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In 2008, Takabuti was taken to Manchester Royal Infirmary where radiography and CT-scanning were performed; recent analysis has revealed several unexpected and unusual features. Initially, the scans indicated that she was around 25-35 years of age at death; there were no signs of disease and her cause of death remained unidentified. Current research on the CT-scans has revealed that the only organ tissue returned to the body after evisceration was the heart which, as the locus of the owner’s personality, was usually afforded special treatment. Endoscopy was used to take samples to identify any traces of disease. Partial visual examination of her teeth, together with the CT scans, enabled Takabuti’s dental state to be determined: all her teeth were present, there is no evidence of tooth decay and little indication of gum disease, in contrast to many ancient Egyptians who suffered from worn, sensitive and abscessed teeth. Stable carbon and isotope analysis undertaken on a sample of Takabuti’s hair has demonstrated that she probably ate a diet lacking cereals but rich in food derived from trees and shrubs as well as legumes, beans and pods. The lack of cereals is unusual in an ancient Egyptian diet.

Visitors to the Lawrence Room, Girton College, Cambridge University, on Thursday afternoons (when the small one room museum is open to the public) will find a dead body on display. The body is that of an Egyptian mummy from the Coptic period with a painted face mask and inscription ‘Hermione Grammatike’. It was this inscription that attracted Girton College to acquire this ancient body. A loose translation suggests this was a woman scholar, and therefore the first recorded woman scholar in history and as such an appropriate ‘mascot’ for one of the early great champions for formal female education. The mummy was purchased from Egyptologist Flinders Petrie who had excavated it in 1910–11 (Imogen Gunn and Dorothy Thompson, pers. comm.). The case of Hermione is both particular and general. Across all of the UK and indeed the Western world, human remains from all ages and all parts of the world can be found in all types of museums of all sizes apparently isolated and insulated from society’s normal relationships with the dead: grief, morbidity, respect, invisibility. Context would appear to be everything in terms of attitudes to the display of the human dead. This paper reviews this concept of context, and offers some commentary on the origins, constraints, and boundaries for the display of human remains. To begin with an Egyptian mummy as an example is also appropriate, as this particular category has an almost ubiquitous and overpowering place in Western museums. It has been accepted practice to include human remains in displays since the widespread establishment of public museums in the nineteenth century. These are normally associated with archaeological discoveries but can also be found in physical and social anthropological displays, medical and history of medicine displays, and occasionally in other contexts. Museum practice is very much a creation of Western, primarily Enlightenment, values and the inclusion of human remains in displays can be traced in these values (for example, the anatomical drawings of Leonardo da Vinci and the public anatomy demonstrations of the nascent Royal Society in London) and in the Christian European culture from which this derived (for example, the display in churches of saints’ relics: Weiss-Krejci this volume).

Visitors to the Hull and East Riding Museum used to reach the climax of the Iron Age exhibition, Celtic World, by coming face-to-face with the extraordinary funerary offerings from three chariot burials at Wetwang Slack (Dent 1985). Now removed for urgent conservation, the iron swords from two male burials, their scabbards decorated with intricate, incised Celtic art, and the corroded iron mirror and sealed bronze container from the female burial, were displayed in Perspex cases. Beads of red glass ‘enamel’ adorned both swords and box, and a slender iron pin shone with a thin strip of glowing gold, entwined around a coral bead. These artefacts are marvellous testimonies to Iron Age craft skill, speaking of the repertoire of decorated objects through which power amongst these communities was underpinned and reproduced (Giles 2008). Behind these cases, setting the scene for these personal possessions or funerary gifts, is an oversized image—now the focus of that section of the museum: a reproduction of Peter Connolly’s impressive and moving reconstruction of a chariot burial (Fig. 19.1), loosely modelled on the Kirkburn K5 inhumation (see Stead 1991) and painted in the late 1980s. The image shows a tableau of mourners surrounding a grave, in which has been interred the body of an adult male (Fig. 19.1). He is lying over the wheels of a dismantled chariot, with a shield placed over his chest, and forequarters of pig lain on top. The box of the chariot (still attached to the pole shaft) is being lowered over the body like a coffin, before the grave is back-filled. The participants in this ceremony are predominantly male, with one woman at the edge in an apparent state of grief: two others are in the background, one keeping a pair of children at a distance from the proceedings. Two ponies are being led away from the scene, tossing their heads as if perturbed by the event. Such images have a powerful, instantaneous impact: ‘act[ing] at a distance, across the gallery, in a way a block of text cannot’ (James 1999a: 121).