Schepenese

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Schepenese is the name of a female mummy from ancient Egypt that is in the possession of the St. Gallen Abbey Library . There it is exhibited together with its two sarcophagi in the baroque book room and is one of the main attractions of the library, which is a UNESCO World Heritage Site .

The person Schepenese

Little is known about the mummified person. It was not until 2010 that it was possible to determine beyond any doubt with a computer tomography that it was a woman's mummy . It is thought to have been around between 650 and 610 BC. Chr. , The daughter of Amunpriesters Pestjenef in Thebes lived. At that time Psammetich I was Pharaoh of Egypt.

During X-ray and computed tomography exams in 1996, no evidence of an unusual cause of death was found. The only visible injuries were post-mortem caused by the mummification itself. Based on the severely abraded tooth crowns, the age was estimated to be over 30. This is a common finding in Egyptian mummies, because the food was heavily mixed with sand and there was considerable abrasion of the millstones in the bread .

The place of burial of the Schepenese is not clear, because the way in which she and various other coffins with mummies - including those of their father - came to Europe is obscure. At the time of Egyptomania at the beginning of the 19th century, many mummies were improperly excavated in Egypt and then sold to European customers by the grave robbers .

relationship

According to the inscriptions on the coffins, Schepeneses was the father of the Amun priest Pestjenef ("Godfather of Amun Pestjenef"). The Amun priesthood was de facto the ruling dynasty in Upper Egypt at that time and therefore very influential. Pestjenef's mummy is now in the possession of the National Museums in Berlin (Inv. No. 51–53). His wife and thus Schepeneses mother was called Tabes ("The one belonging to God Bes "). The grandmother of Schepenese was also called Schepenese, she probably got her name from her.

coffins

Schepenese lay inside two wooden coffins that were nested one inside the other. The inner coffin made of sycamore wood is extremely richly decorated inside and out and provided with long texts in Egyptian hieroglyphics . They tell of the family tree of the dead and call on various gods who are supposed to assist her on the way to the afterlife. Proverbs from the Egyptian Book of the Dead are also among the inscriptions, including the first stanza of Proverb 71. It contains a decisive error that is also found in the coffin inscription of a Wennefer , which was found by Auguste Mariette in Deir el-Bahari and therefore probably dated the same sculptor or at least the same false template was used for his coffin:

“Words to speak from Osiris
mistress of the house Schepenese, justified,
daughter of the Godfather of Amun Pestjenef,
justified, Lord of Venerability : 'O falcon,
who rise from the primeval waters,
Lord of the Great Flood - let me be unharmed, like
you let himself be intact! '
'Free me, release me, bring
them to earth and fulfill my wish'. "

- Quoted in Müller, Siegmann; Schepenese
  1. ↑ Osiris is the ruler of the realm of the dead after he was resurrected by mummification. The buried therefore use his name as a proper name for themselves
  2. ^ "Mistress of the house" means a married woman
  3. ↑ Addressed to a god at the last judgment
  4. ↑ “liberate”, “release” also stand for earthly birth. Here the longed-for rebirth is already indicated with the language.
  5. ↑ Answer of the judge of the dead, here wrongly in the first instead of the third person (he wrongly declares himself free)
  6. ↑ It would be correct: theirs

The outer coffin is a bit simpler and made of tamarisk wood . When the coffins were examined using the radiocarbon method, it was found that it is around 400 years older than the inner coffin, i.e. 1060 BC. Chr +/- 40 years. This suggests that it was being reused because wood was rare in Egypt. Only the head and the neck collar of the lid are painted. Inside the bottom of the coffin there is a drawing of the Theban necropolis goddess.

History of the mummy in St. Gallen

The double coffin and the mummy were the first Egyptian burials to reach Switzerland in 1820 . They were given to the then St. Gallen Landammann Karl von Müller-Friedberg from his school friend Philipp Roux, who lived in Alexandria . The first to examine it at the time was Professor Peter Scheitlin (1779–1848). In 1836 the Catholic Grand Council decided to acquire the mummy for 440 guilders as the superintendent of the monastery library. Since then it has officially been part of the inventory of the Abbey Library. Incidentally, the first piece of Egyptian origin was not Schepenese. A stuffed crocodile had belonged to the city library since 1623. Today it is considered the first object in the collection of today's St. Gallen Natural History Museum and hangs in the entrance hall.

Name interpretation

When Egyptology was still in its infancy, the Bernese classical philologist Johannes Zündel published an article in the journal for Egyptian linguistics and antiquity in 1864 . He read the name of the mummy as "Sepunisi" and translated it as "Singer of Isis ".

On June 27, 1903, an article by the Egyptologist Alexander Dedekind appeared in the St. Galler Tagblatt . In it he did away with the popular notion that the noble lady was the daughter of a pharaoh. Rather, it was the daughter of a priest. Dedekind translated her name with "Scheta-en-Isi" ("Secret of Isis"), which he improved shortly afterwards in further articles in the daily newspaper into "Schap-en-Isi" ("Gift of Isis").

The name “Schep-en-ese”, which is recognized today, was first coined in 1934 by Hugo Müller from Lucerne, who was studying Egyptology in Berlin at the time, in an extensive work. He was more cautious in explaining this than his predecessors: "The name indicates some relationship to the goddess Isis."

Fungal attack

In autumn 1993 the mummy was shown for five weeks in the exhibition “Mummies from Swiss Museums” in the Kulturama in Zurich . Experts found a fungal attack in Schepenese. They could not rule out that it was the Aspergillus niger mold , which was suspected to be behind the deaths in the " curse of the pharaohs ". After the exhibition it was taken to an anthropological research institute in Aesch for examination . The discovery sparked enormous media hype. At the beginning of February 1994, the Ciba-Geigy laboratory in Basel gave the all-clear: the two fungi were harmless. They were killed with X-ray irradiation. The mummy and its glass coffin were cleaned and disinfected. On June 15, 1994, she returned to the monastery library to the great sympathy of onlookers and journalists.

Under the spell of Egypt

Schepenese was loaned to the St. Gallen Historical and Ethnological Museum in 2010/11 for the special exhibition “Under the Spell of Egypt” . It was also an attraction in this museum, which is why the museum management would have liked to keep it on permanent loan. When redesigning its Egyptian Hall in 2016, the museum tried to include the Schepenese mummy in its collection in exchange for a few specimens of sacred art. Abbey librarian Cornel Dora refused the request. He argued that the mummy was a "central document in library history". The collection activities of the libraries go back to the Baroque period , when there were no museums.

literature

  • Peter Müller and Renate Siegmann: Schepenese. The Egyptian mummy of the St. Gallen Abbey Library. Klosterhof, St. Gallen 1998, ISBN 3906616452 .
  • Renate Siegmann: A crowd puller: double coffin with the Schepenese mummy in the St. Gallen Abbey Library. In: A. Küffer and Renate Siegmann: Under the protection of the sky goddess. Egyptian coffins, mummies and masks in Switzerland . Zurich 2007, pp. 110–121.
  • Renate Siegmann: Schepenese's secret: the mummy of the St. Gallen Abbey Library . In: Antike Welt 1/2014, pp. 53–57.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Treasures of the Abbey Library , stadt.sg.ch, accessed on October 4, 2018.
  2. ↑ Michèle Vaterlaus: Mummy Schepenese is a woman , 20 minutes , July 4, 2010, accessed on October 4, 2018.
  3. ↑ a b St. Gallen Abbey Library , niletimes.ch, accessed on October 4, 2018.
  4. ↑ Renate Siegmann: The mummy and the coffins of the Schepenese , in: Müller / Siegmann, p. 55 ff.
  5. ↑ Peter Müller: The mummy in the baroque library room , in: Müller / Siegmann, p. 16/17.
  6. ↑ Peter Müller: The mummy in the baroque library room , in: Müller / Siegmann, p. 17/18.
  7. ↑ Michele Kalberer: Everyone wants Schepenese , St. Galler Tagblatt , March 3, 2011, accessed on October 4, 2018.
  8. ↑ Schepenese - more than mummy , St. Galler Tagblatt, March 1, 2016, accessed on October 4, 2018.
personal data
SURNAME Schepenese
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Female mummy from ancient Egypt
DATE OF BIRTH 7th century BC Chr.
DATE OF DEATH 7th century BC Chr.