ZCZC
BFF-49
BELGIUM-HISTORY FOCUS
Tintin and the mystery of the duelling mummies
BRUSSELS, July 14, 2020 (BSS/AFP) – The mummified corpse of Rascar
Capac thrilled and terrified generations of young fans of the Tintin
comic book story “The Seven Crystal Balls”.
Now, Herge’s fictional Inca has sparked a row between rival Belgian
tourist attractions, each of which displays a mummy they say inspired
Tintin’s creator.
The very serious Art and History Museum is in Brussels’ Jubilee
Park, near where Herge used to live, and he was known to frequent its
collections.
The museum’s Andean mummy, squatting upright with knees bent,
appears similar to the haunting effigy in the author’s illustrated
tale of the be-quiffed reporter Tintin’s adventure.
Curators thought they had established the link beyond doubt 10
years ago, but the Pairi Daiza safari park in southern Belgium is
touting a rival mummy.
Last week, the popular zoo began marketing an exhibit of the
“authentic mummy nicknamed Rascar Capac”.
The royal museum is not taking this well, and has all but accused
the zoo park of false advertising.
“We don’t attract visitors by promising them pandas,” sniffed
museum director general Alexandra de Poorter.
The zoo has expressed regret over an “argument started by the royal
museums” but admits that “no one can say for sure which mummy inspired
Herge.”
If there is confusion, it dates back until at least 1979, when the
2,000-year-old preserved corpse now on display at the zoo appeared in
Brussels at an exhibit titled “Tintin’s museum of the imagination”.
The collection was assembled to mark the 50th anniversary of the
1929 release of the boy reporter’s first book-length adventure,
“Tintin in the Land of the Soviets”.
MORE/MRU/2006hrs
ZCZC
BFF-50
BELGIUM-HISTORY FOCUS-TWO LAST
Author and illustrator Georges Remi — better known under his pen name
Herge — attended the show, adding some credibility to the mummy’s
significance.
But this, according to the Art and History Museum’s curator of
Latin American relics, Serge Lemaitre, was a mistake.
The mummy in question had been bought by a Belgian collector in the
1960s, long after Herge published the “Seven Crystal Balls” book in
1948.
– French connection? –
“And in the first frames serialised in 1941 in the newspaper Le
Soir, Rascar Capac was hairless and had very bent knees, just like our
mummy,” Lemaitre says.
Herge lived near the Jubilee Park — still a popular spot in
Brussels’ European quarter — and knew the museum and its curator Jean
Capart well.
Capart even seems to have been fictionalised as Professeur
Bergamotte — or Professor Hercules Tarragon in the English-language
version of “The Seven Crystal Balls”.
Not only that, but items drawn from other pieces in the museum’s
ethnographic collections have appeared in the Tintin tales, notably a
Peruvian figurine that inspired its eponymous twin in “The Broken
Ear”.
The museum is thus confident in its claim, but — as is often the
case in a Tintin mystery — the plot may have a further twist,
according to independent expert Philippe Goddin.
“We should stop arguing. Herge looked at lots of Inca mummies, but
his first sketches of Rascar Capac are essentially based on a drawing
in the Larousse dictionary,” he said.
This is an explanation that will not suit anyone in Belgium, where
tourist attractions have seized upon any Tintin link to exploit as a
key draw.
The drawing in the Larousse was based on a mummy brought back from
Peru by the 19th-century French explorer Charles Wiener and is today
in the Quai Branly Museum … in Paris.
BSS/AFP/MRU/2006hrs