Excerpt from AJC:
Recently conserved after almost a century-long hibernation in storage, [a mummy] is the star of and impetus for the museum’s “Life & Death in the Pyramid Age: The Emory Old Kingdom Mummy.” Egyptologist Peter Lacovara conveys the historical, religious and geographical context for the prized artifact through tomb objects from the Carlos collection — many acquired with this show in mind — loans, large-scale photographs and informative texts.
The exhibition designers created a particularly dramatic tableau by transforming a gallery doorway into the entrance to a tomb. The visitor walks through it, just as an ancient Egyptian bringing an offering for the deceased would have done, to reach the offering plate (one of the new Carlos acquisitions), which sits in front of an actual “false door” door of a tomb.
Off to one side, a wooden sculpture — a repository for the tomb-owner’s soul — “watches” the proceedings through a backlit slit in the wall.
The video about the mummy’s conservation, definitely a highlight, recounts the lengths to which a multidisciplinary team went to reassemble and secure the severely deteriorated mummy — a prospect a daunted conservator described as the equivalent of piecing together a bag of crushed potato chips.
In some respects, conservation was uncharted territory. The mummy represents a period in which Egyptians were still experimenting with the process and conventions of mummification — before they arrived, for example, at the stiff prone position to which we are accustomed.
It’s fascinating to see how creatively Carlos conservator Renee Stein and colleague Mimi Leveque solved structural problems inherent in putting a 4,000-year-old Humpty Dumpty back together, and how they made use of discoveries Lacovara reported from the field during the process. (Hint: ears and mittens.)