Emam spent a valuable month visiting museum collections and libraries around the UK while based at the Trust’s Kensington house.

Outside the Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology, UCL

I was very lucky to get the grant from Robert Anderson Trust in October 2019. Visiting London gave me an invaluable and indispensable opportunity to access material I needed to study for my PhD thesis in museum collections and libraries, and to assess potential future projects as well. Also to gain knowledge and exchange experiences with university staff and international students who share similar interests.

It would have been impossible to achieve all my research aims without spending time in London. Acquiring the necessary information on the theme of “Meroitic and Post-Meroitic amulets” in different museums in UK would have been almost impossible otherwise. Here, I could access bibliographic materials in many libraries that are not available in Egyptian libraries or online, and the inability to access these references would have affected the value of the outputs of the research project.

Studying Meroitic inscriptions in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge 

My program in UK was very busy, but in the end, I was able to study “the Meroitic and Post-Meroitic amulets” in six museum around UK (British Museum, UCL Petrie museum, Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, Garstang Museum and World Museum in Liverpool, and Manchester Museum), and to visit many libraries – at the UCL Institute of Archaeology, the Egypt Exploration Society, the School of African and Oriental Studies at University of London, and finally at British Museum’s Egypt and Sudan department. I also visited the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford and the National Archives in Kew.

Photographing Meroitic amulets in the Petrie Museum, UCL

Finally, I would like to express my deep thanks to the Robert Anderson Trust for giving me this opportunity and making such opportunities available for promising colleagues. Thanks to Dr Chris Naunton for his kind hospitality and help. I also appreciate as well the support of French Archaeological Institute Oriental at Cairo, and last but not least thanks to all the staffs of libraries and curators of the museums which I visited for their help and flexibility during my short visit.

The curators of the World Museum, Liverpool and Manchester Museum were clearly pleased to be able to host Emam during his tour of collections containing Meroitic amulets!