Having paid obeisance to modern potentates and dollar deities (donors), officials breaking ground Thursday for a University of Chicago building addition prudently paid respects to some ancient spirits too.
After all, there is no need to recklessly dare invoking the curse of a mummy.
The ground-breaking was for a $10.1 million addition to the university’s 65-year-old Oriental Institute, 1155 E. 58th St. The venerable museum houses one of the world’s greatest collections of bones, stones and lore from ancient Egypt, Babylon, Sumeria, Persia and other long-dead Near East “Fertile Crescent” cultures.
As such, curators celebrating the event decided to re-enact rituals used by Egyptian pharaohs to break ground for pyramids and temples as far back as 3,500 years ago.
“Egyptians wrote down a lot, giving us a precise record of what they did and said on a day like this when they began to build a building,” said Emily Teeter, an assistant curator at the museum.
Teeter and other museum Egyptologists translated the hieroglyphic recordings describing the rituals that were inscribed on ancient temples and tombs in the Valley of the Kings, along the Nile River in Egypt.
Then, they edited the inscriptions down to a script so the ceremony could be performed on Thursday, perhaps for the first time in nearly 2,000 years.
Two schoolchildren played the roles of a pharoah-king and the goddess Shefkhet Abouy (pronounced chef-ket ah-BOO-ee), a little-known deity Egyptians trotted out for such occasions.
The children took pains to honor Re, the Egyptians’ paramount sun god, not to mention his cohort, the falcon-shaped Horus, as well as Thoth, the god of wisdom, and an assemblage of lesser deities.
They performed the ancient ceremony in the balmy sunlight behind the museum, where the 14,000-square-foot wing will be built.
The ceremonial king and goddess ritually laid out the foundation of the addition in a space that the museum’s founder, pioneering archeologist James Henry Breasted, had hoped would be used for a wing.
By Egyptian reckoning, the four-level addition will be 52 cubits long and 26 cubits wide (a cubit being the length of a forearm from elbow to tip of middle finger). By modern reckoning, that’s about 90 by 45 feet.
The addition will include a climate-control system that, for the first time, will allow the entire museum to slow the deterioration of the 180,000 artifacts in the collection. Among them are the mummified remains of seven old Egyptians who most certainly once prayed to the very gods whose names were invoked Thursday.
U. of C. President Hugo Sonnenschein began the morning with a more conventional ground-breaking, in which university and museum officials and donors turned spadesful of dirt with silver shovels.
Citing a fundraising letter written in the name of one of the museum’s mummies, he complained that Chicago summers could be as hot as “a papyrus swamp at noon, fit only for crocodiles.” Built in 1931, the museum has never been able to protect adequately its collection from the threat of heat and humidity damage.
Doffing a pith helmet he wore for the occasion, Sonnenschein saluted donors among the 200 at the ceremony who so far have contributed $6.9 million for the addition. He joked, however, that the museum’s mummies still could conjure up a curse or two if the rest of the building fund money wasn’t soon forthcoming.
The addition is slated for completion in spring 1998. Until then, the museum will remain closed.
