Sorry… I know it’s late, the trick or treating is done and everyone has abandoned the Halloween craziness and moved on to drinking from the Christmas firehose.
These come from Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts and this part of the museum is suitably creepy. I kept feeling like an angry person was looking over my shoulder every time I read an inscription/story about each of the people in the section.
I guess I’d be really pissed too if someone removed me from my comfy tomb or grave and placed me in a museum in a country that I wasn’t familiar with.
The most fascinating of the group is the portrait mummies. These are examples of how the general population of Egypt would have treated their dead.
Mummification of the body was only minimal and in most cases, the body was placed in a simple grave with several other people. Rather than keep opening a grave to add people, a family might keep the mummies stored in their house until enough people had died to have a burial.
Not all of the mummies are from Egypt. The husband and wife sarcophagus comes from Italy and the stone protective deities come from Iraq.
