The Manchester Museum in the north of England reopened last month after a £15m redevelopment project and their inaugural free exhibition 'The Golden Mummies of Egypt' showcases their stunning collection of Egyptology featuring eight mummies dating from the Greco-Roman period (300 BC to 300 AD). ), brought to Britain by the archaeologist Flinders Petrie, after his excavations of 1888-90 and 1911 in a monumental necropolis at Hawara, in the Fayoum region south of Cairo.
The exhibition has arrived in Manchester after touring North America and China and now curator Campbell Price is doing something on a mission: changing the way we think about mummies.
X-ray scans of the mummies are included. We hope to 'change the narrative about mummies' by refocusing attention 'from the inside - what we expect to have a right to see - outward - what the ancient Egyptians expected. people to see it."
Rather than including voyeuristic speculation about human remains, the Golden Mummies exhibit focuses more on the amazing wraps the Egyptians made for their dead to spend eternity in.
The main myth Price hopes to dispel relates to the idea of mummies: mummies weren't actually about preserving the dead but rather about turning the dead into gods. The ostentatiously decorated coffins and wrappings do not reflect the person inside but use idealized divine imagery to help the soul live with glory. greatest. Using iconography associated with funerary deities—the male god Osiris and the god Hathor—it is as if embalmers are offering the reassurance that, yes, this person is ready for the afterlife.
"I want to move away from biomedical explanations, and focus on the gods," says Price. "I'm not saying all those scientific inquiries are bad and shouldn't be made. I'm just saying, it's an opportunity to look at things differently."
Sun, Mar. 26, 2023
