I visited the Egyptian collection at the Mediterranean Museum in Stockholm this week. It's one of the places in Stockholm that I had not yet visited so when my oldest was going there with his school, I jumped at the opportunity.
The Museum of Mediterranean and Near Eastern Antiquities has permanent exhibitions on Ancient Rome, Greece and Egypt and temporary exhibitions covering the ancient cultures around the Mediterranean Sea. The museum is located in central Stockholm in what used to be a bank, richly decorated with marble walls and heavy vault doors.
I listened in as the guide took a class of 13 year olds through geography, vases, and hieroglyphs, culminating with a visit to the mummies in the basement. The guide did a great job at engaging his audience and the kids asked and answered many questions.
How did it end up here?
My favourite question was one who wondered how the mummy got here. The immediate answer is that the items in the collection were a gift from the Swedish Royal family when the museum opened. The Royal Family had in turn been gifted the items by their British counterparts.
But the question is of course bigger. Why do we put the remains of dead people who were buried 3500 km away 5000 years ago in a museum in central Stockholm? Here the answer gets complicated. Was it right to remove the objects from their original site? Was it right to bring them out of Egypt? Is it different to remove a vase than the remains of a dead person?
These are hard questions.
The easy way out is to be pragmatic about it. We are where we are. We have a collection of physical artefacts that are preserved and on display for young people to learn about how life was different and how it was the same. For all the 3D visualisations we create, it adds something extra to the experience to have a real physical object in front of you. Like the kids who squirmed when told that they were looking at the actual preserved skin of a dead person.
The young students got a great overview of evolution of early farming, writing, and the role of religion in society.
I got some nice pictures and inspiration for future game designs. I will return another day for the other exhibitions.