Mummies and a Monkey

I made it to the Fascinating Mummies exhibition in the National Museum of Scotland today. Sadly there was a strict No Photography rule in the exhibition itself but instead I captured a banner outside. The exhibition has many items on loan from the Rijksmuseum van Oudheden (or National Museum of Antiquities) in Leiden, the Netherlands. I first visited this museum while staying with my maternal grandmother (who lived in Leiden), then paid a visit during a school trip and I was also there several times as a student. What struck me most today was just how exhibitions have changed. Then (back in the dark ages!) there were simply many items on show, and you wandered past them, reading the often very boring descriptions. Nowadays exhibitions are very much interactive, with big description boards, videos and in this case also x-rays and 3D representations. The exhibition was also beautifully stage-managed. I was very much struck by various quotations (from Egyptian Book of the Dead) up on the wall such as: "May he grant that I see the sun disc and behold the moon unceasingly every day, may my soul go forth to travel to every place which it desires" and also "To speak a dead man's name is to make him live...".

They resonated with my liking of gravestones and in many ways that's what I have subconsciously been trying to do by picturing so many graveyards on this blog.

I loved all the patterns and hieroglyphics on the mummies themselves as well as their caskets and my only issue was that the catalogue gives no close-ups nor are there many cards available to buy. But I made a great many notes in the catalogue, just to remind me.

Finally I did need a blip for today and as the mummies were off limits I settled for a close-up of the Millennium clock which towers over the hall of the museum, reaching up towards the top floor. It chimes once an hour and from the Balcony cafe I had a prime seat to enjoy this spectacle.