Researchers have discovered a 4,000-year-old handprint on an ancient Egyptian tomb offering, which will appear at a museum exhibit in the United Kingdom this October, reported CBS News partner BBC News.
The handprint likely dates to 2055 to 1650 B.C.E., Helen Strudwick, a curator working on the exhibition, told the news outlet. Strudwick called the discovery “rare and exciting,” BBC News reported. Researchers at Cambridge University found it pressed into one side of a “soul house,” which is a clay model resembling a building that can be traced to burials in ancient Egypt, according to the British Museum.
Strudwick, a senior Egyptologist at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, England, said the unusually detailed handprint was left by whoever constructed the ceramic piece, before the clay dried.
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“We’ve spotted traces of fingerprints left in wet varnish or on a coffin in the decoration, but it is rare and exciting to find a complete handprint underneath this soul house,” she told BBC News, adding: “I have never seen such a complete handprint on an Egyptian object before.”
The “soul house” will be displayed at the Fitzwilliam Museum starting October 3, as part of its upcoming exhibit titled “Made in Ancient Egypt.” It will spotlight relics of ancient Egyptian civilization, focusing on different forms of art, the people who made them, and the techniques they used to do so, according to the museum.
“Revealing the untold stories of the Egyptian makers, technology and techniques behind these extraordinary objects, our exciting new exhibition is the first to explore ancient Egypt through the lives of its craftspeople,” reads a description of the exhibit on the museum’s website, which notes that the display will feature jewelry, ceramics, sculptural pieces and some “spectacular objects never before seen” in the U.K.
CBS News has reached out to the Fitzwilliam Museum for more details.
