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
offerings in the afterlife by means of a boon that the king gives to Osiris and to Sokar-Osiris "who is at AkhmîirT. It is noteworthy in these texts the use of Pyramid Texts, namely, Pyr § 17, 580, 638, 825. At the beginning of the main text, A. Bianchi 8 , who also studied the inscriptions on this coffin, prefers to read that the gods Osiris and Isis make protection for Nesy-Pa-Mahes rather than being the deceased as the Osiris Isis-the-Great who bestows such protection. The priest Nesy-Pa-Mai (or Mahes) mentioned in these texts could be the same man whose decorated wooden coffin is in the Berlin Museum 9 , very similar in style to the one used for our Montevideo mummy, and bearing somewhat longer inscriptions but also quoting the same Pyramid Texts. Already about twenty years ago, J. R. Ogdon suggested that due to the difference in style in the decoration of the mask, which has a Ptolemaic appearance, and the coffin of the Montevideo mummy, which is clearly Late Period, it was possible that the items were not contemporary and could have been put together from different mummies in order to assemble an attractive package for the unsuspecting tourist. A. Bianchi has also recently made a similar statement' 0 , a more detailed study is currently being made at the museum in order to clarify this matter, including C14 dating. When Eso-Eris arrived in Montevideo and was installed in the Natural History Museum, one would have thought that her wanderings were over and that she would rest in peace among the various collections of zoological, palaeontological and anthropological specimens which were the pride of the oldest museum in Uruguay. And so it seemed for about eighty years. However, in 1977, while Uruguay was governed by a military junta, it was decided that the Egyptian mummy should be transferred to a new archaeological museum to be inaugurated in one of Montevideo's most stately mansions, the Palacio Taranco, in the heart of the Old City. Although the transfer was criticized by many, others thought that a step in the right direction had been taken, because together with the mummy, an assemblage of Graeco-Roman pottery and other later objects coming from private collections, made more sense as part of the exhibits of an archaeological museum than the outdated and odd mélange of its previous location. ' J. Baines - J. Malek, Egipto: Dioses, templos y faraones, Ed. Folio (Spain) 1993, p. 118. ,0 A. Bianchi, op. cit (note 8), p. 8.
