As detective stories go, the British Museum's (BM) exhibition and 3D film, Mummy: the Inside Story, is less a whodunit and more a who bodged it.
The big secret revealed by virtually unwrapping the mummy of Nesperennub, a Theban priest who lived 2,800 years ago, is that his embalmers accidentally glued a bowl to his head. Cloudy X-ray images taken in the 1960s had shown a mysterious object on top of his head, which curators thought was an accessory for the afterlife.
But now, thanks to CT scanning (computerised tomography) of his mummy at the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgey, the embalmers' shoddiness has been uncovered. Cowboy workmanship, it seems, is as old as the pyramids.
Mummy: the Inside Story, a 20-minute-long 3D film, is a classy production, narrated by Ian McKellen, star of stage and Middle Earth. It is directed by Max Whitby, whose CV includes four BAFTAs for science and history programmes and who used to direct Tomorrow's World. Mummy the movie is attracting full houses even though tickets are £6 for adults, £15 for families.
As you queue on the grand staircase of the Great Court you can try on your cardboard 3D glasses. The souvenir specs have an ancient Egyptian motif, and with them you can get a 10 per cent discount on the colourful book that accompanies the exhibition.
The BM's marketing department shows all the symptoms of Egyptomania: tickets for Mummy are printed on papyrus-style paper and the museum is hung with more advertising banners than an out-of-town Tesco.
Unwrapping mummies was a fashionable event in the 19th century - an invitation by Lord Londesborough to an 'unrolling' in Piccadilly in 1850 is reproduced in the exhibition book. Your visit starts in a darkened antechamber where you are told by the disembodied voice of Ian McKellen that such unwrappings were dramatic but unscientific and highly destructive.
The introduction is designed to heighten the visitors' anticipation of what they are about to witness: a modern unrolling by 'non-invasive, cutting-edge technology'.
Over 1,500 cross-sectional CT scans of the mummy have been reassembled by a 'powerful visual supercomputer into a single 3D "volumetric" database'. In other words, you see inside the mummified priest's coffins, under his wrappings, down his nose, and even up his leg (confirming his gender).
Studying his bones, the museum has corroborated that Nesperennub died when he was in his late 30s, a good age in ancient Egypt, and discovered that he may have suffered from terrible headaches. There are markings inside his skull suggesting that he had a brain tumour.
While there are numerous zooms over and through the mummified body and its coffins, the much-hyped special effects only really impress when hieroglyphs and amulets zoom out at you. But they are fun nevertheless.
The visitors are also treated to a computer-generated model of the priest's workplace, the great temple complex of Karnak, which was so vast that its inner temple makes a medieval cathedral such as Notre Dame seem dinky. During the scenes of Karnak the 12-metre wide curved screen comes into its own. As well as his day job tending the temple of the god Kons at Karnak, Nesperennub was one of the king's fan bearers. But any royal gossip went with the priest to his tomb on the banks of the Nile. This too is reconstructed in the film, and there is a giddy descent down a vertical shaft to his burial chamber, another opportunity for the film makers to use a 3D effect.
Reconstructing ancient faces is always fascinating and in this exhibition completing the priest's face is a cue for a neat bit of historic reconstruction. You see a lookalike actor as Nesperennub superimposed on images of Karnak. When the priest dies you see his body being mummified and the embalmers trying to prize off the bowl that they accidentally resined to his head for eternity. But the visitors are spared the goriest details. Shown before the watershed, Mummy is not Six Feet Under, circa 900 BC.
Once the film ends you are shepherded into a relatively small space not much larger than the introductory antechamber. In three showcases Neperennub's outer and inner coffins are displayed alongside a full-sized image of his corpse.
The style of display is more science centre than traditional BM - bright orange backlit text in a black space - in keeping with the exhibition's high-tech approach to archaeology. Real amulets from other mummies and a replica bowl are displayed on the image of the mummy in their positions on the priest's body.
Having watched the film, the visitors are more interested in Neperennub than they would be if he was just another mummy in the BM's galleries. But this does not hide the fact that the scale of Mummy: the Inside Story is modest. I wondered how many of visitors felt, like me, that the experience had been oversold. After all, British visitors could have seen the mummy unwrapped in their living room, albeit in 2D, as there was television tie in with channel Five.
The BM is keen to stress the pioneering nature of the project. Working with Silicon Graphics Inc, which supplied the software, and a CT scanner courtesy of the NHS, it has used new technology to put one of its, frankly, B-list mummies in the spot light. Mummies seem to lend themselves to this approach .
As early as the 1890s, when the BM's industrious curator, EA Wallis Budge, was acquiring Nesperennub, museums were rushing to get their mummies X-rayed. The exhibition is also a novelty for the BM. Mummy: the Inside Story, has attracted a lot of attention despite its relatively modest budget, thanks to a bit of old fashioned showmanship.
But for a small exhibition in the Great Court's far from great gallery space, Mummy features a rather big shop. It seems to fill a third of the space. On sale are the souvenir mugs and T-shirts that you would expect although the mummy Christmas decorations were a surprise - it was after all August. But the BM is not the first museum to get excited about the commercial potential of mummies.
The 1970s documentary on Egyptomania by Christopher Frayling includes a splendid interview with the colourful director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Thomas Hoving. He recalls being enraged that someone thought of selling Tutankhamun sleeping bags before he did, when the Met bought the blockbusting exhibition to New York.
Javier Pes is the editor of Museum Practice
Project data
Cost: £100,000
Design and lighting: British Museum
Film: Windfall Films and the Red Green and Blue Company
Virtual realisation: Silcon Graphics Inc.
Construction: Fakespace Systems
Seating: Hille Seating
The big secret revealed by virtually unwrapping the mummy of Nesperennub, a Theban priest who lived 2,800 years ago, is that his embalmers accidentally glued a bowl to his head. Cloudy X-ray images taken in the 1960s had shown a mysterious object on top of his head, which curators thought was an accessory for the afterlife.
But now, thanks to CT scanning (computerised tomography) of his mummy at the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgey, the embalmers' shoddiness has been uncovered. Cowboy workmanship, it seems, is as old as the pyramids.
Mummy: the Inside Story, a 20-minute-long 3D film, is a classy production, narrated by Ian McKellen, star of stage and Middle Earth. It is directed by Max Whitby, whose CV includes four BAFTAs for science and history programmes and who used to direct Tomorrow's World. Mummy the movie is attracting full houses even though tickets are £6 for adults, £15 for families.
As you queue on the grand staircase of the Great Court you can try on your cardboard 3D glasses. The souvenir specs have an ancient Egyptian motif, and with them you can get a 10 per cent discount on the colourful book that accompanies the exhibition.
The BM's marketing department shows all the symptoms of Egyptomania: tickets for Mummy are printed on papyrus-style paper and the museum is hung with more advertising banners than an out-of-town Tesco.
Unwrapping mummies was a fashionable event in the 19th century - an invitation by Lord Londesborough to an 'unrolling' in Piccadilly in 1850 is reproduced in the exhibition book. Your visit starts in a darkened antechamber where you are told by the disembodied voice of Ian McKellen that such unwrappings were dramatic but unscientific and highly destructive.
The introduction is designed to heighten the visitors' anticipation of what they are about to witness: a modern unrolling by 'non-invasive, cutting-edge technology'.
Over 1,500 cross-sectional CT scans of the mummy have been reassembled by a 'powerful visual supercomputer into a single 3D "volumetric" database'. In other words, you see inside the mummified priest's coffins, under his wrappings, down his nose, and even up his leg (confirming his gender).
Studying his bones, the museum has corroborated that Nesperennub died when he was in his late 30s, a good age in ancient Egypt, and discovered that he may have suffered from terrible headaches. There are markings inside his skull suggesting that he had a brain tumour.
While there are numerous zooms over and through the mummified body and its coffins, the much-hyped special effects only really impress when hieroglyphs and amulets zoom out at you. But they are fun nevertheless.
The visitors are also treated to a computer-generated model of the priest's workplace, the great temple complex of Karnak, which was so vast that its inner temple makes a medieval cathedral such as Notre Dame seem dinky. During the scenes of Karnak the 12-metre wide curved screen comes into its own. As well as his day job tending the temple of the god Kons at Karnak, Nesperennub was one of the king's fan bearers. But any royal gossip went with the priest to his tomb on the banks of the Nile. This too is reconstructed in the film, and there is a giddy descent down a vertical shaft to his burial chamber, another opportunity for the film makers to use a 3D effect.
Reconstructing ancient faces is always fascinating and in this exhibition completing the priest's face is a cue for a neat bit of historic reconstruction. You see a lookalike actor as Nesperennub superimposed on images of Karnak. When the priest dies you see his body being mummified and the embalmers trying to prize off the bowl that they accidentally resined to his head for eternity. But the visitors are spared the goriest details. Shown before the watershed, Mummy is not Six Feet Under, circa 900 BC.
Once the film ends you are shepherded into a relatively small space not much larger than the introductory antechamber. In three showcases Neperennub's outer and inner coffins are displayed alongside a full-sized image of his corpse.
The style of display is more science centre than traditional BM - bright orange backlit text in a black space - in keeping with the exhibition's high-tech approach to archaeology. Real amulets from other mummies and a replica bowl are displayed on the image of the mummy in their positions on the priest's body.
Having watched the film, the visitors are more interested in Neperennub than they would be if he was just another mummy in the BM's galleries. But this does not hide the fact that the scale of Mummy: the Inside Story is modest. I wondered how many of visitors felt, like me, that the experience had been oversold. After all, British visitors could have seen the mummy unwrapped in their living room, albeit in 2D, as there was television tie in with channel Five.
The BM is keen to stress the pioneering nature of the project. Working with Silicon Graphics Inc, which supplied the software, and a CT scanner courtesy of the NHS, it has used new technology to put one of its, frankly, B-list mummies in the spot light. Mummies seem to lend themselves to this approach .
As early as the 1890s, when the BM's industrious curator, EA Wallis Budge, was acquiring Nesperennub, museums were rushing to get their mummies X-rayed. The exhibition is also a novelty for the BM. Mummy: the Inside Story, has attracted a lot of attention despite its relatively modest budget, thanks to a bit of old fashioned showmanship.
But for a small exhibition in the Great Court's far from great gallery space, Mummy features a rather big shop. It seems to fill a third of the space. On sale are the souvenir mugs and T-shirts that you would expect although the mummy Christmas decorations were a surprise - it was after all August. But the BM is not the first museum to get excited about the commercial potential of mummies.
The 1970s documentary on Egyptomania by Christopher Frayling includes a splendid interview with the colourful director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Thomas Hoving. He recalls being enraged that someone thought of selling Tutankhamun sleeping bags before he did, when the Met bought the blockbusting exhibition to New York.
Javier Pes is the editor of Museum Practice
Project data
Cost: £100,000
Design and lighting: British Museum
Film: Windfall Films and the Red Green and Blue Company
Virtual realisation: Silcon Graphics Inc.
Construction: Fakespace Systems
Seating: Hille Seating