What the Letters and Appeals tell us about Funerary Culture

The letters tell us that the living saw the dead (with tombs and false doors in this case) as having a “special power”, what Verma thinks of as ‘Kh’iker’, which means ‘the life force of the able spirit of Ka’. The letters also shows that there was a reciprocal relationship between the dead and the living, much like how the appeals to the living functioned. The letters also tell us that the dead were not thought of as completely detached from the living world, but instead were tethered by the false door, and played an integral role in solving certain family problems. 

Verma refers to these letters as an “indirect method of remembrance”. In other words, the letters are the physical remnants of a dialogue between family members and their dead.

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Letters Through a False Door: An Interactive Exhibit

• Premise: Visitors will have the option of writing a letter to a deceased individual whose false door is currently being exhibited at the Museo Egizio. 
• Material: Paper or Email. 

Letters Through a False Door is a social experiment for the viewer of the Museo Egizio to engage in a dialogue with a person from an ancient society. In this experiment, the constraints of letter writing in ancient Egyptian society will not translate completely. One, because family members of the deceased who would have written the letters are now also dead. And two, simply because museum visitors in Turin are not tomb visitors in Ancient Egypt. However, I think letter writing in this context is a useful tool for engaging with a museum object that was once also engaged with in this manner. From this experiment, we can also guide our visitors to think critically about their role as a visitor in this museum, and their identity and relationship with real ancient Egyptian individuals. 

Material: Digital or paper? Benefits of the email: the email creates an archive. The email is formal enough for a letter. The email sends letters to be held in the internet. Comparison between afterworld and internet. Both are not 3 dimensionally physical like the materiality of the ‘living’ world. Both require an interface (computer screen, false door) to interact with them. 

Appeals to the Living: An Interactive Exhibit

• Premise: Visitors will have the option of saying aloud an appeal to the living, that will be translated on a label into Italian, English, and Arabic. Currently I am not aware of any of the false doors in the Museo Egizio collection having appeals to the living inscribed upon them. This aspect of the interactive exhibit is thus a proposal for future research on the current collection, and a proposal for the Museo Egizio to acquire a loan of appeals to the living associated with false doors.
• Material: Voice

We might now think about the implications of modern visitors engaging with the appeals to the living. If persay, one was visiting a museum where there was tomb architecture inscribed with an appeal to the living, the visitor could be given the option to read a translation of the appeal, and if they so choose, say aloud the offering formula implied in the appeal. This might be done as an experimental and interactive option for visitors to engage with a tomb architecture in a museum collection, and make a deeper connection with the tomb owner. 

We might also think of this as a way of tending/taking care of the Ka spirit of the deceased tomb owner. Appeals to the living were part of the ways in which the deceased ensured that they were well provided for in the afterlife, and that their memory stayed tethered to the world of the living. When thinking about the role of the museum, one of its main tenets is to care for the memory of the collection. Exploring ways to keep alive the memory and person associated with a false door, by sustaining ancient practices associated with memory preservation in the first place is a seamless parallel to express. It also prompts us to ask the question: what is the role of the visitor?

The social experiment of letter writing through a false door will give the viewer the space and tools to be an active participant in the the museum, and to learn about the Ancient Egyptian false doors through an experiential exercise. Why is this important?  Museums face the challenge to break out of a static narrative; to meet the need to represent the multiplicity of historical narratives, as well as the need to provide a diverse set of approaches to learning about those narratives. Experiential learning is just one of these ways. 

Letters Through a False Door; A Translation

The social experiment of letter writing through a false door will give the viewer the space and tools to be an active participant in the the museum, and to learn about the Ancient Egyptian false doors through an experiential exercise. Why is this important?  Museums face the challenge to break out of a static narrative; to meet the need to represent the multiplicity of historical narratives, as well as the need to provide a diverse set of approaches to learning about those narratives. Experiential learning is just one of these ways.

The social experiment of letter writing in the museum will have modern incongruencies with the ancient practice –  but that’s okay. It raises the question: Who is a family member now? I don’t mean this literally, I mean how can we take the idea of a family member who would have engaged with the false door in its ancient social context, and translate it to the modern and transitioned context of the museum space, where the false doors are now situated. In ancient Egypt, access was limited to family and cult members. Now the doors are accessible to a wide range of people. We have all seen the false doors, we have all had an intimate encounter with the object. We have allowed ourself this privilege. So the question remains, can we allow ourselves the privilege of interacting with the individual behind the object? 

This interaction through letter writing is not to be thought of as a rejuvenation of practicing Ancient Egyptian religion – most/all museum goers are not actively practicing the ancient Egyptian religion, and furthermore – the Museo Egizio is not a religious institution, so therefore this is not the social context in which museum goers experience the collection today. 

Instead, we can think of it again as a translation practice. We are experiencing the false doors within our own social contexts, so the letter writing experiment is a translation of the letter writing practice in ancient times to an exercise that can be understood and applied within the museum environment. The incongruencies between ancient and modern time and place is already there; where the false doors are located, who has access… Yet, by engaging with the letter writing exercise, the visitor can still perform with the false door as it was originally intended to be interacted with. 

By putting yourself in the position of writing a personal letter to the deceased and delivering it to the false door, the visitor is given the opportunity to physically conceptualize the false door as more than an object. The letter writing experiment is a way to bring forth the function of the false door in a translated iteration, while simultaneously challenging the function of the museum – by changing how museum visitors are allowed to interact with the collection.