Who wants to live forever?

This afternoon, I spent some quality time with a gentleman by the name of Irethorrou. He’s a 2500-year-old mummy who belongs to the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco; he’s been on loan to another museum for the last 65 years, but is now back in town as the centerpiece of a new exhibition about how science is giving us new insights into mummies — literally.

Now, I’m an antiquities whore. Drop me into a museum with anything from the Middle Ages on back and I’m happy as the proverbial clam. (Not to harsh on the Renaissance, mind you.) I can sit and contemplate Roman ruins or Anglo-Saxon metalwork for quite a while. So the idea of getting to hang out with a mummy is inherently appealing in and of itself. But then I saw this video about how FAMSF sent Mr. Irethorrou down to Stanford for a trip through a couple of cutting-edge CT scanners to see what’s going on under all that linen, and — well, if I were a cartoon character, my eyeballs would have been going BOI-OI-OING.

See for yourself:

Anyway, I couldn’t resist. So I hopped on the bus and headed over to the Legion of Honor, where he’s resting peacefully in a glass case in the middle of a room. On the wall above him is projected a loop of 3-D images from the scans. Around him are more display cases containing a couple of canopic jars, some burial amulets, an imposing outer coffin, and other funerary artifacts. Most astonishing and wonderful are the two plaster models of skulls, made from scans of Irethorrou and another mummy known to be his father — and forensic reconstructions of their faces.

Intellectually, I knew that mummy was a human being. But emotionally, it hit me as I looked at that face: this was a person. He was alive. He had a family, he had a job as a temple priest, and when he died, he was buried with great ceremony and reverence. And it all happened 2500 years ago, so long ago that it’s hard to imagine, so very long ago that had he not been buried in a coffin with his biography carved upon it, his name and his very existence would have been so completely forgotten that it would have been as if he had never existed. And yet there he was, lying in the center of an artfully lit room, the lid of his cedar sarcophagus propped open to reveal his well-wrapped shape. His name was written on signs on the display case, on the walls, on the website that led me to the exhibit. People were speaking it, as if he had been alive just yesterday.

The Egyptians believed they didn’t really die as long as someone still existed to say their names. How amazed and delighted would Irethorrou be, if only he knew that his belief in immortality turned out to be true?

Filed under Uncategorized | Comment (1)