World Museum's restored Egypt Gallery is unveiled

World Museum Liverpool’s Egypt Gallery is set to reopen its doors on Friday after a major 18-month long restoration and refurbishment.

The gallery at the William Brown Street museum is three times bigger than it was before – making it the largest ancient Egypt gallery outside the British Museum.

And the museum’s Mummy Room is also being reopened to the public. After 150 years!

Nine mummies will be on display in the room, with a tenth in the main gallery space, twice as many as were shown before the gallery closed for restoration work, and again second only in number to the British Museum.

One mummy, and a number of coffins, were previously owned by H Rider Haggard of King Solomon’s Mines fame.

The massive refurbishment programme means around 1,000 key objects will be on show to the public, including some that have never been seen including a recently identified statue part of Nefertiti and two mummy masks, along with Djed-hor’s Book of the Dead and an 8th century BC brightly painted coffin from Thebes.

Museum bosses say the larger gallery also allows them to be able to redisplay objects damaged when the building was bombed in the May Blitz of 1941.

A timeline at the entrance chronicles more than four millennia of the ancient Egyptian civilisation, showing Cleopatra was actually closer to modern civilisation than to the building of the pyramids.

Steve Judd, director of World Museum, said: “Our mummy collection is world-renowned.

“Until now, space restrictions have limited us from showing the full scope of our collections. By expanding the gallery, we look forward to wowing visitors with never-before seen objects displayed in new and exciting ways.”

Watch a Facebook Live tour of the new gallery on the Arts City Liverpool Facebook page HERE.