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Tony Schumacher

@tonyschumacher.bsky.social

Ex taxi driver.

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Greg Jenner (Historian)@gregjenner.bsky.social · last yr.

There’s a lovely new exhibition at the V&A Museum in London that aims to inspire kids through the aesthetics of #Egyptology — Having cowritten my own children’s book about Ancient Egypt with Dr Campbell Price, I spoke to the exhibition’s curator, Benjamin Hinson, for this month’s V&A magazine

ALL THE FUN OF THE PHARAOHS V&A MAGAZINE - SPRING 2025 The 1999 film The Mummy, contemporary fashion, DC superheroes and 2.000-year-old artefacts all feature in a new exhibition Making Egypt at Young V&A this month. The show aims to give creative inspiration to kids by exploring how ancient Egypt has influenced visual culture. Also aimed at young people is Greg Jenner's new book series, Totally Chaotic History, launched last year with its debut book Ancient Egypt Gets Unruly! The podcaster and long time consultant for the BBC's award-winning Horrible Histories series, Jenner is adept at getting people excited by the past - his BBC Radio 4 history podcast You're Dead to Me pairs academics with comedians and fully supports pop-cultural references. He shared a video call with Benjamin Hinson, an Egyptologist, curator in the V&A's Asia department and lead on Making Egypt, to explore how pharaohs fascinate us Their conversation has been edited. GREG JENNER: “Tell me about the exhibition's inspiration and its genesis.” BENJAMIN HINSON: “The V&A has always had a big collection of ancient Egyptian material; it was set up to inspire artists and designers, and ancient Egypt was considered the origin of a lot of the crafts that the museum was concerned with. So the starting point for the exhibition was: how do we tell a story about Egypt that is both uniquely "V&A* and that captures young minds? We wanted it to be a jumping-off point for young people who might want to become a fashion designer or a jeweller, to see these amazing examples of creativity inspired by Egypt and hopefully come away with ideas of their own.” GREG: “And the ancient Egyptians are amazingly exciting, exotic and glamorous, and they have this beautiful stuff. In the UK curriculum, you study them at the age of seven. So they're your first entrance to history; your gateway drug to the past. But it is also this extraordinary civilisation that defies logic - it's so vast and long. One fact that always blows people's minds is that Cleopatra is closer to the iPhone than she was to the pyramids: she lived around 2,000 years ago and the Great Pyramid is 4,500 years old. here were 25 dynasties and countless pharaohs but this huge canvas often becomes essentialised into three or four names such as Hatshepsut or Tutankhamun. Ramses the Great and Cleopatra are around 1,200 years apart - it's like saying Lady Gaga and Alfred the Great are contemporaries! BH: “Explaining this has been one of the interesting challenges for us because it isn't a social history or an archaeology show. We didn't want to rely on those few famous names to get people through the door but, in a show aimed at eight to 12-year-olds, how do you still get across that these are objects from a vast swathe of time where society and style changes? That's partly why we start the exhibition with the Nile: it is one constant across this huge period. We explore the importance of water in stories and the idea of creation and the meaning that the Egyptians gave to different associated with the river. The importance of water socially and religiously never really changes.” GJ: “My book is telling the story of ancient Egypt at 100 miles an hour, to give a sense of all the discontinuities and ruptures because the way that we teach Ancient Egypt is homogenised, generalised and compressed It takes Egyptology seriously; the joke is that I'm getting confused and lost. And my co-author, Egyptologist Campbell Price, is in the margins, scribbling on my homework and correcting me.” GREG: “the human body and animals were represented and also the use of colour: gorgeous turquoises, the gold; that notion of Egypt as a land of sand and soil, the dark earth and the water. It's this incredible palette that lends itself so easily to artists, creatives, Hollywood stylists, fashion designers. It catches your eye immediately and yet has a kind of elegance to it. GJ: And actually there are several periods in this history where we as historians don't really know what's happening. There are civil wars, you've got the Sudanese influence coming in; there's the Babylonian period. But it's just not in our brains or in our culture. You only make sense of ancient Egypt when you start at the beginning and understand where things came from and why they were created or by whom. Why was linen the go-to fabric? Well, it's strong, clean and simple to manufacture. It's pure, too, so it's used in religious and death ceremonies as a symbolic thing, It has functionality but also meaning. вн: This show explains why objects are how they are, and acknowledges that they can have multiple functions - practical and religious. Just because this is an exhibition for children, that doesn't mean you should patronise or simplify. There haven't really been many exhibitions on ancient Egypt specifically targeted at young audiences and we felt we had a real chance to think, for instance, how do you introduce decolonisation to an eight-year-old? There will be a trail based on the Osiris myth (the god's body was dismembered). Visitors have to find his limbs throughout the gallery and at each point learn a fact about excavation, why objects are in museums, how they left Egypt. Young people know and care about these issues because they hear them in the news and are increasingly switched on. Gj: The thing I really wanted to do in my book is explain to kids why we historians have changed our minds: why do we no longer think Hatshepsut was a bad queen? Why have we come around to a new way of thinking? Campbell has a theory that mummification was about transformation rather than preservation. Each generation of historians comes with fresh questions to the same evidence. And sometimes the world we live in now inspires us to look again at what we think we knew about the past. I think it's wonderful that your exhibition is going to set kids off on that journey.
Tony Schumacher@tonyschumacher.bsky.social · last yr.

Starmer trying to be Trump's friend is absolutely doomed. There's nothing to be gained by tying yourself to a man who has no understanding of loyalty. The only hope for the UK is to align with the EU and to be part of a united opposition to a tyrannical USA.

Tony Schumacher@tonyschumacher.bsky.social · 2y ago

I should clarify that I'm not a policy advisor for world governments, but shouldn't we all just stop selling stuff to the USA and instead sell it to each other? His tariffs won't work if nothing is coming in, and the stuff he needs to kickstart US manufacturing they'll have to import so...

Tony Schumacher@tonyschumacher.bsky.social · 2y ago

www.theguardian.com/technology/2... None of this is real money though is it? All these billionaires... It's all just made up figures. There one minute, gone the next, back again the minute after. The tragedy is that our pensions are tied to all this bullshit.

Tech billionaires lost almost $100bn in stock market selloff sparked by DeepSeek

Nvidia saw $600bn of its market value disappear, while its CEO, Jensen Huang, saw his net worth drop by nearly $21bn

theguardian.com

Dr Gillian Kenny@medievalgill.bsky.social · 2y ago

It’s Nollaig na mBan or Women’s Christmas in Ireland. Traditionally it was a day off for women who had worked to make Christmas great for their families. Nowadays it’s also a time to remember + celebrate women. So here’s a funny podcast on Gráinne O Malley I was in. www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p...

BBC Radio 4 - You're Dead to Me, Grainne O’Malley

Greg Jenner takes us to 16th-century Ireland to meet pirate queen Grainne O’Malley.

bbc.co.uk