Visitors take advantage
of last chance to see mummy exhibit at Science Center.
Death waits for no one. But some people waited to see death.
“We wanted to come for months and months,” said Rolf Rupprath of Orlando. “Just the way they were preserved for hundreds and thousands of years … and then we drove by yesterday and it said it was the last day. So we had to come.”
The wildly successful “Mummies of the World: The Exhibition” had been at the Orlando Science Center since June, and Sunday marked the last day before — bear with us here — everything wrapped up.
But there were still plenty of people who got in just under the wire for a glimpse of the mummified remains on display – from your standard Egyptian mummies to shrunken heads and adorned skulls. There was even one mummy from Baltimore, though that’s a long story.
The Egyptians in their sarcophagi — what most people think of when they think of “mummies” — including Nes-min, an Egyptian priest who would have been in charge of mummifying others before he wound up wound-up. Though not as well as he would have done himself, apparently, as the mummification was half-finished.
Another Egyptian mummy, Nes-hor, received a more thorough mummifying: The brain was removed through the nose and the internal organs were taken out through a slit cut into the body. Most of the organs were then dried, wrapped in linen and
placed right back in the body.
But there were also mummies from much more recent times — like the Baroness Schenck von Geiern and the Baron von Holz, who were buried unembalmed in a German crypt in the 1600s and somehow ended up mummified, much to the surprise of Napoleon’s troops 200 years later.
And the cool, dry air of a Hungarian crypt allowed hundreds of bodies to be mummified in the 1800s, including the unfortunate Orlovotz family – mom, dad, and little Johannes, a mummified baby who will haunt your dreams forever.
“Look at the baby mummy!” said Valerie Bode of Miami to her 3-year-old daughter, Ellie. “So happy!”
“We didn’t want to miss out on the opportunity to have her learn about mummies,” Valerie Bode said, adding that they had also seen the popular “Bodies” exhibit – bodies posed as if they were performing various activities, like getting in a little running after death.
Lindsay Kelly’s kids, Noah, 4, and Caden, 11, were checking out a display simulating how some of the mummies feel — running their hands over “embalmed skin,” “bog bones” and “bog body skin.”
“It’s strange, and interesting,” said Kelly of the textures. “It’s not what you’d expect …”
Dennis and Glee Hellyar of Winter Park, standing amid the baron and baroness, said that one of the reasons they hadn’t been there earlier was sheer “procrastination” — waiting for a friend to be able to come with them up until he finally backed out.
Heather Smith, meanwhile, “saw the Tutankhamen exhibit when I was little, and I’ve always had a fascination with mummies.”
So her husband did her a solid and dropped her off for the afternoon, where she was free to sketch some of the exhibits, including one of an elaborately decorated Brazilian “trophy head.”
“It looks like a giant shrunken head, so I thought it was interesting,” Smith said.
For Ann Marie Roman of Orlando, meanwhile, her schedule kept her away until Sunday.
“But I finally got here, and it’s beautiful,” Roman said. “Very well done …. It’s exciting to see something like this here (in Orlando). It’s nice that you don’t have to fly up to New York or Philly to see something like this.”
Then there was MUMAB – “Mummy of the University of Maryland at Baltimore” — the first “modern-day mummy” created in the 1990s by Egyptologist Bob Brier and anatomist Ronn Wade.
“It’s the youngest intentional mummy,” said Science Center spokeswoman Jennine Miller. “Ronn Wade actually came and spoke about the process in September, and we definitely saw a different crowd for that — all of his local fans.”
Orlando was the second-to-last stop for the mummies, Miller said – the last stop is Salt Lake City in December – and the exhibit “definitely brought us some new visitors who don’t necessarily come to (the center). A lot of people have the misconception that we’re geared towards children, but there’s a lot of events to engage adults as well.”
It was certainly a long way from how mummies used to be treated, like the Victorian-era “unwrapping parties” where a mummy would be taken to dinner and slowly unwrapped — with amulets sent home as party favors.
As an anonymous writer in the center’s guestbook described it: “It’s sort of creepy …. But it was really interesting.”