Over several days, a ten-inch Egyptian statuette gradually rotates to face the rear of the locked glass cabinet in which it is displayed, and has to be turned around again by hand.
Those who like tales of haunted pyramids and walking mummies may regard the mystery of the 4,000-year-old relic – an offering to Osiris, god of the dead – as the strangest thing to hit Egyptology in decades
‘In Ancient Egypt they believed that if the mummy is destroyed then the statuette can act as an alternative vessel for the spirit. Maybe that is what is causing the movement.’
The statue, made by one Neb-Senu in about 1800BC, was donated to the museum in 1933, and had been reassuringly immobile for most of that time.
However Mr Price and his colleagues are now used to finding it facing the rear of its case – perhaps significantly, displaying a prayer on the back requesting ‘bread, beer, oxen and fowl’.
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