Egyptian Funerary Masks

My name is Carlo Ruindi, I'm an Egyptologist, and today I'm at the Australian Museum in Sydney to have a look at their amazing cartonnage collection. The main highlight of the collection are these four pieces. Many of these objects are not well documented. There's not much information about them other than the donor or when they came. So what we're trying to do at the Australian Museum is to reconstruct the history of these objects via their style, their collection history, provenance research. We just did some laboratory analysis, radiocarbon dating, which dates this mask roughly to the 3rd century BC. So maybe that's part of the story. It's part of the history of the object, for sure. So we need to take a Sherlock Holmes. Yeah, it's an investigative work, you're right. So in the later periods of Egyptian history, cartonnage, which is this material that we Egyptologists call this mixture of linen glued together with plaster, saw a dramatic increase in production. Cartonnage was much easier to mould and produce than wood, which was very expensive, especially in this period. So it was used to manufacture these pieces to cover the mummified body of the deceased and to protect them in the afterlife. The mummy mask was used to restore the capacity to see and the foot case was to help the deceased walk again and trample over the evil forces that you will find in the afterlife. One of the differences we can see is in the face. This mummy mask from Abydos has a white face, white pale cream, whereas the other one, one from the Fayoum, has a gilded face. This would denote that possibly the individual was wealthier and was able to afford a wealthier burial. Whereas the other colours, cream, yellow, were an imitation of gilding and gilding was of course used because it was the colour of the skin of the gods. We must remember that this, especially the faces of this mummy mask, are not a true representation of the deceased but they're just idealised shapes and more often than not they were produced with an internal mould that was used to manufacture them. So that's why we can identify many examples in many museums in the world. My name is Heather, I'm the Manager of Collection, Care and Conservation at the Australian Museum. Hi my name is Melissa, I'm a conservator here at the Australian Museum. The masks were brought into the lab as part of a funded project for conservation and restoration. We'd hoped to put them on display in an Egyptian gallery further down the line but for us it's looking at an object and its composition, its materials and starting to get familiar with that object and so it's quite a privilege working in conservation to be able to do that. These objects presented us with a very unique opportunity to delve a little bit further into how materials are put together and how humans over time interact with those materials.