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Asru lived in southern Egypt around 2,700 years ago. When she died the transformative rituals of mummification were performed on her body, which was carefully wrapped in layers of linen cloth and buried into finely decorated wooden coffins. This took place on the west bank of the southern city of Thebes, where she probably lived. Hieroglyphs on her coffins give the names of her mother Tadiamun and her father, an important official named Pa-Kush meaning the Kushite Man, indicating that he came from the area of southern modern Egypt or northern modern Sudan.
Asru’s mummified body was acquired in Egypt in the early 1800s by Robert and William Garnett. She was shipped to Manchester and unwrapped at the Manchester Natural History Society in April 1825. She has regularly been on display for the two centuries since.
You can find out more about Asru and her display over the last 200 years in this blog post by Dr Campbell Price, Curator of Egypt and Sudan at Manchester Museum.
All our work at Manchester Museum is driven by our values of inclusion, imagination and care. We are thinking hard about what care for people, relationships and collections looks like.
Two hundred years after her unwrapping, we are are considering what the future might hold for engagement with Asru.
We invite you to share your thoughts, asking: should we continue to display the body of Asru?
– We have a post box on our Egypt and Sudan gallery next to Asru’s display. Fill in a card and let us know what you think.
– Share you thoughts with us on the form below.
– Or head over to Instagram or Facebook and join the conversation.
As a museum shaped by colonialism, decolonising is an integral part of Manchester Museum’s mission to build a more just and sustainable world. Decolonising is a long-term process that starts with acknowledging the true, violent history of colonialism and how it shapes our world and this museum. Decolonising aims to build new ways of being and working that are based on values and principles of justice and de-centers white western systems of knowledge.
Decolonial interventions include the Decolonise! trail, which invites visitors to critically reflect on how the collections got here, whose stories are told across the galleries and how museums shape our understanding of the world. Asru is one of the stops on the trail.
You can download the trail and read more about our decolonising work here:
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