Egyptological Museum Search

Egyptological museum search  

You can also try the Museum Downloader bookmarklet to facilitate downloading images from online catalogues.
Brief introduction to the bookmarklet. 

The Egyptological museum search is a PHP tool aimed to facilitate locating the descriptions and images of ancient Egyptian objects in online catalogues of major museums. Online catalogues (ranging from selections of highlights to complete digital inventories) are now offered by almost all major museums holding ancient Egyptian items and have become indispensable in research work. Yet the variety of web interfaces and of search rules may overstrain any person performing many searches in different online catalogues.

Egyptological museum search was made to provide a single search point for finding objects by their inventory numbers in major collections of Egyptian antiquities that have online catalogues. It tries to convert user input into search queries recognised by museums’ websites. (Thus on museum websites, stela Geneva D 50 should be searched as “D 0050,” statue Vienna ÄS 5046 as “AE_INV_5046,” and coffin Turin Suppl. 5217 as “S. 05217.” Egyptological museum search aims to allow searching for inventory numbers in the form, in which they are cited in scholarly literature.) The following online catalogues are supported:

Short name	Full name	Free license
Aberdeen	University Museums, The University of Aberdeen	—
Allard Pierson	Allard Pierson Museum, Amsterdam	—
Ashmolean	Ashmolean Museum, Oxford	free for non-commercial educational purposes
Berkeley	Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology, University of California, Berkeley	—
Berlin	The Berlin Egyptian Museum	CC BY-NC-SA
Bibliotheca Alexandrina	Bibliotheca Alexandrina Antiquities Museum	—
BM	British Museum	CC BY-NC-SA
Bologna	The Archaeological Civic Museum of Bologna	—
Bolton	Bolton Museum	—
Boston	Museum of Fine Arts, Boston	—
Bristol	Bristol Museum & Art Gallery	—
Brooklyn	Brooklyn Museum	CC BY (low-resolution images)
Bruxelles	Royal Museums of Art and History, Brussels	—
Budapest	Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest	—
Cleveland	The Cleveland Museum of Art	CC 0
Durham	Oriental Museum, Durham University	—
Edinburgh	National Museum of Scotland, Edinburgh	—
Field Museum	Field Museum, Chicago	—
Fitzwilliam	The Fitzwilliam Museum, University of Cambridge	CC BY-NC-ND (low-resolution images)
Genève	The Museum of Art and History of the City of Geneva	royalty-free use acknowledging the copyright
Glasgow Hunterian	Hunterian Museum Archaeology & Ethnography Collections, Glasgow	—
Jerusalem	Israel Museum, Jerusalem	—
København	National Museum of Denmark, Copenhagen	—
Leiden	National Museum of Antiquities, Leiden (Egyptological museum search can search by both inventory and Leemans numbers)	CC BY
Liverpool WM	World Museum, National Museums Liverpool	—
Los Angeles County Museum	Los Angeles County Museum of Art	—
Louvre	The Louvre, Paris	—
Lyon	Museum of Fine Arts, Lyon	—
Madrid	National Archaeological Museum, Madrid	—
Manchester	The Manchester Museum, The University of Manchester	—
MMA	The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York	CC 0
Moscow	The Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow	—
Ny Carlsberg	Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, Copenhagen	—
OIM	Oriental Institute Museum, The University of Chicago	—
Philadelphia	The University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, Philadelphia	—
San Jose	The Rosicrucian Egyptian Museum, San Jose	—
Stockholm	Museum of Mediterranean and Near Eastern Antiquities, Stockholm	—
Swansea	The Egypt Centre Museum of Egyptian Antiquities, Swansea University	—
Sydney	Nicholson Museum, The University of Sydney	—
Torino	Egyptian Museum, Turin	CC BY
Toronto	Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto	—
UC	The Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology, University College London	CC BY-NC-SA (low-resolution images)
Walters	The Walters Art Museum, Baltimore	CC 0
Warszawa	The National Museum in Warsaw	CC 0
Washington	National Museum of Natural History, The Smithsonian, Washington	—
Wien	The Museum of Art History, Vienna	CC BY-NC-SA

Note: NC licenses virtually only allow using images in presentations and theses. CC 0 and CC BY allow using images in printed publications and on websites.

Search forwarding is not yet supported for Global Egyptian Museum and Bible and Orient Museum, Fribourg.

More information on Egyptian collections can be found online on Trismegistos, Artefacts of Excavation, and Desheret.org.

The tool can be used in two ways. First, one may use the online search interface. One may select the museum, enter the searched inventory number in the box, and press “Search.” Then the browser is redirected either to the object desription in the online museum catalogue or to a search results page on the museum website. Second, one may send HTTP GET queries to the Egyptological museum search in order to connect it to a one’s own online or offline application by creating query URLs of the following form:

http://static.egyptology.ru/varia/mus.php?museum=(Museum)&no=(Inventory number)

In order to provide compatibility with other databases, which may use different designations of the museums, Egyptological museum search supports a number of aliases. Examples of query URLs:

http://static.egyptology.ru/varia/mus.php?museum=Leyden&no=D 127

http://static.egyptology.ru/varia/mus.php?museum=New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art&no=56.136

http://static.egyptology.ru/varia/mus.php?museum=Turin&no=Cat. 1374

In case you wish to adapt Egyptological museum search for the needs of a different discipline, you may make use of its source code published on Github.

 

Egyptological museum search | Impressum