Four mummies housed in the Museum of Fine Art in Budapest, Hungary as well as a collection of artifacts from the first Hungarian archaeological excavation in Egypt. The digs carried out in Sharuna and Gamhud in Central Egypt were initiated and financed by Fülöp Back, a businessman living in Cairo. He donated the greater part of the finds discovered during the expedition of 1907, including seven wall fragments from a Ptolemaic temple and twenty-five coffins.
The Hungarian public was first able to view the Egyptian artifacts in the Ethnographic Repository of the National Museum in 1912, when the collection was exhibited in the Industrial Hall in Budapest’s City Park. In the early twentieth century, Egyptologist Ede Mahler suggested that the Egyptian artifacts of Hungarian public collections be united in one large collection. This only took place years later, in 1934, when some 1,200 Egyptian artifacts were transferred from the National Museum and other public collections to the Museum of Fine Arts. Hungary’s first permanent Egyptian collection, curated by Aladár Dobrovits, debuted in the Museum of Fine Arts five years later, in 1939.
In 2012 The Museum of Fine Arts launched a program aimed at the comprehensive examination of the four mummies preserved in its Egyptian Collection.
Studies[]
Computer tomography, biopsy, radio carbon dating tests, and DNA research were conducted.
- The mummy known as Rer was a female who died between the ages of 20 and 24 in the 3rd to 4th centuries BC, and it was concluded from the rather shattered condition of her skeleton that her death was probably caused by a serious physical trauma.
- The analysis of a second coffin’s iconography and the CT examination of the mummification technique produced the same results, the Hortesnaht mummy and coffin can be linked to the cemetery complexes connected to the town of Ahmim in the 3rd century BC. A CT scan led to a facial reconstruction.
- The Szombathely mummy study allowed researchers not only to establish the age of the mummy 2nd-3rd centuries BC – but also to ascertain that it belongs to a cartonnage coffin with a gold plated face already preserved in the collection. Up until now it had been assumed that the mummy had reached Hungary through Count László Almásy, but according to the most recent research it was purchased by Provost Adolf Kunc in Egypt (1896) and donated by him to the Premonstratensian Secondary School in Szombathely.
- In the case of the so-called unwrapped mummy, the determination of its age on the basis of the carbon isotope test of a bone sample it can be stated that the mummy was prepared in the later Ptolemaic period in 2nd-1st century BC. The chemical tests identified the dark material covering the body as plant resin, which also substantiates its dating.
External Links[]
https://xpatloop.com/channels/2012/01/-mummy-project--in-fine-arts-museum-in-budapest.html