Mummy of Ramses II’s high priest at the Royal Museum of Scotland
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The mummy and coffin of a high priest of Ramses the Great will be displayed in public for the first time at the Royal Museum of Scotland.
Iufenamun and his coffin were brought to Scotland by the Victorian engineer Sir Colin Scott-Moncrieff, probably given to him while stationed in Egypt. He donated the relics to his former school, the Edinburgh Academy, but in 1907, they were passed to the Royal Museum, now part of the National Museum.
For decades the identity of the mummy was unknown and it was rarely displayed.
Historical research shows that Iufenamun was involved in the reburial of the royal New Kingdom mummies in 961 BC. Temple priests had decided that in order to save the tombs of the pharaohs from desecration they should be moved from the Valley of the Kings to a secret resting place in Deir el-Bahari. This is the now famous Cache of the Royal Mummies, where the mummies of some of the greatest pharaohs of Egypt were found between 1875 and 1881 and excavated by French archaeologist Gaston Maspero, director of the Egyptian Antiquities Service.
The exhibition will feature a bronze cast of the head of Iufenamun as he would have looked 3000 years ago, the work of of University of Dundee forensic anthropologist Caroline Wilkinson.
Source: Times Online
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