Piece by piece, we are approaching the main objective of the “Gods and Mortals of Ancient Egypt” Project, the creation of an innovative exhibition that will highlight one of the most beloved collections in the MNIT patrimony – the Collection of Egyptian Pieces. We will start presenting the most important of the 49 artifacts in the collection, as they are ready for presentation and have passed the conservation and restoration stage.

So, from the #ZMEAonline series, we present #episodul1 : The Mummified Crocodile.

The Egyptians considered the crocodile to be the image of the Sobek god, so the giant reptile was considered a sacred animal and was worshiped like the god it represented, and after death it was carefully mummified. The slaughtered crocodiles were either caught or raised in captivity, in special farms, where they even had hatching areas. Such arrangements have been found in Egypt, especially in the area of sacred animal necropolises.

The crocodile baby from the Egyptian collection of MNIT has become part of the museum’s patrimony as a donation from the Hungarian historian Orbán Balázs. The piece is quite well preserved, with slight degradation of the mummified body and the textile strips with which it was wrapped. The scan of the crocodile’s mummy with a computer tomograph performed at the University of Agricultural Sciences and Veterinary Medicine Cluj-Napoca shows that the skeleton of the reptile is complete, only with slight movements of some vertebrae. At the same time, specialized analyzes, especially those performed with the help of a video microscope, showed that the textile strips used in the mummification process are of the cloth-fabric type, made of linen thread, twisted in an S shape, only 0.4 mm thin.

Following the evaluation prior to the restoration process, different types of degradation were found, due to deposits of dust and dirt of unknown nature on the entire surface, dehydration, flotation, thinning, flax detachment, fragility, deformation / folding of the fabric-cloth, white punctate deposits of unknown nature on the animal’s abdomen.

The curative conservation-restoration activities aim at carrying out minimal interventions on the cultural good, according to the principle of primum non nocere (first of all, not to harm), the aim being to stop the already visible degradations of the object and to restore its integrity. Thus, cleaning treatments were performed with a surgical vacuum cleaner and extremely fine brushing. Cold distilled water vapor cleaning treatments were also performed for rehydration and unfolding, followed by repositioning of the strips of textile strips. Where possible, floating textiles were repositioned.

The crocodile is now ready to take its place in the exhibition that you will have the opportunity to visit next year at MNIT, a top exhibition that will highlight one of the most important collections of Egyptian pieces in the country.

RO-Culture program https://www.ro-cultura.ro/

Project Management Unit – PMU https://www.umpcultura.ro/