You’ll find one of Sydney’s most impressive museums, The Chau Chak Wing Museum, on the picturesque grounds of the University of Sydney. The purpose-built modern building stands in contrast to the university’s heritage sandstone facades, housing significant collections of objects that document art, science, history and ancient cultures. Among them, the museum is home to Australia’s largest permanent collection of Egyptian antiquities – not be confused with the Australian Museum's current major exhibition, Ramses and the Gold of Pharaohs, which is on loan from Egypt.
The Chau Chak has a holding of more than 5,000 items, including mummified human and animal remains, and more than 300 items are on display at any one time. However, as of this week, visitors to the museum will no longer be able to see some particularly coveted items from the Ancient Egyptian collection in the public display – those items that are actual human body parts.
“For hundreds of years body parts in museum collections have been treated as objects,” said Dr Melanie Pitkin, Senior Curator of the museum’s Nicholson Collection. “We have become so accustomed to seeing them on show that we often forget they once belonged to living people.”
Unwrapped ancient Egyptian mummified body parts will be returned to the Museum’s closely monitored collection store while the museum works to implement better practices with Egyptian communities and authorities. Materials excavated from the coffin of Mer-Neith-it-es, including an endocast (internal cast) of the skull, resin and wax ear, and glazed pottery beads, have also been removed, to accommodate a new display.
Dr Pitkin said the changes come after extensive research into attitudes towards the ethics and display of human remains undertaken with museum visitors, and Egyptian communities locally and abroad. This included a survey of museum goers; a weekend of intensive focus groups with 17 members of the Egyptian-Australian community from Sydney, Melbourne and Adelaide; and an in-depth survey for local Egyptians who have visited the Chau Chak Wing Museum.
Replacing the display of body parts is a selection of Ancient Egyptian funerary faces from coffin lids and masks that covered the deceased – which, according to the religious beliefs, helped to transform them into an eternal being, the underlying principle of mummification. The remains of two mummified bodies (Meruah and Horus), their 3D visualisations generated from CT scans, and CT scan data of another mummified body (Mer-Neith-it-es) also remain on display, along with a painted portrait from the Roman era.
The changes happening at the Chau Chak Wing Museum are in line with a wider shift in attitudes about the ethics of museum collections in recent years, especially when it comes to displaying human remains and cultural artefacts that have been “looted” or stolen. This has largely been spurred on by the work of Sydney journalist and presenter Marc Fennell and his team, particularly the global podcast sensation, Stuff The British Stole. When Marc recently spoke to Time Out Sydney, he said: “Museums and galleries are changing, there’s no question about that, even between when I started and now. There’s been a massive shift, but there's still a long way to go. There's still a lot of stories that don't end up on the wall.”
The Chau Chak is also planning to reframe the language and messaging around human remains. This includes the renaming of ‘The Mummy Room’ in consultation with Egyptian communities for next year.
“The word mummy derives from the Arabic word mūmiya, meaning bitumen, which refers to how a mummified body looked after resins were applied,” said Dr Pitkin. “It’s a colonial term embraced when Egyptomania took hold in Western cultures in the 19th century. ”
“In renaming the room we’d like to focus more on the transformation of the body into an eternal being, which is the whole point of mummification, rather than the body itself. We also encourage visitors to critically reflect on the ethical complexities museums face when caring for human remains.”
The museum has been leading with a considered and modern approach since it opened in 2020, combining university collections that have been 150 years in the making under one roof. Time Out explored the museum with its Deputy Director, archaeologist Paul Donnelly, in 2021. You can read more about that over here.
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