The Hieroglyphs for "Lady of the House of Scrolls"
This picture was taken in the new Great Court which is brilliant and is well worth visiting just to see the air and space it has created in the once crowded museum..
I was born in Northumberland in the UK in 1967 - that makes me 37 in the year 2004.
I did my Library Degree in Manchester and graduated in 1989.
I'm an Further Education Librarian and have worked in libraries on
Tyneside, in Cambridgeshire and am presently employed in the London area.
I keep hamsters and my present one (bought in July 2002) is called Henut due to the fact that the
mummy in the Horniman Museum in Forest Hill in London (which I was translating when I bought
Henut) had that name. Loosely translated it means "lady / mistress".
I got interested in Egyptology in 1972 when I was four and a half, the King Tutankhamen exhibition came to the British Museum that year. All thanks to Carol Andrews for organising that - I met her recently, a lovely lady! Although I was too young to go down to London my parents took me to the the Oriental Museum in Durham which was nearer home and and had a nice Egyptology collection which was small enough not to bore a four year old. While my parents were getting my eighteen month old sister out of her pushchair (they were a bit like chieftan tanks in those days) I wandered off to get lost in some of the side room and and bump into the gentleman who you will find out about if you follow the link at the bottom of this page. He facinated me, lying there in his glass case and my parents couldn't get me out of the room at the end of the visit.
I have had a bit of a love-hate relationship with Egypt over the years. Following the visit and information in the papers and all over the media (I remember Blue Peter doing a good piece on him) mum and dad bought me large poster of King Tut's mask to stick on my bedroom wall. Whether this was a good idea or not is laid down in history - I didn't sleep for a week - and it had to be removed.
Recently I bought a new book on Egyptology for my personal library which has been added to over the years and which had a lovely dust cover with the same picture on. Let us just say I had to remove it from my flat before I went to bed that night, old habits die hard even when you are 33!
On a happier note in 1975 I won a painting competition with an artistic effort titled 'Tutankhamen and his wife'. At the time we did not know what his wife's name was and I was suprised to find out about the links between Ankh-en-es-amun and the mummy films during my research for these pages. Unfortunately that picture doesn't survive otherwise I would have posted it here too!
Hatshepsut Hamster
June 2000 - July 2001
Her affection and sense of humour will be missed.
me!
