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Two mummies buried in a museum garden … a coffin that rotates … skulls amassed for dubious research … What if the most interesting stories about Egyptian mummies are not the ones you know?
Mummified explores the curious, unsettling and controversial stories of the Egyptian mummies held by museums in France and Britain. From powdered mummies consumed as medicine, to mummies unrolled in public, dissected for race studies and DNA-tested in modern laboratories, there is a lot more to these ancient human remains than meets the eye. Following mummies on their journeys from Egypt to museums and private collections in Paris, London, Leicester and Manchester, the book revisits the history of these bodies that have fascinated Europeans for so long.
Mummified explores stories of life and death, of collecting and viewing, and of interactions – sometimes violent and sometimes moving – that raise questions about the essence of what makes us human.
In 1964 radiographs of an Egyptian mummy displayed by the, then, Gulbenkian Museum of Art and Archaeology in Durham revealed an artificial upper limb attached to a deformed lower forearm. The limb was removed for further study. It concluded that the deformity was due to pre-mortem, amputation above the wrist, the ancient embalmers applying a crude restoration. In 2005 the author undertook a detailed reappraisal of this restored limb. These findings now suggest that this individual exhibits a congenital deformity to the upper limb. Such a proposal prompts a discourse on how deformity was perceived, not only by ancient Egyptian society but by those across the ancient world. Textual sources have been selected to highlight how perfection of the physical body was prized by some cultures, contrasting this with how those who exhibited ‘otherness’,were either accepted or marginalized.
display. In the same way that he has been with me through my personal journey, Pacheri is going to follow us on the journey that is this book. Because, like many displaced bodies in European museums, he has a story to tell.                         * I have been interested in stories about Egyptian mummies for many years. I grew up in the suburbs of Paris, and when, at thirteen, I
Before we embark on our journey through these chapters and do some learning and some unlearning, we need to ask one seemingly simple, but actually very complex, question. What, exactly, is a mummy? An Egyptian mummy is the preserved body of an ancient person. 2 It is a body (sometimes wrapped up, and
: Why are Egyptian mummies still on display in museums today? What is their educational, scientific and emotional purpose? Where do we go from here (‘we’ meaning not just the museum, but you and I)? The past few years have demonstrated that there are new challenges brought about by new
their countries and taken to this little room in the British capital? What was the rationale behind putting so many bodies in a single room – entire bodies and body parts, sometimes as small as a lock of hair, but often as violent and shocking as heads on a shelf? Why was I looking at an Egyptian mummy inside the storage space of a national science museum? And who was behind this impulse to collect the
, in which he stated: ‘I give to the Public Museum at Montagu House my Egyptian Mummy, with everything thereunto appertaining, with the rest of my Egyptian antiquities.’ 3 The mummy was illustrated, first by George Vertue in 1724, and then in an engraving by the antiquarian Alexander Gordon in 1737. 4 Gordon wrote on the circumstances of the discovery of the mummy that
Egypt and one for Africa? Have you ever wondered why human remains from other countries are being removed from display while Egyptian mummies remain on public display? In this chapter, we are going to look at the return of the White mummy. We’ll see that Egyptian mummies are not neutral bodies in museums, and that their very presence in these institutions is a result of studies and attitudes that are
grand statement, there, on ‘common’ property or heritage that wants to be inclusive, and yet is immediately the property of a few – not unlike today’s discourses on ‘shared heritage’. In 1840, the Literary and Philosophical Society published a catalogue of one of its exhibitions that included a range of objects, from Indian dresses to fossils, birds and insects … and an Egyptian mummy. 8 While it
. It is late May, and the elite of the city are attending the Exposition Universelle de Paris. A peculiar event has been advertised as the central entertainment of the show: the unrolling of an Egyptian mummy. The mastermind of this event is French archaeologist Auguste Mariette, who has been charged with the creation of an Egyptian building for the Exposition. 1 Mariette is the most famous Egyptologist in