An afternoon spent on Egyptology.

Ever since we read about mummies, my almost six year old son bombarded me with questions. Some were relatively easy - Where is Egypt? and Can we go to Egypt?. Others were philosophical - What happens after death? and What do mummies do in their after-life?. The colorful inscriptions on the mummy cases in the book raised yet another plethora of questions, ranging from What do all these inscriptions mean? and Why do they have to write it down?. The tomb robbers were even more intriguing - Why do they not keep mummies of the tomb robbers? Of course, the associated ethical issues were hard to interpret for the youngster.

Well - there is only so much I can do to even partially answer these questions.

The family headed to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY to spend an afternoon with the mummies and learn about the Egyptian civilization. While I vaguely remember reading about it in high school history texts, the truth is that Egyptology has intrigued me, too. I had never ventured to learn more, though [other than visits to local museums and observing some of the artifacts].

The MET, NY on a warm summer day.

We are generally, however, not too fond of visiting museums. Travel to the city, maneuvering the traffic on 5th Avenue, long walks inside the museum all contribute to the unwillingness of spending part of the day there. Only this time, there was no respite.

I will not be able to do justice to the innumerable Egyptian artifacts stored in the museum by describing them in this blog. They are displayed chronologically over 39+ rooms (including study rooms). Nonetheless, some exhibits caught the eye.

Papyrus in honor of goddess Hathor found at her shrine in Deir el-Bahari.

Royal funerary procession 

Remnants from the tombs.

Mummy cases. The Egyptians carved the faces of the dead on the case containing the mummy.

The temple of Dendur was impressive. The government of Egypt gifted it to the MET in 1956 and it had to be dismantled and removed from its original location to avoid Lake Nasser from submerging it due to construction of the Aswan High Dam. The task was accomplished with the help from UNESCO.

The iconic room in the MET and details of the hieroglyphs on the walls of the temple at Dendur.

My son decided some study of hieroglyphs would help. So he asked Now do you understand what is written there? Well, Sigh. How do you explain to a six year old, that the task of computational linguistics is much harder than just examining artifacts? 

Back at home, we poured over publications of the MET which explained the calligraphy. Hours spent trying to interpret them were not frustrating. Here is what we came up with!

Many of these are not described in the publication from the MET. So we invented some of those! My son felt the second hieroglyph was a pyramid [and had to do with burial] while my interpretation was a ship (or boat) with a sail. We both could be wrong. The horned viper was misleading, too. The young man preferred calling it a snail, probably because of the horn-like structures. The semi-circular disks could be baskets, but the hieroglyph typically used for representing them seemed to have handles on them. The ones we were reading did not have them. Most importantly, we did not understand whether they were telling a story or just depicted some objects that were being kept in the tomb.

Want to help us? We would love to hear from you.

We learnt also, that reading papyrus electronically is not as easy as one might expect. The letters are faded. The material fragmented. What a pity that these ancient manuscripts, after being recovered from the pyramids and having survived the tomb robbers now lie in the museum, without being interpreted! 

The Ancient Lives project is a recent venture of papyrologists from Oxford and the Egypt exploration society which is using crowd sourcing to scan and interpret (if possible) Egyptian hieroglyphs. For all those with young kids (elementary and middle school?) interested in Egyptian hieroglyphs - here's an excellent way to spend those long hours away from school!