Golden Mummies of Egypt: Interpreting identities from the Graeco-Roman period

By Campbell Price and Julia Thorne

Golden Mummies of Egypt presents new insights and a rich perspective on beliefs about the afterlife during an era when Egypt was part of the Greek and Roman worlds (c. 300 BCE–200 CE). This beautifully illustrated book, featuring photography by Julia Thorne, accompanies Manchester Museum’s first-ever international touring exhibition. Golden Mummies of Egypt is a visually spectacular exhibition that offers visitors unparalleled access to the museum’s outstanding collection of Egyptian and Sudanese objects – one of the largest in the UK.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Release date: Mar 7, 2023
• ISBN: 9781526172709

Book preview

A decorated mummy mask shown head-on with a detailed painted headdress, a golden face and striking black and white eyes with a blue outlineMasked mummy inside its opened coffin container with decorated covering for the face, head and body sections.

Fig 2 Masked mummy of a woman called Tasheriankh. From Akhmim. H: 201cm. Acc. no. 13783. c. 300–30 BCE.

The words Golden Mummies of Egypt in white and gold capital letters on a black background with gold decorative dots of different sizes scattered around the words; Logo for Manchester Museum; Logo for Manchester University Press; Logo for Nomad ExhibitionsHead of an antique statue made of dark metal showing details of its face and hair

Fig 3 Detail of copper alloy statuette of Isis or Hathor-Aphrodite. From Tanis(?). Robinow Collection. Acc. no. 11035.

CONTENTS

Foreword

Esme Ward, Director of Manchester Museum

Chapter 1

Gold, Sex, Art, Death

Chapter 2

Egypt, Europe and Manchester

Chapter 3

Hawara

Chapter 4

Aegypto Capta: Life in Graeco-Roman Egypt

Chapter 5

Papyri and Provenance

Roberta Mazza

Chapter 6

Scintillating Flesh: The Divine Deceased

Chapter 7

Facing the Dead

Chapter 8

Modern Technology and the Manchester Mummies

Iwona Kozieradzka-Ogunmakin

Chapter 9

Receptions: Between Rapture and Revulsion

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Map

Acknowledgements

FOREWORD

Museums are products of their age, reflecting the preoccupations, politics, obsessions and values of their time. When Manchester Museum first opened its doors in 1891 it was presented as an appeal to the civic spirit, scientific curiosity and devotion of the townsfolk of Manchester. Located in the world’s first post-industrial city, sat at the heart of global trade networks, the museum presented an opportunity to educate and show the city’s wealth, connectedness, innovation and ambition. Its collections are often referred to as encyclopaedic, ranging across disciplines in the natural sciences and human cultures across the world.

Since an Egyptian Gallery first opened in Manchester in 1912, the public has been captivated by Egyptology. Over a century ago, when the extraordinary material from Hawara entered the collections, the methodology of Empire was in full flight. The museum was conceived of and built at the height of Empire; a repository for active collecting, in earnest, across the length and breadth of the colonies. Today, how to fully acknowledge, interrogate and address the complexities of this colonial past is at the heart of the museum’s work and decolonisation forms a key part of the context in which this book has emerged.

Alongside leading museums all over the world, we are exploring how we critique and shift the context, language and thinking of the past towards a context of possibility and action for the future. Today, Manchester Museum is the UK’s leading university museum in a hyper-diverse city, home to over 4.8 million objects and every year, over half a million people visit, to be inspired and learn. Its mission is to build understanding between cultures and a sustainable world, as an engine of civic engagement and action that reclaims the purpose of the museum as an agent of public good. Put simply, Manchester Museum aims to become the most inclusive, imaginative and caring museum you might encounter.

Care underpins the work of all museums. The word curator comes from the Latin, ‘curare’ – to care, watch over, attend. In Manchester, we care for our collections, but we also care for people, ideas and relationships. We believe that, in caring for the past, we are staking a claim on what will matter in the future. Our future and relevance will, in large part, lie in our ability to become a leading pro-social space, working with a wide range of people to imaginatively address the key issues of our time. In creating a place of belonging, the work of today’s museum extends beyond research, education, representation and display.

As more people than ever question the legitimacy of institutional knowledge, calling for deepening levels of inclusivity, and promoting equity and solidarity, museums have been accused of ‘whitewashing’ history, privileging a ‘pale, male, and stale’ perspective, and underrepresenting diaspora communities. As we continue to strengthen trust with source communities globally, work collaboratively and encourage open conversations about the future of collections, we increasingly conceptualise those collections as stories and relationships as well as shared cultural heritage internationally.

The complexities we embrace and new, diverse stories we choose to tell have shaped Golden Mummies of Egypt. Whilst embracing the striking visual and imaginative impact of this extraordinary Graeco-Roman material from Egypt, it also reveals the wider assumptions, context and significance of the collection and its interpretations. As with the very best museums and exhibitions, Golden Mummies of Egypt seeks to create new emotional connections and make our understanding of the past and our world more complex.

Esme Ward

Director, Manchester Museum

Fragment of a red piece of cloth with a narrow blue border. On the cloth is a black and gold line drawing of an Egyptian goddess in profile facing the right with one arm raised.

Fig 4 Fragment of a linen shroud depicting a goddess, with conflated hieroglyph atop her head for both Isis and Nephthys. From Hawara(?). H: 34cm. Acc. no. 13949. 1st Century CE.

Chapter 1

GOLD, SEX, ART, DEATH

Always believe in your soul, You’ve got the power to know, You’re indestructible, Always believe in, ‘Cos you are Gold

Spandau Ballet

Ancient Egypt is synonymous with a surfeit of archaeologically recovered, miraculously preserved things: ostentatious material wealth focused on the idealised body, produced by seemingly mysterious lost artistry, and all motivated by an apparently unshakable belief in an afterlife existence. It is a combination – gold, sex, art, death – as intoxicating as it is enduringly popular with book readers, documentary watchers, and museum visitors. But to what extent are these concepts representative of ancient concerns or realities, and how might modern (Western) interpreters – collectors, archaeologists, curators, writers, artists – have shaped (consciously or otherwise) the ancient past to fit a narrative attractive to themselves and their audiences?

Despite its title, this book is not yet another breathless retelling of the glories of ‘lost’ civilizations unearthed by noble archaeologists, nor simply a descriptive account of their fragmentary material remains in a jigsaw-like attempt to say what the ancients ‘believed’. Instead, it aims at a critical reassessment of material from a particular archaeological setting: Flinders Petrie’s 1888–90 and 1911 excavations at Hawara in Egypt. An attempt is made to give an account of the archaeological material under discussion on its own terms, and to assess its significance and possible meaning(s) to ancient producers and users as far as that may be possible. Yet deliberate attention is given to previous modern interpretations and the people who made them – reading this archive material ‘against the grain’ – in order to trace how such significant archaeological collections ended up in (and being interpreted by) the West generally, and at Manchester Museum in particular.

In approaching the motivations and assumptions of these past interpretations, I also want to acknowledge the contingency of my own commentary. I hope to avoid any claims to objectivity or superiority compared to past interpreters, as if I were somehow insulated and immune from the passage of time and trends in analysis. I am writing at a period of heightened global anxiety around concepts of identity and ethnicity. These contemporary concerns will inevitably, as they have always done before, shift the kaleidoscope through which we view objects from another culture – albeit one that is attractively ancient and safely distant.

The Egyptian and Sudanese collections of Manchester Museum are amongst the largest in the UK, numbering some 18,000 items; a rich and varied repository of objects once invested with very different meanings to those they hold now, and one that has been prominent in the popular presentation of Egyptology. The fame of the museum’s Egyptian displays is matched on a smaller scale by research requests to access material held in storage, although much of the collection remains relatively little-known outside a small specialist community. This book offers, therefore, an opportunity to present some key objects from the collection, many of which have not been on display for decades, or ever published, and examine them in the context of their makers’ and finders’ expectations.

What is on public display at Manchester and at museums elsewhere is only the tip of the iceberg in numerical terms, and it consists of disproportionately well-preserved items – the result of curatorial and conservation decisions about what can be made meaningful today and ‘appropriate’ to put on public view.

Manchester Museum has particularly strong holdings of Graeco-Roman Period material due to the nature of archaeological sponsorship and finds division, especially at the important cemetery site of Hawara, which preserved a range of items of high artistic merit to a Western gaze; these are frequently the objects that most resonate with the public. It is a cliché to say that Graeco-Roman Egypt (c. 300 BCE–300 CE) has fallen between the disciplines of Egyptology, Classics and Roman Studies; Ancient Greece and Rome have their own appeal, usually for a quite distinct constituency than that of Egypt. But the combination of the three – although often in the academic wilderness – has found particular favour with museum audiences. The fuller-figured goddesses, the liberal use of gold in non-royal graves, and the hauntingly alluring ‘Faiyum Portraits’ all seem to break with stringent Pharaonic ideals of artistic decorum and appear more brash and more directly appealing to modern sensibilities. One problem with interpreting these culturally mixed materials is one of terminology, as highlighted by my predecessor as Egyptologist at Manchester Museum, Christina Riggs:¹ Pharaonic funerary face-coverings are termed ‘masks’ while Graeco-Roman influenced panel paintings are referred to as ‘portraits’ – suggesting an artificial distinction in their purpose and audience (Fig 5 & 6).

A decorated mummy mask shown head-on with a detailed painted headdress, a golden face and striking black and white eyes with a blue outline

Fig 5 Mummy mask for a woman. Stylised curls of hair and the presence of earrings indicate a female gender. From Lahun. H: 49.7cm. Acc. no. 2120.

Part of a wooden panel painted with the head and shoulders of a man with dark curly hair, a narrow moustache, and wearing a white garment

Fig 6 Mummy panel of a man. From Hawara(?). H: 34.2cm. Acc. no. 13750. Mid to late 1st century CE.

Another important element for consideration here is that, for the most part, the richest objects prized by (middle and upper-class) archaeologists, collectors and museums, derive ultimately from exactly that stratum of ancient society: the rich. Far from the somewhat utopian (read: egalitarian) vision of a ‘great civilization’, ancient society was deeply unequal and the elite monopolised resources as they do globally today. Inevitably, because monuments and mummification were labour-intensive and therefore expensive, only those with sufficient access to the requisite resources would be actively able to make a mark on eternity.

Whether due to social convention, earnest religious conviction, or a combination of both, the ancient elite invested much material expenditure in display surrounding death. Because cemeteries were situated in desert-edge locations in order to last for eternity, they survive disproportionately well compared to settlements which tend either to be situated too close to agriculture to encourage preservation or have been readily built on top of. The resulting bias in archaeological preservation is compounded by the comparatively rich pickings offered by cemetery sites compared to settlements. Thus, museums packed with grave objects belonging to the elite reinforce notions that the ancient Egyptians were all ostentatiously wealthy, and all obsessed with death.

Such persistent tropes remain difficult to challenge. Despite an increasing level of disciplinary soul-searching, Egyptology – especially in museums – is often still presented in Victorian or Edwardian terms of the ‘discovery’ of ‘treasure’, and objects interpreted as if they might give a direct insight into life in ancient times – despite, for the most part, coming from tombs. The technologies of revelation concerning human remains – so popular in museums – are usually presented as a linear development from unscrupulous unwrapping to more enlightened and non-invasive imaging, but each partakes of a significant level of voyeurism despite repeated claims to scientific disinterest.

The ‘science’ of Egyptology is as contested and contingent as the meaning of much of the material that forms its subject. There are no simple answers – or, at least, the complexities of an honest answer tend to be inversely proportional to the simplicity of the question posed of the evidence. ‘Ancient Egypt’ has been constructed and re-constructed countless times, to the point where these two words cannot bear the weight of multiple meanings freighted upon them. Each imagining depends on the interpreter and the context of the interpretation.

A black and white photograph of a man and a woman examining a wrapped mummy

Fig 7 Rosalie David and Eddie Tapp before the unwrapping of mummy 1770, at the University of Manchester in 1975.

While investigation of Manchester Museum’s mummies is rather well-known within the fields of Egyptology and museology (Fig 7),² the impact of the Museum’s displays – focused almost inevitably on the Egyptian human remains – has been significant for popular culture more widely. Opening an exhibition in 2013, Manchester-born writer, broadcaster and Professor of Public History Michael Wood claimed that the Museum’s gilded child mummies had first sparked his love of ancient history; a 2015 British TV series Cucumber referenced the kudos of working with Manchester Museum’s mummies; and in 2019 photographer Michael Spencer Jones confessed that his cover design for Mancunian band Oasis’ album Definitely Maybe (Fig 8) was influenced by mummies in the Museum’s Egyptology galleries.³ As so often in museums around the world that hold Egyptian material, the majority of the general public repeatedly express a desire to see mummies on display.⁴

Mummies sheathed with golden or painted faces are at once the physical epitome of our desires and fantasies of ‘ancient Egypt’ – seen through a particularly alluring Graeco-Roman lens – yet they are also a mirage, whose meanings and identities are conjured up by our own presuppositions and cultural anxieties. The visible objects themselves have a very powerful appeal, a distinct magnetism for those in the present. A physical museum encounter with them has the possibility to confront a viewer with life- and death-worlds quite different from one’s own, and to provoke an empathy between cultures, past and present. How – and perhaps why – we respond the way we do to funerary objects from Graeco-Roman Egypt is the subject of this book.

A photograph of the members of the band Oasis in a living room. 3 of the men are seated, one is standing by the window, and one is lying on the floor.

Fig 8 Photograph used for the cover design of Oasis’ 1994 album Definitely Maybe.

Copyright © Michael Spencer Jones. All rights reserved 1994–2020

Campbell Price

Curator of Egypt and Sudan

Manchester Museum

A decorated mummy's coffin with a plain headdress and face and a colourful intricately detailed body section

Fig 9 Lid of the inner coffin of an elite woman named Asru. Probably from Thebes. H. 150cm. Acc. no. 1777. c.700–650 BCE.

Chapter 2

EGYPT, EUROPE AND MANCHESTER

Concilio Et Labore (By Wisdom and Work)

Latin motto of the city of Manchester

Like many British cities, and indeed urban centres around Europe and the United States, Manchester is home to a museum with a significant collection of Egyptian antiquities. The accumulation of such material in Manchester did not come about by chance but through a complex network of political circumstance, philanthropic patronage and personal taste. In order to evaluate the responses to the Museum’s Egyptology collection – particularly its especially rich Graeco-Roman funerary material from Hawara – it is desirable to begin by sketching out the broader context of acquisition of Egyptian material in Manchester, one which is all too often overlooked or given only token acknowledgement.

The Museum is part of Manchester’s largest and oldest University (Fig 10), but functions in the same way as a major civic museum typical of many other cities in the UK and elsewhere, combining both natural history and human cultures.¹ In large part that is because the collections are based on those of the Manchester Natural History Society. Like many other learned societies and proto-museums of this type, the Manchester society received donations of Egyptian objects. In 1825, two cotton merchant brothers named Robert and William Garnett bequeathed a wrapped mummy and two coffins belonging to an ancient Egyptian of unknown gender (later identified as a woman named ‘Asroni’ or ‘Asru’) (Fig 9).² In common with many similar procedures undertaken in the early Nineteenth Century in the UK,³ Europe and America,⁴ a contemporary press account gives a synopsis of the unwrapping:

‘On Tuesday last, a most valuable addition was made to the Museum of the Natural History Society in this town, by a donation of R. and W. Garnett, Esqrs. Consisting of an Egyptian mummy, brought from Upper Egypt, in a perfect state of preservation; a tablet of gypsum, covered with hieroglyphicks; a crocodile of the Nile, and a species of lizard.

The Mummy was opened in the presence of the council, and several members of the Society, and the following were some of the appearances noted:

The body was inclosed in two wooden cases, the coverings of both of which were adorned externally, on the upper part, with a carved representation of a human face, supposed to be intended as a portrait of the deceased; below the face, they were covered with figures and hieroglyphicks, painted in bright and lively colours.

On taking off the top of the inner case, the body was found covered with a cloth of coarse texture, and of a light brown colour, the removal of which exposed to view a variety of bandages of the same material, passing round the body in different directions, so as to envelope it in an immense number of folds. The inner bandages were impregnated with bituminous or resinous matter, of a dark colour, which rendered the cloth so brittle, that the inner folds were obliged to be broken off in pieces.

When the body was exposed, it presented a dark brown appearance, the soft parts being quite shrivelled and dried upon the bones. It was 4 feet 11¾ inches in length, was extremely light, and several of the teeth, the finger and toe nails, were quite perfect. The scull, and head altogether, were remarkable for their excellent proportions. On the body were found, in several places, the larvae of insects, and a few specimens of a small green coleopterous insect. Under the upper part of the body, on the bottom of the inner case or coffin, a quantity