Visitors to the Penn Museum will soon be able to walk through a reconstructed Egyptian tomb chapel that is more than 4,000 years old.
The museum’s new Egypt Galleries: Life and Afterlife opens Dec. 12 with more than 1,000 artifacts spanning 4,000 years of ancient Egyptian history. The centerpiece is the 4,300-year-old Tomb Chapel of Kaipure, a high-ranking treasury official during Egypt’s Old Kingdom whose burial chapel was excavated at Saqqara more than a century ago.
The chapel is made from nearly 100 carved and painted limestone blocks and includes a five-ton false door, a symbolic threshold tied to ancient Egyptian beliefs about the afterlife. After extensive conservation, more of the original pigment is visible, and visitors will be able to enter and move through the reconstructed space…