Exhibition: The Secrets of Tomb 10A

Heritage Key (Helen Atkinson)

With three photos.

People were just as silly 4,000 thousand years ago as they are now, but they manifested it in different ways, of course, which is what makes it interesting. The Ancient Egyptians, for example, had a well-known obsession with how to get ahead in the afterlife, and the wealthier citizens and royalty poured a lot of money, time, and thought into the items that would go in the tomb with them.

Generally, museum exhibitions tend to concentrate on the flashier tomb accessories – golden death masks, jewels, and statues. But a new exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, goes down a different, somewhat more modest road. The Secrets of Tomb 10a (don’t look for the prequel Tombs 1-10!), which opened Oct. 18, is an unusually comprehensive staging of what was in the tomb of Djehutynakht, a local governor from central Egypt, and his wife, Lady Djehutynakht, who died sometime during the Middle Kingdom (2040 BC – 1640 BC), around 4,000 years ago, and were buried at the necropolis of Deir el-Bersha.

“It’s unlike any Egyptian exhibition I can think of because, for one thing, 90% of the material is from one tomb,” says Denise Doxey, Curator, Ancient Egyptian, Nubian, and Near Eastern Art at MFA Boston. “So instead of having isolated bits of nice artwork without a context, this is very much focused on context.”