The mummies tell their story

Now 200 years ago Jean-François Champollion announced in Paris the deciphering of the hieroglyphs of the Rosetta stone, the key to many secrets of the Egyptian civilization.

Thomas Osborne
Thomas Osborne
18 July 2022 Monday 00:00
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The mummies tell their story

Now 200 years ago Jean-François Champollion announced in Paris the deciphering of the hieroglyphs of the Rosetta stone, the key to many secrets of the Egyptian civilization. Champollion was a philological prodigy who as a young man already spoke Coptic, ancient Greek, Latin, Hebrew or Arabic.

Two centuries later, it is not philology but the most advanced technology that allows us to delve into the heart of Egyptian civilization, inside its mummies: CT scans and three-dimensional images allow the mummified remains to be unwrapped virtually and entire lives to be revealed. . From the illnesses they suffered, from cancer to atherosclerosis, to the amulets with which they accompanied their bandages to protect them in the afterlife, as shown until October 26, the exhibition at CaixaForum Madrid Mummies of Egypt. Rediscovering Six Lives.

An exhibition that through the stories hidden by six mummies from very different periods – two priests, a married woman, an official and a child and a young man from the Greco-Roman period – reviews life in Egyptian civilization. And it does so through 260 pieces including sarcophagi, mummies and objects of daily life – from food to beauty, music, healing practices or religion – that come from the British Museum, such as the exhibition's curators, Marie Vandenbeusch and Daniel Antoin.

The director of the British, the German Hartwig Fischer, underlined when presenting the exhibition that it is "an approach to how they lived in the past, their aspirations and fears, and thus understand how close we are to them and they to us despite the time and distance, is an exercise in humanity”.

If, as the Director of Culture of the Fundación la Caixa, Ignasi Miró, recalled, ever since in 1892, in Lot number 249, Arthur Conan Doyle portrayed for the first time the existence of a terrible and vengeful mummy, we have not stopped having scary stories in the that the mummies want to return, now "six come back to life at CaixaForum not as supernatural creatures but as men, women and children willing to speak to us through time".

Vandenbeusch points out that of the 120 mummies they have, they have selected six with "something unique and original that opens a window to the life of ancient Egypt." "The first is Ameniryirt, a high-ranking official from Thebes, in fact they are all part of an elite that could afford mummification," says the curator, who points out that Ameniryirt suffered from a disease, soft tissue cancer spread to the bones. Although the arteriosclerosis that he suffered from could also have caused his death between the ages of 35 and 49. He was 164 centimeters tall.

“The second individual, a priest, Nesperennub, relates us to a more magical world, the embalmers placed many amulets between the bandages and inside his body to give him access to the gods in his next life”, objects that, he recalls, are still inside of the mummy but of those who have printed exact replicas in 3D: “When we saw them for the first time – he says – it was something magical, because they are still where the embalmer placed them thousands of years ago and yet we can hold them in our hands”.

The third mummy belongs to another priest and the fourth to Takhenemet, a married woman from Thebes about whom the curator recalls that "she has something very moving, the preservation of her hair, a small bow on top of her head, I wonder if it was a personal style that they tried to preserve for their life in the afterlife.” The last two mummified are from the Greco-Roman period, "with a lot of connection already with the Mediterranean world". “In the naturalistic portrait of the child painted on the shroud around the bandages with which the body was wrapped, we see a child we would recognize. In the mummy of the young man, 18 years old, very well preserved, we have found a wooden element inside his skull, probably part of the embalmer's tool to extract the brain and break the septum of the nose and in the incision in the abdomen. to extract the organs there is an object that looks like a small papyrus. Who knows if future technologies will allow us to read the texts written on it, perhaps the name of the young man.