This room is always an attractive part of the Museum to the majority
of visitors. Here are arranged illustrative specimens of the arts and
customs of people who lived two thousand years before our era; and the
preserved bodies of men and women who trod the streets of Thebes and
Memphis, partakers of an advanced civilisation, when the inhabitants
of Europe were roaming about uncultivated wastes, in a state of
barbarism. Here are graceful household vessels, compared with the art
of which the willow pattern of the nineteenth century is a barbarism,
and fabrics of which modern Manchester would not be ashamed. Into this
room a vast collection of Egyptian curiosities is crowded; and, with
patience, the visitor may glean from an examination of its contents a
vivid general idea of the arts and social comforts of the ancient
people who built the Pyramids, and were in the height of their
prosperity centuries before the Christian era. The cases are so
divided and sub-divided that it is only by paying particular attention
to the numbers marked upon them that the visitor can hope to follow
our directions with ease. He will see, however, on first entering the
room, that the mummies are placed in cases occupying the central space
of the room; and that huge and gaudily painted coffins, having a
somewhat ghastly effect, are placed perpendicularly here and there on
the top of the wall cases. But the attention of the visitor on
entering this room is usually rivetted at once upon the human remains
of people that flourished more than two thousand years before our era.
The first thought that rises in the mind of the spectator on beholding
these wrecks of the human form, is,--why all this trouble, these
bandages, these scents, and these ornaments? It is as well, therefore,
to explain that the ancient Egyptians believed that there would be a
resurrection of the body hereafter. They believed that these poor
mummies would issue from these waxen bandages, and once more walk and
talk as of old; hence their gigantic excavations at Thebes for secure
tombs; hence the great Pyramids built to preserve the sacred forms of
their Pharaohs. Some of the ancient Egyptians retained the embalmed
bodies of their relations in their houses, enclosed in coffins, upon
which the face of the deceased was faithfully pourtrayed. Some
specimens of these representations are in the room, and some in the
Egyptian saloon below. The mummies of the poorer classes were not so
well preserved as those of the rich; therefore, remains of the plebs
have crumbled to dust, while those of the sacerdotal class, having
been deprived of the intestines, and the brain having been drawn
through the nose, having been filled with myrrh, cassia, &c., soaked
in natron,[7] and then securely bandaged, have remained in a
comparatively sound state to the present time, and may be found in
every museum of any note.