And it is this external deification that the show centres – rather than scanning coffins to see if the people inside were well-preserved, or if they had gammy knees or died of cancer.
“I want to get away from that biomedical interpretation, and focus on the becoming-a-god bit,” says Price. “I’m not saying all those scientific inquiries are ‘bad’ and shouldn’t be done. I’m just saying, it’s a chance to look at the material in a different way.”
This is partly about respect; Manchester Museum’s new director Esme Ward’s stated mission for the institution is “to build understanding between cultures and a more sustainable world”, with their core values being “inclusion, imagination and care”. And when talking about showing care, in the case of this particular exhibition, it felt important for the team behind it to acknowledge that we were never meant to see under the mummies’ wrappings.
Some in the sector even suggest that mummies shouldn’t be on display at all; in 2020, the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford removed a mummy, alongside other human remains such as shrunken heads, from its displays. The decision was made following audience research that showed visitors often understood the Museum’s displays of human remains as “a testament to other cultures being ‘savage’, ‘primitive”‘ or ‘gruesome’… [reinforcing] racist stereotypes”. The Museum said that the decision to remove human remains was an attempt to “show our respect for the communities around the world with whom we work”.
“It’s fairly clear that the Ancient Egyptians involved in making works like this didn’t want them to be unwrapped,” confirms Price. But it’s not just sensitivity to this that has informed Manchester Museum’s decision-making: he also isn’t terribly convinced by the science available to us. “I have been in hospitals where mummies have gone into the CT scanner and there are Egyptologists, biomedical Egyptologists and clinicians, and no one can agree what CT scans show,” he laughs. After all, CT scans were designed for living bodies, not dried-out corpses. “You can say ‘this is evidence of a health condition’, and someone else will say ‘no it’s an effect of mummification’. Something may appear like a calcified whatnot or a fossilised ding-dong – but actually you’ve got to own up to the public and say ‘we do not know’.”
The legacy of Western archaeologists unwrapping mummies (often destroying them in the process) also has the tang of colonial entitlement to it – from Victorians making macabre entertainment out of ‘unrollings’ through to the fact that some institutions continued to unwrap in the name of research right up until the 1980s. Since then, digital unwrapping has taken over – and of course, does not damage the mummies. And CT scans can offer astounding detail: from revealing amulets buried with the body right down to how hardened an artery was.
The argument for ‘unwrapping’
Speaking out against ‘unwrapping’ is somewhat controversial: there will be many who think pursuit of knowledge trumps all other considerations, or that after thousands of years, it is overly reverential to worry about the feelings of the dead. “Some biomedical [Egyptologists] maybe have had their noses put out of joint; more hard scientists may be disappointed [by our exhibition],” acknowledges Price. And Manchester Museum is also placing itself in opposition to other notable institutions, such as the British Museum, whose Exploring Ancient Lives exhibition is literally about using scans to humanise the individuals inside their mummies.
First seen at the museum itself in 2014, that exhibition has since been on a whopping international tour; it heads to Japan and Spain this year. No one from the British Museum was willing to discuss it for this piece, although in an article for BBC Culture in 2014, original curator John H Taylor said their intention was “to get back to the idea that these were once real, living people”.
