The Mummy Exhibit

Yesterday morning we went to the Leonardo museum and visited the mummy exhibit. Josh has been itching to go since he saw the first billboard advertising it and it was so fascinating. We saw Egyptian mummies, of course, but also bog mummies and European mummies (accidentally aerated in drafty castle dungeons and discovered centuries later) and South American mummies. We saw Peruvian shrunken heads (made with real human heads minus the skulls and brains--amazing!) and a couple of accidentally mummified corpses from 1760 Hungary. I was fascinated with every bit of the exhibit, especially the Hungarian mummies. It was a 38-year-old woman and her 41-year-old husband and her one-year-old son (she had three children who all died under 2 years of age). They died from tuberculosis along with the other 261 other bodies found in Hungary. The mummies were dressed in replicas of the clothing they were wearing when buried and I found myself more fascinated by those clothes than by the bodies--the flowered pattern of the woman's skirt, the drawstring neckline of her blouse, the man's curved, hob-nailed boots. Everything just seemed like it would take amazing craftsmanship and I was astonished to find that people really dressed that well in such an inconvenient time period. The leatherwork on the boots astounded me. There weren't any machines to make them (nothing to boast about, anyway). Some craftsman did that all on his own. Incredible.

Scarlet did pretty well in the museum. I have to admit, I didn't consider her reaction to the mummies because I honestly didn't think she'd realize what they were. The first mummy caught her notice right away and she paid it cursory attention, but when I brought her close to the second mummy, which, granted, looked far more human, Scarlet started whimpering and reaching out for me to hold her. I hugged her tight and then passed her on to Josh to carry while I pushed James in the stroller. Scarlet grew accustomed and eventually indifferent to the mummies shortly thereafter. She was fascinated by the mummies of children, though, which she kept calling babies. I couldn't tell if she recognized them as actual human babies or dolls, since she calls her dolls babies. Either way, she was pretty relaxed in the exhibit.

One other section of the exhibit fascinated me. In South America, there was some tribe that offered child sacrifices to false gods in response to natural disasters. They selected especially beautiful children to appease these gods and either exsanguinated them, suffocated them, or drugged them to sleep and buried them alive. Horrifying. These children were under three years old. It called to mind the wickedness of the Lamanites and the Nephites at the end of the Book of Mormon, when both nations committed unspeakable horrors and were irredeemably evil. It takes a truly evil society to believe that murdering innocents could be an acceptable act.

The rest of the Leonardo was pretty kid-friendly but not nearly as interesting. Scarlet enjoyed the green screen that showed her on the beach and in space, especially because she was wearing a green sweater so her head floated above the stars. She could also control the migratory direction of a flock of computerized birds on the wall by moving her body this way and that. She liked them chasing her on the wall but kept leaving the marked spot on the floor to run away from them, so she would lose control of the birds. 

We left at naptime and even though Scarlet and James were both surprisingly awake on the drive home, they both had a long, late nap later that day. I'm not sure I'd go again anytime soon, but we enjoyed our first visit to the Leonardo.