Why museum's last mummy has been taken off display

The mummified body of an ancient Egyptian woman has been removed from a museum exhibition after more than 200 years on display as part of efforts to respect "the wishes of the dead", curators have said.

Layers of linen were carefully peeled away from the 2,700-year-old remains of the woman named Asru when she was first taken out of her wooden coffin and put on public display in Manchester in 1825.

Centuries later, her remains have been placed in storage in a decision that "aligns most closely with what we understand about her own wishes", a Manchester Museum spokesman said.

"Elite Egyptians of her time expected that their mummified bodies would remain wrapped in their coffins, invisible to the living," he added.

Asru's mummified body had been on display in the Oxford Road museum's Egypt and Sudan Gallery before it was moved into storage earlier this month.

She was mummified in a series of rituals used by ancient Egyptians to preserve the body after death in preparation for the afterlife.

Her remains and coffins were dug up in modern Luxor, the site of the ancient city of Thebes, before they ended up in the ownership of Manchester traders William and Robert Garnett in the early 1800s.

The body was donated to the Manchester Natural History Society in 1825 and placed on display for the next two centuries.

The museum spokesman said removing the display "reflects changes in how we think about our responsibility towards ancestors, museum collections and the communities they represent".

He said: "Before making this change, we consulted with Egyptian colleagues, members of the Egyptian diaspora and visitors to the museum, helping us to understand people's feelings about care for mummified people.

"However, the decision to remove Asru from display aligns most closely with what we understand about her own wishes," the spokesperson said.

Asru's final resting place has not yet been decided, with the museum now considering whether to keep her coffin and body in storage or return it to Egypt.

While many museums continue to display mummified remains as part of their interpretation of ancient history, the practice has become the subject of ethical debate in recent years.

A 2025 report by British parliamentarians, the All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) for Afrikan Reparations, called for an end to the public display of Egyptian mummies and other human remains.

In the report, the APPG said the practice was non-consensual and a "disregard of the potential wishes of the ancestors and the intention of the communities that originally laid them to rest".

"The presence and public display of Egyptian mummified persons in UK institutions further reveal the extent of museums' participation in colonial regimes of exploitation," the report said.

Egyptologist Dr Angela Stienne led a debate on the matter at Derby Museums in 2025 - exploring the topic "without judgement".

She argued that people "disassociate" mummies from actual people - partly down to popular culture and fictional depictions of mummies.

Following her visit, Tony Butler, executive director at Derby Museums, told BBC Derby, "These are real people, you put them in a museum and you disassociate them from the culture that they lived."

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