What age would you find it appropriate to show a child an Egyptian Mummy in a museum

[wishuponastar25]

Bit of a strange question but just as the title says really!

Any age, I found this kinda stuff fascinating as a kid, I grew up watching nature documentaries but I know people who won’t let small children watch that kind of stuff because of the killing. I don’t think it harmed me at all.

When I was a kid there was a mummy on the corner of the stairs of the museum. You could stick your finger into the hole of the sarcophagus and feel the cloth. Us cousins used to dare each other to do it.

She's safely behind glass these days.

Never. Those mummies deserve the same respect as our dead.

If 100s of years in the future looking at my remains (not that there will be any im going to be cremated and my ashes put in a firework) will help teach children about the past then I hope they feel free to crack on.

I first saw the mummies in the British museum when I was around 5ish. I was absolutely fascinated by them!

From birth but teach respect alongside. Bodies in museums are to be learned from. They aren't supposed to be there, so should be treated with respect. In the Pit Rivers Museum in Oxford they have shrunken heads, which were fascinating to my 6 and 10 yo.

@ANameChangeAgain The Pitt Rivers removed their tsanta/shrunken heads from display in 2020. More info here: www.prm.ox.ac.uk/shrunken-heads.

I agree with others that there isn’t a minimum age at which I think children should see mummies, but I personally am very uncomfortable seeing them on display and would want to try to have an age-appropriate conversation about why the mummies are there and whether we think they should be.

Egyptian… been around them since a baby. The don’t seem to make the link with death and it being once a human until much older. Thought of it more as a statue.

From day 1 ... but I did my undergraduate dissertation on the mummy portraits from Roman Egypt. My kids have seen pictures of these and I've shown them a book all about them.

I can't wait to take my kids to the BM. Thinking this summer will be the time we do it.

@Tonsiltrouble

Certainly did! He’s always been an inquisitive child. We later found out he has Asperger’s so that probably plays a part. But we were unaware at that stage. And tbf my NT 5yo went to the Iran exhibit at the V&A last summer and got something out of it.

He certainly had extremely developed empathy and reasoning skills for a four year old if this is true.

Whatever you do, don't go visiting Pompeii as a possible holiday, if you're worried about your children seeing an Egyptian mummy.

Honestly, I've never given this a single thought. My two DCs are recently 5 and have known what mummys are since they were maybe 3 or 4?

I don't think they've actually seen one yet, but I wouldn't have a problem with them seeing one somewhere.

DS saw one being unwrapped on TV when he was a toddler. He was fine with it until DH told him what it was... seems there was a misunderstanding and he thought DH meant me. I heard the wail from upstairs Doesn't seem to have scarred him though

Any age. It's not scary and you can't see the actual body. It's educational.

From birth! God I used to love them. So gruesome and horrific and brilliant and exciting.

I saw one in a museum when I was seven. I had no problem with the concept of death, but the idea of a human corpse on display was very disturbing to me - it impacted on my strange anxieties about contamination that I already had. I got over it soon though - now I'm a big fan of Egyptology and always look for documentaries about mummies!

I agree that it's important to learn about the background of how UK museums acquired their artefacts, and how we treat / used to treat human remains from other cultures.

@dottydodah

princesssparklepants Is that the one in Dorchester? My DC loved it there when they were little . It is a good idea for them to be created I think .We went to the BM in the Autumn and it is so vast ,I think the little one is much more interesting and less overwhelming for LO

Yes that's the one!

Couldn't for the life of me remember the town name!

Any age… children are hugely open to learning facts and take things on board very well if presented in an appropriate manner

I think any age when they weren't scared (I know some children hit an age when they do get scared). But I would avoid anywhere that encourages a theme-park kind of approach. IMO most museums don't these days and have exhibits about who the people were and what their lives would have been like. But occasionally you still find '10 revolting facts about mummies' kinds of things and I think that's a bit off.

Do you know why they're called mummies? Apparently it's from an old word "mumea", meaning "bitumen" because the people who originally re-discovered them thought they were coated in it. At the time, they thought bitumen had medicinal properties which is why they used the bandages and other parts of the mummy in health cures and treatments for all kinds of illnesses.

My dc learned about ancient Egypt in p3 so aged 6/7 we went to the museum at the time as Dd1 was fascinated by the topic along with dd2 who was 3. Not sure why there would be any age guide.

We went on a primary school visit to a museum I was about 6 ish, I do remember being a bit freaked out and it obviously left an impression for me to remember 32 years on! It's the only thing I remember from the day now i think about it. My children are younger but I'd still take them to see the same thing, maybe be on hand more to explain what it was, we were just wondering around in groups of children, not with a teacher so that didn't help.

Don't you understand what previous posters have explained about how wrong it is to steal people's bodies from their graves and display them?

I get that point but I don't think this is the reason OP was asking or age would be irrelevant

Any age

Any age really. It depends on the individual child if they have any interest. There are bog bodies in the national museum in Dublin that mine love seeing.

If 100s of years in the future looking at my remains (not that there will be any im going to be cremated and my ashes put in a firework) will help teach children about the past then I hope they feel free to crack on.

I get what you mean. I don’t feel particularly strongly about what may or may not happen to my remains after I die either. But there’s a much broader issue here about viewing people (both living and dead) from other cultures as curiosities or specimens to be studied, in a way that’s very ‘othering’. It’s a very colonialist practice to collect objects, people and indeed bits of dead people and put them on display for your fellow white Europeans to gawp at.

You can’t really talk about the display of mummies without acknowledging how the displays have come to be there in the first place. They don’t come from a nice, neutral position, unbiased position of just ‘wanting to know more about the past’, there’s a whooole mess of stuff going on there.

I took my ds to Luxor museum when he was around 4/5 and he ran out of the room with the mummy of Rameses, crying. Saying that, it is a very well preserved one and quite creepy.