ITP 2013: August 15 – Miral Taha

The 15th of August was a very special day for me, as I was looking forward to going to Cambridge.

 It all started at around 8 am at Schafer House, when Katherine Coleman joined me and my colleagues from Egypt, Sudan, Kenya, and Uganda to go to Cambridge and visit the Fitzwilliam Museum which is one of the greatest art collections of the nation and a monument of the first importance.

There we met Sally-Ann Ashton, Senior Assistant Keeper of Antiquities at the Fitzwilliam Museum to give us an overview of the Afro-combs exhibition. This was very important to me because my masters were on hair dressing tools in Coptic art. 

The pieces on display include hundreds of remarkable combs from the pre-dynastic Egypt to modern day, which I worked on some of them in addition to the combs and hairpins in Petrie museum. The museum also presents associated images and sculpture showing the wide variety of hair styles found in Africa and around the world.

The most interesting thing about the museum is exhibiting hair dressing tools from pre-dynastic periods till the modern ones which is something that can be done in my museum inside Bibliotheca Alexandrina, as we have writing and painting tools, hair combs, hair-pins and children toys from the Pre-dynastic period till the Islamic period, so we can exhibit the modern of all of these to show the influence of the past on what we have now. Also we can show movies about how these pieces where used in the past.