Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology

The Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology – set up in 1892 by eccentric traveller and diarist Amelia Edwards – is named after Flinders Petrie, tireless excavator of ancient Egypt. Where the British Museum’s Egyptology collection is strong on the big stuff, the Petrie is an extraordinary selection of minutiae (amulets, pottery fragments, tools, weapons, weights and measures, stone vessels, jewellery), which provide an insight into how people lived and died in the Nile Valley. Highlights include colourful tiles, carvings and frescoes from heretic pharaoh Akhenaten’s capital Tell el Amarna. The museum also has the world’s largest collection of mummy portraits from the Roman period (first to second centuries AD). Computers offer 3D views of select objects from the 80,000-strong collection.