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mummy,” recounted Horus’s improbable backstory alongside
a campy illustration resembling a still from a low-budget
horror film.
The truth is decidedly less dramatic, but more comforting:
After the O! Osiris exhibit, Horus was moved to a new home in a
high-security, climate-controlled room, where he has remained
ever since. Access is strictly controlled, with trained staff
conducting routine checks a few times a week to monitor storage
conditions. He has been removed for study or display only a
handful of times since: for medical imaging in 1996 and 2016,
and for public display in Enterprise Square in 2015. According
to a radiology webinar available from the Ontario Association
of Medical Radiation Sciences, the most recent set of scans in
2016 saw Horus attended to by a museum employee who was
quite protective of him and made sure he was handled with the
utmost care.
So, what to do with Horus now? At the moment
our priest’s future is complicated by the fact that, in Alberta,
protocols governing the ethical treatment and study of human
remains are focused primarily on consultation with Indigenous
communities, many of whom — both in Canada and abroad
— have fought for decades to stop their own ancestors from
becoming museum attractions.
The situation is a bit different in Horus’s homeland, where
many contemporary Egyptians take pride in exhibitions of
mummified persons. In 2021, President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi held
a “Pharaoh’s Golden Parade,” in which the mummies of 22 New
Kingdom kings and queens received a glittering military escort
from the ageing Egyptian Museum to the newly opened Nation-
al Museum of Egyptian Civilization. Others find such displays
offensive, including former president Anwar Sadat, who famously
closed the Royal Mummy Room in 1980, arguing that exhibition
of human remains was distasteful and sacrilegious.
Should Horus be returned to Egypt? Egyptian authorities are
reportedly aware of his existence (which seems to have come
to their attention following Dr. Lovell’s 2018 article), but they
have not yet requested his repatriation. (Conciatori says her
predecessor returned the Egyptian consulate’s phone call and
left a voicemail, but nothing has happened since.)
The global movement toward repatriation of culturally
sensitive artifacts — not to mention human remains — is
generally recognized as desirable (the Egyptians would like
their Rosetta Stone back, thank you very much). Still, it doesn’t
always line up with the reality on the ground. “It’s not my job to
judge,” says Conciatori. “My job is to make sure we are ethically
caring for our collections, including this person, because it
is a person.”
Conciatori is on the board of directors for the Canadian
chapter of the International Council of Museums and was
involved in helping revise the council’s code of ethics. “The field
is in constant evolution and adapting to changing mentalities,”
she says. Still, she admits that she doesn’t always have a clear an-
swer when asked why members of the public cannot see Horus.
There’s a fundamental tension between knowledge creation and
human dignity in the museum world. On one hand, studies of
mummified persons have yielded valuable knowledge. On the
other hand, says Conciatori, we must remember that Horus never
“Why Did She Come?” (excerpt)
Poem by Iman Mersal (translated from Arabic by Khaled Mattawa)
Why did she come to the New World, this mummy,
this subject of spectacle
sleeping in her full ornament of gray gauze,
an imaginary life in a museum display case?
I think mummification is contrary to immortality
because a preserved corpse will never be a part of a rose.
The mummy did not choose migration, but those who
waited in long lines
at consulates and built houses in other countries
still dream of returning when they become corpses.
—You have to take us there!
This is what they instruct in wills they hang around
their children’s necks
as if death is an unfinished identity
that matures only in the family burial plot.
Iman Mersal is a renowned Egyptian–Canadian poet and
professor of Arabic literature at the University of Alberta.
gave consent to anyone to dig him up and cart him around
Alberta. “We have to ask: ‘what is the goal?’” Over the last
few decades Horus has been hauled up and down fire escapes,
diagnosed and un-diagnosed with cancer, loaded in and out of
minivans in parkades, poked and prodded with every kind of
(non-invasive) medical imaging imaginable. But to what end —
and to whose benefit?
And what of the curse? A mummy is, first and foremost,
a dead human being — and that triggers complicated, often
unsettling emotions. On one hand, we feel a natural urge to
protect and respect the dead and their humanity (“mummy
brown” paint notwithstanding). On the other, there’s a deep
and entirely understandable fascination with the dead. That
tension is uncomfortable. To rationalize our objectification of
a dead body and absolve our own guilt, we must dehumanize
and sometimes even villainize it. From this angle, the “cursed
mummy” trope is textbook psychological projection: I feel
uneasy about my attraction to this dead guy. But I’m not the
bad person here – he is!
For her part, Conciatori doesn’t think much of the curse, but
she acknowledges that untimely coincidences can give some
people pause.
When Jocelyn Hendrickson finally started looking into the
mummy lore, she was pleasantly surprised by what she found.
The university had indeed been handed an eerie, disturbing
touchstone that had been maimed and mistreated. But there
was no conspiracy. In fact, there have been — and continue to
be — many people over the years who have thought deeply about
Horus, how he should be cared for, and whether he should be
subject to scientific inquiry or ethical display.
For now, at least, Conciatori thinks it’s time to give him his
rest. “Yes, we have a mummy,” she says. “But it’s not an object.
It’s a human being deserving of dignity.” ED.
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