Mummy Dearest

It begins with the eyes. As Egyptologist Zahi Hawass writes: “As you slowly brush the sand from around a mummy, you never quite know the moment when the mummy’s features will emerge. Suddenly its eyes will pop out from the sand, staring directly at you.” There is an immediacy about a dead Egyptian that quickens the archeological senses, offering the prospect of a closer, even personal, relationship with one of the most ancient of all human civilizations.

Mummies remind us the ancients were once living human beings like ourselves, happy and unhappy, amiable and quarrelsome, lovers and loved. Thanks to modern medical science, we can be present at their deaths, reconstruct their diets, even study the hazards of their daily tasks. A flood of books and television programs caters to our near-obsession with mummified pharaoh and humble Egyptian alike.

Zahi Hawass’ “Valley of the Golden Mummies” has all the allure and fascination of classic Egyptology: a chance for spectacular discovery, of gold and mummies peering from the soil, archeologists brushing sand from richly adorned burial mounds, the thrill of mummy eyes peering from the dirt. In 1996, an antiquities guard’s donkey in the Bahariya Oasis west of the Nile stumbled into a hole and revealed the face of a mummy peering out of the sand. Thousands of Ancient Egyptians lie in a huge 4-square-mile cemetery at Bahariya, used from the time of Alexander the Great (332 BC) through Roman times, until as late as the 5th century. Through these centuries, the oasis was a wealthy farming and mining community, home to prosperous merchant families and grain farmers. Hawass, the most responsible of archeologists and as concerned with conservation as excavation, estimates it will take at least a decade to explore the Bahariya cemetery.

In his lavishly illustrated account, Hawass describes excavations in five family tombs, from which he uncovered 105 mummies. One sepulcher, Tomb 54, contained 43 mummies from several generations, lined up closely alongside one another. A wealthy man of about 50 was completely wrapped in linen with a cartonnage (layers of glued linen) chest plate, his chest and head covered in a layer of gold. A woman with identical adornment lay next to him, her head turned toward him as if gazing lovingly at her husband. There are mummies of children, too, including a brother and sister and the mummy of a young woman who died shortly before her marriage. She wore a stucco mask painted to resemble the countenance of a bride, for the Egyptians believed she would be married in the afterlife.

An undisturbed Ancient Egyptian cemetery is a treasure trove, not only of richly adorned mummies but scientific information as well. Thanks to non-intrusive medical technologies, Bahariya’s mummies will tell us more about the Ancient Egyptians than all the desiccated corpses unearthed in the Nile Valley over the last two centuries. Already, studies on bones and teeth from the cemetery show that few Bahariyans lived beyond 25 to 35 years. Many of them suffered from chronic osteoarthritis resulting from habitual squatting, a common posture in a culture without many chairs.

The Bahariya cemetery has come along at an opportune moment, for a revolution in our knowledge of mummies is unfolding in quiet, air-conditioned laboratories. In “Conversations with Mummies,” Egyptologist Rosalie David and writer Rick Archbold take us into this esoteric archeological world. Mummy research starts with the actual process of mummification. The idea of preserving the body for the afterlife goes back to the very roots of Egyptian belief, to the Osiris myth of the slain god-king who was given eternity after his murder by his jealous brother Seth. His restored corpse became the archetype for the mummy, where the deceased’s ba (personality) and ka (life force) reunited for the journey into the next world. Mummification, at least in theory, was designed to preserve the body in as recognizable and lifelike a state as possible. But Ancient Egyptian embalming was haphazard, at first little more than exterior bandaging of the corpse. Then the embalmers discovered natron, a natural salt compound, which helped dry out the body. After 2000 BC, the priests eviscerated the corpse and removed the rapidly decaying soft organs. The classic era of mummification came some centuries later. By this time, the embalmers were not only eviscerating the body through a slit down the side but also removing the brain through the nose, a gruesome process described by the Greek writer Herodotus in the 5th century BC.

Herodotus tells us the process of mummification took 70 days, but the techniques are still little understood. In a macabre research project, Egyptologist Bob Brier and anatomist Ron Wade of the Maryland State Anatomy Board “mummified” the corpse of a modern 76-year-old. They found, for example, that whisking the brain with a hook-like device enabled them to remove it through the nose. The organs were removed with a stone knife, the body then dried with natron for 35 days. At that point, the corpse was supple enough to arrange the limbs for burial. After another 35 days, the deceased was completely dried out, with no signs of putrefaction. The modern-day mummy was wrapped in linen bandages and put into a temperature-controlled “tomb.” The researchers CT scan it occasionally for signs of decay, but so far it is holding up nicely.

The modern mummy project is part of a systematic effort to unravel the mysteries of ancient health. Such researchers combine MRI and other technologies with formal autopsies and tissue analyses, with remarkable results. Nakht, for example, was a Theban weaver who lived around 1180 BC. His mummy arrived in Canada’s Royal Ontario Museum a little less than a century ago. He had received a surprisingly elaborate burial for a lowly weaver, but X-rays showed his internal organs had not been removed, a procedure reserved for the wealthy. They also showed he was a young teenager who had suffered from prolonged periods of malnutrition. Nakht’s corpse was then unwrapped and proved to be remarkably complete. A two-day autopsy even recovered his complete brain, perfectly preserved in a waxy state. Nakht was 15 years old, stood 4 feet, 8 1/4 inches tall, suffered from black lung disease and desert lung disease and from trichinosis, probably from eating pork. He suffered from malaria and died of pneumonia. His lungs contained particles of red granite that could only have come from granite quarries at Aswan, far upstream from Thebes, a place of harsh punishment. Why he was sent to the quarries we do not, of course, know. The malnourished teenager was “a veritable museum of parasitic infections,” whose bones showed the inevitable consequences of squatting for hours on end at his work. Nakht died bent over in agony, his lungs burning as he gasped for air and slipped in and out of a coma.

In about 850 BC, a woman named Djedmaatesankh, a chantress at the temple of the sun-god Amun at Karnak in Thebes, was buried in a beautiful coffin after elaborate mummification. Her untouched mummy went to the Royal Ontario Museum in 1910 and had never been studied until technology allowed its examination without opening the coffin. It received a complete body CT scan in 1977 and another one with much more sophisticated MRI technology in 1994. Djed had been a beautiful woman who had borne no children. She acquired a massive dental abscess in her upper jaw, a common condition in Ancient Egyptians. As the abscess worsened, Djed was in dreadful pain. Her rank breath permeated the house. Eventually the abscess burst and the pus passed into her bloodstream, killing her in short order.

The personal histories of Djed and Nakht raise the hairs on one’s arms. David writes how personal one’s relationship with a mummy can become. She writes: “I almost feel as if I know each of them personally--when they were young and healthy--and talked about their lives, their families, and their world.”

The science of mummies is still in its infancy, with sophisticated tissue studies and DNA researches in the immediate future. Soon we may know, for example, who fathered the boy-king Tutankhamun, one of the great mysteries of Egyptology. But, more important, David and her colleagues have shattered the idyllic illusion of Ancient Egyptian life gleaned from tombs, temples and papyri. The Egyptians lived without vaccines, antibiotics and modern dentistry, and a life expectancy rarely exceeded 35 years. They endured chronic anemia, malaria and other parasitic diseases of many kinds. Nearly everyone lived with some form of severe pain, yet they built the Pyramids of Giza and sublime temples to the gods. One marvels at what the Ancient Egyptians achieved in spite of their pathology. “Conversations with Mummies” takes us on an engrossing journey into a very different world from that of royal propaganda.

The Bahariya discoveries have stolen the headlines in recent months, but they are only one of many spectacular discoveries along the Nile over the last two centuries. Nicholas Reeves is a talented Egyptologist who has undertaken an ambitious compilation of the major archeological discoveries made year-by-year in Egypt since Napoleon’s invasion of 1798. “Ancient Egypt: The Great Discoveries” is very much a reference book, a smorgasbord of mummies, temples, tombs and other finds, but fascinating all the same. Reeves begins with the Rosetta Stone and Napoleon’s savants, who revealed Egyptian civilization to an astonished Europe, and ends with the Valley of the Golden Mummies in 1999. He covers the usual high spots, like Tutankhamun, the Theban royal mummy cache find of 1881 and Queen Nefertari’s portrait head. But Reeves also gives prominence to less celebrated finds, an astounding number of them mummies or burial complexes. This is a book about the material remains of Ancient Egypt, but it also chronicles the gradual shift from mere treasure hunting to slow, scientific recording of even minor details of Ancient Egyptian life. It is a chronicle of heroes and villains, including the tomb robbers Giovanni Belzoni and Bernardino Drovetti, and Frenchman Victor Loret, who excavated in the Valley of Kings and found the tombs of Tuthmosis III and Amenophis II. Italian Ernesto Schiaparelli unearthed the magnificently decorated tomb of Queen Nefertari, recently restored by the Getty Conservation Institute, and the sepulcher of the 18th Dynasty architect Kha and his wife Meryet. George Reisner of Harvard excavated spectacular Nubian royal tombs from 1916 to 1920. Frenchman Pierre Montet found the 21st and 22nd Dynasties’ royal sepulchers at Tanis in Lower Egypt in 1939, an event eclipsed by the outbreak of World War II. The list of discoveries goes on and on, offering a feast of archeological adventure and science for the casual and serious reader.

But the meal is hard to digest especially when one realizes just how little we still know about Ancient Egypt and just how much has been destroyed, as much by casual scientists as by profiteers. Fortunately, the remarkable scientific advances summarized in these pages allow us to salvage something from the detritus of a lost civilization.