The Discovering Ancient Egypt exhibition has broken two records for Canberra’s National Museum of Australia.
International, national and local visitors injected $27.7 million into the ACT – the NMA’s biggest economic impact since its opening in 2001, independent reports stated.
This included accommodation, hospitality and retail spending, and money spent at the museum.
Attendance numbers were also at a record high with 208,900 people visiting the exhibition in its run from 15 December 2023 to 8 September 2024.
More than half of the visitors, 53 per cent, were from interstate, with three per cent from overseas. Additionally, 34 per cent were first-time visitors to the NMA.
NMA senior curator Craig Middleton told CD people couldn’t get enough of Egypt.
“All of the three major exhibitions overlapped, Ramses and the Gold of the Pharaohs at the Australian Museum in Sydney and Pharaoh at the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne,” Mr Middleton said.
“We’ve got these three exhibitions at the same time, where some might have thought it was a potential risk, especially in a less populous territory in Canberra, it did the opposite; people were going to all three.”
He said the exhibition at NMA offered something different to the others – a look into everyday life.
“I think what we offered to our audiences, Australians and international people, was a look at what they were less familiar with,” Mr Middleton said.
“How did they live their lives and what did they do?
“And, how they prepared for the eternal afterlife.”
The more than 220 objects for the exhibition were loaned from the Dutch National Museum of Antiquities (Rijksmuseum van Oudheden) including ornate sculptures, rare Book of the Dead scrolls, jewellery and coffins.
The next international exhibition at the NMA is Pompeii, which will run from 13 December 2024 to 4 May 2025.
Thousands of people were killed in Pompeii and Herculaneum in Southern Italy when Mount Vesuvius, an active volcano, erupted on 24 August 79AD.
“It’s bringing together large-scale projection immersive shows with more than 90 artefacts from that moment in Pompeii, the moment of the eruption, which not only was devastating for that city but preserved it,” Mr Middleton said.
“It’s interesting because it’s doing something that hasn’t been done before.”
He said the museum committed to one major international show per year during the busy summer tourist period.
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