Culture : MUMMIES : * The prized remains of Egyptian pharaohs will return to public display in Cairo, aided by the Getty Institute.

For years they have slumbered in silent twilight, stretched out in splendid repose in a storeroom of the Egyptian Museum. Here in this cluttered mausoleum, the same sun that once gave life to Egypt’s pharaohs peeks each morning through small, dusty windows near the ceiling and creeps noiselessly across their grinning teeth and shrunken eyes.

Egypt has always welcomed outsiders to the painted tombs of its pharaohs and the magnificent temples erected to ancient gods. But for years the royal mummies have been hidden from public view--shielded by the conviction, dating from the heyday of the Islamic revolution in Iran, that it would be unseemly to display bodies of dead kings.

But political realities change, and so, it seems, does the fate of these 3,500-year-old relics. It started in 1980, when former Egyptian President Anwar Sadat criticized Iran for displaying on television the bodies of American servicemen killed during an abortive hostage-rescue mission near Tehran. Iranian Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini responded angrily: What was Egypt doing displaying the bodies of its pharaohs to tourists? Sadat swiftly banished the mummies to the basement.

Now, both Sadat and Khomeini are dead. And the royal mummies are once again going on public display--thanks not only to new politics, but to new technology that will allow their ancient corpses to be protected from the modern-day hazards that lay outside their quiet tombs.

“You can see all the objects in the pictures, you can go to any square in the world and see the monuments created by these people--the obelisks in New York, or Paris, or Istanbul or Rome. But this does not compare with looking face to face with the men that did these works--that man who made all this empire!” said Nasry Iskander, who for 20 years has studied Egypt’s mummies and who is now heading the project to reopen the mummy room at the Egyptian Museum next month.

A total of 11 royal mummies will go on display during the first phase, including Seti I, Ramesses II, Ramesses V, Tuthmosis IV and Queen Henttawi, the lovely, full-bosomed queen, only about 22 when she died, who was the wife of Pinejem I and the only mummy to be successfully restored.

These are the rulers who presided over the greatest years of Egyptian civilization and who created the cult of priests whose mysterious ceremonies, documented in hieroglyphic inscriptions and ancient papyri, preserved the bodies of the pharaohs and nobles in the belief that a new and eternal life was to come after the pharaoh’s death barge sailed through the stars of the night.

For the new exhibit, the Egyptian Museum is gathering together all the materials which accompanied this ancient rite of death: The fox-like hood worn by the priest during his prayers over the dead king, the ankhs (small crosses with an arched oval joining the two arms) held aloft to symbolize eternal life and the wedge used to help breathe the spirit of life into the pharaoh’s mouth.

The museum even has the tools used in the mummification process, which wasn’t fully understood and duplicated until the 1940s. On display will be the sloped embalming table, with a basin at one end used to collect bodily fluids; tiny pricks and knives, used to remove the viscera from a small hole in the lower abdomen and suck the brain out through the nose.

The rest of the body was then packed in natural salts to extract the remaining fluids from the tissues, and it was then wrapped in resin-coated linen and draped in a garland of lotus flowers, some of which survive today.

During the fabled expeditions of the 19th Century when most of Egypt’s burial treasures were uncovered, the pharaohs themselves eluded a generation of French, Italian and British adventurers and were presumed to have been long ago plundered. Then, in 1881, Sir Gaston Maspero, a professor at the College de France, arrived in Egypt and opened an expedition to find out for sure.

Maspero had returned briefly to Paris when his assistant, Emile Brugsch, prevailed upon local villagers to lead him along a long and winding path through the Deir al Bahari line of cliffs near the ancient city of Thebes (now Luxor). They descended into a deep shaft, from which they entered a chamber filled with coffins. On their lids they read names that could only have been dreamed of before: Amosis, founder of the New Kingdom; Tuthmosis I,II and III; Ahmose Nefertari, patron of necropolis workers; Ramesses I and II; Seti I. All the major pharaohs dating from as far back as the 17th Dynasty, about 1580 B.C.

In all, there were 39 mummies, 19 of them royals. (A second cache discovered in 1898 boosted the total of unearthed royals to 27.)

Brugsch was left with two fears: The first, that the remainder of the unbelievable treasure might be plundered if it were left to the villagers; the second, in those politically unstable times, that the locals might be enraged at the sight of foreign archeologists hauling out such a precious Egyptian treasure. He decided in favor of preservation, and loaded the mummies onto a boat to sail up the Nile to the protection of the museum in Cairo.

Brugsch recalled the scene in a magazine article of the day unearthed by John Romer in his book, “The Valley of the Kings:”

“When we made our departure from Luxor, our late helpers squatted in groups upon the Theban side and silently watched us. The news had been sent down in advance of us. So, when we passed the towns, the people gathered at the quays and made most frantic demonstrations . . . the women were screaming and tearing their hair.”

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The royal mummies went on display in 1953 in room 52 of the Egyptian Museum--which quickly became its most famous room--and remained there until Sadat ordered them secreted. “I can’t accept exposing the remains of Egypt’s pharaohs in exhibitions for people to view. This is against the commandments of the three religions--Islam, Christianity and Judaism,” the late Egyptian leader said.

But Iskander sees the mummies as examples of history and a lost civilization. “These are magnificent leaders, and you feel you want to see them face to face,” he said. “On the other hand, these are not any more human beings. They are now objects. And everybody must now look at them as objects, not as bodies of human beings.”

More than 130 years after the discovery of the first cache--3,000 years after it was last sealed--technology now is playing an important role not only in preserving the mummies but in learning the secrets of their ancient identities.

The display cases, developed by the Los Angeles-based Getty Conservation Institute, provide a nearly oxygen-free environment that is as near the still air of the tomb as possible.

“In the past, very little research has been done on the conservation of organic materials,” the Getty Institute said in an announcement of the showcase project. “Through this project, part of our environmental research program, we are developing preventive conservation methods that can be used by museums throughout the world to protect their collections.”

In addition to protecting the mummies, technology is for the first time allowing scientists to extract ancient DNA samples--a human version of “Jurassic Park”--to establish royal genealogy trees and confirm the identities of mummies who often were reburied in the wrong casket.

A study by the Australian Center for Egyptology in cooperation with Utah’s Brigham Young University, completed last year, extracted the genetic building-block material from mummified bones, membranes and teeth and established a clear genetic relationship spanning three generations from 4,200-year-old mummies uncovered near Fayoum, Egypt.

“We can identify grandfather and grandmother and son and daughter, and by marriage, granddaughter and grandson,” said Iskander, who participated in the study.

The fact that scientists have been able to extract DNA from mummies and perform restoration work that has shown tissues to be virtually intact “means that the process was perfect,” Iskander said.

“What we want to present with this is that it was not just an act, it was a process, physical and spiritual. Each piece of it that remains means something. It shows it was a real civilization, a unique civilization.”