![]() ![]() In December 1763 John Hadley FRS, a London doctor, borrowed the mummy from the Society on behalf of a group of physicians who planned to dissect it and study the embalming process. However, in 1734 a committee appointed to inspect the state of the museum collection reported that Norfolk’s mummy was falling to pieces, having been stored upright rather than laid flat. Norfolk’s mummy was in poor condition by the 1730s, so in 1733 the Council of the Royal Society arranged for it to be cleaned and housed in a protective case. Sadly, the Repository was not always well cared for, and numerous artefacts were lost or damaged. Profile and face of a male mummy, from a book plate for a late 19th century publication about Pharaonic Egypt (RS MS/827) A number of early Royal Society Fellows were certainly avid antiquaries: John Aubrey and William Stukeley were both well-respected in the field, while Sir Hans Sloane’s enormous collection was bequeathed to the nation upon his death in 1753, becoming the British Museum. The College of Antiquaries had been shut down by King James I in the early seventeenth century, and its successor organisation, the Society of Antiquaries of London, wasn’t established until 1707. The Royal Society might not seem the most obvious place to deposit a mummy, but it’s worth remembering that we were one of the few learned societies with an interest in antiquarian matters at the time. You can probably guess what the main ingredient was… Mummies were also ground up to make medicine, while mummy brown was a popular colour used by Pre-Raphaelite painters. We don’t know where the Duke got the mummy from, though trade in mummified remains from Egypt was common throughout Europe, and specimens often found their way into private hands for display, or were destined to be unwrapped and examined. In length five feet and ½, defended with several linnen Covers, all woven like ordinary Flaxen Cloth’. Nehemiah Grew described it in his 1681 Musaeum Regalis Societatis catalogue as ‘an entire one taken out of the Royal Pyramids. Regular readers of our blog may recall that Henry Howard, 6th Duke of Norfolk, donated an Egyptian mummy to the Society’s museum, or Repository. King Tutankhamun’s golden funerary mask, from Wikipedia (Creative Commons licence) The exhibition inspired me to do a bit of digging through our own archives, to unearth the story of a mummy that was once part of the Royal Society’s museum. It’s an amazing collection of artefacts and objects from the Boy King’s tomb, all created to help him on his journey through the afterlife. I recently visited the excellent Tutankhamun exhibition at the Saatchi Gallery in London. This includes important collections of personal papers donated by twentieth century Fellows, and the modern archives of the Society itself. ![]() Jon Bushell is the Royal Society’s Modern Records Archivist, responsible for managing the Society’s archive collection from 1900 to the present day. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |