Curators restore ancient Egyptian coffin smashed in 1969 student protest
Over the past three months, conservators at the Museum of Civilization have been painstakingly piecing together a few large pieces and hundreds of tiny fragments from the lid and the back of a rare 2,500-year-old Egyptian sarcophagus broken during a violent student protest in 1969 at the École des Beaux-Arts de Montreal, which received the coffin as a gift from the Cairo Museum in 1927.
The elaborately-painted Hetep-Bastet coffin and the mummy inside, a woman who was in her 60s when she died, likely in part due to a broken hip and abscessed cavity, are on loan to the museum, which plans to hand the ancient wooden coffin back to its owner, the University of Quebec in Montreal (UQAM), in far better condition than when it left.
As part of the restoration, curators are taking paint that has flaked off and reattaching it to the surface of the sarcophagus, gluing the broken wooden fragments together, and cleaning the coffin with a vacuum and soft brush to remove modern blue paint on the lid.
The public is invited to watch on Nov. 19, 20 and 25 as curators restore the coffin.
Once the work is complete, the coffin will be on display as part of the exhibit Tombs of Eternity: The Afterlife in Ancient Egypt, which opens Dec. 19.
