Egyptian mummies

Several Egyptian mummies are exhibited in the University of Tartu Art Museum: a boy, a teenager, and a dog, who – according to researchers – might have lived in 700 BCE. The first two are the only complete Egyptian human mummies in Estonia.

The mummies come from the collection of Otto Friedrich von Richter (1791–1816), one of Estonia’s first Orientalists, thanks to whom the University of Tartu had one of the most prominent Egyptian-themed collections in Tsarist Russia in the 19th century. After Otto Friedrich’s sudden death, his father Otto Magnus von Richter donated his entire collection to the university – a total of 128 antiquities. Among these, in addition to the mummies, there was also a wooden sarcophagus and several valuable manuscripts and prints in Arabic, Persian, and Turkish.

In 1915, Richter’s collection of Egyptian antiquities was evacuated to Russia with the rest of the art museum’s antiquities, and this part of the collection is now housed in the I.N. Kramskoy Art Museum in the Voronezh Oblast. However, the mummies were located in the old anatomy room of the University of Tartu at that time and were not evacuated to Russia.

Location: The University of Tartu Art Museum