Bitesize: Ancient Egypt

The Box is running Bitesize: Ancient Egypt on Sunday 22 November, a guided tour through its Ancient Egypt collection. It's part of the museum's Bitesize format, which is exactly what it sounds like: a short, focused introduction rather than a full-day slog. You meet a member of the front of house team at the Welcome Desk five minutes before it starts, and from there they lead the group through a small selection of the collection, spending about an hour with it. It's a good way to get a handle on the gallery without having to navigate the whole thing on your own.

The collection itself covers the pharaonic period, which spanned more than 3,000 years, so the objects on display come from very different eras. You'll see pieces of daily life from the Old Kingdom—the early dynastic period when the first great pyramids were being built—and a funerary object from the reign of Ramesses the Great, who ruled during the New Kingdom, centuries later. The tour pulls a few of these together to give you a sense of the scale of the whole period, from the ordinary things people used in their day-to-day lives to the elaborate objects made for the afterlife.

Because it's a guided session, you're not just wandering and reading labels; you've got someone there to talk you through what you're looking at and answer questions as you go. It's an hour's work, so it's easy to fit around other things on a Sunday morning. The session runs from 11.30am to 12.30pm and costs £3.00.