Hidden treasures stored away from the public gaze at The McManus will be opened up next week.
The Courier has been given a peek at some of its most prized treasures at its Barrack Street centre.
Assistant curator Carly Cooper said: “Originally, this was to be a coffee morning and then we gave it the tagline CU Inside.”
Now the collection, which houses some of the museum’s more fragile items, will open its doors next Monday to allow people to find out more about what goes on inside the building.
Staff and conservators are based in the building and they will be on hand to talk about the projects they have been working on, including finally being able to confirm the museum mummy’s name.
Christina Donald has been working on Egyptology research and had collaborated with Professor Sue Black at Dundee University to get the mummy scanned.
“We have a good working relationship with the university so we took it up to them,” she said.
“By scanning it we wanted to see if there was anything in it if it was a man or a woman and how they died. Looking at the surface initially, it does seem to be a woman, which seems to match the hieroglyphs on it.”
An expert from England has now been able to work with the collections unit to confirm the mummy does match the name on the case hnty-k though she has been given a more pronounceable name in the department.
Christina said: “We think she may have been an elderly woman. The mummy case came into the collections in the 19th Century.
“Our expert is now presenting a paper on it at the Vatican mummy convention.”
However, it is not just the mummy which members of the public can come up close to during the open day.
There will be talks on conserving model ships and wet specimens as well as the process of taking in donations and how they are documented. And collections on display will vary from Chinese coins to three large ship models.
Carly said: “They have just recently come into the building. I think they are all Dundee-built ships The Prosperity, The Lord Duncan and the Loch Tay.”
The women are keen for the public to come down on to the open day next Monday 11am-3pm.
Christina said: “The museum is really the shop front, the tip of the iceberg. We want to show people just because things are in storage they are still important.”