Inside The Conservator's Art

A behind-the-scenes look at conserving Egyptian artifacts at the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology http://conservationblog.hearstmuseum.dreamhosters.com/?p=147 { 2009 12 01 }

Conserving crocodiles
Among the objects that were working on are several large Greco-Roman crocodile mummies.

Crocodile mummy (PAHMA 6-20100) with painted mask, textile wrappings and reeds. Huge numbers of animals were mummified in Ptolemaic and Roman Egypt, as the animal cults that had long been a feature of Egyptian religious practice exploded in popularity. Devotees worshipped living animals as embodiments of deities and elaborately mummified the sacred animals upon their deaths. Worshippers also dedicated mummies of a gods or goddesss given species as votive offerings. (This recent National Geographic article gives a great overview of animal mummification in ancient Egypt.) Crocodiles were mummified as a form of worship of Sobek, a deity who shared the primeval, aggressive and powerful nature of the crocodile. Votive mummies were interred in the thousands in large animal cemeteries, including the crocodile cemeteries at Tebtunis and Kom Ombo. We are not certain whether the PAHMA crocodile mummies were votive offerings or whether they were sacred animals, but their large size suggests that they could have been sacred. Where are the wrappings? Mummies and the hunt for papyri PAHMA 5-513, another crocodile mummy, has a very different appearance than the crocodile mummy above because it was unwrapped shortly after excavation.

The back of PAHMA 5-513, unwrapped mummy with adult and baby crocodiles. After Sir Flinders Petries discovery that discarded papyrus sheets with writing on them were sometimes incorporated into cartonnage mummy accoutrements, late 19th and early 20th century papyrologists routinely unwrapped mummies in hopes of recovering classical texts on papyri. Scraps of papyrus recovered from Egyptian mummies are an important source of information about the ancient Mediterranean world, as they can contain diverse texts ranging from legal documents to literary passages by famous authors like Homer, Sappho and Archilochus.

Example of a papyrus fragment containing ancient poetry, Cologne. Image courtesy of Papyrus Project Cologne. Early excavators unwrapped both human and animal mummies in hopes of finding such valuable texts. British papyrologists Grenfell and Hunt, who excavated Tebtunis during the winter of 1899-1900 for the University of California with funding from Phoebe A. Hearst, recovered over 30,000 papyrus text fragments from mummies. Grenfell and Hunts excavations at Tebtunis included a large crocodile cemetery associated with a temple dedicated to Sobek.

Photograph of crocodile mummies excavated at Tebtunis, 1900. Courtesy of the Egypt Exploration Society. Only 31 of the roughly 1,000 crocodile mummies excavated by Grenfell and Hunt yielded papyrus fragments, which are now housed with the rest of the collection at the Bancroft library at UC Berkeley. We assume that 5-513 was also unwrapped in an effort to find papyri. Both the wrapped and the unwrapped PAHMA crocodile mummies require conservation treatment so that they can be safely transported for further study and exhibited. Right now we are learning as much as possible about how the crocodiles were mummified and how their constituent materials have deteriorated, and deciding how best to stabilize them. Stay tuned as we discover more about these mummies, and go about conserving them. Posted by Allison on Tuesday, December 1, 2009, at 10:45 am. Filed under Historical background, Mummies and mummification. Follow any responses to this post with its comments RSS feed. You can post a comment or trackback from your blog.