From the field

Posted on May 21, 2013 by mollygleeson

Those of you familiar with the Penn Museum know that we have a lot of ongoing research projects, not all of which are based here at the museum. Since the museum was founded, it has supported and initiated archaeological excavations around the world, and this work continues today.

In fact, we have a team out in the field right now – Egyptian Section Curator Joe Wegner recently headed back to the field with a small team of graduate students to continue his work excavating in Abydos at the mortuary complex of Pharaoh Senwosret III.

Excavations underway in Abydos

Excavation of a tomb in progress

Abydos is located 300 miles south of Cairo and is the cult site of Osiris, king of the afterlife and god of the netherworld. It was a place of pilgrimage and considered sacred throughout Egypt’s 3000 year history. The Penn Museum excavations there are focused on the classical phase of the Osiris cult during the Middle Kingdom (Dynasties 11-13, ca. 1050-1650 BCE) and has concentrated on three principal areas: (1) the subterranean tomb of pharaoh Senwosret III; (2) the mortuary temple and associated structures dedicated to the cult of Senwosret III; and (3) the urban remains of the Middle Kingdom town at South Abydos.

Senwosret III built the first hidden royal tomb there, abandoning the pyramid form and setting the stage for the later hidden tombs in the Valley of the Kings.

During the last field season, Joe’s team completed the construction of a cover building over the entrance to the tomb of Senwosret III. There are double iron doors to the left side, which lead down iron stairs set above the ancient mud-brick stairs down into the tomb.

The new tomb covering over the entrance to the tomb of Senwosret III (this photo was taken before the covering was plastered and painted to blend into the surrounding desert).

The new covering over the entrance to the tomb of Senwosret III (this photo was taken before it was plastered and painted to blend into the surrounding desert).

So far this season the team has been busy. One project is the continued excavation of newly-discovered tombs – one of which can be seen in the image below. In the photo, you can see the sloping passage which ends in a blocked doorway. It is evident that the tomb robbers who originally emptied this structure entered through the vault in the center of the image. To the right of the image is where the next chamber lies, through another door and down, and more excavation is required to enter this area of the tomb.

One interesting feature of this tomb is that it seems that whoever made the bricks signed their work by impressing two fingers into the top of the wet mud before the brick dried (seen in the image below). Only one, seen in the center of image, has a single dot.

The team is also searching for fragments of artifacts which may help to indicate the date of this, and other tombs. I will continue to provide updates as they make new discoveries!

Special thanks to Kevin Cahail for sharing information and photos from the field.

Conserving a child mummy

Posted on May 15, 2013 by mollygleeson

A couple weeks ago, I introduced you to our child mummy Tanwa, and now I’m happy to report that I’ve completed her conservation treatment.

Tanwa before conservation treatment

Tanwa has been in our collection since 1898; she was collected through the American Exploration Society, an organization founded by Sarah Yorke Stevenson, the museum’s first curator of the Egyptian section.

Tanwa was exhibited in the museum early on, but she has not been on display for a long time. When she came up to the Artifact Lab, we could see that she was generally in good condition, expect for the fact that some of the narrow bandages wrapped around her body, especially those around her feet, were fragile, torn, and partially detached. Many of the strips on the underside of her body were also damaged – although these aren’t usually visible since Tanwa is always lying on her back, they are at risk of detaching with any movement or handling.

Details of damaged linen around the feet (left) and on Tanwa's back (right)

Details of damaged linen around Tanwa’s feet (left) and on her back (right)

After fully documenting Tanwa’s condition, I first removed excess dust and grime from the surface of her wrappings using a soft-bristled brush and a HEPA-filtered vacuum. Cleaning the exterior surface significantly brightened the linen, and I think at this point Tanwa was already looking much better.

Tanwa had a few straight pins stuck into her wrappings in areas, apparently as a measure to temporarily secure some of the fragile linen. I removed all of these pins and adhered the linen in place as necessary with small amounts of methyl cellulose adhesive.

A pin stuck into the bandages on Tanwa’s head (left, indicated by red arrow) was removed and the linen was secured to prevent further loss (right, after treatment)

I then proceeded to repair the linen around her feet and in all other places where the linen was fragile and at risk of detaching or becoming further damaged. All repairs were carried out using similar materials and methods to those I used to repair our falcon mummy. Distorted linen was relaxed and reshaped by humidification with either a damp blotter and Gore-tex sandwich, or using the Preservation Pencil. Detached linen was tacked down using a 6% solution of methyl cellulose adhesive, and fragile areas of linen were backed/supporting using Japanese tissue paper toned with acrylic paints.

Backing a fragile area of linen with toned Japanese tissue paper – the blue clamp is holding everything in place while the adhesive dries

Here are some after treatment details to compare to the before treatment shots seen in the second image on this post:

After treatment details of the linen around Tanwa’s feet (left) and on her back (right)

All of Tanwa’s linen wrappings are now fully stabilized and she is ready to be exhibited for the first time in decades!

An overall view of Tanwa, after treatment

Ancient Egypt is all around us

Posted on May 10, 2013 by mollygleeson

Talk about job perks – earlier this week a group of us from the Egyptian section and the Conservation department took a little field trip to downtown Philadelphia to visit the old Wanamaker building (first department store in Philadelphia, now a Macy’s) and the Masonic Temple. These two buildings may not immediately make you think of Egypt or mummies, however, if you have been keeping up with the blog you’ll know that one of our mummies was donated to us by John Wanamaker, founder of Wanamaker’s Department Store. You can read more about that in a previous post by following this link.

But the Egypt connection we were exploring on this trip is the fact that both the old Wanamaker’s building and the Masonic Temple have Egyptian architectural elements. The Egyptian room at the Masonic Temple is something that more people may be familiar with.

A shot from inside the Egyptian Room at the Masonic Temple.

The Egyptian Room is an incredible, ornately decorated meeting space in the Temple. It was completed in 1889 (apparently the interiors took over 35 years to finish, and you can really appreciate this when you’re standing inside those rooms-it’s impossible to take everything in during 1 visit). The room is flanked by 12 huge columns and both the columns and the walls are intricately painted and ornamented to depict scenes similar to those found the walls of ancient Egyptian tombs and temples.

A detail of one of the columns depicting the face of Hathor, goddess of love and motherhood.

Nothing in that room was left undecorated, including the ceiling, which it is painted blue and has a solar disk placed on the east end, representing Aten, the sun. Emanating from the disk are rays tipped with little hands each holding an ankh (the symbol of life).

A detail of the sun disk on the ceiling. Note that the intersections of the ceiling crossbeams have ancient mason-marks – these are some of the only non-Egyptian motifs in the room!

Our curator Dr. Jen Wegner has spent some time in this room AND translated all of the hieroglyphs, so she can attest to the fact that it is all very authentic. It is really quite a wonderful space, and the best part is that the Temple offers tours to the public and virtual tours on their website (although as I said, these photos really don’t represent the rich colors and details very well – you should really visit in person if you can).

Much less accessible to the public, and virtually forgotten by many at this point, is the Egyptian Hall in the old Wanamaker’s Building. I learned about the Egyptian Hall from Rick Seifert, who visited the Artifact Lab recently and we immediately made a connection. Rick is the Historian of the Friends of the Wanamaker Organ and when he found out that our mummy PUM I came to us from John Wanamaker, we exchanged information and he extended this special invitation for us to see what’s left of the Egyptian Hall. Built in 1910, unfortunately only remnants of this room remain-much of it has been dismantled and built into/over since the store changed hands in the 1990s.

Before entering the Hall, signs of it are visible – here we see Hathor again, adorning the top of a column just outside:

Then Rick led us into the Hall, essentially at the mezzanine level – the lower level is sealed off with a drop ceiling and any elements that may be remaining below are obscured. But what we could see gave us an idea of what the Hall may have once looked like:

It is possible to see the tops of the columns which surround the room. The details were more recently repainted, but you get a sense of what the colors may have been.

It is possible to see the tops of the columns which surround the room. The columns were recently repainted, but you get a sense of what the colors may have been.

There are also some gorgeous details in the ceilings:

The ceilings are decorated with winged sun disks and empty cartouches. The original glass set into the ceilings is now gone.

And in the railings:

It is unfortunate that so much of the Hall has been dismantled – and so recently! To get a sense of it’s former glory, there are some nice images in this old postcard and this photograph from the 1920s.

So just in case you think that we might get enough of this stuff at the Penn Museum – it’s impossible. We were eating this up! Special thanks to Rick Seifert and to John at the Masonic Temple for these opportunities to explore ancient Egypt right here in Philadelphia.

An introduction to our child mummy Tanwa

Posted on May 3, 2013 by mollygleeson

In my recent post about the Philadelphia Science Festival, I put in a little teaser photograph of one of our child mummies currently in the lab:

Now, all of our mummies are special, but this child mummy has several qualities that make her particularly endearing. One of the things that we really love is that her name is written on her wrappings, near her feet.

Her name is actually written in both Greek and Demotic – Demotic is the language/script that developed in later periods in Egypt (and is one of the languages inscribed on the Rosetta Stone, along with Greek and hieroglyphic Egyptian). In Greek, this inscription reads: “Tanous (daughter of) Hermodorus”. In Demotic her name reads as “Tanwa”.

So, based on this inscription, we know that she dates to the Ptolemaic Period, and that she is a girl. According to our Egyptologists, what is interesting about the names is that they give a good indication of the multi-cultural nature of this time period. Not only in the fact that 2 languages are represented, but that the girl’s name incorporates the name of an Egyptian goddess, Iwnyt, while her father’s name includes the name of a Greek god, Hermes.

Tanwa has been CT-scanned, which has confirmed the fact that she is a girl, and was likely right around the age of 5 when she died.

Here is a still from the CT scan showing a detail of Tanus' skull. Based on her teeth it has been estimated that she was right around 5 years old when she died.

Here is a still from the CT scan showing a detail of Tanwa’s skull. Based on her teeth it has been estimated that she was about 5 years old when she died. That pin you can see near the top of her skull is modern and not actually in her skull-it was used to secure the outermost layers of linen in that area.

One of my favorite things that CT scanning has shown is that she is wearing 2 bracelets on her left wrist. We are guessing that these might be gold.

Two bangle bracelets on the left wrist show up clearly on the CT scan.

She also has a small metal ball included in her wrappings just over her right tibia. Exactly what this is and why it was placed there is a bit of a mystery.

A detail shot of the metal ball near her right tibia.

There is a lot more we can learn from these CT scans, which I will describe in a future post.

Fortunately, Tanwa is in fairly good condition; one of the main issues that we need to address here in the conservation lab is that many of the narrow linen bands wrapped around her body are fragile, torn and partially detaching. I am currently more than halfway through the conservation treatment, and I will provide a thorough report on what we are doing to stabilize her wrappings next. Stay tuned!

Reimagining an ancient Egyptian material

Posted on April 30, 2013 by mollygleeson

Have you checked out our In the News section of this blog? Periodically, we try to update this page with some interesting articles related to our Egyptian collection, stories about projects and discoveries in Egypt, and even our own lab highlighted in the press.

One of the more recent stories that we’ve posted is about a new discovery related to Egyptian blue, one of the world’s first synthetic pigments. The ancient Egyptians made it by heating together copper, silica (sand), lime (calcium oxide) and an alkali such as natron (sodium sesquicarbonate) and it is found on objects from as early as the 4th Dynasty through to the Roman Period. We see this pigment on artifacts here in the lab, including Tawahibre’s coffin (and for more details read our blogpost on how we know this.)

A detail of Tawahibre’s coffin. Based on analysis, this pigment has been determined to be Egyptian blue.

One thing that has been discovered about Egyptian blue is that it has luminescent properties-this luminescence cannot be seen in normal light conditions, but can be detected using infrared light. Using an infrared light source, it is possible to not only positively identify Egyptian blue using a completely non-invasive technique, but it is also possible to discover very small traces of Egyptian blue pigment on surfaces of objects. The British Museum provides a great overview of this phenomenon on their website. It is our hope that we might be able to try this technique to examine some of the artifacts in our collection.

A painted wood uraeus on display in our Upper Egypt gallery. The paint has not been analyzed, but based on appearance the blue is most likely Egyptian blue. Examination with an IR light source could confirm this.

Furthermore, it is now understood that this luminescence is produced by the nanostructure of the pigment – scientists have discovered that the calcium copper silicate in Egyptian blue can be broken into nanosheets, which produce infrared radiation similar to beams that communicate between TVs and remote controls and car door locks. It is now being envisioned that these nanosheets could be used for future near-infrared-based medical imaging techniques and security ink formulations!! Talk about a new life for such an ancient material.

You can read and hear more about this by following this link to our In the News section of this blog. Have you read or heard about something recently that you think we should share on our blog? Leave a comment here and we’ll try to incorporate these suggestions whenever possible.

The Philadelphia Science Festival & National Preservation Week

Posted on April 24, 2013 by mollygleeson

You may look at the photos above and wonder, what are these women doing, and what are they wearing? We answer these sorts of questions every day in the Artifact Lab, but tonight, we won’t be the only ones talking about conservation here in the museum. The Philadelphia Science Festival is currently underway, and this evening, from 5:00- 8:00pm, we are hosting one of the festival’s Signature Events: Long Live Our Treasures: The Science of Conservation and Preservation. Not only will all of our museum’s conservators be available in the Artifact Lab, but we’ll be joined by conservation and preservation professionals from 17 different organizations, including The Barnes Foundation, the Conservation Center for Art & Historic Artifacts, the Franklin Institute, the University of Delaware, and the Free Library of Philadelphia, just to name a few.

What can you expect to see at this event? Essentially, the third floor of the museum will be taken over by booths from each of our partnering organizations. At each station, conservators and researchers will be demonstrating and discussing the preservation of cultural heritage, including photographs, films and home movies, books, paintings, herbarium sheets…oh, and mummies of course!

Curious about this mummy? Visit the Artifact Lab to find out more!!

Curious about this mummy and what we’re doing to preserve it? Visit the Artifact Lab to find out more!!

There will also be many hands-on activities, which everyone has been working hard to prepare.

Artifact Lab intern Melissa Miller prepping demo artifacts for the Science Festival. She is making them “dirty” so Science Festival attendees can try their hand at cleaning them.

Long Live Our Treasures is essentially an opportunity to learn from the experts about how science and art are combined in the unique field of conservation, and to find out what you can do to care for some of your most treasured possessions. In addition, there will be several presentations throughout the evening – for a full schedule follow this link.

This week is also National Preservation Week. If you’re in the Philly area, and you’re at all interested in museum conservation, our event this evening is the perfect way to celebrate, to connect with conservation experts and enthusiasts in our community, and to learn more about the important collections in the Philadelphia area and what is being done to preserve them. We’ll look forward to seeing you!

It’s hard work, but with lots of rewards

Posted on April 18, 2013 by mollygleeson

As I’ve said before on this blog, one of my favorite parts of my job is meeting our visitors on a daily basis. This kind of interaction is really rewarding for me, and I hope that the feeling is mutual for those who do get a chance to stop by the Artifact Lab during open window sessions. So you can imagine how pleased I was to find this in my mailbox yesterday:

As soon as I saw this, I knew exactly who it was from. Last week I was visited by three brothers, Sean, Aidan, and Quinn – their Granddad brought them to the museum for a day, and after doing his homework, specifically came up to the Artifact Lab for our 11:15 open window session. They had lots of questions for me, and we talked for awhile about our animal mummies. I explained to them that we don’t need to unwrap these mummies to know what’s inside – x-rays show us that this rather nondescript mummy -

- is definitely an ibis, indicated by the characteristic long curved beak which is clearly visible in x-radiographs taken from 2 different angles:

The ibis' beak, indicated here with red arrows, is seen in x-radiographs taken from two different angles.

The ibis’ beak is indicated here with red arrows

To illustrate this in the lab, we printed out one of these x-ray images along with a little drawing of an ibis, and we keep it next to the mummy for comparison. As soon as the youngest brother, Quinn, saw the picture, he quipped, “I wish I could color that!”. So I immediately handed it over to him and asked him if, when he was done coloring, he could share a photo of it with me to post on the blog. Well, he sure didn’t waste any time – not only did he send me his drawing (signed and everything):

but the brothers also included a very sweet, and beautifully illustrated thank you note.

What wonderful artists, and very thoughtful boys. Answering questions can be hard! But with visitors like this, it doesn’t feel like hard work-it’s just fun. Thank YOU Aidan, Sean, Quinn, and Granddad Dan for visiting me in the Artifact Lab and being the highlight of my day!

Tawahibre all tied up

Posted on April 13, 2013 by mollygleeson

When I wrote about the fantastic image we retrieved from our Archives a couple weeks ago showing our Mummy Gallery in 1935, I promised to provide an update on the treatment progress on Tawahibre’s coffin.

Well, why don’t I start with this:

A view of Tawahibre’s coffin from above

While you may not be sure what you’re looking at here, this looks like progress, doesn’t it? I’ll tell you what you are seeing – the coffin is tied in several places with cotton twill tape, holding small pieces of white Volara foam and blueboard (acid-free, lignin-free corrugated board) in place against the coffin surface.

A detail of the Volara foam and blueboard held in place with cotton twill tape

The purpose of this system, other than looking kind of intriguing, is to place select pressure in areas on the coffin (whenever I say this I always think of the useful book The Gentle Art of Applied Pressure-the title speaks for itself). As I have described previously, the coffin is pretty distorted in areas, due to the fact that many of the individual wood elements have separated and moved apart and that the plaster has separated from the wood substrate. We are trying to realign these pieces as much as possible using humidification with a Preservation Pencil, which allows us to direct a small stream of warm humidified air in select areas, which helps the plaster and wood relax a bit and encourages movement. Once we get an area to move sufficiently, we then apply pressure to the area to hold everything in place.

Here Nina is directing a stream of humidified air with the Preservation Pencil and I am applying pressure with my hands.

We’re also continuing to consolidate the painted surface and readhere loose pieces of plaster and wood.

We don't usually work in teams, but yesterday we had a little group humidification and consolidation party!

This treatment has been a team effort, and yesterday we had a little group humidification and consolidation party!

While we’re making progress and becoming pretty comfortable with the coffin and the treatment, there are still some scary areas to deal with. This is an area that I’ll be tackling next:

A detail of a badly damaged area on the coffin, showing significant cracking and flaking and detached and displaced fragments

Wish us luck as we continue this work!

Salvaging PUM I’s chest wrappings

Posted on April 6, 2013 by mollygleeson

This week, I started to work on the treatment of our mummy PUM I‘s linen wrappings. Poor PUM I – not only is his body quite deteriorated and in multiple pieces, but his linen wrappings are also fragmentary and very fragile. Some of linen in the worst condition are the pieces that once covered his chest, which were cut off during the 1972 autopsy.

This rectangular section of textiles was cut away as a single unit during the 1972 autopsy.

In addition to the mechanical damage caused by the autopsy, the linen has suffered from insect damage and it is significantly stained and embrittled in areas, likely due in part to deterioration of the human remains they were once in contact with.

Removing the wrappings (left) and the chest wrappings after removal (right)

While this linen is in poor condition, it can be moved as a single unit, so we removed it for treatment. The goal of the current treatment is to keep the linen layers in this section together; to prevent them from slipping out of alignment and to prevent the linen from continuing to tear and deteriorate even more.

After vacuuming the linen thoroughly, I got to work relaxing distorted areas and realigning tears.

Local humidification of the linen in progress, using damp blotter and Gore-Tex

To realign tears, I bridged these areas from behind with small pieces of Japanese tissue paper, adhered in place with methylcellulose adhesive. The methylcellulose works well because it sets very quickly with only a small amount of pressure from my finger or a spatula.

One side of the wrappings before (left) and after (right) humidification and tear repair

The other side of the chest wrappings before (left) and after (right) tear repair

This is only the beginning of the treatment on PUM I’s wrappings, but I think they are already looking better!

From the Archives

Posted on April 3, 2013 by mollygleeson

The Penn Museum Archives is an incredible resource for us here at the museum.

A view into the Penn Museum Archives

When we begin working on objects in the conservation lab, we carry out preliminary research, which often includes searching for related materials in the Archives. Among the materials we may be interested in are archaeological field notes, letters between curators and archaeologists or collectors about the acquisition of specific artifacts, and old photographs.

Recently, Senior Archivist Alex Pezzati scanned some images for me, including this one, a shot of the Egyptian “Mummy Gallery” in 1935.

I was excited to see some of the artifacts we’re working on in the Artifact Lab right now in this photo. Can you pick some of them out? In the image below I’ve circled some of them in red.

The objects circled in red above are either being worked on in the Artifact lab or are on display in our accompanying exhibit

These old exhibition photographs can be extremely valuable to conservators. Not only does this particular image tell us that certain artifacts were definitely on display, and when (which may not be recorded elsewhere), but it also shows us how they were displayed. In some cases, seeing the way that artifacts were previously displayed may help to explain damage, such as excessive fading on one side or adhesive residues left behind by an old mount. We can often make good guesses about this type of damage, but it’s always nice to have some proof!

What particularly excited me about this photograph is that it shows the coffin of Tawahibre in the gallery. We are currently working on this coffin in the lab, but it is still too fragile to separate the lid from the base to allow for examination of both pieces individually.

The coffin of Tawahibre in the Artifact Lab.

Just recently, Curator Dr. Jen Wegner was up in the lab and we were discussing the coffin and some of my observations, and she wondered out loud if the back had any text written on it. I had wondered the same thing myself but I knew that until we carried out further work, we wouldn’t be able to know.

BUT, since this 1935 photograph shows both the lid and the base of the coffin on display, we don’t have to wait any longer!

The lid and the base of Tawahibre’s coffin, side by side in the Mummy Gallery in 1935.

As you can see in the above image, there is writing on the back! Now only if we could just hasten the conservation treatment so we can examine it for ourselves…

Another thing that is useful about this image is that is shows that much of the damage we’re seeing on the coffin today was present in 1935. This includes both major structural damage and extensive paint loss in areas. It is likely that the coffin came into our collection with this damage, which is somehow reassuring to me. I will also note this in my documentation.

Tawahibre’s coffin in 1935 (left) and today (right). Much of the major damage we see today had already occurred by 1935. To highlight this, I’ve circled some of the damaged areas in red in both images.

We continue to plug away on the treatment of the coffin and we are hoping to soon reach the point where we can separate the lid. I will provide an update shortly about some of the more recent work we have been carrying out on this artifact!