Hearst Museum of Anthropology, was part of Object Lessons, an exhibit in The Bancroft Library that ran through May 2020. This crocodile mummy, part of the Egyptian collection at the Phoebe A. These mummies, along with a collection of papyri held by the Center for the Tebtunis Papyri at the Bancroft Library, give us clues about how everyday ancient Egyptians lived and how far they went to appease crocodiles, hoping their devotion would win them some good will toward humankind. Hearst Museum of Anthropology at UC Berkeley. Now, more than 100 years later, 19 mummified crocodiles are part of the Egyptian collection at the Phoebe A. But instead of collecting the mummies, they began to break them open, remove the papyri and discard the crocodiles. When they found papyri - paper’s earliest ancestor - stuffed inside of the mummies with text written on it by Egyptians thousands of years before, they were suddenly interested.
They were searching for human mummies and artifacts, fueled by Egyptomania - the Western obsession with all things Egyptian. Hearst, found hundreds of crocodile mummies on an expedition to Northern Egypt in 1899, they were annoyed. When archaeologists, funded by University of California benefactor Phoebe A.
