Manitoba Museum mummy keeps visitors rapt

The Manitoba Museum has opened its latest exhibit, WRAPPED: The Mummy of Pesed, just in time for Halloween. The show features the mummy in her coffin as well as over 60 ancient Egyptian antiquities, CT scans and forensic facial reconstructions of Egyptian mummies.

While the Mummy of Pesed may be nearly 2300 years old, researchers still know an awful lot about her and other mummies from ancient Egypt.

SCENE asked Anya Moodie-Foster, museum programs director at The Manitoba Museum, to share five fun facts about mummies with us. And while she couldn't confirm whether the mummy brought a curse, she was happy to oblige with some other facts we might not know:

A mummy smells very nice.
One of the things we have in the exhibit is a little interactive called Five Scents of the Mummies, so you can smell the various things that the mummy is preserved with, things like cinnamon, frankincense, and other oils and spices that make the mummy smell nice.

In a funeral, after the mummy has been prepared, they would go through the "opening of the mouth" ceremony. This is where a priest would symbolically open the eyes, the nose, the ears and the mouth of the mummy. This made it so that the mummies could symbolically see, breath, hear and speak again if they wanted to.

In some periods it was actually common to paint eyes on the side of a coffin and position the mummy so that it was facing that way so it could see out.

Several things make up "you" as a person in Egyptian thinking.
When a mummy is put in the tomb, what's with it is called its ka, which is like its life force, and looks after the body in the tomb and continues to receive food offerings. So the family might come and bring food or drink to the grave and this is to help sustain the ka,  which is with the mummy in the tomb. 

People say prayers, and written on the side of Pesed's coffin in our exhibition is the basic prayer for the dead, which is 'may you have bread and beer and cattle and fowl,' basically 'may you continue to have the things you need to sustain you while you're in the tomb and the afterlife.'

When you mummify someone you remove their organs, but you always leave in the heart.
They would basically remove the lungs, the liver, the stomach and the intestines, and in certain time periods they would mummify them separately and place them in special jars that would be buried with them. The other thing is that they didn't seem to think the brain was necessary for the afterlife, so basically they would remove the brain through the nose.

It takes up to 300 metres or more of linen to wrap a mummy.
Wrapping is a very complicated process that could take up to two weeks. It's all part of a religious experience, so they would say prayers and do other things while they were wrapping. It was an incredibly intricate process, especially in later periods.

The Manitoba Museum presents WRAPPED: The Mummy of Pesed​ until April 6, 2014. On weekend afternoons Anya Moodie-Foster gives demonstrations of the mummification process, including how to remove a brain through the nose.

As well, the Planetarium has a companion show called Stars of the Pharaohs explaining the sky during the time of ancient Egypt. If you're heading down Main Street, you can't miss it because there is an enormous artistic sarcophagus installed in the courtyard.