4,500-year-old ancient Egyptian mummy restored. It will be on display in Bra

On Sept. 9 at 9 a.m., the exhibition Man Revealed will open to the public at Palazzo Mathis in Bra. Studies and restoration of a 4,500-year-old Egyptian mummy. The event is curated by the Conservation and Restoration Center “La Venaria Reale” (CCR) with the collaboration of the University of Turin, its University Museum System and the Department of Life Sciences and Systems Biology, the Soprintendenza Archeologia Belle Arti e Paesaggio for the Metropolitan City of Turin and J Medical Center. Produced with the support of the City of Bra, the exhibition has the patronage of the Province of Cuneo and the Piedmont Region. It will be free to visit until Dec. 12, 2021, Thursday through Monday from 9 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. and 3 p.m. to 6 p.m. For more information call 0171/452711 or write to info@fondazionecrc.it.

The exhibition is part of the collaboration between Fondazione Cassa di Risparmio di Cuneo and Fondazione Centro Conservazione e Restauro “La Venaria Reale” (CCR), which on this occasion presents to the public the conservation recovery project of an Egyptian mummy dating back to the Old Kingdom (4th Dynasty, 2600-2400 BC.C.), among the oldest in the collections of the Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography of the University of Turin (MAET). Displayed for the first time in Bra after the delicate recovery operation, the find was discovered in 1920 during the Italian archaeological mission to Egypt, which included the medical anthropologist Giovanni Marro, founder of the museum where the find is kept today.

The exhibition is divided into four rooms. In the first one, a video introduces the exhibition and the project, and the visitor has a way to start learning about the history and context of the find. The second room is devoted to the diagnostic insights and techniques used to support the knowledge of the mummy, in particular the explanation of the results of the tomographic analyses, carried out by the J Medical Center in Turin, which enabled the anthropological study; there is also a 3D reproduction of the mummy’s skull, created from the analyses and processed data. The third room presents the complex restoration of the mummy’s textile apparatus from the Venaria Center in an image-based account of the intervention and the methodological stages in the ethical respect and approach to the human find. Finally, the fourth room displays the mummy in a glass case so that it can be appreciated from every point of view.

The mummy comes from the northern necropolis of Gebelein (Upper Egypt) explored in 1920 by the Italian Archaeological Mission in which Giovanni Marro, a physician and anthropologist and founder of MAET, also participated.

In a huddled position, with its limbs and body completely bandaged and some facial details painted on the bandages, the mummy is among the oldest in the collection and is a rarity because of the state of preservation of the textiles. Its provenance and dating are very important in defining funerary rituals in Egypt’s southernmost provinces during the Fourth Dynasty.

Never studied or exhibited to the public before, the find is unveiled on this occasion and gives the opportunity to follow its diagnostic insights aimed at revealing the non-visible parts of the bandaged body. The mummy had already undergone Carbon-14 dating; on the occasion of the restoration, a state-of-the-art computed tomography (CT) scan with multislice spiral acquisition was carried out at Centro Medico J medical in Turin. The radiological examination allowed reconstruction with very high definition three-dimensional images of anatomical structures and biological identification (determination of sex and biological age at death).

Since this is a human body, the restoration intervention of the Textile Artifacts Laboratory of the Conservation and Restoration Center “La Venaria Reale” paid special attention to ethical issues related to the handling, preservation and display criteria of human remains.

Ph.Credit Silvano Pupella

4,500-year-old ancient Egyptian mummy restored. It will be on display in Bra

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