Our friend Mark and I had privileged access to the launch of a new exhibition on Monday, hosted at our beloved Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology - Sounds of Roman Egypt. It was fascinating! From the Petrie website:
The UCL Petrie Museum has one of the largest and best-documented collections of Roman artefacts in the UK, including musical instruments that are too fragile to be played today.And we even got to play some of them! - who knew that a donkey's jawbone was used as a rhythmic percussion instrument in Roman times?
For this exhibition, researchers used laser scanning and computer modelling to create 3D printed replicas of the original objects in the Petrie collection, and made recordings of the instruments to reveal sounds not heard for hundreds of years.
Of course, despite the extensive research and transcription of papyrus and other fragmentary musical annotations and the subsequent recordings by modern musicians in the exhibition, nobody really knows how their music would have sounded - I rather hope it might sound something like this...
...or maybe not.
Sounds of Roman Egypt is on at the Petrie Museum until 22nd April 2019 - read more about the project on the blog page of the University of Kent, which contributed to the research.
