Mummies that were on display at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition are back in Chicago after a 6-year national tour. The exhibition “Mummies“ opens at the Field Museum on Friday, March 16, 2018, and showcases artifacts from ancient Egypt and ancient Peru.

Some of the ancient mummy artifacts on display at the 1893 World’s Fair. [from The Catalogue of the Cliff-Dwellers Exhibit (H. Jay Smith Exploring Company, 1893).]

After the close of the 1893 World’s Fair, mummies that had been part of the anthropology exhibit entered the collection of the Columbian Museum of Chicago (the original name of what is now the Field Museum of Natural History.) The artifacts then were not accessible to the public for more than a hundred years. The Field Museum’s 2013-14 exhibition, “Opening the Vaults: Wonders of the 1893 World’s Fair,” included mummies from the Chancay culture in what is now Peru. Before starting out on the “Mummies” exhibit tour, a 2,000-year-old Egyptian mummy known as the “Gilded Lady” hadn’t been seen in public since the 1893 Fair.

Visitors to the new exhibit can do something guests at the Columbian Exposition could not: unwrap the mummies! Digitally, that is. Field Museum scientists employed non-invasive CT scanning and DNA analysis to discover more about the people whose bodies are inside the wrapped bundles. This allows visitors to get a deeper look inside the mummy artifacts using display screens in the exhibit.

“Mummies” runs at the Field Museum in Chicago through Sunday, April 21, 2019, and requires a special ticket for admission.