Exhibitions

Six-year-old Anna Smith stared into the case that holds "The Child Mummy."

"He couldn't be dead," she said. "He doesn't even look sick."

The baby mummy that's on loan to the Evansville Museum from the St. Louis Science Center has been in town since Tuesday, but the public opening was held Saturday afternoon, complete with cake and Halloween costumes.
Davinn Bacon, 4, plays with an interactive part of the display as Stella Rodenberg, 9, looks at the child mummy on display at the Evansville Museum.

Davinn Bacon, 4, plays with an interactive part of the display as Stella Rodenberg, 9, looks at the child mummy on display at the Evansville Museum.

"By midday, we had more than 100 visitors," said Gena Garrett, 28, science educator at the museum. "People are fascinated with how well-preserved the mummy is. We had some Egyptian items in storage to include a mummified cat that we've added to the exhibit to make it more complete."

The mummy is a boy who died at about 7 months of age. Scientists believe he lived during the period of 40 B.C. to A.D. 130.

Stockton's favorite mummy is back on display, just in time for Halloween.

Iret-net-Hor-irw, a 65-year-resident of The Haggin Museum, begins a run today as the centerpiece for the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco's Very Postmodern: Mummies and Medicine exhibit at Legion of Honor in Lincoln Park.

Since his August departure from his longtime Victory Park home, the mummy - called Irethorrou by his new owners at the Fine Arts Museums - has undergone extensive scanning and a little touch-up restoration for his debut today.

Of course, what is scary to us is not scary in other cultures. The demons and frightening images in so much Asian art represent protective deities whose ferocious aspect is not to threaten us but to drive off evil demons and destructive thoughts that prevent enlightenment.

Mummies are another image from an ancient culture that has come to represent the complete opposite of their original purpose. From Herodotus to Hollywood, mummies have fascinated us. Medieval doctors used mummy wrappings in their medicine (along with other, even more obscure and ineffective ingredients). When Napoleon invaded Egypt in the 18th century, he brought with him a host of scientists who were determined to unlock the secrets of Ancient Egypt, including how mummies were manufactured. Nineteenth century travelers didn't feel that their journey was complete unless they could bring back a mummy (or two or three) for the family castle. In the 1920’s the curse of Tutankhamen became a media sensation. Art from Egypt has influenced artists from Ancient Greece onward.

A 2,500-year-old priest named Irethorrou will be teaching anatomy to all comers in an exhibition beginning Oct. 31. The mummified remains of this onetime inhabitant of a Middle Egyptian city will be on display in his coffin at the Legion of Honor in San Francisco, along with a reconstruction of Irethorrou’s head.

The reconstruction is based on determinations of his bone structure that were part of an intensive series of state-of-the-art scans conducted in August by Stanford University School of Medicine radiologists, processed into a visual format by Stanford information technologists, and interpreted by an Egyptologist with a penchant for mummies from the town of Akhmim, the spot in ancient central Egypt where Irethorrou was found.

A Palo Alto-based software company, Fovia Inc., further wove the radiological data into a three-dimensional “fly-through” movie. Shown on a wall-mounted high-definition monitor in the exhibit gallery, the film will present visitors with visual navigations through the mummy’s anatomy, zooming in to inspect what remains of his internal organ systems and then swooping back out through the wrappings. It’s even possible to see objects, such as small amulets, buried with the mummy and hidden from view since its burial.