Presentation Schedule
From Family Tomb to Museum Collection: The Shifting Histories of Three Egyptian Mummies (110323)
Friday, 10 July 2026 15:30
Session: Poster Session 2
Room: Brunei Gallery (Ground Floor)
Presentation Type:Poster Presentation
This paper examines how museums produce knowledge on mummified human remains through the object biographies of three related Egyptian mummies now dispersed across four European museums. The mummies of Dismutenibtes, Padiamenet and Osirmose were excavated, collected and separated by Giovanni Anastasi, the Swedish-Norwegian consul in Alexandria, in the nineteenth century. Today their mummies can be found in Oslo, London, Brussel and Liege. Since entering separate museums has the meaning, value and knowledge produced around the mummies shifted and been shaped by distinct institutional methodologies in cataloguing, conservation, research and exhibition methods over time. Although belonging to the same family and originating from a shared family tomb in ancient Thebes, their subsequent museum histories have followed markedly different trajectories. Their meanings and values have shifted according to different museum methodologies within conservation, research, and exhibition. Across time they have been understood variously as curiosities, scientific and medical specimens, and recently as individuals with focus on ancient identities and constructed person-hoods with the rise of ethcial concerns surroudning the display of human remains. By tracing these diverging yet intertwined object biographies, the paper argues that museums actively participate in the historical construction of knowledge surrounding these mummies. In doing so this paper highlights museums as a historiographical site where this ancient Egyptian family are repeatedly interpreted, recontextualised, and assigned new meanings over time.
Authors:
Eva-Johanna Marie Lafuente Nilsson, University of Oslo, Norway
About the Presenter(s)
Eva-Johanna Marie Lafuente Nilsson is currently a doctoral research fellow at the University of Oslo, Norway.
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