University College London houses one of the world’s most important collections of ancient Egyptian material, the majority excavated by Flinders Petrie, his students and his successors in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It is a museum of archaeology that helps to explain the development of a discipline that was in its infancy when Petrie worked in Egypt over a century ago. It is a teaching collection, its densely packed cases entrancing, and sometimes intimidating, visitors who rave about its old-fashioned feel, but it is anything but frozen in time.