The unique Mummies of the World exhibition is finally in Budapest

If there is an exhibition you should not miss this year, then this is it – Funzine.hu warns you. The Mummies of the World exhibition has finally opened in Hungary, providing the most extensive collection of mummies on the continent.

We already reported the great news that the exhibition is coming to Budapest. Now we can give you more enticing details. The exhibits are composed in a way they have never been before,

showcasing mummies of the last 4500 years, from Egypt through the early South-American cultures and the European Middle Ages, up until 18^th-century Hungary.

The bodies and different objects of the Mummies of the World exhibition arrived to Budapest owing to the collaboration of researchers, museums, private collections and scientific institutes from Hungary and abroad.

Photo: avilagmumiai.hu

Why is the exhibition special?

“Thanks to the new scientific methods we can look into the bodies so that they can tell their stories” explained anthropologist Ildikó Szikossy, one of the curators. “They tell us how people lived in their times, we can learn about their nutrition, personal tragedies, illnesses and the circumstances of their death.

There are many interesting relics but these bodies tell the most about the people of the past.”

The Mummies of the World exhibition shows us how the bodies were preserved naturally, you can see for example the ice-mummy of a rabbit, or corpses dried by the heat, beside one of the famous “bog bodies”: the body of a woman from the Iron Age that was preserved due to the oxygen deficient environment in the Netherlands.

Some of the most interesting exhibits

There is the great mystery of the “Transylvanian Mummy”, the body of a well-built man. Nature also preserved his remains for 300 years but we do not know much more about him.

Among the artificially mummified bodies, there are corpses from South-America such as the “basket mummies” and many remains from Egypt. These bodies are exhibited with their relics, caskets and tools, which can help us understand how this ancient civilisation thought about death.

Photo: avilagmumiai.hu

Mumab, the so-called “Maryland Mummy” is also part of the exhibition.

It is the body of an American man who offered his own remains so that scientists of our times could attempt to replicate the Egyptian mummification.

For the exhibition, the Vac finds were repatriated to Hungary. The Vac Mummies mean the bodies of a Hungarian family: mother, father and little John. They are assumed to have died because of the tuberculosis in the 1700s, and their bodies were preserved in a crypt, later helping scientists to research the illness.

Information

These are, of course, just some of the interesting exhibits, for more you must go and see it for yourself.

The exhibition came to Hungary from Prague and is open until the end of 2018. If you wish to see something less macabre, make sure to check out the Frida Kahlo art exhibition that even Will Smith adored. But if you would like to travel in time and learn more about the mummies, then click here for ticket information. The exhibition is located in the KOMPLEX, (1061 Budapest, Király utca 26.) and open daily from 9:00 until 20:00.