Lesser known museums No.138: Nicholson Museum

Just along the road and across the main quadrangle from the Macleay Museum, is Sydney University's other little gem museum - the Nicholson.

I forgot all about it while I was at the Macleay the other week, so headed back on Friday to make amends. While the Macleay Museum is about natural history, the Nicholson is about

antiquities. Very manageably sized collections of antiquities from ancient Greece, Cyprus, Egypt, Italy, and the 'Near East' (including Mesopotamia, Pakistan and India).

I liked the Egyptian mummies of course. They've got three human ones, and X rays or CT scans or something of one of them, and they've also got mummified cats, birds, and crocodiles, would you believe. The section was about Egypt as seen through the eyes of Greek travel writer Heroditus, in 450BC. As well as putting all those early pyramid reviews on TripAdvisor, he busied himself recording recipes for mummification. Feel free to try it out for yourselves, but stand well to the side when you pull out the plug. Hopefully the kids in the school group (or ancient history & mummification tutorial group?) will take all necessary precautions.

A well promoted attraction in the Greek section was the Lego Acropolis. That seemed to have been removed or dismantled when I got there though. Never mind, the 1895 plaster one was there, and it's not a bad Acropolis at all.