This piece was originally published on the Historical Honey website in September 2014
http://historicalhoney.com/ancient-lives-new-discoveries-eight-mummies-eight-lives-eight-stories/
Ancient lives, new discoveries: eight mummies, eight lives, eight stories
http://historicalhoney.com/ancient-lives-new-discoveries-eight-mummies-eight-lives-eight-stories/
Ancient lives, new discoveries: eight mummies, eight lives, eight stories
The British Museum, London, 22 May – 30 November 2014 (now extended to 12 July 2015)
When Napoleon Bonaparte invaded Egypt in 1798, he was
accompanied by 167 scholars, his Commission on the Sciences and Arts. Their
work revealed a dazzling world of ancient temples and tombs to European eyes.
The expedition’s results, published in the 23-volume Description de
l’Égypte, made Ancient Egypt fashionable. The rage for
collecting Egyptian antiquities, and the race to fill European museums with
them, had begun. Ancient Egypt entered popular culture, and its remains are
still familiar today: mummies in magnificent decorated coffins, funerary masks,
hieroglyphs. The Rosetta Stone, one of the most iconic Egyptian antiquities,
was discovered by Bonaparte's Commission, captured as a war-trophy and is now
on display at the British Museum. The Stone was central to deciphering
hieroglyphs, helping scholars to understand this ancient world. In a
fascinating exhibition at the same institution, eight mummies, whose secrets
are being unlocked by cutting-edge technology, prove themselves to be key to
new insights into Egyptian lives and culture.
The exhibition begins with an image of family life: a
statuette of a priest and his family, apparently in their prime. Yet this was
placed in a tomb, perpetuating a memory of pristine youth. The whole display is
about the interplay between life and death, representation and reality,
realised through human remains, artefacts and visualisation technology. The
mummies themselves have never been unwrapped, for fear of damaging them. The
advent of CT scans now allows experts to look inside in incredible detail
without harming them. At the most basic level, they help us to begin to
visualise people: we learn ages, sex, heights and about some of their ailments.
The CT scans sometimes expose the gap between what is represented on coffins
and what lies inside. One coffin of a woman actually held the body of a man.
Skilfully treated, carefully mummified and beautifully wrapped, the scan
nonetheless reveals that part of his brain – and a tool – had been left behind
in his skull. Padiamenet, a temple doorkeeper – was not so lucky. The serene
exterior of his coffin hides the fact that his body was shoddily treated after
death: the embalmers needed rods to reattach his head to his body after it fell
off. To add insult to post-mortem injury, his feet projected out at the end of
his coffin and had to be covered with cloth.
If these bodies form a highly emotive and informative
link between past and present, their lives are a point of connection to
Egyptian culture more broadly. Through Tjayasetimu, a 7-year-old temple singer,
we learn about music, an array of instruments arranged behind the showcase
glass, tantalising in their silence. Again there is a disparity between the
representation on her coffin and the body within: the coffin depicts a mature
woman, whose unwrapped hands and feet signal life, not a dead child whose adult
teeth are still waiting to erupt in her jaw. The length of the hair that still
remains on her head leads to a discussion of hair’s symbolic importance. The
way in which hair was dressed reflected age, gender and social status: young children
had their hair shaved; the wealthy wore elaborate wigs, an astonishing example
of which is on display, a profusion of curls and plaits made up of hundreds of
human hairs. The tiny coffin of a toddler from the Roman period emphasises the
importance of the family to the Egyptians, the nearby toy mouse and wooden
horse shrinking the two-thousand-year gap between them and us.
Museums and technology are not always the happiest of
bedfellows. There is a danger of gimmickry, and the inevitable but frustrating
risk of things breaking down. Here, there is a sympathetic balance because what
the technology can reveal is totally new and fascinating, and it is elegantly
incorporated into the exhibition design. Along with the CT scans, many of which
the visitor can explore for themselves, there is sparing use of 3-D printing,
allowing us, for example, to see replicas of the amulets still preserved in the
wrappings around the body of priest’s daughter Tamut, their hidden forms
revealed after millenia by the CT scans.
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