Though there weren’t any mummies and none of the objects spontaneously spread to life, on Halloween morning the Boston Museum of Science unpacked three of the 115 artifacts that will be on display in its upcoming international exhibit, ‘Quest for Immortality: Treasures of Ancient Egypt.’
‘We’re oblivious to Halloween,’ said Jan Crocker, manager of traveling exhibitions, when asked about the coincidence. ‘We’ve been working long hours.’
But despite the lack of horror and gore, the newly revealed artifacts were far from dull.
The first object unveiled was the golden funerary mask of Wenudjebauendjed, one of the few surviving examples of the gold masks the Egyptians made for kings and great nobles. Most objects with such valuable amounts of gold were plundered and melted down by bandits who raided tombs for treasure. But gold had more than monetary value to the Egyptians; it represented the sun, imperishability (since it does not tarnish) and the very flesh of the gods.
Next up was the canopic chest of Queen Nedjmet, wife of the high priest Herihor and possibly a sister of legendary Pharaoh Ramses XI. Canopic containers held mummies’ internal organs, which were removed during the embalming process, dried and then buried with the body in case they were needed in the afterlife.
Nedjmet’s chest is made of intricately gilded and painted wood and is topped with a statue of the jackal deity Anubis, god of mummification and embalming.
The final object brought out of its crate was a two-foot-long stone statue called Osiris Resurrecting. The stone figure of Osiris, god of the afterlife, sports a braided beard and a golden headdress of ram’s horns and a sun disk. In addition to being a rare sculpture of Osiris in such a pose, the piece is remarkable for its composition of a little-used stone called gneiss.
Egyptian curators who travel with the exhibition carefully inspected each artifact wearing white gloves after it was removed from its crate.
‘Quest for Immortality: Treasures of Ancient Egypt’ will depict the journey of pharaohs from death to immortality through six areas: Journey to the Afterworld, The New Kingdom, The Royal Tomb, Tombs of Nobles, The Realm of the Gods and The Tomb of Thutmose III.
Objects on display include statues, jewelry, masks, sculptures and painted coffins that range in size from two inches to 12 feet in height. The centerpiece of the exhibition is a meticulously reconstructed, full-scale walk-through reconstruction of Pharaoh Thutmose III’s (1479-1425 BCE) burial chamber.
The exhibit’s roughly 3,000 year old artifacts are on loan from the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, Luxor Museum and the archaeological sites Tanis and Deir el-Bahari while construction is taking place on a new facility to house the Egyptian Museum in Giza. Many of the objects have never been outside Egypt, and some have never been on public display.
The Museum of Science is the exhibit’s sole northeastern host as it travels from the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. on to other cities in the United States and Canada.
‘Mysteries of Egypt,’ an Omnimax film starring Omar Sharif, and a planetarium program called ‘Stars of the Pharaohs’ will complement the exhibit.