A Glasgow Institution Quietly Rewrites Its Galleries
Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum in Glasgow has removed several ancient Egyptian artefacts from public display, citing the absence of “informed consent from the deceased individual” as the governing rationale. The removed items include a painted coffin containing the remains of a priest, a mummified male head, a mummified right hand recovered from the Valley of Kings in Luxor, and a mummified right foot — objects estimated to be between 2,000 and 5,000 years old, and which had formed part of the museum’s collection for generations.
The removals came to wider public attention when a visitor, Jonny McFarlane, shared a photograph on social media of a notice now occupying the space where the exhibits once stood. The sign read simply: “We have removed human remains from this display as a mark of respect.” McFarlane noted that he had brought his daughter specifically to view the mummy, having been inspired by her enthusiasm for a book on ancient Egypt — only to find the display gone.
The Institutional Rationale
Glasgow Life, the charitable organisation funded by the SNP-administered Glasgow City Council that oversees the city’s museums, confirmed that human remains would no longer be displayed, describing the policy as reflecting “contemporary museum practice”. The charity indicated it is working to remove archaeological human remains from both the History Discovery Centre and the Scotland’s Early People gallery at Kelvingrove.
In justifying the decision, Glasgow Life invoked two documents of some institutional weight: the International Council of Museums’ revised Code of Ethics, and the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Afrikan Reparations 2025 report. The organisation framed the removal as an expression of respect for the “inherent dignity of human remains” — a formulation that, applied to artefacts of this antiquity, raises immediate and obvious questions about how such dignity is to be assessed or operationalised.
The Consent Problem
The central difficulty with the consent argument is not merely philosophical but practical. The individuals in question died between two and five millennia ago, in a civilisation whose funerary customs were, by any reasonable reading, oriented towards public veneration and the preservation of the physical body for posterity. Soliciting retroactive consent from a mummified Egyptian priest is, as critics have noted, not a standard that any institution can meaningfully satisfy — and invoking it as a governing principle invites the question of where such logic terminates.
Manchester Museum, which recently removed the mummified remains of Asru — a 2,700-year-old Egyptian temple musician displayed for some two centuries — stated that the decision “aligns most closely with what we understand about her own wishes”. That formulation, while presumably well-intentioned, represents a significant epistemological claim, and one that has not gone unexamined by those sceptical of the broader trend.
A Pattern Across British Institutions
Kelvingrove is not an isolated case. Oxford’s Pitt Rivers Museum removed Egyptian mummified remains and South American shrunken heads from display in 2020, citing concerns about reinforcing what it described as “racist or stereotypical thinking”. The accumulation of such decisions across major British institutions suggests a coordinated shift in curatorial philosophy, one driven less by new archaeological evidence than by the application of contemporary ethical frameworks to historical collections.
What distinguishes these moves from ordinary curatorial revision is the explicit grounding in consent and dignity language typically associated with the living. Museums have always exercised discretion over what they display and how; the novelty here lies in the stated reasoning, which borrows from a rights-based discourse that was not designed with ancient artefacts in mind and which, when applied to them, produces conclusions that many visitors find difficult to reconcile with the purpose of a public museum.
Political and Public Reaction
Scottish Conservative MSP Murdo Fraser offered the most pointed political response, describing the removal as “woke madness at its most ridiculous” and arguing that Glasgow’s museums ought to be “showcasing our history, not quietly removing it to appease the latest trend in political correctness”. The characterisation of the decision as a form of cancellation — applied now even to objects predating written British history by millennia — has resonated with a section of the public that views such moves as symptomatic of a broader institutional loss of confidence.
Public disappointment has been tangible. Visitors who made specific journeys to view the mummies have found notices in their place, and the social media response has been largely critical, suggesting that the museum’s governing body may have underestimated the affection in which these exhibits were held. For many, the Egyptian collection represented precisely the kind of encounter with deep human history that justifies the existence of a major civic museum.
The Broader Question for British Museums
The Kelvingrove episode forces a clarifying question about what publicly funded museums are for. If their purpose is to preserve and communicate the material record of human civilisation — including its ancient, foreign, and sometimes mortuary dimensions — then the removal of Egyptian mummies on consent grounds represents a significant departure from that mission. If, alternatively, their purpose is conceived in more activist terms, as institutions that model contemporary ethical norms, then such removals follow logically enough from the premises.
The tension between these two conceptions of the museum is unlikely to be resolved by any single policy decision. What the Kelvingrove case does is make that tension visible, and it does so in a manner that is difficult to dismiss as marginal: a major civic institution, funded by public money, has concluded that objects between two and five thousand years old cannot be displayed without the consent of individuals who have been dead since before the Roman Empire reached Britain. That is a position worth examining with some care.