Some assembly was required

Ancient Egyptian artifacts come together for institute exhibit

By Amy Biancolli

Albany

Reunions require complicated planning. But the Albany Institute of History & Art has pulled off a doozy by reuniting the far-flung coffin parts of Ankhefenmut, a 3,000-year-old 21st Dynasty Egyptian priest and sculptor in the Temple of Mut, who had long been separated from two important pieces of his funerary box.

The lid came from the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. The mummy board, or inner lid, vacated its usual public display at the British Museum in London. The coffin bottom — and Ankhefenmut himself — have resided at the institute since their 1909 arrival from Cairo with a second, partially wrapped Ptolemaic-era mummy that dates to around 300 B.C.

Separated for over a century, Ankhefenmut and his sundry coffin parts have been reassembled for "GE Presents: The Mystery of the Albany Mummies," a show seven years in the making that opens Saturday, runs through June 8 and explores the life, afterlife and archeological saga of AIHA's most popular denizens.

"It's putting the mummy and coffin into context and reuniting the parts," said guest curator Peter Lacovara, an Egyptologist who lives in Albany but works for the Michael C. Carlos Museum at Emory University in Atlanta. "It's putting all the pieces back together again. Part of an archeologist's work is to reconstruct the past — so this is a more physical version of what we do."