The Münster Mummy

A couple of Egyptian mummies can be found in museums in North Rhine-Westphalia, one of which is the so-called ‘Münster Mummy’ in the Archaeological Museum. Not much is known about where it was found or about the longest part of its history and the person who was buried in the traditional ancient Egyptian manner between 750 and 580 BC. The only known fact is that the mummy was donated to the Karl Ziegler Grammar School in Mülheim in 1903 by a former scholar, the merchant Wilhelm Schmitz-Scholl. How this scion of the Tengelmann founding family came into possession of the mummy and coffin is unclear - including how the two objects came together, as the coffin is around 150 years older than the corpse inside and was probably originally made for another deceased person.

In 1978, the artefacts were handed over to the Archaeological Museum after decades of standing storage and having played no part in the lessons at the grammar school. The mummy and coffin were in such poor state of preservation that they could not be exhibited.  In addition, the head of the mummy was missing. With the support of the Cluster of Excellence ‘Religion and Politics’, the ensemble was restored in 2016. Among other things, it was discovered that the head of the mummy had still been present when Schmitz-Scholl purchased it. After a tour of six Japanese cities, the mummy - the missing head was replaced by a skull made of fibreglass and synthetic resin and wrapped in (slightly different coloured) bandages - and coffin have been on permanent exhibit at the Archaeological Museum since 2021.