Manchester Museum poses interesting question to visitors about mummy display

Yahoo

29-06-2025

The Manchester Museum is asking visitors whether they think it should take an Egyptian mummy away from display after being in the museum for 200 years.
A small plaque has been placed next to the body of Asru, a woman who lived in Thebes some 2,700 years ago.
For 200 of those years Asru has been at the Manchester Museum since her she was unwrapped there in 1825.
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Now visitors are met with a plaque asking them: 'Should we continue to display the body of Asru?'
It also goes into some of her history, explaining: 'Asru's mummified body was unwrapped at the Manchester Natural History Society in April 1825.
"She has regularly been on display for the two centuries since. In that time, we have also changed as a museum and are thinking more about how we care for people.'
The question is a part of a wider shift in museums across Britain as they more closely interrogate the link between their collections and imperialism, including the Transatlantic Slave Trade, the Guardian reports.
Much of the money which built both the physical museum buildings and their collections had its origins in the extractive policies of the British Empire and the mass trafficking of human beings from Africa to North and South America and the Caribbean.
Museums and collections dating from after the abolition of slavery are also a part of this. Much of the huge amount of capital given to slave owners as "compensation" would go on to become a massive cash injection for the industrial revolution, including in Manchester, as the former slavers reinvested their money.
Asru's body was acquired by Robert and William Garnett, the sons of someone who made money trafficking enslaved people from Africa and who then followed him into the city's booming cotton industry.
Study has revealed that Asru was around 60 years old when she died, and the daughter of a "Pa-Kush", meaning a black Sudanese man, who worked as a scribe.
The Museum has also launched a Decolonise! Trail, challenging eurocentric approaches to collections.
Chloe Cousins, Manchester Museum's social justice manager, who created the trail, said: 'The trail is new but the concept of decolonising isn't new to Manchester Museum at all. Telling more accurate and nuanced accounts of the history of the collections is one of the ways we can care for the people and communities whose belongings, stories and histories are held here.'
The Manchester Museum is not the only institution in Manchester to be grappling with the often difficult history of its collections.
A piece by artist Kani Kamil at Manchester Art Gallery as part of the exhibition Rethinking the Grand Tour saw her put a pre-1910 Iraqi Kurdish dress on display - but still in the box in which it is stored.
This was accompanied by a message written on the wall in Kurdish reflecting on the memory and humanity contained within that box.
It is like so many other boxes from all around the world kept hidden away in museum archives here in the UK, hundreds or even thousands of miles from their homes and the people that created them.