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The Mummy Congress: science, obsession and the everlasting dead by Heather Pringle

Wrapped up in tales of the mummy's curse

Jonathan Sale
Friday 13 July 2001 00:00 BST
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Most of us have ambled up to a dead body, gawped a bit and wandered on. What we paused at so casually was not the corporeal remains of a relative but an embalmed corpse – not a mother in a morgue, but a mummy in a museum.

Mummies have not come back from beyond the grave; they were never there in the the first place. They are sufficiently far removed from us, by time and chemicals, to be approachable, but still human enough to be intriguing. Some were preserved by skilled embalmers, others by chancing to die in hot, dry sands or cold bogs.

Death cannot be cheated, but decomposition can be. Margaret Thatcher joked about being the returned mummy and she had a point, in this if nothing else: mummies are recycled. While the original owner of the flesh has gone to the destinations specified in the Bible or the Egyptian Book of the Dead, the flesh left behind can be put to several uses.

The most basic case of recycling was use as a pigment. In the French Revolution, the mummified hearts of kings were snatched from their sepulchres and ground down to be used for a portrait now in the Louvre. It gives a new meaning to the phrase "royal blue".

The painter Lawrence Alma-Tadema, who specialised in Egyptian scenes, was horrified to see that his work was rather too authentic. He spotted his supplier grinding up a mummy as a raw material for paint. His friend, the Pre-Raphaelite Edward Burne-Jones, learning that he also possessed a tube of recycled pigment, dug a hole in the lawn and gave it a decent burial.

A rancher near the Rio Grande had a different way of expressing reverence. Stumbling across the 1,150-year-old body of a native American which had been preserved by the dry sand, he kept the mummy – or daddy – as an honoured guest on a spare bed in the room of his son, who has now inherited it. The poor mummified fellow received a better deal after death than before. A medical expert recently spotted the vastly extended colon which pointed to death by terminal constipation – a condition resulting from a disease spread by the ominously named "assassin bug".

The Mummy Congress is wide ranging in every sense. Heather Pringle's lively prose takes us across the centuries, across the globe, and across scientific disciplines. Bringing to life the study of mummies, she introduces us to the scholars of dessicated flesh: the Egyptologists, pathologists and archaeologists who gather at the "world mummy congress" with which she begins and ends her enthralling book.

Although the specimen you admire in the museum may well have begun life as a contemporary of Tutankhamen, the mummy business is not dead. A body discovered in 1983 in Lindow Moss near Manchester immediately began helping police with a murder investigation. It turned out that there had, indeed, been foul play – but it had taken place almost 2,000 years earlier. The body, mummified by the surrounding peat, gave helpful clues to the county archaeologist. "Lindow Man" had been axed, garrotted and knifed, possibly as a human sacrifice.

This sacrifice was not in vain. Doubtless, he would have been pleased to know that a subsequent skin cream boasted of having as its unique selling point the pulverised peat which had kept him preserved.

An even more far-fetched aim is to take mummification into the future. One idea was to produce from mummified tissue a modern clone of an Inca. A concept which is better established, in the sense of having extracted large sums from paying customers, is cryonics: the deep-freezing of corpses until such time as science will be able to jump-start the defunct cells.

Heather Pringle unearths a funeral director in Salt Lake City who explains that burial or cremation gets one off to a slow start in the next world. However, the soul of the chilled body hits the heavenly ground running. Admittedly, scientists in forthcoming centuries may fail to bring you back from the grave, or three-star fridge compartment; but one will be looking one's best at Judgement Day. After all, when the Last Trump sounds, you don't want to look as if you've been a long time dead.

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