Mummy braces and sacred gazelle skins: Investigating animal provenance, skin selection and leather processing in Ancient Egypt

Presentation by Lucy Skinner, Postdoc, Center for Textile Research, University of Copenhagen.

This talk presents the types of method and a selection of the results from my PhD investigations of ancient Egyptian and Nubian leather. I will discuss a type of object known as ‘mummy braces’, demonstrating how new techniques and methods were used to investigate the animal provenance of the skin used to make the leather, and manufacturing techniques adopted to produce these unique types of item.

‘Mummy braces’ (sometimes called ‘stola’) are long ribbons of red leather terminating in rectangular or triangular-shaped ‘mummy tabs’, adorning some Egyptian mummies dating to the Third Intermediate Period. During my PhD I investigated sixteen ‘mummy-tabs’, or ‘pendants’ with embossed decoration, from the British Museum. The results show that a colourant made from madder dye was used to stain the leather red, and the decoration was embossed using a stamp or die mould. Most notably, I discovered that rather than [the more typical] goat skin, gazelle skin was used to make the leather used in the mummy tabs and braces and could even tell the area of the animal’s skin from which the leather was cut.

I will utilise many of the methods and techniques presented in this talk, within my post doc in the Fashioning Sudan project.