The Egyptian Museum of Turin

Thursday, because we expected it to be raining, we thought would be a good day for the Egyptian Museum, one of the top attractions in Turin. It turned out not to be raining, and the place was mobbed with groups of school children, and neither of us had slept well the night before (the beds in this apartment are probably new like everything else, but not very good) but it was still a good choice of activity.

The museum got its start in the early nineteenth century when some Italian archaeologists were among the most active pursuers of knowledge, and of course treasure, relating to ancient Egypt. The Egyptian Museum of Turin is said to be second only to Cairo in the breadth and depth of its Egyptian collection. Some sources put one or more of New York's Metropolitan Museum, London's British Museum, Paris's Louvre, and Berlin's Egyptian Museum and Papyrus Collection in between Cairo and Turin, but it's definitely up there in the top six.

If a person listened to every section and subsection of the recorded information on the acoustiguide that is included with admission, and read all the wall texts, and looked at all the objects in a thoughtful way, they could spend at least an entire day and more likely two. We did not give it that kind of in-depth attention, but we did go into all the rooms, listened to one of the shorter versions of the acoustiguide, and I took a lot of pictures, so we learned some things. One of the exhibits I thought was really interesting was about the food items provided in the tombs for the dead to eat in the afterlife--various kinds of beans, various kinds of breads, mummified meats, cheeses, honey, figs, wine, beer, milk.

Another exhibit I found fascinating was the ancient rock temple of Ellesiya. When the Aswan Dam was being planned in the 1960s, under the leadership of UNESCO, cultural institutions from many parts of the world provided assistance to the Egyptian government in removing and preserving works of cultural significance that would otherwise have been destroyed after the dam was built and Lake Nassar flooded the area. The museum at Turin was one of those helpers, and as a reward for their help, they were given this little temple. Don't ask me how they moved it! The wall texts describe a technique called strappo that I think must resemble the way that frescoes are removed, but that would only be useful for removing and protecting the paintings from the walls, not for removing and transporting the entire rock cave. Anyway, here it is, and visitors can go into it.

Another thing is that the underwear everyone wore was basically the same, kind of like cloth diapers, a large triangle, so everyone's name was on all their underwear to keep it from getting mixed up with other people's at the laundry. You can see a symbol painted or embroidered near the white circle (a button?) in the middle.

Here are some of the pictures I took. The mummies of cats and other pets are interesting, as are the items a woman (e.g. queen) might want to have in the afterlife, such as cosmetics and a headrest/neck pillow, in addition to the usual ornaments (fifth row down, in the middle next to the hippopotamuses).

Also, for those who remember the glorious moment when I spelled "pschent" correctly in the final moments of the Jackson community spelling bee (it is pronounced "skent"), this picture shows the so-called white crown of Upper Egypt. When combined with the red crown of Lower Egypt (which I did not see represented anywhere in the museum, but you could look it up) produces the pschent or double crown, which was worn by the pharaohs after the unification of the two kingdoms around 3000 B.C.E..