A07_P01

Dating the Egyptian mummies curated at the University of Tartu Art Museum collections

Oras E¹,  Tõrv M¹, Rannamäe E¹, Anderson J²

¹University of Tartu, Tartu, Estonia, ²University of Tartu Museum, Tartu, Estonia

Two ancient child mummies accompanied by a bird and a dog mummy are exhibited at the University of Tartu Art Museum, Estonia. According to museum records the mummies were brought to Estonia from Egypt by a young Baltic-German scholar and voyager Otto Friedrich von Richter in the early 19th century. Yet, their exact provenance and date was unknown. An interdisciplinary team of experts was summoned to study these unique heritage objects using modern analytical methods, including radiocarbon dating. To establish the age of these objects and their temporal relation to each other, the total of eight samples were AMS dated: four from human and four from animal mummies. The AMS dates and further modelling allowed identifying the chronological sequence of the two boy mummies showing that they were not contemporaneous. The animal mummies displayed as accompanying burial goods at the exhibition turned out to be earlier than the human specimens. Hence, we could conclude that there is no contemporaneous connection between the animal and human mummies. Furthermore, our multiple sampling approach enabled us to detect some considerable dating discrepancies between different sample types from the same object. Our study highlights the fruitfulness of combining thorough scientific expertise and multi-analytical research methods when it comes to disentangling curated heritage objects with intricate secondary history. We also exemplify the relevance of multi-proxy and multi-sample approaches for analysing complex heritage items, allowing to display a more truthful picture of the past for the research communities as well as the wider public.