Conservation work on a 2,300-year-old Egyptian mummy is taking place at Durham University.Specialists have been examining the body of the adult male at the university's oriental museum, before it goes on a year-long tour of Japan.
It was brought to the UK in the 1860s and has proved a popular attraction at the museum for many years.
Curator Craig Barclay said the mummy had what was believed to be one of the first examples of a prosthetic hand.
The false hand, modelled from linen bandages and shaped with a finger and thumb, was displayed separately from the body.
The mummy's coffin indicated the man could have lived in the city of Akhmim, on the east side of the Nile in upper Egypt, around 250 BC.
Monday, October 01, 2007
Egyptian mummy prepared for tour
BBC News
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The Brooklyn Museum is also preparing a mummy to tour in an exhibition To Live Forever, that will tour to 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 is now undergoing scientific testing. Additional information is below:
Mummies in Brooklyn Museum Collection
To Undergo Scientific Study
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.
I am please to see the Durham mummy is having a bit of a holiday!
I first met him in 1972 when I was 5when I wandered into the room he was in (you can do the maths to work out how old I am now!.He was the one who introduced me to my fascination with Egypt. Now I can even read hieroglyphs and have to teach a whole load of kids how to do it at a summer school this year.
Enjoy your travels Seneb!
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