When you primarily teach online, you often get invited or included in events about emerging technologies and their role and suitability in Higher Education. For about a year, we have been increasingly fascinated by the potential of Virtual Reality (VR) as a teaching...

Egyptology at the University of Manchester has been taught in many different forms and formats through the years. In the early 20th century the noted Egyptologist Margaret Murray gave public lectures at the Manchester Museum. In the 1980s and 1990s, Egyptology was...

Dr Joyce Tyldesley has recently published a book on Nefertiti's famous bust from Tell el-Amarna (currently in the Neues Museum Berlin), its manufacture, history and the many different ways in which museum goers and members of the public have engaged with it - and the...

One of the benefits of teaching online is that lectures can (and should!) be pre-recorded some time in advance of the actual scheduled class taking place (as already discussed in Behind the Scenes #1). This means that there is a greater degree of flexibility in...

The Manchester Museum collection houses more than 18.000 objects from Egypt and Sudan – one of the largest collections in the United Kingdom. Unlike many museums, most of this collection comes not from auctions, but from known excavations – mainly those conducted by...

When Flinders Petrie arrived at the site of Tell Nabasha in early February 1886 he found that the site consisted of a tell (a hill of degraded mudbrick) surrounded by salt flats and swamps. He set to work excavating a large cemetery, a Ptolemaic ‘town’ and a large...

It’s the time of year, the time when hundreds of thousands of prospective students around the UK and the world are making up their minds about which courses to pursue and what universities to apply for. As preparation for our move from the Faculty of Biology, Medicine...

Perhaps amongst the most unusual objects from ancient Egypt are golden flies.  These objects are pendants that appear in the form of a stylised fly as seen from above.  They are generally small, averaging 1.2cm in length, but larger examples do exist...

In this series of blogs entitled 'Behind the Scenes' we're going to show you a little bit about how our distance learning courses are created, and about the people and institutions which support their creation. Here at Manchester we teach a lot of Egyptology online....

The study of Egypt has been a part of the city of Manchester since the Industrial Age. Manchester, as a centre for the cotton industry had strong trade links with Alexandria during the 19th century and many of the cotton merchants and mill owners journeyed to Egypt...