Ancient Egypt in Prague: mummies, Abusir and the Czech Egyptologists

Three Deir el-Medina mummies lie in the Hrdlička Museum

The Hrdlička Museum of Man belongs to the Faculty of Science of Charles University and stands at Viničná 7. It opened in 1937, largely paid for by Aleš Hrdlička, an anthropologist born in Humpolec in 1869 who made his career in the United States. The whole museum fills 128 square metres. In the smaller of its two rooms are three mummies from Deir el-Medina, about 3,000 years old, with objects from their burials.

The villagers called their home st mꜣꜥt (set maat), "the Place of Truth", and the tomb builders were "servants in the Place of Truth". The seat () and the bread loaf () write st, "place", and the feather () of the goddess Maat writes mꜣꜥt, "truth". From September to June visits are by arrangement only, so book through the museum's website before you go.

Read Deir el-Medina, the tomb builders' village

Jaroslav Černý spent his life on the tomb builders

The link between Prague and Deir el-Medina is one man. Jaroslav Černý, born in Plzeň in 1898, took his doctorate at Charles University in 1922 and joined the French excavations at the village in 1925. He worked on them until his death in 1970. Much of what is known about the tomb builders' lives, their pay, days off and quarrels, comes from his reading of their ostraca: flakes of limestone and broken pots they wrote on in hieratic, the cursive form of hieroglyphs.

In 1937 Černý arranged a gift to the National Museum from the French Institute of Oriental Archaeology in Cairo: objects from Deir el-Medina, followed later by a large set of hieratic ostraca. He went on to teach at University College London and then, from 1951 to 1965, held the chair of Egyptology at Oxford. A peak above the village is still called Mont Cernabru, after Černý and the French excavator Bernard Bruyère.

František Lexa taught Prague its first Egyptology

Černý's teacher, František Lexa, taught himself Egyptian and in 1905 published the first Egyptian texts translated into Czech. He announced the first Egyptology lectures at Charles University in 1919, became Czechoslovakia's first professor of Egyptology in 1927, and in 1958 the first director of the new Czechoslovak Institute of Egyptology, set up in both Prague and Cairo.

His student Zbyněk Žába led five Czechoslovak expeditions to Nubia between 1961 and 1965, in the UNESCO campaign to record sites before Lake Nasser covered them. Finds from Taffeh, Kertassi and the area south of Kalabsha came to Prague and went to the Náprstek Museum.

Read about the kings of Nubia

Abusir became the Czech excavation

The institute began at Abusir in 1960 with the mastaba of Ptahshepses, vizier and son-in-law of King Nyuserre of the 5th Dynasty, a tomb many count as the largest of any Old Kingdom official. From 1976 Miroslav Verner led the work on the royal pyramids. In 1982 the team found a cache of papyri in a storeroom of the temple of King Neferefre, the temple's own accounts of offerings and duties, and his temple also gave up several statues of him, among them six heads.

His name, rꜥ-nfr=f, is read "Ra, he is beautiful". The sun () for Ra comes first out of respect for the god, then the heart and windpipe () for nfr, "beautiful", and the horned viper () for f, "he". Miroslav Bárta now directs the Czech excavations in Egypt, which also work at Saqqara.

Read about Bárta's Saqqara tombs

The Náprstek Museum holds the Egyptian collection

Every ancient Egyptian object of the National Museum now belongs to the collection of the Near East and Africa in antiquity at the Náprstek Museum, on Betlémské náměstí in the Old Town. Next to the gifts of Černý and Lexa and the Nubian finds, it holds Czech finds from Abusir: from the mastaba of Ptahshepses and the temples of Neferefre, Queen Khentkaus II and Djedkare Isesi. One of its mummies has been documented in Prague since 1796.

The objects come out for exhibitions. An exhibition of Egyptian mummies filled the Náprstek Museum in 2011. Kings of the Sun, made with the institute, showed nearly 300 objects from Abusir in the National Museum from August 2020 to September 2021, among them Neferefre's statues and loans from the Egyptian Museum in Cairo. Look at the museum's programme before you travel.

The institute announces talks in the Old Town

The Czech Institute of Egyptology is part of the Faculty of Arts and lists its talks on its website, some in person in the Old Town at Celetná 20, some online.

Wherever you see a coffin or a stela, photograph its columns and try the camera on this site. Start with the names, which stand out inside their cartouches.

Read a sign with your camera

Questions

Where to see it

• Deir el-Medina site
• Saqqara site

More to read

• How to read hieroglyphs How to read hieroglyphs: find the way the signs face, sound out the alphabet signs, spot the silent ones. A king's name read sign by sign.
• Which way do you read hieroglyphs? Which way do you read hieroglyphs? Toward the faces: birds, snakes and people look at the start of the line. Rows, columns and the odd exceptions.
• The hieroglyph alphabet: 24 signs and their sounds The hieroglyphic alphabet: the 24 one-consonant signs Egyptologists list, with the picture, the sound and how to spell an English name with them.