Have we got Ancient Egypt's mummies all wrong?

BBC
By Holly Williams
20th March 2023

Mummies, like werewolves, vampires and witches, are the stuff of legend in the popular imagination. The idea of bodies from an ancient civilisation, mysteriously preserved for thousands of years, discovered in glittering tombs, has always held an allure: from the Victorians holding mummy "unwrapping" parties through to "Tutmania" in the 1920s following the discovery of Tutankhamun's tomb, to a wealth of movies from Hammer Horror flicks to Indiana Jones.

Given all this, it's no wonder that myths and misconceptions about them abound. But a British exhibition aims to shed new light on this ancient practice – and maybe even shift our perspective.

Manchester Museum in the north of England reopened last month after a £15m redevelopment project – and their free opening exhibition, Golden Mummies of Egypt, showcases their incredible Egyptology collection. It includes eight mummies dating from the Graeco-Roman period (300BC to 300AD), brought to Britain by archaeologist Flinders Petrie, following his 1888–90 and 1911 excavations of a huge necropolis at Hawara, in the Faiyum region south of Cairo.

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For starters, and rather unusually these days, they are not including any X-rays or CT scans of the human remains below the wrappings; there is no bio-medical speculation on how old these people were when they passed away or how they died. Scans of the mummies were included while the show was on tour – but have now been removed (which involved reworking information displays at some cost), to reflect Manchester Museum's new thinking about how to present such sensitive artefacts. "We're stepping back from this desire to unwrap," says Price, adding that they hope to "flip the narrative" by refocusing the attention "from the inside – what we expect we have the right to see – on to the outside – what the Ancient Egyptians expected people to see."

https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20230320-the-great-debate-about-mummies-should-we-unwrap-them

Price contends that mummification was not about preserving the bodies, but about transforming the dead into gods.