Animal Mummy Catalog

WORK BEGINS....

The Team

A day's work begins with the selection and removal of yet-unstudied mummies from the shelves of the Animal Mummy Room. The process is supervised by senior museum staff and great care is taken when handling the fragile mummies.

Before a mummy is taken down the hall to the X-Ray laboratory its labels and acquisition numbers are carefully checked and recorded.

Dr. Ikram carries a mummy to the X-Ray laboratory, accompanied by two museum guards.

CATALOGING
Once a mummy reaches the lab, we check the Museum records and try to discover when and where the mummy was found, who collected it, and any other information which may have been recorded about it. This is not always easy.

The only publications of the Cairo collection are La Faune Momifiée de l’Ancienne Egypte, written by L. Lortet and C. Gaillard (Lyons: 1905-09), and the volume of the museum’s Catalogue Général : La Faune Momifiée de l’Antique Egypte, by C. Gaillard and G. Daressy (Cairo: 1905). These works are catalogues listing many of the animal mummies present in the museum at that time--nearly 90 years ago. The listing of subsequent finds of animal mummies were scattered throughout the museum’s Catalogue Général volumes or, more often, listed in the Journal d’Entrée.

An important goal of the current project will be to update these records, cataloguing the entire collection and identifying the species represented, their manner of death, preservation, and any other details which may be gathered without damaging the mummy by unwrapping it.

Dr. Ikram and Assistant look up each mummy in the old catalogs.

See how we examine the mummies!