Mystery, science but also reflection. By choosing to devote its new temporary exhibition to mummies, the Toulouse Museum could have fallen victim to the curse of sensationalism. On the contrary, he delivers a journey full of sensitivity with this cabinet of curiosities which inevitably stops in Egypt but also travels all continents in a reflection on the relationship of peoples to death, on their aspiration to eternal life and even on the question ethical to exhibit the dead in museums.
Few bandages and sarcophagi on arrival despite the real mummies that we took the trouble to expose behind one-way windows when they are unwrapped, leaving visitors the choice to light their alcoves or not. Here is a little taste of this amazing, often interactive visit, which allows you to smell the authentic “smell of holiness” – with its scent of roses -, to admire a hamburger mummy or the only leg of a woolly mammoth visible outside of Russia. And to understand that nature is as gifted as the embalmers when it comes to mummification.
Mummies from countries other than Egypt
The talent of the ancient Egyptians and their fascinating rituals to preserve the integrity of the body in anticipation of their new life in the kingdom of the dead have marked the spirits. But other peoples have also resorted, for the same reasons, to mummification. The Chancay civilization of Peru placed its mummies in anthropomorphic textile envelopes, with a false human head, called fardos. In that of a baby, lent by the musée du quai Branly to the museum, the scanner revealed everything necessary for survival to accompany him in the Beyond: corn to eat, cotton seeds to dress and even a charcoal for weaving. Closer to home, the Guanches of the Canary Islands also mummified some of their dead. The famous shrunken heads of the Amazon are also very sophisticated mummies. But they were more of a trophy conferring prestige on whoever wore them as a necklace.
Self-mummifications… by force of the mind
Go into the cell dedicated to the Sokushinbutsu, these Japanese Buddhist monks and mobilize all your willpower to quit smoking will seem like a sinecure to you. They self-mummified themselves alive, with a lot of meditation and asceticism to lose their fat and then eliminate their bodily fluids. With the end, after years of effort, a few swigs of poisonous sap. Their bodies remained intact.
Mummies sometimes trafficked… or “transgender”
The Egyptians also embalmed animals. Wild, like an amazing and unique monitor lizard, or domestic. The mummies of cats, numerous in the necropolises, were linked to the cults of gods like the goddess Bastet. But the sellers of these popular mummies were not always careful. Scanned, some sometimes contain the bones of two or three cats, no doubt out of commercialism.
On the other hand, the mystery remains whole concerning the human mummy found in the collections of the Toulouse museum. The bust, undressed, is unmistakably that of a woman, corpulent to judge by the folds of her tanned skin. But the scan shows “four femur heads”. “It was a real surprise. In fact there are two individuals, besides the feet are placed upside down. It may be a man’s legs,” explains Fabien Laty, in charge of the exhibition. When and why did this “mixing” take place. The riddle is not solved.
All natural mummies
All the art of the embalmers resides in techniques allowing to empty the bodies of all that they have of “corruptible” to keep away coprophagous insects, bacteria and fungi. But sometimes nature does the work. Especially because of the cold. It allows you to see in Toulouse, an impressive leg of a woolly mammoth preserved in the Siberian permafrost (or permafrost) or the images of the body of a shaman from Yakutia, her hands still sewn into her clothes so that she does not take revenge on the living beyond death.
Desiccation is another natural method of mummification that operates in the same way on a prehistoric elephant fetus as on a hamburger left for ten years in an airtight and very dry cupboard. Hydrocarbons, salt or even peat, in Ireland or Scotland, are also good mummification agents. Witness, the man from Tollund, found mummified in 1950 in Danish peat. Skin tanned by oxygen deprivation, he looks bronze. The rope around his neck shows that he did not take the plunge alone, without scientists agreeing that he was a punished criminal or a sacrificial victim destined for ward off a calamity.
Surprising “accidental” mummies
A greenish-skinned hand with turquoise bones protruding from it. This astonishing “piece” was discovered in 1650 near Auxerre. It is probably the hand of a Gallo-Roman remains buried with a bronze obol in the palm of the hand to ensure its passage to the other world. The copper is oxidized playing an antiseptic role and preventing the putrefaction of the famous “green hand”.