Egyptian Amulets bought by Florence Nightingale go on Display

A collection of ancient Egyptian amulets acquired by Florence Nightingale in the winter of 1849 when she went on an adventurous Egyptian holiday are going on display for the first time – and the curator at the World Museum in Liverpool is rather more impressed by them than the Lady of the Lamp herself was. Five years before she sailed to Scutari, Istanbul, during the Crimean war, Nightingale travelled to Egypt at a time when mass tourism there was in its infancy. She wrote vivid letters home to her older sister, Parthenope, who later published them, but described her little amulets as “rubbish”. [...] The amulets were donated to the museum by a relative of Nightingale’s, and are going on display in the first major redisplay since the original gallery and much of the collection were destroyed by a German bomb in the second world war.

(Maev Kennedy, 'Florence Nightingale's 'rubbish' amulets to go on display for first time', Guardian Sunday 23 April 2017).