly there for the dinosaurs, but were pleased to discover that they have a great collection of ancient Egyptian artifacts.
Of particular note for my current project were the following discoveries:
First, most of the jewelry and statuary was blue. Blue has been a key color for our production, it keeps showing up. I love imagining Herself wearing all of this gold and blue.
Another interesting piece was this shroud, painted with an image of the deceased as she was in life.
This is a late Ptolemaic piece, roughly contemporary with Antony and Cleopatra. Check out the Roman influences, particularly in her laurel crown.
It’s obviously not Cleopatra, but I loved being in the presence of an object that not only was made in her time and place, but which bore the marks of her own conundrum (one of them, anyway)–how to be Egyptian in the face of Rome’s rolling expansion.