Mummies of Ancient Egypt. The Art of Immortality

For the first time in the Pushkin Museum im. A. S. Pushkin will host a full-scale exhibition dedicated to the mummies of ancient Egypt. Visitors will be able to see more than 400 exhibits, most of which were previously available only to specialists. The exhibition was the result of a joint research project of the Pushkin Museum im. A. S. Pushkin and the National Research Center "Kurchatov Institute" and, on the one hand, shows the results of extensive scientific work, and on the other hand, invites viewers to reflect on the topic of immortality, based on the ideas of the ancient Egyptians about the afterlife.

In the worldview of the ancient Egyptians, the central place was occupied by belief in an afterlife, in eternal existence beyond the grave. To achieve it, the exact performance of numerous rituals, the correct preservation of the remains and the burial in accordance with religious law and tradition were required.

The exhibition will tell the modern viewer how the ancient inhabitants of the Nile Valley imagined Eternal Being and strove to achieve it, about their beliefs and practices aimed at gaining life beyond the threshold of death.

The exposition will feature mummies of people and animals, sarcophagi, funeral shrouds and masks, Fayum portraits, fragments of tomb reliefs and other monuments of artistic crafts associated with the funeral cult. Conceptually, the exhibition will be divided into three sections: "Death and Magical Transformation", "The Tomb is the House of Eternity", "The Mummies Return: A View from the 21st Century".

The first section — “Death and Magical Transformation” — is dedicated to the mummification process: in addition to the mummies themselves, viewers will see the results of the study of mummies, mummy decor elements (cardboards and their fragments, masks, Fayum portraits), as well as some materials used in mummification. In addition, various papyri of the Book of the Dead, painted burial shrouds, statues associated with the cult of the god Osiris will be presented here.

The second section - "The Tomb - the House of Eternity" - will tell about the ritual of mourning and burial of the ancient Egyptians and will give an idea of the purpose, appearance and structure of the tombs.

The third section - "The Mummies Return: A View from the 21st Century" - is a multimedia zone that includes 3D reconstructions of the appearance of the Egyptians and digital materials reflecting research conducted at the Kurchatov Institute. The results of these studies are shown in detail in the illustrated edition of the exhibition. Thanks to the general sponsor of the Pushkin Museum im. AS Pushkin to VTB Bank, the exhibition received additional multimedia equipment.

Work under the mummy research project lasted from 2017 to 2020: during this time, a CT scan was carried out, followed by an anthropological study of ten whole human mummies and seven animal mummies. The sex, age and probable diseases of individuals were determined, a paleogenetic analysis of several mummies was made, the method of swaddling and the composition of embalming substances were studied, a three-dimensional reconstruction of the skeleton and appearance of one of the mummies was obtained.

During the study, it became clear that the sarcophagi in which the mummies are currently placed did not originally belong to them. In addition, having studied the peculiarities of swaddling and decoration of mummies, the researchers of the Department of the Ancient East came to the conclusion that the collection of the Pushkin Museum also contains rare mummies. A separate study of a small clay coffin with a mummy of a child inside was carried out, which showed that the coffin is a falsification of the 19th century, and the mummy is one of the oldest examples of mummified human remains dating back to the 4th millennium BC.

The Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts is one of the largest museums of foreign art in Russia. The collection contains about 700 thousand works of different eras from ancient Egypt and ancient Greece to the beginning of the 21st century. In the halls of the art of Ancient Egypt, about 600 exhibits are exhibited, representing all periods of the history of the development of the country of the pharaohs, from the 4th millennium BC. until the first centuries of our era. The museum collection contains outstanding works of ancient Egyptian art: relief blocks from the tomb of Treasurer Izi of the Old Kingdom, a fragment of a statue of the king of the Middle Kingdom Amenemhat III, statuettes of the priest Amenhotep and the priestess Rannai, a cosmetic spoon from the period of the New Kingdom and others.

The National Research Center (NRC) "Kurchatov Institute" is one of the leading scientific centers in the world, an interdisciplinary national laboratory. The NRC "Kurchatov Institute" has the scientific, technological and personnel potential necessary for the development of fundamentally new branches of science and technology. Established in 2015 for interdisciplinary research of museum exhibits and archaeological artifacts, the Laboratory of Natural Science Methods in the Humanities (LENMGN) made it possible to conduct gas chromatography and mass spectrometry, electron microscopy and elemental microanalysis, genomic analysis, magnetic resonance imaging and computed tomography, 3D -modeling, etc. Between the Pushkin Museum im. A. S. Pushkin and the National Research Center "Kurchatov Institute" signed a cooperation agreement.

VTB Bank (PJSC)

VTB Bank (PJSC), its subsidiaries and financial organizations (VTB Group) is an international financial group providing a wide range of financial and banking services in Russia, the CIS countries and Western Europe, Asia and Africa.

VTB Bank began cooperation with the Pushkin Museum im. A. S. Pushkin in 2005. During this period, many joint projects were implemented: in particular, the exhibitions “Meeting with Modigliani”, “British Design: From William Morris to the Digital Revolution”, “Cranachs. Between the Renaissance and Mannerism”, “Venice of the Renaissance. Titian. Tintoretto. Veronese. From the collections of Italy and Russia”, “Chaim Soutine. Retrospective" and others. In 2018, VTB Bank became the general sponsor of the Pushkin Museum. A. S. Pushkin; at the same time he supported the large-scale exhibition project Picasso & Khokhlova. In 2019, with his support, the exhibitions “Guests from Naples. Artemisia Gentileschi and contemporaries. From the Museum and Royal Park of Capodimonte and the Pushkin Museum im. A. S. Pushkin” and “Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud and the London School”. In 2020, the bank became the general sponsor of the exhibition “From Dürer to Matisse. Selected drawings from the collection of the Pushkin Museum im. A. S. Pushkin”, and in 2021, with the support of VTB, the exhibition “Bill Viola. Journey of the soul.