Mummies: The Dream of Everlasting Life

South Tyrol Museum of Archaeology, Bolzano, Italy Until 25 October 2009. http://www.iceman.it

The preserved Tyrolean Iceman Ötzi is joined by 70 mummies, many displayed for the first time, in an exhibition that opened this week at the South Tyrol Museum of Archaeology in Bolzano, Italy. Mummies: The Dream of Everlasting Life examines the science and culture of mummification, with diverse examples of humans and animals preserved in various ways and drawn from South America and Asia to ancient Egypt.

Curated together with the Reiss-Engelhorn-Museums in Mannheim, Germany, the collection includes 20 mummies that were discovered in that museum's basement during renovations in 2004. Thought to have been lost, they had been hidden there for protection during the Second World War.

Ötzi the Iceman, the exhibition's host, was found frozen into a glacier in the Ötzal Alps near the Austria–Italy border in 1991. He died there from an arrow wound to the shoulder around 3300 bc, and is thought to have been a hunter, although his identity is unclear. “Since Ötzi cannot leave the museum,” explains Bolzano archaeologist Andreas Putzer, “this is a unique occasion to see these mummies together.”

The rich clothes of this 500-year-old Inca mummy suggest a high social status. Credit: W. ROSENDAHL/BONNER ALTAMERIKA-SAMMLUNG UNIVERSITÄT, BONN

The different stages of mummification in ancient Egypt are revealed in a series of partially preserved bodies. A mummified three-year-old Peruvian child from the fifteenth century represents the first evidence from South America of embalming a human corpse with resin, the same technique that was used in Egypt. An eighteenth-century mummified family found in a Hungarian church and a mummified baron from a cellar in Castle Sommersdorf near Nuremberg, Germany, are more recent European examples. Their bodies were dried using artificial air-conditioning systems. “We want to explode the myth that mummies are only from Egypt,” says curator Wilfried Rosendahl from the Reiss-Engelhorn-Museums.

A range of mummified animals on display include the only known animal mummy found in a bog — a domesticated dog from the sixteenth century, found near Münster in Germany — and naturally preserved examples, including dinosaurs, from varied environments such as deserts, bogs and caves, or under ice or salt.

Related burial offerings and scientific information are shown beside the mummies. Anthropology, genetics, pathology, toxicology and medical studies provide clues about their living conditions, dietary habits and diseases.

Mummification continues to this day as an alternative to burial or cremation. Methods range from those used in ancient Egypt to cryogenic freezing of the brain, with the hope that one day it will be possible to grow a new body from brain cells by means of DNA replication. “Mummies still trigger a deep interest because they represent something between life and death,” says Rosendahl.