Address: 571 South Kilgo Circle
Pricing: $6-$8; members free
Phone: (404) 727-4282
Hours: Tuesday-Saturday 10 a.m.- 4 p.m., Sunday noon-4 p.m. Closed Mondays and university holidays.
How To Get There:
From north of Atlanta, take I-85 South to the Clairmont Road exit. Turn left onto Clairmont and continue for 5-6 miles. At North Decatur Road, turn right and go approximately one-half mile until you reach a five-way intersection. (Everybody’s Pizza will be in front of you on the left.) Turn right into the main gates of Emory University onto Dowman Drive. The Fishburne Parking Deck is located behind Glenn Memorial United Methodist Church on Fishburne Drive, the first right turn off of Dowman Drive.
Parking:Use Fishburne Deck or Peavine lots
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Michael C. Carlos Museum: Magnificant mummies
Aug 3, 2009
You don't have to go to Cairo to see mummies, or Athens to see Grecian urns.
A visit to the ancient worlds of Egypt, Greece, Rome, Africa and the Americas is as close as the Emory University campus, and the Michael C. Carlos Museum, home of the largest collection of ancient art in the Southeast.
The magnificent marble structure on the leafy Emory campus, designed by well-known architect Michael Graves, houses one of the extensive and impressive array of artifacts, gleaming gold and mummies from Egyptian tombs, ornate Grecian urns, a gilded bronze Tibetan Buddha, African masks, Yoruba shrine figures and Incan figures. The Museum is also home to collections of nineteenth- and twentieth-century sub-Saharan African art and European and American works on paper from the Renaissance to the present day.
The Egyptian section is anchored by the oldest Egyptian mummy in the Americas, ten mummies along with nine decorated coffins, amulets, jewelry, a sculpture of King Tutankhamun as a child, and a variety of other artifacts. The mummies recline in glass cases near their ornate nearby coffins. Included are smaller mummies of kittens, birds and other creatures.
The Greek and Roman Art pieces in gold, silver, bronze, lead, ivory, marble, glass and semi-precious stones span over four millennia – from Neolithic pieces dating to 4000 B.C. to Roman objects from the fourth or fifth century A.D. A Minoan larnax, one of the world’s earliest bathtubs, is decorated with whimsical painted fish and once stored water for a family in seventh century B.C. A graceful marble statue of the muse of dance, Terpsichore, is near an exquisite garnet head of Berenike II and the bigger-than-life-size portrait of Tiberius.
The ancient American collection contains more than 2,300 pieces from three principal cultural centers of the Americas: Mesoamerica, Central America, and the Andes. The Carlos Museum's collections are unusually strong in ancient Costa Rica, featuring over 600 works from all periods.
Kids of all ages can explore the art and culture of the ancient world through the interactive website Odyssey Online. Designed for elementary and middle school students, Odyssey Online lets students explore some of the museum’s works of art and learn about the cultures that produced them. There's also a special Odyssey online Greece.
- by Diane Loupe, Atlanta Reporter for HelloMetro
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Diane LoupeA resident of Decatur, Ga., and a native of New Orleans, Diane has a M.A. in Journalism from the University of Missouri. She has worked for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the Associated Press, the New Orleans Times-Picayune and Yale Medical School. A freelance writer and editor, her work has appeared in The Sunday Paper, Women's eNews, the Agnes Scott College alumni magazine, eSchool News, and PTO Today.
