In storage for 100 years, Jewels of the Nile required special attention at WAM

A trove of ancient Egyptian jewelry had been stored at Worcester Art Museum for nearly a century when Paula Artal-Isbrand from the museum’s art conservation department was asked to prepare the pieces for a new exhibition. A big part of her job was to get them clean — just not too clean.

“Some of these objects still had archaeological soil on them," Artal-Isbrand, the museum’s objects conservator, said. “That had to be removed from the surface, but we always make sure some of it remains on an inconspicuous part of the object in case in the future that soil can be analyzed and maybe tell a story about where the object came from, or in what context it was buried and so on.”

Those traces of soil are well hidden and won’t be at all visible to people who visit “Jewels of the Nile: Ancient Egyptian Treasures from Worcester Art Museum,” which opened in June and runs through Jan. 29.

The expansive show features scarabs, beaded necklaces, gold rings, a mummy case, obelisks and more, primarily from a collection assembled by Kingsmill Marrs (d. 1912) and his wife, Laura Norcross Marrs (1845–1926), and given to WAM by Mrs. Marrs in 1926.

The exhibition coincides with the 100th anniversary of Howard Carter’s celebrated discovery of King Tutankhamun’s tomb and chronicles the friendship between the Marrses and Carter, which included several visits by them to his excavation site. The show marks the first time those items are being displayed, and it also includes additional works from the museum’s collection and select loans from private collectors.

Artal-Isbrand began working on the collection in 2017 for a show that was supposed to open in 2020 but was delayed by the pandemic. The pieces needed significant conservation work because they had not been given much attention as they lay in storage for nearly 100 years.

As she worked to gently clean archaeological soil from the items as well as the usual dirt that accrues over the years, she noticed something special about several small vials that had contained cosmetics used by Egyptian women thousands of years ago.

“For the little cosmetic containers, we left the underside uncleaned to leave a remnant of archeological soil, but we saw that some of them still contained some ancient substances,” she said. “The makeup was partially still in there and we didn’t want to touch that, so we didn’t clean the interior of those containers.”

Some of the soiling on the surface of the objects was from extensive handling of the pieces before they arrived at WAM. Until modern laws protecting antiquities were enacted, excavated items went through many hands, with collectors buying them from traders who offered them in shops or on the street. Artal-Isbrand had to clean off the oil and surface dirt that had accumulated on them from being handled over and over.

What do conservators use to clean delicate objects like tiny scarabs?

“It depends on what material the object is made of,” she said. “If it was stone, I used water or saliva.”

Saliva … really?

“Yes, saliva works very well because it's meant to break down food,” she said. “It's designed to start breaking up whatever enters your body so it's amazing how you can use it for cleaning material that’s ever so slightly greasy on the surface, and then we follow up with ionized water.”

Another conservation challenge was that some of the objects made of glass needed restoration. They had parts missing that Artal-Isbrand had to replicate.

“Parts were missing and you don’t want to leave it like that because they really looked incomplete,” she said. One piece, a vessel made of Egyptian carved glass, was missing a leg.

Artal-Isbrand once again had to call on her conservator’s sense of inventiveness regarding materials, since there is nowhere that you can just order a replacement leg for an ancient Egyptian carved glass vessel.

“I used good old epoxy," she said. “There was an existing leg that was complete, so I took an impression of it with a dental wax sheet. You hold a piece of that against the leg and kind of mold it around because it's pretty soft and does exactly what you want. Then you have a perfect little mold, and then you fill that with epoxy and let it cure, and then you shape it.”

As Artal-Isbrand worked her way through the items, she came across some particularly interesting features on an object. It was a little amulet that clearly looked unfinished but displayed the cow-like features of the goddess Hathor, believed by the Egyptians to be one of the most powerful goddesses.

“Conservators are interested in technique, in terms of how objects are made,” she said. “And conservators are especially happy to find objects that are unfinished, because then they may be able to see tool marks or other clues about how they were made.”

Artal-Isbrand began doing some research on ancient jewelry-making methods hoping to solve the mystery of why the amulet was left unfinished. It was made of jasper, a very hard stone, and she closely examined holes near the top that had been drilled into it, probably so it could be hung as a pendant.

“They drilled the holes from two sides, and they were supposed to meet in the middle but in this case, they missed,” she said. “They missed because the stone wasn't thick enough so the whole top broke off. And then the jeweler or the stone worker stopped and discarded the piece and somehow it ended up somewhere and an archeologist found it.”

What it also shows is that the holes they drilled were all conical, so the entrance of the hole is wider than in the middle, a detail that often escapes creators of fake antiquities. “It’s also a way to authenticate fake from modern — the modern is just one hole straight through and not conical,” she said.

A big part of the conservation effort involved restringing the beads of ancient necklaces. After thousands of years, the original organic string material had decomposed, and beads often were discovered in little unstrung piles. Undaunted, the dealers of yore took it upon themselves to render their finds sellable again.

“The necklaces in the collection were all strung, but it had been done randomly because they were not found that way,” Artal-Isbrand said. “They had been restrung for the tourists.”

Curators and historians know how some of the necklaces were strung in ancient times because of photographs and documentation by archeologists who found jewelry in tombs that had been undisturbed by treasure hunters.

“We just systematically went through everything,” Artal-Isbrand said. “The curators looked at every group of beads and assessed them. Most of them did need correction, so I unstrung them and redid them.”

It was an exacting job, but Artal-Isbrand reveled in the restringing.

“I loved it,” she said. “Like most things in conservation, it's slow and systematic. You just go one bead at a time, and while you’re doing that you can't help but think about where these pieces came from and how you're helping to reconstruct a story that otherwise may be lost.”

For some types of necklaces, however, there is no documentation showing how the beads were strung in ancient times. “In those cases, we left the beads unstrung, and just displayed them as a little group,” she said.

Documentation may yet be found, but only if archaeologists find where the items are buried before the treasure hunters do.

“In the past it was about treasure hunting and getting stuff to sell, but once these pieces are moved you cannot reconstruct where they came from. Just studying them the way they are found tells us a story, and that whole context is lost once they are disturbed,” she said.

It's critically important that archaeological excavations are conducted scientifically, meaning really slowly and systematically, and photographing or documenting everything before anything is moved.

Illegal or not, looting of antiquities still goes on, often by people who are struggling to make a living.

“Maybe I'd move them too if I was a starving peasant. It’s tragic, though, because you lose the history,” she said. “That's why you're not supposed to buy any antiquities when you travel, even from somebody who may be hungry or may be poor, because that encourages it. If people say, ‘I'm not interested,’ then there’s no market for it, which may help discourage them from doing it again.”

This article originally appeared on Telegram & Gazette: In storage for 100 years, Jewels of the Nile required special attention at WAM