There's a new series starting on the British Museum's YouTube channel.
No, this is it. This is the series. I'm making it.
It's a conservation series and we're going to follow
the conservation of this ancient Egyptian cartonnage.
It's a new acquisition for the Museum, and it only came into the collection in 2018.
But as you can see it needs a little bit of attention.
Which is why we have this conservation project led by Verena Kotonsky.
My name is Verena Kotonsky I'm conservator for organic artifacts here at the British Museum.
In recent years I've been focusing more and more on the conservation of ancient Egyptian artifacts.
And in the coming months I will be conserving this cartonnage which consists of two halves. We've got
the base which is currently upside down and the lid, which then would have encased the mummy.
Due to its bad condition it's a real challenge for me as a conservator but at the same time it's also
really exciting because due to its bad condition we can actually see how the cartonnage has been
constructed. And that will hopefully contribute to the research in this field. But also again for me
as a conservator I might be able to try out new conservation techniques and materials.
I know it sounded like she said month but what she meant to say was months because this is a long project as
you can imagine. I actually started documenting Varena working on this in October 2019. Now I
know that seems like a very long time ago and no one can really remember that far back -----
Here at the British Museum we try and cast our minds back every now and again.
But as I said
It's a new acquisition and we're also going to hear from the curator John Taylor
who's the curator for ancient Egypt at the British Museum. He knows quite a lot about Egypt. He knows
quite a lot about burial practices in ancient Egypt. We're going to be hearing more from him
And we'll be following the story of this conservation project.
I think that's probably enough of an introduction from me shall we hear from the experts?
It's quite unusual for something like a cartonnage mummy case to become a vailable for the Museum to acquire.
And often when this kind of object does appear it has very little history. We may know
nothing about whereabouts it was found or what was found with it. But in the case of
the Sherborne Castle Cartonnage the situation is rather different. And this is one of the
things that makes it so important because we do know exactly where this cartonnage was discovered,
who found it, and what were the circumstances of the excavation. Because of this we can use
the cartonnage in a much more constructive way to interpret something about burial practices
on the Southern tip of Egypt in the Ptolemaic period.
We know about the cartonnage's history
because it was excavated as part of a large-scale salvage operation which began in 1907
at the southern boundary of Egypt near Aswan. At that time the Egyptian government were planning
to raise the height of the Aswan dam. This would mean flooding a number of archaeological sites
in the immediate area, so they planned a large rescue operation. Many sites were excavated.
The excavations at the beginning were carried out by a very important archaeologist
George Reisner. An American scholar based at Harvard. And he was the person who directed the
excavations where the cartonnage was discovered. Now Reisner is a very significant figure in
Egyptology because he was one of the the great pioneers of scientific method and for the time
his reports, his archaeological reports are some of the best that were issued. So straight away
this gives an advantage to what we know about the cartonnage. In 1907 Reisner began excavating
And one particular place that he focused on was the island of El Heisa
which is just to the south of Aswan and close to the the site of the temples of Philae.
And on this island Reisner and his team excavated a cemetery which contained a number of tombs.
17 of them were completely untouched totally undisturbed. And in his report he describes
what was found in each of these tombs with maps and plans and photographs of the objects as well.
Now one of these tombs contained two burials. It was a rock-cut chamber blocked up with stones and
inside Reisner found two stone sarcophagi quite plain without inscriptions. Inside the sarcophagi
were mummies contained in cartonnage casing. And one of these was the one which was later acquired
by Sherborne castle. Fortunately we have a detailed record of the opening of the tomb
and photographs of the cartonnage in situ and then the cartonnage opened up with the lid taken off
so that you can see the mummy in its linen wrappings.
Now where the mummy is today we don't know. But the cartonnage case was sent to Cairo after the
excavations were completed and there several years later it was bought by Frederick Wingfield Digby,
a member of the family who owned Sherborne castle. And fortunately we have a letter from
Mr Wingfield Digby in which he explains that he is about to acquire from the Cairo museum
a coffin which we know now to be the cartonnage in question. And this is
rather important because this explains to us how the object came to leave Egypt.
At the time, this was during the first world war, the Egyptian museum in Cairo
had a sale room and in the sale room objects that were regarded as superfluous to the collection
were offered for sale. Some of them were bought by representatives of other museums but some
items could be bought by private individuals as well. And it was an indication of the sheer volume
of archaeological material that was coming out of excavations at that period. So it
appears that Frederick Wingfield Digby must have acquired the cartonnage in this way, as a kind of
item surplus to requirements by the Egyptian museum. Since that time it's been at Sherborne
castle in Dorset until last year when it was acquired by the British Museum.
Wonderful isn't it?
I hope you can join us next time to see how we go about turning this object into this.
If you haven't already subscribed do so now, we'll notify you when the next one's ready.