What shook us in the British Museum were the collections relating to “Egyptian death and the afterlife: mummies’’. Yep, the mummies. Dead people shrouded in cloth, some in open sarcophagi. The skulls, mandible, ribs and other body parts belonging to ancient people of the Nile valley were also on display.
The museum is among many institutions globally that still display human remains, although advances in museological ethics and approaches to how collections of the dead are curated (not to mention repatriation policies) mean the number is dwindling.
As a kid, I remember the mummies on display in the Melbourne Museum. I was ghoulishly fascinated – though not shocked. Today I find displays of dead people shocking – and not at all fascinating – even if museums still advance the purported scientific benefits of holding such specimens.
Times have changed, even if some globally revered organisations haven’t.
It’s beyond time for public collecting institutions, which claim to operate ethically and respectfully, to remove all human remains, including Egyptian mummies, from public display and, where possible, to repatriate them.
It is never OK to have them on public view as objects of entertainment.
