Cork artist Dorothy Cross returns UCC mummy back home to Egypt
Dorothy Cross with the mummy, formerly located at UCC, Cork, that was returned to Egypt in a gold-gilded crate.
It’s been a long and difficult journey, but Cork artist Dorothy Cross has finally succeeded in returning a mummy to Egypt that she had first heard about many years ago through family working in UCC.
The mummy, believed to be that of a middle-aged adult male - possibly a priest from Thebes - was donated to UCC by clergy from the African Missions in 1928. At one point, it was in the care of the college's Department of Pathology, where Cross’s uncle was a professor, and was then put into storage.
At 1.20pm on Thursday, December 12, the mummy — secured in a gold-gilded crate — left Dublin airport on an Air Egypt flight to Cairo. As well as returning the approximately 2,000-year-old body back to what was presumably the man’s country of birth, the transport also marked the final step in Cross’s Kinship project, which she has worked on since 2019.
Cross was also on the flight to Cairo, along with her support team; arts manager Mary Hickson, curator Maeve-Ann Austen, and poet John Fitzgerald, formerly of UCC.
Cross had hoped to organise a reception to see the mummy off, with the singer Lisa Hannigan performing on the tarmac at Dublin Airport.
“But we couldn’t do any of that,” says Cross. “It was the same in Egypt; there was no celebration or anything like that on our arrival. We landed in Cairo in the dark, and the mummy was brought to the old Cairo Museum.
“But it’s wonderful that that’s where he’s gone to. The old museum has got the ancient glass display cases, and it’s very atmospheric, compared to the new, more modern museum. They’ll probably do some work on restoring the mummy now, but we don’t really know what will happen to him after that.”
University College Cork confirmed that a number of objects from its Heritage Collection have been transported to Egypt. As well as the mummified human remains, the donation to the Egyptian state include a sarcophagus, a set of four Canopic jars, and items of cartonnage (coverings) dating variously from about 500 AD to about 945 BCE.
The donation of these objects by University College Cork to the Egyptian State is a multi-agency collaboration involving the University, the National Museum of Ireland, the Egyptian Ministry for Tourism and Antiquities, the Irish Department of Foreign Affairs, and embassy staff in Dublin and Cairo.
The college said the accessioning of the donation is ongoing and the process is expected to formally conclude in 2025.
Professor John O’Halloran, UCC president, said: “We are pleased to confirm this significant development in the ongoing donation process. I wish to thank both embassies in Dublin and Cairo, the National Museum of Ireland, the Egyptian Ministry for Tourism and Antiquities, and the Department of Foreign Affairs for their collaboration.”
Cross, who was born in Cork and currently lives in Connemara, first had the idea for the Kinship project after the conclusion of her Heartship project, commissioned by Hickson in her role as director of the Sounds from a Safe Harbour Festival in Cork.
On that occasion, in September 2019, Cross arranged for an Irish Navy vessel, the LÉ James Joyce, to carry a human heart that had been taken from Cork and had ended up in the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, up the River Lee from Haulbowline.
“On the drive back to Connemara,” says Cross. “I remembered a story my Aunt Mary had told me, about there being a mummy in UCC, and I rang Mary Hickson to suggest returning it to Egypt. That was exactly five years and two months ago.”
When Cross investigated the mummy’s more recent whereabouts, she was astonished to find that UCC had stored it in Letterfrack, just five miles from her own home in Killary Harbour.
With Hickson’s assistance, Cross began exploring how the mummy might be returned to Egypt. There were countless bureaucratic obstacles to be overcome before the necessary permissions to transport the mummy could be secured, and the Museum of Egypt could be persuaded to accept it in Cairo.
Most recently, the project was delayed by the wait for one final signature from the Museum of Egypt’s governing body. “I tend to work quickly,” says Cross. “I don’t have the same brain space as institutionalised people. So it has been very frustrating at times.”
The Egyptian ambassador to Ireland, Sarwat Khaled Wafik Ismail, finally intervened to secure the signature. “It was very last minute, “ says Cross. “Our license to transport the mummy would have run out at the end of the year.”
Even then, there was one final hurdle to be overcome. “Egyptair operates a daily flight from Dublin to Cairo. But it transpired that our crate was too big for the plane. So the ambassador had to intervene again, and Egypair brought over a bigger plane from Amsterdam.”
Cross is now making a film on the Kinship project, which will also be the subject of a book of essays, by Edward de Waal, Max Porter, Hisham Matar and several others, to be published by Lilliput Press in February.
She is well aware of how the project coincides with the movement to repatriate historical objects from museums worldwide. It seems to be only a matter of time, for instance, before the Elgin Marbles are finally restored to Greece.
“But my interest was in restitution,” she says. “UCC have sent a number of objects back to Egypt along with the mummy, but my own interest was in restoring a human body to his homeland. For me, that’s what the whole project has been about. It’s a simple human body, not an artifact.”
- Further information: dorothycross.com
