BOO HOO, I WANT MY MUMMIFIED PERSON
Museum curators want to stop talking about Egyptian 'mummies'. Is it time we got a grip?
When I was a child I used to enjoy watching a cartoon show called ThunderCats. It was about some heroic aliens who were a sort of cross between humans and big cats - Lion-O, Cheetarah, Panthro, etc etc.
These guys kicked around on a planet called Third Earth, engaged in weekly combat with some nasties known as the Mutants, and tangled with a supernatural undead sorcerer who went by the name of Mumm-Ra.
Mumm-Ra existed in two forms. On his days off he lived as a wizened deathless corpse wrapped in bandages, who skulked around a giant pyramid muttering evilness. However, when business called, he could transform into a gigantic blue supervillain in a loincloth. (Imagine if Liver King mated with a Smurf and you’re about halfway there.)
Perhaps you know about ThunderCats already. It’s possible you’ve even been thinking about Mumm-Ra this week. Because of course, mummies are all up in the historical conversation. It has been reported - and those italics are there for a reason - that curators in several British museums would prefer that we did not use the term ‘mummy’ at all, on the grounds that it is ‘dehumanising’.
According to these newspaper reports, curators at National Museums Scotland, the British Museum and the Great North Museum: Hancock, in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, have ditched the word mummy from their preferred vocabulary, recommending as a blander, less sexy alternative ‘mummified person’ or ‘mummified remains’.
An extract from an eight-month-old blog by one of the curators at the Newcastle museum has been dug out and tacked on to these reports:
Many of us have grown up hearing legends about the “mummy’s curse” and watching movies portraying supernatural monsters. This distorts our interactions with mummified people as they have been seen in popular culture in ways that can undermine their humanity.
And another section from the same blog has been used to concoct headlines implying that this is an argument about colonialism.
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