Hedvig Győry: Mélanges offerts a Edith Varga „Le lotus qui sort de terre” (Bulletin du Musée Hongrois des Beaux-Arts Supplément 1. Budapest, 2001)
JUAN JOSÉ CASTILLOS: Eso-Eris, the Wandering Mummy
moved to Argentina where he worked for many years and was appointed as a member of the official committee that planned the foundation of the city of La Plata. In 1889 he visited Egypt and when he returned, the following year he donated this Egyptian mummy to the National Museum of Natural History, where it remained until 1977. The generous engineer, who never forgot his homeland in spite of living abroad for many years, described the event in a book he published in 1890: "I bought at the Boulaq Museum an excellent reproduction of such a statue (the famous one of king Khefren in his throne) and also two mummies, one of which complete with its Pharaonic coffin that you will see when I return to Buenos Aires" 5 . Viglione died there in 1891, shortly after his return. The second mummy he bought in Cairo, a poor specimen which was little more than a skeleton, was donated to the La Plata Museum in Argentina. These mummies were most probably the result of intensive exploitation of the ancient cemeteries in the vicinity of Akhmîm that took place during the eighties of the XIX century and which flooded Cairo with antiquities from that source that were sold to tourists and spread practically all over the world 6 . In 1890, the Director of the National Museum of Natural History of Montevideo, Dr. Carlos Berg, decided to remove the bandages that covered their Egyptian mummy but with the unusual idea of leaving half of them undisturbed so that the public could see from an angle of the room the mummy bandaged as it was and from another, the excellent preservation of the exposed body. This he achieved by means of a longitudinal incision going from the neck to the feet that removed only half of the bandages that covered the left side of the mummy. I have not seen this treatment anywhere else and although it was and still is criticized for exposing the body to further deterioration, it has provided over the years a very educational display that allowed the contemplation in one single mummy of both its wrapped and unwrapped conditions. Over the years, and in spite of continued public interest in this ancient Egyptian mummy, until 1973 no serious attempt was made to study it properly and publish it so that some of its unusual features could be made known. For instance, in the 1960s, a team of radiologists X-rayed the 5 L. Viglione, Cartas de Nápoles, Alejandría y Cairo de Egipto. Buenos Aires 1890, p. 116. '' British Museum, Department of Egyptian Antiquities Internet Homepage states: "The extensive cemeteries located to the north-east of the town were excavated with little official supervision in the 1880s. The rock-cut tombs contained many hundred intact burials, mostly dating to the Ptolemaic and Roman Periods. Unfortunately, the mummies, coffins and items of burial equipment were removed without record of their findspots or archaeological context, and today are dispersed around the world".
