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Massive Egyptian false door raised at Penn Museum
After nearly three decades of conservation and intensive study and planning by engineers and conservators, the Penn Museum has reassembled the five-ton false door from the Tomb Chapel of Kaipure and installed it its new Egyptian gallery on the main floor. Almost 100 limestone blocks forming the rest of the chapel will join the false door to reconstruct the entire tomb chapel over the next few weeks.
The limestone offering chamber dates to around 2350 B.C., the late 5th or early 6th Dynasty of Egypt’s Old Kingdom. It was one of two chambers in the above-ground portion of the tomb of Kaipure, a treasury official, documented at the Old Kingdom cemetery at Saqqara in the 19th century. The tomb was dismantled and transported to the United States for Egypt’s pavilion at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St. Louis, aka the World’s Fair of Meet me in St. Louis fame, in 1904.
The Penn Museum (then called the Free Museum of Science and Art) heard Egypt was willing to sell it and bought the chapel a few months after the World’s Fair for $10,000 ($265,000 in today’s money). After they secured the limestone blocks of the Kaipure chapel, they found the whole thing was too heavy to install on the second floor where they’d planned it to go, so it could not be immediately placed on display because they were too heavy. Twenty years later, the chapel was finally installed in the new wing of the museum.
It was on display there for 70 years. In 1996, the Penn Museum embarked on a conservation project that would fully restore the west wall, including the false door, followed by the south and east walls. Its carved hieroglyphic inscriptions and vivid painting have been restored brilliance. This ambitious endeavor is at long last reaching its conclusion, and next year, the fully restored Kaipure chapel will be the centerpiece of the museum’s new Egypt Galleries: Life and Afterlife.
Once completed, visitors will be able to move through the monumental structure and experience what it feels like to be inside an ancient tomb chapel.
“To preserve the experience of going into a large space like the funerary chapel, the conservation process is a complex and collaborative effort,” says Julia Commander, Senior Project Conservator at the Penn Museum. “Every level of detail matters—from the smallest trace of original pigment to the structure’s overall layout.”
The museum has created a cool timelapse video showing the reinstallation of the false door.
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