Coffin opened at Field Museum

[kmt_sesh]

The Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, Illinois, is preparing a new traveling exhibit called Images of the Afterlife. This will showcase mummies we usually keep in storage as well as their CT scans, most of which were shot in 2011 (I'm a docent at this museum, by the way). We had a short-run, three-month exhibit of the same subject in 2012, and it was just an afterthought: a way to fill a temporary exhibit hall for a short period. It turned out the exhibit was a phenomenal success, so our curators are doing it again. Its first stop will be in Los Angeles and it actually will not be mounted at our own museum until 2018.

Recently the museum opened a coffin of one of our storage mummies to assess what it will take to conserve and prepare the mummy for the traveling exhibit. Even the opening of an ancient coffin is a rare affair these days. The less you touch ancient things, the longer they last. And due to CT scans it was already known this mummy was in rough shape. It is the mummy of a boy about fourteen years of age from around 2,300 years ago (the Ptolemaic Period of Egypt). I really like this mummy and spent quite a long time studying his coffin and its inscription for the time it happened to be on display.

The opening of the coffin generated a lot of media interest and I was surprised to see how much of it landed on the internet. I thought I would share links here. The first is a slideshow containing some very good photos of the mummy:

http://abc7chicago.c...-museum/427073/

This link provides a decent video from a news broadcast (my apologies for the annoying intro ad):

http://wgntv.com/201...-in-the-making/

The last provides some more information on the mummy and the opening of the coffin:

http://www.huffingto..._n_6288654.html

Let me know what you think.

[Likely Guy]

That's the same 12 -14 year old boy? The son of a priest.

Could you imagine, that if we had taken the care and the energy that we do now, before we unwrap the bodies, what we might have learned? Thousands and thousands of mummies, thrown out like cordwood.

Edited December 13, 2014 by Likely Guy

[kmt_sesh]

That's the same 12 -14 year old boy? The son of a priest.

Could you imagine, that if we had taken the care and the energy that we do now, before we unwrap the bodies, what we might have learned? Thousands and thousands of mummies, thrown out like cordwood.

That was typical in Victorian times and went on sporadically into the 1970s at certain museums and institutes. I've come across no records of unwrappings at the Field Museum, and I've done a ton of research on its collection. But then CT scanning came along in the mid-1970s, and it pretty much negated any reason to continue unwrapping mummies. It's extremely rare for a mummy to be unwrapped nowadays pretty much anywhere. Minirdis himself is not going to be unwrapped, just conserved and repaired.

In the old days, many mummies that were unwrapped literally fell apart on the table. Sometimes the wrappings are the only thing still holding them together. To an extent this is true of Minirdis, the mummified boy in the article. He's not in good shape. I've studied his CT scans and he's mostly skeletal now; his feet are disarticulated from the rest of the body, which is why our museum hired a specialist to try to figure out how to reattach them. I didn't know this beforehand but the video in my link mentions how it's thought the coffin was propped upright at some point in the past, which caused the mummy to collapse toward the footboards—that's evidently when a lot of the damage occurred (not in ancient times).

Anyway, yes. Minirdis was the son of a priest named In-Iret-Horu (often called "Inaros" via Greek derivation), who in turn was the son of a priest named...damn, it faded off the coffin. I've studied the inscription painted down the front-center and granddad's name was right at the curve of the ankles, where painted glyphs often seem to fade away. Dad and granddad were both stolist priests, whose job it was to dress the cult image (statue) of the god in the temple. These were high-ranking men. Given Minirdis' youthgul age at death it's likely his dad was training him to become one, too.

[Kenemet]

I want to come see it!

[Aus Der Box Skeptisch]

That's the same 12 -14 year old boy? The son of a priest.

Could you imagine, that if we had taken the care and the energy that we do now, before we unwrap the bodies, what we might have learned? Thousands and thousands of mummies, thrown out like cordwood.

Don't forget the medicinal purposes of mummy!

[kmt_sesh]

I was at the museum today and stopped by the anthropology lab to see what was going on. It's one of those labs with an all-glass front so visitors can watch the scientists work. Unfortunately, this being a weekend, neither the curator nor his staff were at work (although sometimes on the weekend they are, which is why I took the chance). In fact, the only one in there was the mummy Minirdis. He wasn't doing much but lying around.

I could see him on a special exam table in the middle of the lab. Previous to this (and not counting the photos from the web articles) I had never seen this mummy outside his coffin. He really is small. He looked lonely in there, or perhaps bored, so too bad I wasn't able to go in and visit with him.

Hey, mummies are people too.

[Aus Der Box Skeptisch]

Awe