More than 500 ancient Egyptian artefacts have been bought to Melbourne for an exhibition, eight years in the making.
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00:00It's the largest exhibition of ancient Egyptian artefacts ever loaned out by the British Museum
00:07and it's here now in Melbourne.
00:25It's hard to capture the scale of the exhibition here in Melbourne, the entire ground floor
00:30of the gallery filled with artefacts in a show that's taken years to put together.
00:36One of the people who's led all of that preparation work is the British Museum curator Marie Vanderbost.
00:41She joins us now here in the gallery in Melbourne.
00:44Marie, how does it feel to see all these works all the way over here in Melbourne?
00:49It's actually great to finally be here and finally seeing the design, everything in 3D
00:56because we've been working on it for about eight years and suddenly to be here and to
01:02see the final results, it's absolutely fantastic.
01:06And when people come here, what will they see as they move through the exhibition?
01:10So the idea is really just to cover 3,000 years of history and to look at ancient Egyptian
01:17civilizations through the lens of the pharaoh.
01:20So it's a very iconic figure, but the idea is really to try to go beyond that image and
01:27to try to understand a bit better who were the ancient Egyptians and what were the kind
01:33of things they believed in, they were producing, and the challenges also to live in this ancient time.
01:41In this room, for example, there's such an impressive collection of huge statues.
01:46What are we looking at behind you?
01:47Yeah, so those statues are statues of the goddess Sehmet.
01:51So I really encourage the visitors when they came in to be very careful.
01:56It's a very fierce and powerful goddess and she needed to be appeased.
02:02And King Amenhotep III had really that at heart and he had more than 700 of those statues
02:09sculpted during his reign.
02:12Any time we see ancient artefacts, especially from the British Museum, travelling around,
02:17we hear that debate around the provenance on them and whether they should be returned.
02:21We saw indigenous spheres from Australia returned from a separate UK museum.
02:27How do you navigate that as a curator?
02:29So obviously there are quite a lot of work in terms of provenance, which is done before
02:33an exhibition like that is put together, and all the objects in this exhibition have been
02:38thoroughly researched and there is no issues with any of them.
02:43That's one side.
02:44The other side is really the partnership we have with our colleagues in Egypt and we really
02:48try to create a dialogue between the British Museum and our colleagues in Egypt to set
02:55up, you know, healthy ground for conversation.
02:58Obviously these are normally seen in a very museum context, but we're in a gallery now
03:01and it's quite different, isn't it?
03:03How different does it feel for you seeing them in this way?
03:06I think it was quite stunning for me to come here.
03:09We're talking about more than 500 objects from the collection that I'm probably used
03:15to seeing in certain settings and to have that in a completely different way here, it's
03:19stunning.
03:20I really encourage people to come again and again.
03:25The scale is impossible to capture on film.
03:28It's something you need to see in person.
03:30It's on here.