During the recent protests in Cairo, the Egyptian Antiquities Museum was under threat of vandalism and looting. Fortunately, local residents rallied to protect the building and the treasures within.
The museum with its eye-catching pink façade has always been a popular tourist attraction. Since the early nineties, tourist venues also attracted Muslim militants who took responsibility for scores of fatal attacks aimed at shaking the economy in an attempt to bring down the government of President Hosni Mubarak. On February 26, 1993, a bomb ripped through the museum’s coffee shop, killing three—a Turk, a Swede, and an Egyptian—and wounding twenty. A month later, four buses near the museum’s entrance exploded from the force of a bomb. There were no injuries. In September, four years later, a shooting and bomb attack killed nine German tourists and their driver by the museum gate. A recent terrorist attack at the museum was on April 30, 2005, when a suicide bomber detonated a nail bomb, wounding seven standing near the entrance. Running from the scene, the attacker’s sister and fiancée opened fire on a sightseeing bus in another suburb. Fortunately there were no injuries. The soon-to-be-groom turned on his fiancée and shot her to death before killing himself. Despite these incidents and others across Egypt, tourists were not deterred from visiting Cairo’s most famous attractions, particularly the Royal Mummy Room.
After the discovery of three cachettes in Thebes, between 1881 and 1898, twenty-seven royal mummies of pharaonic times were placed in the museum in 1902. Among them were Seqenenre, Ahmose I, Amenhotep I, Tuthmosis I, Tuthmosis II, Tuthmosis III, Seti I, Rameses II, and Rameses III from the Deir el-Bahari cachette. From the tomb of Amenhotep II were his mummy and those of Tuthmosis IV, Amenhotep III, Merenptah, Seti II, Siptah, Rameses IV, Rameses V, and Rameses VI. Due to skillful ancient embalming, careful interment of the bodies by priests, the tombs’ stable temperatures, and their extreme dryness, the bodies remained remarkably well preserved.
In September 1976, the deteriorating mummy of Rameses II was sent to Paris for conservation, with a passport describing his occupation as king (deceased). He was infested with Daedalea biennis Fries, a fungal species, and placed in a ventilated display case sterilized with gamma-ray radiation using cobalt-60. He was flown back to Cairo eighteen months later, fumigated but fragile.
In October 1980, President Anwar El-Sadat ordered the curator to lock the room, stating that the country’s monotheistic faith was against the disrespectful public display of the dead. A year later President Sadat was assassinated and Vice President Hosni Mubarak succeeded him and, after another four years, he re-opened the Royal Mummy Room, which displayed eleven kings and queens.
The Egyptian Antiquities Organization of the Ministry of Culture—now the Supreme Council of Antiquities—remained concerned with the fragile body of Rameses II and the possible alteration of genetic information. In collaboration with the Getty Conservation Institute based in California, the Council embarked on a project to prevent the chemical and biological degradation of the entire mummy collection. The project had strict guidelines: the cases should be independent of any mechanical or electrical systems; maintenance should only be required every two years; developing countries should also be able to construct the cases; and the cost should be kept to a minimum. In March 1995, fanfare greeted the addition of ten decay-proof, hermetically-sealed glass caskets. The mummy collection had expanded to include almost all of the original cadavers. So there they lay, insulated from heat, humidity, drifting desert sands, polluted air, fungi, bacteria, insects and camera flashes.
The mummification process consists of cleansing the inner organs; their placement in jars; and the administration of prayers for each extracted organ. Nails were tied to fingers and toes to prevent loss. Servants bathed the empty chests in Nile water before packing them with linen or sawdust. Nostrils and eye sockets were plugged with tampons of material. The surface of the body was anointed with oils, spices, and resin to prevent moisture loss. It was a slow process, up to seventy days, before wrapping commenced: each finger, toe, leg, arm, head, body part, and organ.
Mummy is from an Arabic word, mumiyyah, and it means bitumen, the black color of the skin of unwrapped mummies.
This is an excerpt from my novel, The Sudan Curse (2009) by Martina Nicolls.
Image Copyrighted by Historylink101.com & found at Egyptian Picture Gallery.
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