In addition to a name like that of a Welsh village and positions as bombastic as those of Lord of the Audience and Bearer of the Girdle, Penamunnebnesuttawy He wore atrocious teeth, herniated discs and a cardiovascular disease that, it is suspected, is what ended up putting him in the hands of the embalmer, the same one who, once he got to work, decided to leave the brain in its place. Strange thing, yes. Never what will we need in the afterlife.
At his side, the no less distinguished Nesperennub, priest of the temple of Karnak, Beloved of the Gods and Master of the Libations of Khonsu de Benenet, also suffered, like his colleague Penamunnebnesuttawy, atherosclerosis, but what is surprising in his case is not that, but an excessive passion for the amulets that he cultivated until the day of his death. Literally. Scarabs, hearts, statuettes of Tot, eyes of Horus… Nesperennub had almost all of them, and he entrusted himself to them so as not to attend Osiris’ appointment empty or alone.
What nobody expected, neither the researchers of the British Museum What they have spent decades trying to unravel the mysteries of Ancient Egypt, is that all those amulets would appear embedded in the bandages and shrouds of Nesperennub’s mummified body. Stowaways without a ticket to accompany the priest in the bad drink of dealing with Anubis. “New technologies have allowed us to discover things that we had no idea about fifty years ago,” celebrates the Director of International Engagement at the British Museum, Nadja Race. And precisely this, new technologies applied to ancient Egyptian funeral rituals, is what is going ‘Egyptian mummies’ exhibition that brings six mummies back to life and makes them recite their lives in the rooms of Caixaforum Barcelona.
The latter, of course, is pure rhetoric, but where eviscerated, dehydrated and bandaged bodies do not arrive, the computed tomography and the three-dimensional image. Thanks to these techniques, explains the curator of the exhibition and head of the Department of Ancient Egypt and Sudan at the British Museum, Marie Vandenbeusch, it has been possible to virtually ‘unwrap’ Penamunnebnesuttawy and Nesperennub, as well as four other four mummified bodies, and reconstruct their lives after their deaths.
archeology and biology
The exhibition, conceived as a kind of intimate and domestic version of the monumental ‘Pharaoh’ who passed through the same center a few years ago, combines archaeological and biological studies to, based on these six mummies, influence aspects such as funeral rites, healing practices, music or food in the Nile Valley. The remote past , seen through the mummies and their sarcophagi and more than 250 objects Found in graves and deposits. A complete panorama that allows us to know in detail “who the six of the Caixaforum were, how they lived, what they worked for and how they faced death”.
A visitor observes one of the sarcophagi in the exhibition
We already know Penamunnebnesuttawy and Nesperennub, so let’s move on to Ameniryirt, an official from Thebes surrounded by instruments for mummification, adzes and canoptic vessels who, in addition to atherosclerosis, also suffered from soft tissue cancer. A rarity that, highlights the curator, reveals the antiquity of the disease. Along the way, and walking among mummies, papyri of the ‘Book of the Dead’ and funerary stelae share the limelight with digital recreations of the interior of the sarcophagi and what the bandages and linen hide. We also found detailed studies of the types of breads eaten, an apparently minor detail that nonetheless explains the dental problems of some of the mummified bodies. And it is that, in addition to what one would expect to find, the analyzes have revealed the presence of stones, sand and cereal husks in doughs and loaves.
With the fourth mummy, a married woman from Thebes named Takhenemet who was buried with her sistrum, a rattle-like instrument, the exhibition delves into the importance of music in Ancient Egypt, while the fifth and sixth, both unnamed, shed light on childhood and evolution of mummification in Greco-Roman Egypt.
The case of the minor is especially striking, since his body, encased in a tiny sarcophagus and surrounded by spinning tops, balls and even a wheeled horse, has many more layers of fabric than normal. “It is as if they wanted to protect with greater dedication,” says Vandenbeusch, who, he says, “breaks his heart” to have to choose only six mummies out of the more than 120 kept by the British Museum. With those six, however, it is enough to get a fairly complete idea of what the desert swallowed between 800 B.C. C. and 100 AD