Mummies, gold, and an obsessive belief in the afterlife – these concepts are all central to our image of ancient Egypt. But how important were they to the Egyptians, and how long did they survive after the last of the pharaohs? A new exhibition, Golden Mummies of Egypt, uses 108 objects to explore expectations of life after death during the relatively little-known Graeco-Roman Period – when Egypt was ruled first by a Greek royal family, ending with Cleopatra VII, and then by Roman emperors (between 300 BC and AD 300).
Wealthy members of this multicultural society made elaborate preparations for the afterlife, combining Egyptian, Greek, and Roman ideals of eternal beauty. Manchester Museum, part of the University of Manchester in the United Kingdom, houses one of the finest collections of this material outside Cairo. However, our responses to these objects, excavated at a time of British rule of Egypt in the 1880s-1910s, may reveal more about ourselves than about the people who made and used them.
Cosmopolitan culture
The exhibition opens on the theme of ‘Life in a Multicultural Society’. Egypt was always in contact with neighbouring cultures – it was never as isolated as it is often portrayed. Plentiful evidence survives to show that pharaonic Egypt traded with Nubia and the Mediterranean world for centuries, with many non-Egyptians coming to live in Egypt. But relations between peoples were not always peaceful and there were sometimes violent power struggles. During the Graeco-Roman Period, some of these events were recorded in papyrus documents.
