Discovering Ancient Egypt

Overview

When museums come to mind, so do two things typically found within their walls. Dinosaurs tend to feature across their halls of knowledge. Digging into humanity's past as well, so do ancient artefacts. Accordingly, it should come as little surprise that Brisbane's Queensland Museum started off 2024 embracing prehistoric creatures — albeit in Lego form — and that it is ending it, then spending more than half of 2025, with a big showcase of objects spanning 3000 years of Egyptian history.

Hailing from the Dutch National Museum of Antiquities, and already featuring at the Western Australian Museum in 2023, then the National Museum of Australia in Canberra since late the same year, Discovering Ancient Egypt displays in southeast Queensland from Friday, October 25, 2024. Running until Sunday, August 17, 2025, this showcase is filled with highlights, especially if you're interested in how ancient Egyptians approached the afterlife.

Among its 200-plus items, five sarcophaguses feature, alongside painted funerary coffins and papyrus sheets from the Egyptian Book of the Dead. Discovering Ancient Egypt isn't just concerned with rituals and beliefs around dying, however, with the daily lives of ancient Egyptians, as well as their innovations, also a focus.

During its stint in Brisbane, complete with carved statues from the Saqqara necropolis as well, Queensland Museum expects the exhibition to be a hit — because diving into Egypt's history always is for the institution. In fact, this type of blast from the past has proven among the ten most-popular exhibitions at the venue.

Another highlight that's displaying alongside Discovering Ancient Egypt: 34 pottery vessels from Queensland Museum's antiquities collection that hail from necropolis of Esna, as unearthed by British archaeologist John Garstang.