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International Award to the Ancient Egyptian Collection

The AVICOM (International Committee for Audiovisual, New Technologies and Social Media) organizes the annual festival, Faimp (Festival of Audiovisual International Multimedia Patrimony) to present and evaluate innovative multimedia technologies and audiovisual productions initiated or produced by museums, heritage and cultural institutions throughout the world every year. In 2020, the Sehotepib stela digital program became one of the winners in the interpreting exhibition installation category, which present this ancient artifact through twenty-first-century technology. With the help of this program visitors can explore the stela individually, out of curiosity. They can translate the inscription on it, puzzle out the meaning of the unique symbols and meet an ancient Egyptian family that lived more than three thousand years ago.

The renewed Egyptian permanent exhibition of the Museum of Fine Arts awaits visitors with an enriched collection and new display. The new exhibition provides the most important information about ancient Egypt in a spectacular, interactive, clearly understandable and scientifically pertinent way. With this award, the committee appreciated that the stela of Sehotepib in a hypebox provides a good opportunity for the visitors to discover and understand the details and the function of a more than three-thousand-years-old ancient artwork individually, without the help of an Egyptologist.

The stela of Sehotepib in a hypebox

The hypebox is located in the second part of the Ancient Egypt exhibition of the Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest, where the visitors can familiarise themselves with the everyday life next to the river Nile, the various utensils they used at home, the different Egyptian writing systems and their magical practises. The more than three-thousand-year-old stela placed in the hypebox originally belonged to the inspector Sehotepib, who lived during the reign of Amenemhat III (1831–1786 BC). Visitors, young and old alike, can easily understand its meaning, function and symbolism with the help of the menu of the hypebox. They can get to know more about the gods represented on the stela, get acquainted with Sehotepib’s family by an interactive family tree, and restore the original colours of the stone slab with their fingers. They can also translate the offering formulae used to magically ensure food offerings to the owner and his family in the hereafter. Using the typewriter function of the digital exhibition installation our visitors can find out how their names could look like if written in hieroglyphs.

 

Film director: Csanád Szesztay
Multimedia: Bence Samu – NOWLAB
Curators: Éva Liptay, Gabriella Dembitz, Flóra Judit Kevély

 

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