INDUSTRIAL archaeology, pioneered in Britain nearly half a century ago by the late Kenneth Hudson, has acquired a European dimension. British, Dutch and German specialists have established the European Route of Industrial Heritage (ERIH) project to link significant sites here and on the Continent.
The group has stated that, when complete, “the network will extend from Ironbridge Gorge . . . the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution, through to the Ruhr, the industrial powerhouse of North Rhine-Westphalia in Germany”. The project draws together existing industrial monuments and is bringing new ones into the scheme.
The network has two tiers of sites: “anchor points” of special national or international importance such as Ironbridge Gorge, Blaenavon, in Wales, and Völklinger Hütte in the Saarland, and “key sites”, which “represent the industrial heritage of a region and specific aspects of technology and innovation”. Britain will have more than 30 such points, from Cornish tin mines to the Strathisla distillery in Scotland.
They will be linked in a series of “themed routes”, each focusing on a different aspect of industrialisation, and there will be four local pilot routes in Britain. The South Wales route will explore “a powerhouse of the Industrial Revolution, supplying coal, iron and steel to the UK and other countries”. The Big Pit mining museum at Blaenavon and the Blaenavon Iron Works, together with the Swansea Maritime Museum, will form its anchor points.
In the East of England, the Waltham Abbey Royal Gunpowder Mills reflect that water mills powered the munitions industry, while the region was also the granary of the Industrial Revolution. West Midlands and North West England routes are also being developed.
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The Saarland route in western Germany shows how coal from Lorraine and labour from Luxembourg fed into the Völklinger iron and steel works to produce some of the highest-quality steel in Europe. In the Ruhr, the Duisburg Landscape Park is based on a former steelworks, and the Zollverein coke plant at Essen is dramatically lit for visitors as a silent inferno.
In the Netherlands, food production and craft skills, with wind and water the motive powers, will form the basis of the route, with the Museum Zaanse Schans at Zaandam and its 17th and 18th-century windmills giving “an insight into industrialisation in the pre-steam age”, ERIH says, while sites in Belgium will include a copper works and a paper mill.
A travelling exhibition of “heroes and villains”, such as Alfred Krupp and Isambard Kingdom Brunel, as well as workforces and dissidents such as the strikers of 1926, “will explore both positive and negative aspects of industrialisation.
ERIH promises to “take you on a journey of discovery to the milestones of European industrial heritage”, answering such questions as “who built the first factory?” and “where can you find the largest steam engine ever built?”
www.erih.net
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Mistaken mummies
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The mummy of Queen Hatshepsut, the notorious female pharaoh of New Kingdom Egypt, may have been lying unrecognised in the attic of the Cairo Museum for a century.
Found in 1903 by Howard Carter, who later discovered the tomb of Tutankhamun, the mummy has long been identified as that of her wet-nurse.
Hatshepsut reigned in 1498-83BC as the fifth pharaoh of the Eighteenth Dynasty, the later members of which included Akhenaton and Tutankhamun. She was the daughter of Tuthmosis (or Thutmose) I, half-sister and wife of his son Tuthmosis II, and half-sister to his successor Tuthmosis III, whose early reign she dominated. After her death he erased her images and inscriptions, and built a reputation as a warrior king who has been dubbed “the Napoleon of Ancient Egypt”.
Hatshepsut’s formal tomb in the Valley of the Kings, known as KV60, was looted in antiquity, but in there Carter found the denuded bodies of two elderly women. One lay uncoffined on the floor, the other was in a lidless coffin with the name and title of the Great Royal Nurse In-Sitre, Zahi Hawass notes in the Egyptological journal KMT.
The coffin and its mummy were removed to the Cairo Museum in 1908, and eventually stored in the attic. “Since that time they have remained neglected, and until now there were no photographs available,” Dr Hawass says. The other mummy was left in the tomb, and the late Elizabeth Thomas suggested that this might be Hatshepsut, rescued from her looted original tomb.
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“I do not believe this could be Hatshepsut,” Dr Hawass says. “This woman was elderly and had been very fat in life, with huge pendulous breasts”. Intrigued, he had the mummy in the attic re-examined.
“The mummy is less than five feet tall, but the coffin is some seven feet long, suggesting that it was not originally intended for this person. The mummy still in the tomb is significantly taller, and would be a much better fit for the coffin,” he says. The attic mummy “was well mummified and wrapped with fine linen. She has long wavy white hair. I think the face is quite royal, and believe that anyone who sees it will have the same reaction.”
Dr Hawass, who is director-general of Egypt’s Supreme Council for Antiquities, believes that Hatshepsut’s mummy was moved to KV60 by the necropolis priests some time after 1100BC for security reasons; her wet-nurse may have already been buried there and the burial already plundered.
The two mummies from KV60 will be put on display in the Cairo Museum, since the mummy of Tuthmosis III is also there. DNA testing or some other technique might resolve whether Queen Hatshepsut has finally been found.
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KMT, A Modern Journal of Ancient Egypt, Vol 17 No 2: 40-43.