Abstract
The Bologna mummy project (BOmp) is the result of an institutional collaboration between the Archaeological Museum and Eurac Research, Institute for Mummy Studies of Bolzano, Italy. The project was launched in 2019, following the international conference Human Remains, held in Turin in the same year (30th of September - 1st of October). Three Egyptian mummies housed in Bologna museum’s storerooms inside wooden and metal crates, since the late 1970s, were considered an interesting case study by the researchers of the Institute for Mummy Studies. After the opening of these crates containing two subadult and one adult mummies, it was decided to start the project with the study, conservation treatment and the exhibition of the female mummy with a rare painted shroud (1st-2nd century AD) and the mummy of a male child with three tunics (13th century AD) at the NOI Techpark on the occasion of the 10th World Congress on Mummy Studies | WMC 2022, Bolzano, Italy 05 – 09 September 2022. The matter of exhibiting the Egyptian mummies is the subject of still unresolved debate. The need for respect and care in displaying human remains, laid down in the code of ethics for museums (ICOM), is often countered by media overexposure or by abandoning said relics to storage due to the emotional difficulties of interaction or ideological rejection that such issues present. This project tried to overcome these contradictions by placing the dignity of the individual and therefore of the exhibition of human remains as central to this topic. Through anthropological and paleopathological study as well as the analysis and the conservation treatment, light has been shed on the lives of these two ancient Egyptians, returning their lost identity and revealing a history that deserves to be known.