Mummy’s eventful afterlife

Munster / DPA

This mummy has probably had a more eventful afterlife than anything in the three-decade lifespan of the Egyptian man who died and was embalmed and wound in bandages 2,700 years ago.
Somewhere along the way the body lost its head, and it may have attended high-school parties in the role of a spook.
Apart from lacking anything above the neck, CT scans show an almost complete skeleton with hardly any signs of arthrosis.
“He was a man aged around 30, who led a life easy on his joints,” says Angelika Lohwasser, professor of egyptology who headed the presentation at the university archaeology museum of Muenster in Germany where he is now on show.
In order to preserve his body and help his soul into the afterlife, he was mummified like many of his contemporaries: eviscerated, embalmed and covered in linen strips making him into a stiff package.
On his journey from Egypt to Munster via a secondary school in Germany’s Ruhr region, he suffered various indignities, as proven by the fact that his coffin is 250 years older than him.
“Perhaps traders put mummy and coffin together in order to get more money for the whole ensemble,” says Lohwasser.
In the 19th century the trade in mummies was flourishing. Colonial archaeologists exported them from Egypt to Europe and North America, practically flooding the market with them in order to keep financing their work, she explains.
For a while, she thought that it was because of the trade that the mummy’s head went missing. It was common practice for body
parts to be broken off and sold separately, she explains.
But, she says, restoration workers found skull fragments in the coffin and she now believes that the head may have fallen apart when curious researchers tried it unwrap it.

It’s not clear how the mummy ended up at the Konrad Ziegler Secondary School in the town of Muelheim.
“Perhaps it was a gift for a teaching collection,” says Lohwasser. In 1978 the school offered the mummy and its coffin on permanent loan to the university.
Because of its poor condition, it was consigned into storage just a couple of years later, well wrapped up.
Nothing happened until an academic research project, “Religion and Politics” at the University of Munster, raised 15,000 euros (15,900 dollars) for its restoration.
Renowned mummy restorer Jens Klocke led the painstaking work.
He found a number of things in the coffin – including chicken bones, a bread crust, a cigar butt and a damson stone – which
suggest the mummy had a social life in recent decades.
“We don’t know if the pupils were playing practical jokes or if the mummy was a guest at a school party or something. It’s just guesswork,” says Lohwasser.
The laboriously restored dried body is the star turn at a recently opened special exhibition on death and mummification.
The Muenster Mummy has got its head back, in a manner of speaking. There are cases documented in ancient Egypt of mummies having parts replaced so that their souls can find peace.
So the Munster Mummy has also had a head remodelled and bandaged up to go with it.
“After all we can’t show a mummy without a head,” says Lohwasser.