Brooklyn Museum prepares mummy

Sincere thanks to Sally Williams, Public Information Officer at the Brooklyn Museum, for letting me know in a comment to a previous post that The Brooklyn Museum is also preparing a mummy to tour in an exhibition To Live Forever, that will tour ten cities in the United States beginning next summer. Along with other human and animal mummies in the collection, the red shroud mummy of Demetrios, which will also be in the exhibition, is now undergoing scientific testing. I thought it worth promoting the comment to a post as people might miss it. Additional information is below:

The Brooklyn Museum Conservation Laboratory is engaged in a study of the human and animal mummies in the Museum’s collection, using the tools of modern-day scientific investigation to reveal new information about mummification practices in ancient Egypt thousands of years ago. The project started on July 5 and brings together scientists from the Brooklyn Museum, the Getty Research Institute, in Los Angeles and the University of Bristol in England. It will begin with the X-ray fluorescence (XRF) of the first-century C.E. the mummy known as Demetrios, which will be a part of the forthcoming exhibition To Live Forever: Egyptian Treasures from the Brooklyn Museum.

X-ray fluorescence will allow analysis of the painted surfaces associated with the wrapping of mummies, including painted linen bandages and shrouds. Preliminary results have already shown that the red paint used on the Demetrios mummy was made, in part, from components imported from Spain. The lead in the paint was demonstrated to have come from a Spanish silver mine, but it remains unclear whether the paint itself was manufactured there or, alternatively, whether if the lead ingredient was traded to Egypt with the paint then produced locally.

In addition to X-ray fluorescence, the team will use CT scanning: this will permit a non-invasive examination of the mummy interiors, providing medical information related to, for example, the condition of the bones, as well as examining other burial materials that might have been included within the wrapped linens. Carbon 14 dating will also be used to help provide an accurate date of the mummies’ creation. Finally an analytic method known as FTIR or SEM EDX, will help determine which chemicals were employed in the technical process of mummification and how their composition changed during the three thousand years these techniques were in use.

The Brooklyn Museum’s world-renowned collection of ancient Egyptian material includes five human mummies and nearly fifty animal mummies, among them cats, crocodiles, and birds.

The exhibition, To Live Forever, of which the Demetrios mummy will be a part, includes 107 objects from the Brooklyn Museum’s holdings. The exhibition is slated to travel to more than ten venues beginning in the summer of 2008 and concluding in the fall of 2011.

It has nothing specifically to do with Egyptology, but the Brooklyn has an excellent blog which looks at life behind the scenes at the museum (in the right hand navigation bar you can select only blog items relating to Egyptian Art, but the real value of the blog is its insight into the museum as a whole).