Thursday, December 16, 2010

Milwaukee Public Museum Opens With Human And Animal Mummies Exhibit

The Detmold Child mummy
4504-4457 B.C., Peru (6,420 years old)

Photos by HNG

The mummies will be on display beginning Friday

By H. Nelson Goodson
December 16, 2010

Milwaukee - On Friday, the Milwaukee Public Museum will open its Mummies of the World exhibit to the public. The mummies exhibit includes animal, human and a child from Peru dating back as far as 6,420 years.
The recent exhibition is possible through the discovery of 20 mummies in 2004 within the Reiss-Engelhorn Museums of Mannheim, Germany. The mummies were believed lost until someone found the mummies accidently in a museum basement.
Museum curators says that at least 150 artifacts and real human and animal specimens from South America, Europe, Asia, Oceania and Egypt will be displayed making the current exhibit one of the largest in the midwest to see. Fragments from the Book of Death are included in the display. Egyptians used to save their earnings to generate enough wealth to buy document scrolls known in modern day as the Book of Death (transliterated: rw nw prt m hrw), which the funerary text were believe to guide and asist the dead into the underworld (Duat) and to the everafter life. Without it (document scroll), Egyptians would not be able to find their way to eternal life.
The oldest mummy is the Detmold Child from Peru, dated through radiocarbon to be 4504-4457 B.C. or about 3,000 years before the birth of King Tut, making it the oldest infant mummy in history. The child mummy is on loan by the Lippisches Landesmuseum in Detmold, Germany.
The Mummies of the World exhibit runs from December 17, 2010 through May 30, 2011.

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