Meet the Mummies at Luxembourg's MNHA museum

People will be able to see world's largest exhibition of mummies in Luxembourg when it opens at the Musée national d'histoire et d'art from June 12.

Visitors will be able to view mummies and artefacts not only from Egypt, but from all continents around the world as the exhibition demonstrates that the practice, thought to give the dead eternal life, was widely used.

The fascinating exhibition includes animals, preserved by accident in nature, as well as tattooed Maori heads from New Zealand and the preserved bodies of regular people who were mummified in a small community in Hungary.

The exhibition takes visitors on a trip through time, right up to present-day preservation techniques such as cryogenics and the plastination method trademarked by Gunther von Hagens. It includes a plastinated body preserved using the latter's technique.

“Mummies – The dream of everlasting life” was conceived by the Reiss-Engelhorn Museums in Mannheim where it ran from September 2007 to May 2008.

It is complemented and in fact grew out of an initial proposal by a student to host an exhibition of mummy-related artefacts which were donated to the museum by Luxembourgers who collected Egypt artefacts.

This part of the exhibition, called “From the banks of the Nile to Luxembourg”, was put together by Egyptologist Dr Heidi Köpp-Junk of the University Trier, with Luxembourger Manon Schutz, Egyptologist from Oxford University, and MNHA archaeologist Dr Franziska Dövener, who searched the museum's stores and were delighted to find a genuine treasure.

“Franziska kept finding another piece and another piece. After we stopped searching she wrote me another email with 'ugly vase' in the title,” explained Dr Köpp-Junk. “I nearly had a heart-attack when I saw what it was. It was so rare. There are some, really only a few, in museums, but they are mostly broken.”

The 'ugly vase' from the email referred to a terracotta vase which was given to Luxembourg as a gift by the Republic of Egypt in 1972. It is thought to be around 5,000 years old and was buried with a person of considerable social standing. “I actually thought it was a fake, some kind of tourist souvenir. I was completely unaware it was Egyptian,” said Dr Dövener.

Because of the nature of the exhibition's content, which includes preserved human bodies, it comes with a recommended age minimum for over 12s only.

The exhibition opens to the public at the MNHA on June 12 and can be visited up until January 10, 2016. To find out more, visit www.mnha.lu

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