Pennsylvania Museum Erases Huge Egyptian Fake Door –

After nearly three decades of conservation and intensive study and planning by engineers and conservators, the Pennsylvania Museum has reassembled the five-ton false door of the Capure Tomb Chapel and installed it in the new Egyptian Gallery on the main floor. Nearly 100 limestone blocks that make up the rest of the church will be used to rebuild the entire funerary chapel over the coming weeks, along with false doors.

The limestone sacrificial chamber dates to around 2350 BC, the end of the Fifth Dynasty or the beginning of the Sixth Dynasty in Egypt’s Old Kingdom. This is one of two burial chambers in the above-ground portion of the tomb of Kaipure, a finance official, recorded in the 19th-century Saqqara Old Kingdom cemetery. In 1904, the tomb was dismantled and shipped to the United States to serve as Egypt’s pavilion at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition (also known as the St. Louis World’s Fair) in St. Louis.

The Pennsylvania Museum (then known as the Free Museum of Science and Art) heard that Egypt was willing to sell it and purchased the church a few months after the World’s Fair for $10,000 ($265,000 in today’s money). Once they had secured the limestone blocks for Caple Chapel, they discovered that the whole thing was too heavy to be installed on the second floor where they planned to install it, and therefore could not be put on display immediately because they were too heavy. Twenty years later, the church was finally housed in the museum’s new wing.

It remained on display there for 70 years. In 1996, the Pennsylvania Museum initiated a conservation project that would fully restore the west wall, including the false doors, and then the south and east walls. Its carved hieroglyphs and vivid paintings have been restored to their full glory. This ambitious effort is finally coming to an end, and next year the fully restored Kepure Chapel will become the centerpiece of the museum’s new Egypt Gallery: Life and the Afterlife.

Once completed, visitors will be able to walk through the massive structure and experience the feeling of being inside the Tomb Church.

“To preserve the experience of entering a large space like a funeral chapel, the preservation process is a complex, collaborative effort,” said Julia Commander, senior program conservator at the Penn State Museum. “Every level of detail is important – from the smallest trace of original paint to the overall layout of the structure.”

The museum created a cool time-lapse video showing the reinstallation of the fake door.