Getting to know Campbell Price
In early January I met with Dr Campbell Price, curator of Egypt and Sudan at Manchester Museum. He greets me with an enthusiastic handshake and smile, leading me to his behind-the-scenes office. It is instantly obvious Campbell relishes his work; animated and eager, he speaks with passion and precision. He summarises his role as “[E]nthusing about our amazing Egyptology collection,” “Trying to understand… the ancient Egyptians a bit better,” and communicating this temporally and culturally distant world to visitors.
He tells me that he imagined doing his kind of job in childhood, and that his recent book, Brief Histories: Ancient Egypt, describes how he became an Egyptologist. For the past two years during research leave Price has been “Investigating the idea of ancient Egyptian faces” which he hopes will lead to an exhibition. He intends to explore questions such as ‘how do we imagine and reconstruct the ancient Egyptian face?’ and ‘what did ancient Egyptians think about faces and masks?’.
Decolonisation and repatriation
Manchester Museum aims to decolonise and indigenise its collections, taking an honest approach and working with communities to present displays that prioritise non-colonial worldviews, equity, and justice. The ‘Decolonise!’ Trail’ prompts visitors to critically reflect on where collections come from, whose stories they tell, and how they shape our understanding of the world.
Campbell says that curators are increasingly taking into account “lived experiences,” and stresses the importance of curatorial humility and cultural empathy. Price is also involved in conveying these aspects of museum practice to schoolchildren, for example by loaning them ancient Egyptian items and encouraging debate about why such objects are in Manchester.
In an effort to heal and reconcile relationships Manchester Museum has repatriated some items: in 2019, the museum returned 43 cultural heritage materials to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities, and in 2023 it restored 174 items to the Anindilyakwa people. Campbell says that some have “accused us of being woke and reactionary,” but “that’s not quite true because there’s been a tradition of this for at least thirty years” (since the 1990s).
Price states that repatriation events can be very emotional, and emphasises that they are “not framed as a loss” for the museum. In fact, they are mutually beneficial: “We’ve learnt more about our collection in general by having the discussion, which included repatriation.” At a recent event there was actually a gift of material from the community, prompting further knowledge exchange.
The story of Asru
Manchester Museum’s Egypt and Sudan gallery displays the mummified body of a woman, Asru, and her wooden coffins. These were donated by the Garnett brothers in the 1820s, and Asru’s body was unwrapped soon after. At that time there were “completely fictitious biographies” for ancient Egyptian mummies at museums, and various guesses and assumptions were made about Asru. Since then, the ability to translate hieroglyphs and undertake research has informed what we know about her life.
Campbell tells me that her name is quite unusual for an ancient Egyptian. It means ‘her arm is against them,’ referring to “the power of a goddess that’s being invoked against potential harm to a child.” Asru’s mother was Ta-di-Amun, which invokes Amun (the god of the south of Egypt) and her father was Pa-Kush, or “The Kushite.” Price determines that they were likely a family of high social status, possibly buried on the West Bank of Thebes.
Campbell and his colleague Hannah Priest are still working to discover more about Asru’s provenance, acquisition, and how she came to Manchester. They suspect that Asru was temporarily in Smyrna (in modern Türkiye), as in the 1820s there was a market for ancient Egyptian material there. Priest has established that the father of the Garnett brothers traded in enslaved people, which Campbell comments “nuances the story a little bit [as] Asru’s acquisition… echoes the movement of people, against the wishes of those people, around the world.”
The acquisition of artefacts and ancestral remains was (and is) not always ethical or legal. Importantly, Campbell emphasises that “these kinds of colonial questions didn’t… somehow just, overnight, end. … You’re kidding yourself if you think this is something bad in the past that doesn’t persist.” With regards to Price’s work surrounding Asru, the main aim at the moment is to try to “better understand the background to Asru herself, her acquisition… her history within this institution… and then to understand our visitors’ reaction to her.”
The display of Asru
April 2025 marked 200 years since Asru was unwrapped. This anniversary prompted the museum to directly ask visitors, for the first time, ‘should we continue to display the body of Asru in Manchester Museum?’
Campbell explains that asking this question “revolves around the museum wanting to be a bit more open… [and] interactive with our visitors.” At an open discussion in December, museum staff and university students were invited to reflect on the treatment of Asru, but Price notes that “the consultation wasn’t a referendum… the museum is balancing lots of different factors to make a decision” and that the process is still ongoing.
An estimated 8000 individual comments have been received from visitors, and while Campbell admits that he hasn’t been able to read them all, he does tell me that the early indication is a “pretty evenly split” vote. When I ask him about the primary reasons for each side, he intrigues me by remarking that “they kind of mirror each other, in a way.”
He goes on, “having Asru in a space prompts conversations about living and dying… [it] provokes, positively or negatively, a reaction.” For some visitors, this is a benefit of continuing to display Asru’s body, perhaps because it could “demystify or make it less of a taboo to talk about death.” On the other hand, “based on modern Western ideas of death and the display of the dead, that is counterintuitive to us and… sometimes quite shocking.”
In addition, Asru’s expectations for the afterlife are brought into consideration. Campbell observes, “Speaking as an Egyptologist, the ancient Egyptians did not want to be unwrapped and taken out of their tombs.” This is one of many ethical questions the museum will reflect on over the next six months. The important thing, Price states, is curatorial humility: “Whatever happens with the display of Asru, we are very keen to communicate the reasons why we would do it.” In the meantime Asru will remain on display, accompanied with transparent information.
To return or not to return?
The debate about returning items to Egypt has intensified since the Grand Egyptian Museum in Cairo fully opened its doors in November. It houses 100,000 objects, including treasures from the tomb of Tutankhamun, but seeks to retrieve several other key pieces located in museums around the world.
Campbell compares the situation to the debate over the Parthenon Marbles; famous pieces such as the Rosetta Stone (located in London), the Dendera Zodiac (Paris), and the Nefertiti Bust (Berlin) “were acquired under particularly dubious circumstances, and they are kind of emblematic.” He explains that it doesn’t seem the Egyptian government is asking for everything back; only certain key items with an uncertain nature of acquisition.
When it comes to Manchester Museum, Price assures me that those items in the Egypt and Sudan collection with clear acquisition were handed over legally by the Egyptian government. “Albeit a colonial government,” and “not talking ethically, but by the word of the law,” he clarifies. If the case seemed otherwise, the museum would explore those issues with Egyptian colleagues. In addition, there are no treasured items at Manchester Museum that the Egyptian government has requested be returned, so here they will remain.
The majority of the four and a half million objects at Manchester Museum are in storage. I question whether these items, given their seclusion from the public, ought to be distributed to other museums or repatriated. His response is informative: “Something being in storage doesn’t mean it is inaccessible.”
He continues, “The Egyptology collection is frequently consulted by researchers; it is used in teaching; it is used for loans… and exchanges of objects; and everything is photographed and is searchable online.” Items may also become publicly visible with display rotation, though Campbell jokes, “If I could, I’d fill the whole museum with all the Egyptology collection.” Price believes that showing what the museum has and allowing people to request to see things is “The most responsible thing to do,” and adds that other museums are currently working towards this goal.
