by MICHAEL PRESS
Before death became a source of disgust and denial, Europeans cheerfully painted with – and ingested – human remains
The pharaoh was dead. Now the embalmers and the priests went to work: over the next several weeks, they prepared the body at length. They removed the internal organs, and inserted plant resins and spices into the body. The body was dried out with natron, a natural salt compound; it was washed; covered with oil and spices and more plant resins. Then they wrapped the body in layers of linen sheets and bandages, and these too were covered with resin and oil. They placed the body in a coffin and brought it in a funeral procession to the tomb. For thousands of years, Egyptians practised variations of this basic process, for royalty as well as other elites – all with the care fit for the body of a god. ‘Ægyptian ingenuity was more unsatisfied, contriving their bodies in sweet consistences, to attend the return of their souls,’ wrote the English doctor Thomas Browne in 1658. ‘But all was vanity, feeding the winde, and folly.’ These elaborate efforts to prepare the bodies for eternal life in their tombs would fail.
The mummies couldn’t stay hidden forever. Royal or non-royal, however secret the burial place, hundreds of generations of tomb-robbers hunted them. Those that survived have been left for archaeologists to remove. And today, mummies are all around us. They are so common that we take their display for granted. They have been exhibited in museums in Europe and North America for the past two centuries. During that time, scholars have used ever more powerful tools, from unwrapping and dissection to X-rays and most recently CT scans, to study their insides. They have provided us with information about both life and death in ancient Egypt that was unimaginable just 200 years ago. But mummies have been taken out of Egypt and collected in the West for much longer than this. When we look at the entire history of mummy collecting, we look into a mirror that reflects some dark truths. Mummies tell us not just about ancient Egyptians but also about ourselves.
For most of the history of European collection of mummies, the primary thing Europeans did with them was grind them up. At first, Europeans ate them – mummies were considered a drug. ‘Mummie is become Merchandise, Mizraim cures wounds, and Pharaoh is sold for balsams,’ as Browne wrote. But it all started with a ghastly translation error. The word ‘mummy’ comes from the Arabic and Persian mumia, meaning bitumen, a form of petroleum. (This in turn might have come from the Persian word mum, ‘wax’). Medieval Arab physicians such as Ibn S?n? (known in Europe as Avicenna) thought that mumia, bitumen, had medicinal value. They inherited this view from classical authors. Some of these medieval physicians suggested that mumia – sometimes meaning bitumen, but more often some combination of resin and spices – was used in embalming ancient Egyptian bodies. When these ideas continued to circulate, in the Middle East and especially in the Latin translations and handbooks of European doctors starting in the 12th century, they were generally misinterpreted. The European writers thought that mumia was a product of the corpses: the embalming resin and spices mixed with juices from the bodies. After a time, many thought that the corpse itself was the medical mumia.
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