The Myths vs Reality of Mummification

From the elaborate burial rituals of Ancient Egypt to Victorian mummy unwrapping parties, mummification has fascinated humanity for centuries. But what is mummification really about? Because Hollywood, supernatural folklore and popular culture have muddied our understanding of the real history behind this burial practice. Dan is joined by Egyptologist and curator of Egypt and Sudan at the Manchester Museum to unravel (pun intended) the myths and misconceptions around Ancient Egyptian mummification and explore the morbid curiosity the Romans, Greeks and Victorians all had for this mysterious practice. Produced by Mariana Des Forges and edited by Natasha Hughes Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. You can also email the podcast directly at [email protected] mailto:[email protected]. Dan Snow's History Hit is a History Hit podcast. History Hit is part of Little Dot Studios, a Certified B Corp™. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

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  Egyptian mummies. We're obsessed with them. Of course we are. And we have been for thousands of years. And that's what we're talking about on today's episode. But we're going to start by taking you back to the early 1820s, when an audience of Londoners stood agog as the explorer Giovanni Belzoni, a man who'd recently returned from Egypt with a trove of ancient treasures, peeled back a pile of dusty bandages to reveal the sunken, desiccated, parched face of a corpse. This was one of the first unrolling parties. Yes, they were a thing. A macabre sensation that became the rage in Victorian Britain, as people would gather

• 4:08Speaker 00

  to unwrap mummies and have a party. These mummies had been purchased or stolen during trips to Egypt, they'd been brought back to the UK. And the wealthy elites of Europe became obsessed with them and threw them the mysteries of the ancient Egyptians and the process of mummification. What did it all mean? There are stories of Victorians snorting cocaine off mummies, ingesting ground-up mummies, hoping there would be some kind of medical elixir called mamiya. But our long relationship with mummies, as you can tell, it's been complicated, it's been riddled with misunderstandings. And so we've often been muddled and wrong. So here we are, I'm going to set the record straight.

• 4:50Speaker 00

  I'm joined by the expert, the great friend of History Hit, bestselling author and curator of Egypt and Sudan at Manchester Museum, European Museum of the Year, Dr Campbell Price. He's back on the podcast to sort out fact from fiction when it comes to the myths of mummification in ancient Egypt.

• 5:13Speaker 00

  Campbell, you're at the coalface. You're where the rubber meets the road. People come to you, they want to know more about Egypt. Presumably, mummies loom very large in that conversation.

• 5:22Speaker 04

  Yes, in a popular museum like Manchester Museum, European Museum of the Year.

• 5:27Speaker 00

  Obviously.

• 5:28Speaker 04

  It is very common that people associate museums either with dinosaurs or, you're right, with Egyptian mummies. So there's a lot of misinformation, there's a lot of misconceptions about the ancient Egyptian dead.

• 5:39Speaker 00

  So is one of them that mummies are somehow, you're just trying to preserve these bodies forever in a sort of macabre way?

• 5:45Speaker 04

  Yes, because when mummies first encountered the West and when the West first encountered mummified bodies from Egypt, 1700s, at that time, there were experiments in Europe about embalming procedures. With the explicit intention of people die away from home, they need to preserve the body to bring it back. So lots of experiments in anatomy theatres to understand the human body and to experiment in mummification, embalming techniques were back projected onto the ancient Egyptians. So one day you might have a fresh-ish cadaver and then the next day you might have a mummified

• 6:29Speaker 04

  ancient Egyptian and you were assuming that the people who were embalming both were doing the same thing.

• 6:35Speaker 00

  Interesting. Just as you said that, my mind drifted off, speaking of the 1700s, early 1800s, to Nelson and his huge big casket brandy. They saved his body after the Battle of Trafalgar. They didn't throw him overboard to bring him back and bury him in St Paul's Cathedral, as they should have. Anyways, that's some form of...

• 6:49Speaker 04

  That's very Dan Snow take on embalming. Yep.

• 6:53Speaker 00

  So, okay, so we'll discuss it, but it's not actually, they're not trying to just keep these people, keep this flesh from...

• 6:59Speaker 04

  No, I think this is a modern assumption that the reason you would treat the body is to keep it like, you know, you see grandma in the funeral home. This may not be the case.

• 7:09Speaker 00

  Interesting, we'll come to that. Second thing I think we, people like me, think about is that there's mummies, there's an element of the frank, the undead, they rise, they run around, they scare people. There's a, there's a horror element. Is that something the Egyptians would have recognised?

• 7:24Speaker 04

  Yeah, I think exactly as you described, there's a threat and we'll maybe unpack that a little bit. This would have been totally alien to an ancient Egyptian. The mummified dead were meant to be effective and beneficial for you, a living person. And they would be your kind of foot in with the gods. If you did the mummification rituals correctly, the funeral, and you observed an ancestral cult for a dead relative, then they would do things for you. So it was not about threat or fear, but occasionally there were misunderstandings between the living and the dead.

• 8:00Speaker 00

  How interesting, it's the opposite. It's good, you want to be surrounded by mummies.

• 8:04Speaker 04

  Yeah, well, essentially, yeah.

• 8:06Speaker 00

  Okay, let's go back all the way, so take me back into the deep past. When do we start seeing these burial practices emerge? If you go all the way back to the Old Kingdom, even older, how do people bury their dead or dispose their dead?

• 8:16Speaker 04

  So we've got the 3,000-year sweep of ancient Egypt, which is roughly 3,000 BCE up to Cleopatra.

• 8:24Speaker 00

  Yeah, just folks, every time we talk to you, Cleopatra lives closer to the iPhone than to the...

• 8:29Speaker 04

  Pyramids.

• 8:30Speaker 00

  Unbelievable.

• 8:31Speaker 04

  This is because ancient Egypt is a long, long, long, long time and things were very regional. This is important. They did different things in different parts of the country and also it lasts a long time and fashions change. So when you talk about ancient Egypt, there's a tendency to imagine this big, monolithic, all ancient Egyptians believe X. This is simply not true. So in answer to your question, mummification is such a quintessentially ancient Egyptian thing. The Greeks, the Romans are obsessed, you could say morbidly obsessed with what the ancient Egyptians do to their dead.

• 9:05Speaker 00

  So it's not just us, everyone that's come to, even the ancient Greeks, the ancient Romans, everyone's been fascinated by this technique?

• 9:11Speaker 04

  Yeah, because obviously if you're a Greek or someone living in the Greek world like Herodotus, you are visiting Egypt and people are still practising, actively practising mummification. And you think, gosh, it's weird, it's one of the weird things the Egyptians do. So there's this kind of slightly schizophrenic approach to the Egyptians. They have this very long past and they're very clever and they're great healers and they're great magicians, but also they're very superstitious and they do weird stuff and they're kind of to be feared in a way.

• 9:43Speaker 00

  Really? Okay, so take me back way before Herodotus, way before, so we get, that's the end of Egyptian, ancient Egyptian history, right back at the beginning, people being buried...

• 9:52Speaker 04

  Before there are pharaohs.

• 9:54Speaker 00

  Before there are pharaohs.

• 9:55Speaker 04

  So obviously people are being buried and they are being treated in a special way. I think that's what we can say from the archaeology. We've got what we would call, Egyptologists would call, pre-dynastic graves. So pre, before the dynastic period, before 3,000 BCE. And there are people buried in a crouched kind of fetal position, a sleeping position. And we know from later pyramid texts, from hundreds of years later, that there's a concept that you, you sleep to wake, you die to live. So sleep is a metaphor for death, from which you are going to wake up into a new life. Not, not in the sense the body is going to get up and move around, but you're going

• 10:38Speaker 04

  to live in a metaphysical existence in the beyond. And in order to do that, you need stuff. So people are buried with cosmetic items, which seems to be because the body is treated in a certain way that makes it look more divine.

• 10:55Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 10:55Speaker 04

  And that is the fundamental point to understand about mummification. It is not about preserving the person as they were, as they looked when they were alive, but to change them and to change their appearance so they appear as a god. Because that's the only way you're going to survive this terrible rupture of death.

• 11:16Speaker 00

  Are they becoming divine in some way?

• 11:19Speaker 04

  Yes, absolutely, absolutely.

• 11:21Speaker 00

  So it's not just in Rome, emperors became divine, but this is a chance for all Egyptians who can afford it are in somehow becoming divine beings in death.

• 11:28Speaker 04

  Yes, and I think I'm often asked that, what did most people expect? So we know about kings and queens and the elite. I suspect most ancient Egyptians would believe that the act of burying someone and treating the body and doing the proper funeral, regardless of where in the social pyramid you are, the action, the ritual did the transformation. So that answers the question, you know, why is everyone not mummified? The full, the full works is only performed, the wrapping and the oils and the resins and the coffins and the tombs. Yeah, that's only the top 5%, but everyone else believes there's the possibility

• 12:11Speaker 04

  to exist as some superhuman being after death. Otherwise, it would be quite a sad life.

• 12:17Speaker 00

  Yeah, tell me about it. So you, these early tombs, these early graves are buried with cosmetics. Sounds like my daughter's bedroom. I push open her door through a sea of skincare and cosmetics.

• 12:29Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 12:29Speaker 00

  And then what's the next development after that?

• 12:33Speaker 04

  So there is, there's definitely the wrapping of the body from very early on. But we're not talking, you know, the Hollywood bandages wrapped, wrapped around the corpse.

• 12:44Speaker 00

  It's a shroud.

• 12:45Speaker 04

  Shrouding, not necessarily of linen, but of matting. And this is a way of marking the body as, as separate. So the deceased is existing already separate from society. Not because I think the ancient Egyptians are afraid of the dead or, you know, repelled by decomposition, there may be an element of that. But there's a way of marking the dead as entering this other world, the afterworld, in which gods exist. So there does seem to be a concept of gods and the dead exist in this other place and they are in communication with one another.

• 13:27Speaker 04

  So you want to use your own deceased relatives as a means of communication.

• 13:32Speaker 00

  So they can intercede with the gods, they can, they can, they can work on your behalf, they can lobby.

• 13:36Speaker 04

  They can lobby, that's a great, that's a great word to use. If you have a knowing, you know, if you had a great aunt who was particularly, you know, socially powerful.

• 13:47Speaker 00

  Which I do.

• 13:49Speaker 04

  I had one, certainly. You would think after she passed on, she would be your kind of conduit. So why worship a kind of impersonal great god, like the god Osiris or the god Amun, who haven't appeared on the scene yet in the pre-dynastic period, I should say? Why do that when you could actually have a relationship with your deceased great aunt? Who could, as you said, lobby the other divine beings and who could do things of benefit to you?

• 14:21Speaker 00

  So the dead are, you're laying them at rest, hoping to ease their journey into this afterlife, but hoping all once they're there, they're going to help you as well. So there is, there's a reciprocity to this.

• 14:31Speaker 04

  Yes, reciprocity is important and you want to keep the channels of communication open. So we've got archaeological evidence of the, the grave. So the development after burying someone in a, in a pit, basically, with some covering, some items around them, a kind of shallow grave. Then there is the development of that quintessentially Egyptian thing, the two parts, the bipartite tomb. So you have the sealed bit, which is meant to be secure from animals and from tomb robbers, potentially, and then the open bit, which is inviting people in to leave offerings, to speak to the dead, to communicate with the dead. Because A, the dead don't want to be forgotten and the living want that means of communication with the other world, with the divine world.

• 15:16Speaker 00

  And if it's, it's one of those, if you have a particularly illustrious ancestor, perhaps, the one who, the one who got, the great aunt who really was something.

• 15:22Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 15:22Speaker 00

  This might continue for generations.

• 15:24Speaker 04

  Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah. Beyond living memory. Yeah. And if you imagine that the cemetery, because the cemetery would be at a remove from, from the settlement, you could see, you can just see, my gosh, that grave over there has 10 times as many, you know, pots of figs as that one next to it. That person must have been particularly venerated and particularly effective as an ancestor.

• 15:47Speaker 00

  And I suppose if your family continue to enjoy wealth and fortune and are able to afford lots of jars of figs, that does suggest that they're doing their job. So it's a self fulfilling.

• 15:58Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's, it's, yeah, self fulfilling and it's a, a social contract. It is a reciprocity, it's a kind of, yeah, you scratch my back and I'll scratch yours from beyond the grave.

• 16:10Speaker 00

  Let's get to, what's the next step on this journey towards mummification?

• 16:14Speaker 04

  So tombs become more developed. And the standard explanation, Dan, which I might put a pin in and try and challenge, is that the fact that tombs develop and then coffins develop means that the hot, dry sand is no longer in contact with the body.

• 16:37Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 16:38Speaker 04

  And so if you leave a body in a hot desert, it will naturally desiccate. So natural mummification occurs. And so for Egyptology, there is an assumption that when tombs develop, then artificial mummification has to take place. But I'm rather sceptical about this neat division, this neat development. Always be healthily sceptical of neat historical explanations.

• 17:06Speaker 00

  Tell me about it.

• 17:07Speaker 04

  I think there is more artificial treatment of the body while the body is still in contact with hot sand. And there are other religious reasons for doing what the Egyptians do. So the next stage in the early dynastic period.

• 17:22Speaker 00

  So we're into the, we're into the Old Kingdom now.

• 17:24Speaker 04

  Yeah, we're into.

• 17:25Speaker 00

  They're building pyramids.

• 17:26Speaker 04

  They're almost building pyramids. They're building big tombs called mastabas.

• 17:31Speaker 00

  Yes, mastabas.

• 17:32Speaker 04

  And then, you know, there is a chamber, there's a room you can go into, in which the body is placed in a coffin. And so the body at this point is still potentially placed in a wooden coffin, which we have an example in Manchester Museum, I think we've looked at it together in the storeroom, which is, is short, made of wood and it's big enough for an adult to be still in this crouched position. So there's the idea of the, yeah, sleeping to wake, the, the dying to live. But then it's not this Hollywood idea of the, the fully stretched body wrapped, but it's crouched still. And the shape of the coffin is often characterized as a house.

• 18:17Speaker 04

  It's not a house, it's a shrine of a god or a palace of a king. Now, a king is divine, so a king lives in a, in a sort of a shrine. God's statues live in shrines, they are periodically brought out for rituals. And so the body of the deceased, for those that can afford it, is treated in a way like a divine statue. So the dead have their divine status assured by being put in a shrine shaped box.

• 18:49Speaker 00

  And will that box be brought out?

• 18:50Speaker 04

  No.

• 18:51Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 18:51Speaker 04

  It's being left alone.

• 18:52Speaker 00

  We'll separate, we'll part this one, but the Inca would bring them out, wouldn't they?

• 18:56Speaker 04

  And there are other, yeah, cultures that are either keeping the dead within, within visible distance.

• 19:04Speaker 00

  Right.

• 19:05Speaker 04

  Or, as you say, periodically will bring the dead out to participate in.

• 19:10Speaker 00

  So that's not coming out?

• 19:11Speaker 04

  No, these are sealed and closed and this is the secure part of the tomb. But then there's a tomb chapel developing all this time into the pyramid age, which starts out as a little room for the pots of figs, develops into a room with a central doorway, a false door, which enables the interaction of the living and the dead, but maintains the security of the tomb beyond so that tomb robbers can't get in.

• 19:41Speaker 00

  More from Dr Campbell Price after this, don't go away.

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• 23:21Speaker 00

  Oh, so now we're approaching mummification.

• 23:24Speaker 04

  If by mummification you mean what we classically think of as the dehydration of the body, resin.

• 23:32Speaker 00

  I've just got halfway through this podcast and realized a very embarrassing thing. I'm not really sure what mummification is. I'm sorry, Campbell.

• 23:39Speaker 04

  No, no, no, no.

• 23:40Speaker 00

  So what do we mean by mummification?

• 23:42Speaker 04

  So mummification really is the artificial treatment of the body. So that is the application of, or the drying of the body through a chemical means, a kind of a chloride compound, sodium chloride, like Egyptologists call it natron. You've heard of natron, I guess.

• 24:09Speaker 00

  I have not, but it sounds cool.

• 24:11Speaker 04

  Well, it's called natron because it's a salt-like substance that is extracted from different places, but principally from a place called the Wadi Natrun. So there's a homophony here, where we're extracting this, and this is, and I really emphasize this point, this is something that priests used to bathe. So it's like having a salt scrub.

• 24:35Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 24:36Speaker 04

  Which makes you feel pure and allows you to go into the temple and do all your rituals in a state of purity. You can even chew balls of natron, apparently. This is what the Greeks and the Romans think is very weird. But this is applied to the body as a way of purifying it. It has as a, perhaps as a side effect, a dehydrating effect.

• 25:01Speaker 00

  So that's good. So it's doing, there's a ritual effect, and then there's a physiological effect, sucking the moisture out of the skin. So that makes it nice and dry.

• 25:09Speaker 04

  Yes, and then you come along and you want the body to be divine, more divine. So you apply resin, plant resin, which is burnt in temple rituals as incense. So there is definitely a value placed on smelling nice, so frankincense, myrrh. The reason these are, you know, in biblical, people will know those terms from biblical accounts, the reason they are so valuable is because they are used in the treatment of the dead and treatment of ritual procedure. So the ancient Egyptians are applying resin, but I really emphasize not to preserve the

• 25:53Speaker 04

  body, but to make the deceased more like a god. And then the last stage is to wrap the body in linen, fine, radiant, white linen. That's how gods appear.

• 26:05Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 26:05Speaker 04

  They appear in this kind of amorphous shape, what Egyptology calls mummiform shape, but actually, Egyptology has got the associations the wrong way around.

• 26:17Speaker 00

  Yes, the gods aren't looking like mummies, the mummies looking like gods.

• 26:20Speaker 04

  Exactly, Dan. You've got it in one. That's it. So I think when you understand those procedures, mummification is simply, not that simply, it's quite a complicated process, is the treatment of the human body and other bodies, animal bodies as well, to make them, or to emphasize or enhance their god-like qualities.

• 26:45Speaker 00

  And so these little statues of the gods that you're talking about, that'll be brought out on specialty, they would actually look quite similar.

• 26:51Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 26:51Speaker 00

  So the mummies would look like them as well.

• 26:53Speaker 04

  Yes, so that kind of visual comparison was very important to make that association clear.

• 27:01Speaker 00

  And so this is, although you're saying 3,000 years of ancient Egypt is a long, long time, mummification actually is a common thread through it, would you say? I mean, does this endure?

• 27:10Speaker 04

  Yes, it's culturally absolutely central. The dead are far more part of society than maybe in the modern West. But in terms of, you know, if you asked, when do you attend an Egyptian funeral and see something that looks like a mummified body from a Hollywood film? Well, the body starts to be stretched out in the Pyramid Age.

• 27:37Speaker 00

  So, okay, so Old Kingdom.

• 27:39Speaker 04

  Old Kingdom, you know, 2,500-ish BCE. And what happens is there's an interesting period of development around the time of the pyramids, Dynasty IV, Dynasty V, where the deceased is almost completely covered in plaster. And so there are interesting cultural parallels with places like Jericho in the Levant. Those are much older cases where skulls, you know, disarticulated skulls are treated with plaster. So there is this idea that, again, gods are permanent, divine images last forever. And it's something I've looked at in my own research.

• 28:22Speaker 04

  It's clearly something the ancient Egyptians observed. They were maybe less concerned about observing and monitoring the naturally preserved bodies of people in the desert than they were making the simple observation that a statue or an inorganic form of a god lasted way longer than a biological person, because art lasts longer than normal human life.

• 28:50Speaker 00

  Tell me about it. Tell me about it. That's all we can leave behind, Campbell, at the end of the day.

• 28:54Speaker 04

  But with that being the belief, you then want to become an artwork. You want to become permanent.

• 29:02Speaker 00

  How interesting.

• 29:03Speaker 04

  So you apply the plaster, not as a way of, and this is important, not as a way of capturing the person's appearance when they were alive, but making them into this kind of generic image of a god, and then you dress them with linen. And so people are, we've got archival photos from, you know, tombs that were found at Giza, and they look quite...

• 29:24Speaker 04

  Unnerving.

• 29:25Speaker 00

  I bet they do.

• 29:26Speaker 04

  People kind of stiff.

• 29:28Speaker 00

  So the corpse is just a useful chassis for, for creating a, a godlike image.

• 29:33Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah.

• 29:35Speaker 00

  So yes, it's not about cherishing grandpa's memory and trying to preserve his essence. It's about, oh, we can, we can, oh brilliant, we got a corpse, we can, we can turn grandpa into a god.

• 29:43Speaker 04

  Yes, and you want grandpa to, to lobby on your behalf of the gods. And interestingly, of course, I'm not discounting, you know, personal, uh, you know, emotion and grief and regret at death, of course, that's part of the human condition. But beyond that, there is a sense, much later in Egyptian history, that it doesn't really matter what grandpa's personality was. He is joining one of the gods and the gods are generically perfect. So you want him to be one of those kind of, yeah, generic, lacking in personality, permanent beings, rather than, oh, grandpa really liked, you know, his, his.

• 30:25Speaker 00

  He was a lovely guy.

• 30:26Speaker 04

  His beer in a certain way. Maybe you still remember that, but you're not memorializing quite the way we think of being important now.

• 30:35Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's, it, okay, that makes a lot of sense. So, so as the ancient Romans, ancient Greeks discover Egyptian culture, interact with it, they're still mummifying uh, right the way through to the, the period of Cleopatra, the period of people who are familiar with what we might call the classical age. But I've seen in your museum and elsewhere, these wonderful paintings, some of the, some of the best human likenesses I've ever seen from the ancient world are painted on coffins. Now, is that a separate fashion?

• 31:00Speaker 04

  Um, it's related, it's a related fashion. So yeah, that's the period after Cleopatra, because as we all know, when Cleopatra pops her clogs, in comes Rome.

• 31:11Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 31:11Speaker 04

  Uh, Octavian becomes Augustus and, and that starts Roman occupation of several centuries in Egypt and in lots of the rest of the world. But there is still the practice of mummification for the elite, for people who can afford it. You can definitely still be mummified. There's a lot of bad press in Egyptology around those mummified bodies.

• 31:35Speaker 00

  Late, late mummification.

• 31:36Speaker 04

  They're late, it's rubbish. They've, they've declined.

• 31:39Speaker 00

  Nasty.

• 31:39Speaker 04

  They don't know what they're doing, they can't preserve anymore, so they slosh on big buckets of black goo. Uh, and then they stick on a faim portrait. Those images you're talking about are those, and yeah, and we've looked together at them, they're so striking, they look so lifelike. They look like someone you might see in the street. Um, those are mainly second century CE, um, so a couple of centuries after Cleopatra. But their function is the same. And I think it is our sentimental, wishful thinking that makes them into portraits. I don't think.

• 32:14Speaker 00

  They're meant to be godlike.

• 32:15Speaker 04

  They're meant to be godlike.

• 32:16Speaker 00

  Oh my goodness.

• 32:17Speaker 04

  And there are cues.

• 32:17Speaker 00

  That's why they're all so handsome.

• 32:19Speaker 04

  Yes, and beautiful.

• 32:20Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 32:21Speaker 04

  And, and, and there are cues that we, we can observe that we shouldn't miss in those images. So gold is quite liberally applied in the framing of the, of the faim portraits. The style of the, the hair for the men follows that of the Roman emperor. And the, the women, the Roman empress. So if you understand, as you said before, Dan, the Roman emperor is a god. And certainly in Egypt is worshipped as a god. He's on the temple walls. Who are you going to want to look like to ensure, to maximize your chances of going into the afterlife as a god? Well, the Roman emperor, because he is the pharaoh, as he is the emperor, as he is a god.

• 33:03Speaker 04

  So it's not that, and I really want to emphasize this because it's something people ask me a lot in Manchester Museum. Oh gosh, she looks like, she, she, she maybe is in the, the grips of a final illness. No, no, that woman probably had that portrait painted, created portrait, uh, created after death.

• 33:22Speaker 00

  It's AI slop, guys. It's AI slop.

• 33:26Speaker 04

  An Egyptian version of, yes.

• 33:27Speaker 00

  It's, it's very beautiful, some of the finest art I've ever seen from that period. But that's not what they look like, they're breaking my heart here.

• 33:33Speaker 04

  I'm sorry, but, but the point is good and, and it's, it's again, worth really holding on to this idea, they look good because they were meant to be seen. So unlike the pyramid age until Cleopatra, pretty much, when the ancient Egyptian dead, however they're decorated, however beautiful, however stunning, however good they look in a museum now, they were never meant to be seen after the funeral. After Cleopatra, in the Roman period, those faim portraits, we have good archaeological evidence, were set up in chapels where they were visited for generations. They weren't buried, they weren't sequestered out of sight, they were meant to be engaged with.

• 34:14Speaker 04

  Because remember, you need your ancestors to put in a good word for you with the gods. So there's a change in practice that might reflect Roman ideas of what it's appropriate to do after death. So mummification, you know, the funeral in Roman Egypt is not the end. You are visiting the dead and then maybe after grandpa has been dead for a hundred years and he's no longer in living memory, then you gather him and his fellow mummified dead up and bury them.

• 34:45Speaker 00

  More from Dr. Campbell Price after this, don't go away.

• 34:55Speaker 01

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• 36:51Speaker 00

  And mummification comes to an end. Christianity?

• 36:54Speaker 04

  Christianity is a bit of a party pooper generally.

• 36:57Speaker 00

  So what, sort of three, four, 500?

• 36:59Speaker 04

  Uh, yes, yeah, 300, end of the 300 is when Christianity really takes off. There is still the, the treatment of the body and there is still respect of the body. But there is less evidence for the, the complete wrapping of the body. The body might be dressed in, you know, Sunday best. Uh, and the body may inadvertently be preserved due to dehydration in a hot, dry country. But there is not that artificiality in the service of turning the deceased into a god. Uh, that, that was pharaonic practice.

• 37:38Speaker 00

  So that's the end of thousands of years of, of mummification practices. Then let's take a break and leap forward to the rediscovery, the, the, the European mind being opened up to these mummies.

• 37:52Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 37:53Speaker 00

  Uh, 1700s, 1800s? And why do people go so, why does it send people into such a complete frenzy?

• 37:59Speaker 04

  I mean, I think knowledge of the mummified ancient Egyptian dead is, it, it lurks in the, the Western consciousness, you know.

• 38:11Speaker 04

  Well, since biblical biblical accounts are known, it's in Herodotus. As for as long as people have known about Herodotus, they've known about mummification. Anyone who's read the Bible knows about, you know, the treatment of Jacob and these kind of Egyptian ways of doing things. In terms of explorers and archaeologists finding the dead, there's an account of an Italian explorer traveler called Pietro della Valle, who in the 1600s is going to Egypt. And he must be in the area of Saqqara, so that area of the cemetery near Cairo.

• 38:49Speaker 00

  Huge cemetery.

• 38:50Speaker 04

  Huge, was huger then, it's been pretty comprehensively emptied since. But he finds faunporters and he describes, he's got a beautiful description of the richly stitched. He's very impressed by the wrapping. So it's not just gold, it's the wrapping styles, it's these painted faces. And he brings these bodies back to Europe. So there's an idea of the ancient Egyptians doing this based on actual evidence of the mummified bodies from the 1600s. But there's not always respect for these bodies. They are ground up, they are turned into paper, they are ground up for medicine. Mummy is Mumia.

• 39:34Speaker 00

  Yeah, where do we get the word?

• 39:35Speaker 04

  So the term Mumia is this Persian Arabic word for the black substance, which occurs naturally in the area of modern Iran, but which did actually, tests have shown, form part of the black goo that was applied to the mummified dead as a means of turning them into gods. So sometimes you'll see the goddess Cyrus has this jet black skin, a sign of his power and his rejuvenation. And so all the mummified dead want to look like Cyrus. So this becomes very fashionable. I mean, Shakespeare writes about it, I think. Desdemona in Othello has this on her handkerchief and it's meant to be a cure all, particularly good for syphilis.

• 40:20Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 40:21Speaker 04

  Suffice it to say, consuming mummified flesh is not good for sexually transmitted diseases, in fact.

• 40:29Speaker 00

  That's one that you can, that's one that you put a pin in that, folks. It's important.

• 40:33Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 40:34Speaker 00

  Okay, so but that's what people were, people were consuming it as medicine.

• 40:39Speaker 04

  Okay. Yeah. Yeah, ground up for paper, ground up for paint, mummy brown paint. Some of the great pre-Raphaelite canvases.

• 40:49Speaker 00

  Really?

• 40:50Speaker 04

  The brown is mummified flesh. So there is a macarbaness, obviously, I'm getting to that point, where we've travelled quite a long way from that ancient Egyptian idea of the radiant dead being effective for you in the afterlife, who are gonna, you know, promote your interests with the gods who are permanent and enduring and, yeah, divine. That has changed and then fear creeps in. I think you could say, it's interesting, in fiction, in Gothic horror, the fear of the mummified dead in the late 19th century

• 41:30Speaker 04

  does seem to go hand in hand with European and particularly British colonial ambitions in Egypt. So 1882 invasion, bombardment of Alexandria, that there is a sense, I think it's undeniable in the literature, that there is a fear that the Egyptians, the ancient Egyptians are going to bump back for the colonial exploitation of the country and the control of.

• 41:56Speaker 00

  It almost comes from a Victorian guilt somehow.

• 41:58Speaker 04

  Oh, absolutely, colonial guilt. And so it's interesting, the mummified dead in the earlier 1800s are often characterized as quite beautiful women, just reanimated. But then by the late 1800s, they're shuffling, dirty, evil, threatening. And of course, it's in the terminology you talk about, if you say to a child, you know, what is a bandage? A bandage is, you know, you graze your knee and you put a plaster on it and it gets dirty. So the idea that a mummified body is bandaged.

• 42:38Speaker 00

  Covered in bandages.

• 42:39Speaker 04

  It's shuffling and it's trying to kind of consume you in its uncleanness. So that's the fear, which I'm sure is related to, yeah, colonial guilt, yeah.

• 42:53Speaker 00

  And then they had plenty to be guilty about because the Victorians are removing lots of objects from Egypt. And then there's the money, mummy unwrappings, I mean, dinner parties, I mean, where does this, does this come into it?

• 43:03Speaker 04

  Yes, yeah, I mean, I think those unwrappings are happening even in the late 1700s. So as soon as, I mean, I think you've got to give credit to the people at the time. If you're, you know, a learned gentleman in the 1790s and you're maybe interested in anatomy, you're interested in the business, the chemistry of embalming. You've heard all these things about the ancient Egyptians, you know the stories about Mumia. So Mumia is this cure all. And there is some concept in which the Mumia substance is thought to promote preservation of the body.

• 43:46Speaker 04

  So you think if you've got an ailment or a sickness, then if a whole bucket load of the Mumia can preserve a human body, if you take a little bit of it, it'll sort your gummy leg. So by extension, the people who are doing the experiments in the late 17, early 1800s, want to get to the root of this. So they are curious, they are open minded. But when they start unwrapping the bodies pretty ruthlessly to get to the good stuff inside, well, they characterize what they find in racial terms. They're very dismissive actually about the ancient Egyptians. And they don't record what they do, most of them terribly well.

• 44:31Speaker 04

  So all of that evidence has been lost.

• 44:34Speaker 00

  So that's interesting, whereas now we walk around going, ancient Egyptians, unbelievable, how do they do that? Extraordinary. They were rather dismissive. They thought these primitive savages.

• 44:43Speaker 04

  Some of them, well, there was a debate raging about them being primitive savages. Some of them were judged to be honorary moderns. So they must be, you know, Caucasian Europeans supposedly. Because there's lots of skull measuring going on.

• 44:59Speaker 00

  Yeah, of course.

• 45:00Speaker 04

  Yeah, which is a pseudo science. But people at the time, throughout the 1800s into the 20th century, believed it was a viable means of scientific research.

• 45:11Speaker 00

  But there's something presumably, but the people wanted to be present when these mummies were unwrapped. There's an excitement there as well.

• 45:17Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, it was a kind of an after dinner entertainment where you would, well, the well to do who could actually get hold of a mummified body.

• 45:26Speaker 00

  For dinner.

• 45:27Speaker 04

  Well, indeed. Preferably, the body would be in a lovely, painted, decorated coffin, which if you remember before 1822, no one can read hieroglyphs. Champollion hasn't done the deed with decipherment. So no one knows what the hieroglyphs say. So you assume, you know, this is going to be the biography of a beautiful, intriguing woman.

• 45:52Speaker 00

  Which, by the way, I sort of, we've talked about this before. I wish they were biographies. I mean, I know that they're, because hieroglyphs tend to be religious.

• 46:02Speaker 04

  Yeah, quite.

• 46:03Speaker 00

  Ritual texts.

• 46:04Speaker 04

  Quite standard.

• 46:05Speaker 00

  And if they were Roman, it would just, the whole thing would be like, then they did this, then they did that, and these are the dates and who the, and this is who the consul was, which.

• 46:11Speaker 04

  Which is great.

• 46:12Speaker 00

  I think would be quite useful.

• 46:13Speaker 04

  Yes, you do not get that, I'm afraid.

• 46:16Speaker 00

  All of that writing, not once they go, he fought in a battle and this was the result. It makes me a bit sad.

• 46:21Speaker 04

  No. And that's, culturally, that is just not the kind of thing.

• 46:26Speaker 00

  I know, it's funny.

• 46:27Speaker 04

  You want to become a god, you don't want to commemorate what.

• 46:30Speaker 00

  But that, actually, that totally reinforces what you just said. Because it's not about grandpa and his achievements and his life.

• 46:36Speaker 04

  No, his illustrious life.

• 46:37Speaker 00

  No, it's, we're trying to get someone into the gods here, let's go. This is about the divinity of it.

• 46:42Speaker 04

  If you're lucky in some elite tombs in Egypt, you might get a boast about a soldier saying, I followed the king in these places. So you get some geographical information and, you know, you maybe cut off some hands or were awarded with some hands and some servants. But generally, no, hieroglyphs are not giving you that information. So at the mummy unwrapping parties.

• 47:11Speaker 00

  You're left to imagine.

• 47:12Speaker 04

  You, well, you would be helped to imagine by the performer to be very kind of early, although the words didn't exist, early Egyptologists.

• 47:23Speaker 00

  Early podcasters.

• 47:25Speaker 04

  Yes, would be filling in the gaps of what we don't know with a lot of entertaining.

• 47:30Speaker 00

  Yeah, imagine that, imagine that, Campbell.

• 47:32Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 47:33Speaker 00

  Previous iteration. Okay, so and then so they're unwrapped and they're all having, it's a part of it's crazy. It's a sort of, it must have been overwhelming experience, the candles, you're drinking, there's mummies being unwrapped.

• 47:43Speaker 04

  The smell.

• 47:44Speaker 00

  Smell.

• 47:45Speaker 04

  And I know, and still in the rooms we use for storing mummified remains, there is a smell. So if you were doing it live in a warm candlelit environment, it would be quite pungent. And occasionally the accounts say, you know, the last wrappings came off and the person turned to look at us and the smell was overwhelming. So it was quite a sensory experience. In some cases, they would give out, you know, little bits of the cloth as a souvenir. Up until, well, 1908 in Manchester, we had a lady called Margaret Murray, very interesting,

• 48:24Speaker 04

  early Egyptologist, suffragist, folklorist, practicing witch, who lived to be 100. She gave out sections of the scientifically unwrapped mummified bodies she'd just unwrapped. So the fashion of people wanting to be part of it, wanting to be part of a scientific endeavor. But when you read those accounts, and this features in fiction as well, Gothic fiction at the time as well, they're described as experiments.

• 48:54Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 48:55Speaker 04

  So unwrapping is an experiment, it's like exploration.

• 48:59Speaker 00

  We're doing science here, lads.

• 49:00Speaker 04

  We're doing science.

• 49:01Speaker 00

  It's all good.

• 49:02Speaker 04

  We're doing science. Yeah, so we can totally atomise this poor individual.

• 49:08Speaker 00

  Have you ever unwrapped a mummy? Do we unwrap or do we X?

• 49:11Speaker 04

  No, no, no, no.

• 49:12Speaker 00

  Do we put them in this CAT scan today?

• 49:13Speaker 04

  Yeah, CT scanning is the way today. So you can, you can tell a lot, but I should emphasise CT scanning has its limitations because obviously CT scanners are for living bodies, which are 70% water. A mummified body is very dry. So flesh, dried flesh looks like bone.

• 49:35Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 49:35Speaker 04

  And I've been in the hospitals where we've done the CT scan and the radiologist and the archaeologist, the bio Egyptologist cannot agree what the scan shows. Is it paleopathology? Is it something the person had as a condition that may have hastened their demise? Or is it an artefact of mummification? It's a part of the treatment of the body. So you cannot say in 99% of cases, unless someone has an axe through their head, you cannot say how someone died, really what conditions they had. It's very subjective business interpreting CT scans of mummified bodies.

• 50:14Speaker 00

  Let's finish up with the question of how we should treat mummies now. One of my earliest memories is seeing mummies in museums like yours. It's just a profound experience. My daughter is going this weekend to sleep with the mummies in a museum.

• 50:26Speaker 04

  Oh.

• 50:26Speaker 00

  Museum, the sleeping night in the museum.

• 50:28Speaker 04

  Sleepover, yeah.

• 50:29Speaker 00

  How, how, how do you in, in the museum world balance the sort of taste decency ethics? These are human remains, they're revered, and yet they are an astonishing portal through which most people might discover Egyptology, which is a wonderful thing. What, what, are we allowed to be excited by them?

• 50:45Speaker 04

  It's, it's a balance, isn't it? And I think there has been a shift from the times we've just talked about when you're revealing, you're actually unwrapping the dead. With, I mean, today, if you go to the National Museum of Egyptian Civilization in, in Cairo, there are quite strict protocols for not taking photos and trying to be respectful around the mummified bodies of kings and queens. So I know, I mean, at Manchester Museum, we're trying to balance up the, the, the knowledge and the emotional connection with the dead, with respecting the wishes of Egyptian people today, with our visitors. And so I think I was the same.

• 51:29Speaker 04

  It was a, it was a mummified body, a wrapped mummified body in Glasgow when I grew up visiting the, the museum in Kelvin Grove, that really spoke to me and connected with a cartoon I watched as a kid. I think we've talked about this. Thundercats.

• 51:47Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 51:47Speaker 04

  Thundercats, really seminal moment in my childhood was watching Thundercats. And it's funny, I think it's especially true with the mummified dead, as we've just said, you don't go into a museum, even as a child, with a blank slate on your mind. You don't go in with a neutral, oh, ready to be impressed. You go in with a lot of cultural baggage, things you're already interested in, images you've seen, ideas you've already, and opinions and prejudices you've already formed, and you look for confirmation of your belief in museums. And the great thing about museums is they can push back on some of those preconceptions.

• 52:32Speaker 04

  So I think especially for the mummified dead, museums I think are good places to, to have debates about whether we should or shouldn't see those people and how we should care for those people in the future.

• 52:48Speaker 00

  Well, I'm glad you, Dr Campbell Price, are the man in, in those conversations and helping to shape how we, how we resolve these issues. You're such a legend. Thank you very much.

• 52:56Speaker 04

  Thank you, Dan. Thank you.

• 52:57Speaker 00

  Well, thank you very much to Dr Campbell Price. Make sure you go to Manchester Museum. It's one of the best. You can spend many happy hours looking at their collections of Egyptology. Also make sure you smash all the various buttons. You know, you've got to press them so you don't miss another episode of this. See you next time for another episode of Dan's Notes History.

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