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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.
number of museums beyond UCL; most famously at Manchester Museum where she carried out a ground-breaking mummy unwrapping; she also catalogued at the National Museum of Antiquities in Edinburgh, the National Museum in Dublin, and the Ashmolean Museum.87 Some of this work was, again, motivated by the need to supplement an extremely small income, rather than by a commitment to museum archaeology, and the difficulty which women within archaeology faced in trying to earn a living wage was clearly significant. Within museums, women had opportunities to develop and innovate
suggest that it was the mummy of a Greek individual. The papyrus deciphered by Champollion confirmed that it was a young man who had died on 2 June in 116 CE. A series of drawings by Cailliaud in his Voyage à Méroé illustrate the various aspects of the mummy and the coffin, including a drawing done before the unwrapping, and one of the face of the mummy unwrapped. The second mummy opened by Cailliaud
various celebrated physicians … found in tomb of Memnon … case well preserved’. 24 The description confirms that this was the mummy unwrapped with such fanfare by Belzoni prior to the exhibition. Belzoni’s exhibition was a huge success, attracting 1,900 visitors on its first day. The format of the exhibition itself was both ambitious and perceptive, capturing the public imagination. The
virtually unrolling a mummy much more ethical than historical mummy unwrappings, or is it equally intrusive to a dead person who gave no consent to their insides being displayed to all? What if the virtual unwrappings offered to the public today are just the twenty-first-century equivalent of public unrollings? The latest technologies used by curators to bring new life to mummies are changing our