Moving Mummies: Careful Work Keeps Gilman's Ancient Occupants Safe During Renovation

The ancient Greek vases, mummified Egyptian animals, Roman oil lamps, and inscribed marble slabs in the Johns Hopkins Archaeological Collection have gone back underground, of sorts.

The exodus began with the bigger items, including larger stone and metal objects, and then moved onto more fragile things, including an Egyptian coffin and a mummy named Boris on extended loan from Goucher College. The painstaking process will pay off in 2010, when the renovated Gilman opens with a new home for the collection, with more expansive and flexible space for the exhibition and study of its objects.

The exodus began with the bigger items, including an Egyptian coffin and a mummy named Boris on extended loan from Goucher College. (The mummy, acquired by John G. Goucher, received the name before a CT scan performed in the late 1980s proved the mummy to be a she.)

How do you move several thousand ancient objects, some of them no bigger than a bottle cap and others too fragile to be picked up by hand? Very slowly and carefully, of course.

Eunice Maguire, the collection's curator and a senior lecturer in the History of Art Department, has been leading the effort to prepare the items for relocation. Not surprisingly, it requires meticulous care and diligence. A small, dedicated team of students and staff has spent countless hours writing inventory numbers and descriptive data for each piece. The objects are then put into padded boxes or encased in specially designed protective packing materials that have been custom made by a professional art handler the university hired for the move.

The JHU Archaeological Collection was founded in the 19th century through the interest of the university's first president, Daniel Coit Gilman. The collection of international distinction includes Greco-Roman and Near Eastern objects that date from pre-dynastic Egypt into the Byzantine and Islamic periods, and it is very much a working collection, its objects serving as primary resources for study and research in art history, Near Eastern studies, classics, Romance languages, and more.

No stranger to moving the collection (many of its contents have seen different storage locations over the years), Maguire says she’s using this major endeavor as an opportunity to conduct a thorough inventory of the collection, including photographing the objects for a long-overdue digital cataloging.

“We want to make sure we can keep track of things, certainly, and identify where the objects are and what they are in a way that was not possible before,” she says. “The entire digital inventory effort will likely take several years, but in the end we'll have a
very useful tool that will allow us to match up pieces with similar objects at other museums.”

The complete collection needs to be moved by the end of the January, when some of the large-scale excavation work begins in Gilman's basement. Already, many objects endured a shaky period when the library stacks were being removed from the core of the building.

“We had to de-install some of the objects in the cases and pack them up due to the risk of vibration,” Maguire says. “Of course, we had serious concerns about items being damaged in here when the jackhammers were doing their thing.” Maguire is happy to report that no items were harmed.

When the Gilman renovation is finished, the collection will be housed in a new first-floor museum, with glass cases viewable from both inside the space and outside, from the halls lining the museum. Alan Shapiro, the W. H. Collins Vickers Professor of Archaeology in the Department of Classics, says the new space will greatly enhance the school’s new interdisciplinary graduate program in Classical Art and Archaeology.

“Once it’s re-installed, it will be the centerpiece uniting the three departments: Near Eastern Studies, Classics, and Art History.”

Maguire says she is looking forward to the day the collection can again come out of temporary storage, this time for good.

“When I got here I remember a file cabinet that contained inscribed royal stones,” she says, noting that exhibit and storage space for such a large collection have been a longstanding issue. 

“We are very fortunate that we do have a collection like this that the students can work with right on campus,” Maguire says. “The new exhibition space will be wonderful and will allow us to show off the more spectacular pieces of the collection, to give people a sense of what this collection has and is. Many people are not aware of the collection at all, and we hope to change that.”