The Egyptian Museum of Turin, from the Mensa Isiaca to Champollion

Long before tourists queued outside the Egyptian Museum, Turin cultivated a special relationship with ancient Egypt. This bond, which the esoteric tradition has often interpreted as a sign of an initiatory destiny for the city, in fact has a precise history made of collectors, sovereigns and scholars. Retracing it helps us understand why the Turin museum is considered the most important in the world devoted to Egypt after the one in Cairo.

The Mensa Isiaca and Hermetic Egypt

The first Egyptian object, or supposedly Egyptian, to make the Savoy collection famous was the Mensa Isiaca, a bronze tablet inlaid with silver and other metals, decorated with figures of deities and pseudo-hieroglyphs. Probably made in Roman times, in Italy, by craftsmen imitating the Egyptian style, it was acquired by the Savoy in the seventeenth century after having belonged to Cardinal Pietro Bembo.

For Renaissance and Baroque scholars the Mensa was a key to the wisdom of Hermes Trismegistus. The Jesuit Athanasius Kircher, in his monumental Oedipus Aegyptiacus published in the mid-seventeenth century, offered a lengthy symbolic interpretation of it. His readings later proved groundless, but they show how strongly Egypt was perceived as the homeland of mysteries. Today the Mensa is kept in the Egyptian Museum itself, as a document of the European fortune of an imaginary Egypt.

The birth of the museum

In the eighteenth century King Charles Emmanuel III funded the journey to Egypt of the naturalist Vitaliano Donati, who sent some finds back to Turin. The turning point came in 1824, when King Charles Felix bought the vast collection assembled by Bernardino Drovetti, French consul in Egypt and a native of Piedmont. With thousands of objects including statues, papyri, sarcophagi and amulets, the Egyptian Museum was born.

In the same year Jean-François Champollion arrived in Turin, having just announced the decipherment of hieroglyphs. He studied the collection's papyri, among them the fragmentary Royal Canon, a list of rulers that remains a precious source for Egyptian chronology. He is credited with the often-quoted idea that the road to Memphis and Thebes passes through Turin.

The excavations of the twentieth century

At the beginning of the twentieth century the Egyptologist Ernesto Schiaparelli, director of the museum, led numerous excavation campaigns. The most famous led, in 1906 at Deir el-Medina, to the discovery of the intact tomb of the architect Kha and his wife Merit, with its complete funerary goods: clothes, food, furniture, work tools. It is an extraordinary testimony to daily life and to beliefs about the afterlife in the New Kingdom. Among the objects on display are also copies of the Book of the Dead, collections of formulas meant to accompany the deceased on the journey beyond the threshold.

The Egyptian Museum shows clearly how esoteric fascination and scientific research can intertwine. The Mensa Isiaca nourished for centuries the dream of a secret wisdom; the papyri and tombs then made it possible to know Egyptian religion in its historical reality. Visiting its halls means passing through both stories, that of the Egypt dreamed of and that of the Egypt rediscovered.