Walk Like an Egyptian

A visit to the Egyptian exhibit at the Fitchburg Art Museum will introduce you — and the kids! — to that ancient civilization. The trip back in time is both educational and entertaining.

Walk down a hallway, meeting gods and goddesses along the way. Learn about the Egyptian burial ceremony. Crawl through the eight-foot long “tomb shaft” to see a mummy.

Highlighting the Egyptian exhibit are fabulous realistic paintings by Joseph Lindon Smith, who recreated in two dimensions the awesome scenes he saw when the tombs were first opened in the early 1900s. The paintings of the stone walls seem so real that you’ll think you’re actually entering the depths of a pyramid.

According to the museum, “For over fifty years, under the glare and heat of the sun, or in dimly-lit underground tombs, painter Joseph Lindon Smith recreated on canvas the stone relief carvings of ancient Egyptian monuments…

“Long before the widespread use of color photography, Smith accurately replicated the scale, colors, and conditions of the painted limestone relief carvings that decorated tomb interiors. His paintings, once exhibited in the Egyptian galleries at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, were one way to document and share archaeological discoveries.” Standing before these paintings, you’re transported in time to those burning desert sands.

But there’s so much more to this exhibit than Smith’s stunning paintings. You can peer into the windows of a fascinating diorama, to see a model of the mummification process or see reproductions of the Rosetta Stone, a False Door, a household shrine.

You’ll see how the ancient Egyptians lived, the jewelry they wore, the gods they worshiped.

Learn by Playing

The interactive exhibit includes a Nile Challenge Game with questions and answers about Trade, Ecology, and Geography associated with the Nile River; a take-apart, put-together model of the Step Pyramid; and an Ancient Egyptian Employment Office, where you can interview for the job of Farmer, Weaver, Scribe, or Vizier (requires two players).

Visitors can also create a Cartouche and use hieroglyph de-coding to solve the Riddles of the Sphinx.

And you can even sit on King Tut’s Throne — and be king for a day!