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Golden Mummies of Egypt presents new insights and a rich perspective on beliefs about the afterlife during an era when Egypt was part of the Greek and Roman worlds (c. 300 BCE–200 CE). This beautifully illustrated book, featuring photography by Julia Thorne, accompanies Manchester Museum’s first-ever international touring exhibition. Golden Mummies of Egypt is a visually spectacular exhibition that offers visitors unparalleled access to the museum’s outstanding collection of Egyptian and Sudanese objects – one of the largest in the UK.
processes of cultural interconnection are simplified into narratives of ‘invasion’ and ‘liberation’. The reality for most people living in Egypt is likely to have been much more complex. Appreciating some of these complexities is important for understanding the cultural milieu that produced the distinctive funerary imagery of the Graeco-Roman Period. Significant non-Egyptian migrations into the Nile Valley are known from at least the Sixteenth Century BCE, with the arrival of peoples from western Asia known as the
index of a firm belief in an existence after death, rather than the result of dominant socio-religious conventions. Scepticism about the afterlife is rarely factored in, although the Egyptians conceptualised alternatives to a blissful hereafter 13 and targeted attacks on images of the deceased – with presumably negative consequences for the victim – are well-attested from Pharaonic times. 14 The existence of alternative conceptualisations regarding prerequisites for the afterlife, at least during the Graeco-Roman Period, is
particularly strong holdings of Graeco-Roman Period material due to the nature of archaeological sponsorship and finds division, especially at the important cemetery site of Hawara, which preserved a range of items of high artistic merit to a Western gaze; these are frequently the objects that most resonate with the public. It is a cliché to say that Graeco-Roman Egypt (c. 300 BCE–300 CE) has fallen between the disciplines of Egyptology, Classics and Roman Studies; Ancient Greece and Rome have their own appeal, usually for a quite
displayed in Manchester Museum in 2012–2018. © Photo: Michelle Scott Museum displays and school programmes often fall back on long-standing, simplified tropes about this standard procedure, and frequently use Egyptian mummified remains to illustrate rather monolithic statements concerning ancient Egyptian ‘beliefs’ about the afterlife. As we have seen, the reality of expectations and practices, especially in the Graeco-Roman Period, was complex. Given the constrictions of most museum
of people named after him even into Roman times. 4 Thus, in the last centuries BCE some men were named ‘Nimaatre’ after his prenomen – or ‘throne name’ ( Fig 40 ). From the Ptolemaic Period the divine king was worshipped under the name ‘Pramarres’ (derived from ‘the pharaoh ( per aa ) [Ni-] maat-re’), and the main element ‘marres’ is common in Faiyumic private names. Indeed the prominent cult of the deified Amenemhat III during the Graeco-Roman Period in various Faiyum towns some distance from Hawara may have prompted people to
. 1766. The majority of the mummies in the Manchester Museum collection date back to the Graeco-Roman Period (332 BCE–395 CE). Externally, their decoration attests to the deceased’s affluent background, with gilded masks and studs, painted portraits, and voluminous layers of linen wrappings organised in intricate patterns. Layers upon layers of linen strips were used to wrap the body, starting with its individual parts, such as arms and legs, as evident in cross-sectional CT scan images ( Fig
counterpart and rather than recording this failed campaign, reports instead on an insignificant campaign in southern Babylonia, which occurred about the same time:85 ‘The seventh year: On the eighth day of the month Adar the army of Assyria [marched] to Sha-amile’. There may be a reference to this Assyrian defeat in the later Egyptian literary work the Pedubastis Cycle dated to the Graeco-Roman Period.86 Here Pemu of Heliopolis caused a foe ɜslstny (not only an Assyrian name but thought to be a late form of Esarhaddon) ‘chief of the land […], to retreat eastwards’, after
1894. The Gaekwad later added a smaller picture gallery, completed in 1914, but only opened after the First World War. The museum received cultural materials from Europe, reflecting the ruler’s own tastes, and eventually had rooms devoted to Michelangelo, the Graeco-Roman period, the European Middle Ages and early modern pre-industrial times and the eighteenth to twentieth centuries (industrial era