IN THE GRAND SCHEME OF scientific meetings, the Mummy Congress is a small, intimate affair, long on singular personalities and surreal slide shows and short on sophistication, hype, and ballyhoo. There are, after all, far larger scientific meetings, gatherings where thousands of name-tagged delegates in identical conference bags swarm city streets like ants, taking over every cab, restaurant, and bar in sight. There are also far more sophisticated events, where the world watches through simultaneous Webcasts and where handlers manage large, jaded crowds of reporters. And there are certainly far more lavish affairs where attendees dine in gilded French châteaux or toss back glasses of chianti in Tuscan vinyards, all paid for by generous corporate sponsors. But the Mummy Congress is none of these things. It is not large. It is not savvy. And it certainly is not deluxe. What makes the Mummy Congress so memorable—some might say gloriously eccentric—is something a good deal rarer and far more interesting. It is the odd, lonely passion of its delegates. With few exceptions, those attending the congress love mummies. And they relish being around others who feel the same way.
This strange shared passion colors nearly every aspect of the congress. But it makes itself particularly known in the organizers’ choice of a host city. During three years of planning, those responsible for the Third World Congress on Mummy Studies, as it was officially known, paid little attention to the amenities that preoccupy most other conference organizers—an abundance of fine five-star hotels and good restaurants, the existence of colorful nightlife and sightseeing opportunities, the availability of good airline connections and cheap fares. Indeed, they ignored all obvious places to host such a conference—grand cities like Cairo, New York, and London—and found a spot much more to their tastes. They chose Arica, population 180,000, a tiny dot on the map of northern Chile. Nearly a thousand miles north of Santiago, Arica perches on the frontier of a vast, almost lifeless desert, the Atacama. Arica’s claims to fame are modest at best: it possesses a very good port on the Pacific and a large fish-meal plant. It also boasts a church and customs house designed by Alexandre Gustave Eiffel, the famous French engineer, after a tidal wave had washed away part of the town.
Over the years, local tourism officials have tried very hard to lure visitors to Arica. They dubbed Arica the “City of Eternal Spring,” an epithet that rather glossed over its dry, brittle climate, and they encouraged Chilean families to holiday along the spectacular beaches that lined the waterfront. But Arica never really took off as a tourist town. The ocean, cooled by the frigid Peru current, is simply too chilly for anyone to contemplate leisurely swims. Only a few hardy surfers in head-to-toe wet suits dare brave its whitecaps for long. And hardly anyone is interested in roaming the barren Atacama: it is too vast, too intimidating, too fierce. As a result, Arica remains dusty and rather insular. To fly there, many delegates to the Mummy Congress spent twenty-four hours or more jackknifed in airline seats and nodding off to sleep in a series of ever smaller departure lounges. Indeed, one determined researcher hauled herself off and on eleven successive flights from Beirut.
But Arica had one sterling qualification in the eyes of the Mummy Congress organizers, and that single attraction more than compensated for all its many shortcomings as an international conference center. For Arica, unknown to most of the world, is blessed with almost perfect conditions for the long-term preservation of the human body. Bordering what is likely the driest place on earth, the Atacama Desert, it receives just three one-hundredths of an inch of rain in an average year. In bad years, it receives none at all. This relentless, inescapable aridity is precisely what is needed to dry a human corpse to the texture of shoe leather and to keep it that way. Arica abounds in mummies. It is a mummy expert’s Mecca. To see these remarkable treasures and to catch up on the latest mummy news, scientists had converged on the little Chilean port from what seemed the far ends of the earth.
On the night before the congress opened, a certain euphoria infused the parched desert air in the lobby of the Hotel Arica, a sprawling beachfront resort complete with shady palm trees and nonstop Andean panpipe music. By the check-in desk, an impromptu one-man welcoming committee, Larry Cartmell, boisterously greeted arrivals. A pathologist in his early fifties from Ada, Oklahoma, Cartmell had taken the same flight from Santiago that I had; we had sat together on the school bus that picked up Mummy Congress researchers at the airport. He was very entertaining. For the last few hours, he had scarcely stopped talking and enthusing and cracking jokes, all in a booming southern drawl. Cartmell, I discovered, loved Arica and the desert that lay just beyond, where hundreds and hundreds of mummies had been found over the years. He loved analyzing little plastic bags full of mummy hair, which is his particular speciality. He loved the Chileans, although he seemed slightly less partial to those nostalgic for the old Socialist government of Salvador Allende. He even loved his colleagues’ favorite local hangout, the Restaurant of the Dead, a dining establishment that would never find its way into any tourist brochure but which was located just across the street from a local cemetery and a stone’s throw from an important collection of Chilean mummies. The menu was no great shakes, with its sandwiches and roast chicken, but who could resist the name? For Cartmell, who got his start in the mummy business in Arica, the little Chilean town was a piece of heaven. “This whole place,” he told me, beaming ear to ear, “is built on mummies.”
As Cartmell and I waited for a few of his colleagues to join us, he kept a sharp lookout for all new arrivals. An infectious extrovert, he had an ulterior motive. He was dying to see if anyone had a copy of the congress program, which would tell him exactly when organizers had slated his session, the one he had painstakingly organized on mummy hair. It seemed that time slots were everything at the Mummy Congress, as they are in television. Cartmell prayed he had been given prime time. So as soon as he spied someone he knew, he roared out a name and charged over for a chat, shaking hands, hoping like hell that the new arrival had an advance copy of the conference program. From the look of it, Cartmell knew just about every one of the 180 or so mummy experts who had flocked to the congress from all over North America, Europe, South America, and the Middle East. And nearly everyone seemed to know him. As the knot of people expanded around us, Cartmell disappeared to find a table big enough for everyone in the hotel restaurant. Before long I found myself squeezed into a noisy, shrieking, hooting group of mummy experts. To my eyes, the congress was quickly taking on the air of a house party. Indeed, I’d just seen more people hugging warmly in the hotel lobby than I ever had in an airport arrivals gate. “I love these congresses,” rhapsodized Karl Reinhard, who was sitting on my left. “I get to see so many of my friends here.”
Lean and fit-looking in his mid-forties, with a bushy black beard and a Brazilian good-luck charm wrapped around his wrist hippie-style, Reinhard teaches anthropology and palynology, the study of pollen, in Lincoln, Nebraska. But his real passion, it transpired, is for parasites, specifically the types that inhabit the bodies of mummified people. Reinhard had just flown in with his wife, Debbie Meier, a museum conservator, to chair a session before heading down to Brazil, his favorite place for studying all manner of weird parasites in mummies. Fortunately for a guy whose speciality doesn’t make appetizing dinner conversation, Reinhard likes to keep it light. He gives his papers playful titles like “Exploding Worms and the Consequences of Close Human-Parasite Evolution.” He is full of trivia on all kinds of unexpected stuff, such as how the creators of the movie Alien got their ideas for the monster. According to Reinhard, they relied extensively on his speciality, parasitology. The alien’s egg, he said, was a fluke egg. “The molt was based on a tick. Its body structure was like a thorny-headed worm and the lifestyle was based on a parasitic spider. Sigourney Weaver would be nothing without worms.”
Reaching for his beer, Reinhard surveyed the room. Out of the corner of his eye, he spied Bob Brier, a cadaverously thin philosophy professor from Long Island whose popular books include The Encyclopedia of Mummies and whose controversial new tome on the murder of Tutankhamen had just landed on the bestseller list in England. Nearby was the spry, white-haired form of Minnesota pathologist Art Aufderheide, one of the grand old men of mummy research and a leading authority on ancient disease in mummies. In the doorway, the young Peruvian physician Guido Lombardi, who had just spent months tracking down two long-lost Egyptian mummies in New Orleans, scanned the room for a colleague who specialized in human sacrifice in South America. “It’s a very small world here,” Reinhard said, laughing.
It was also, as I swiftly realized, a world where nearly everyone was gainfully employed doing something other than studying mummies. The immense public interest in mummies has never translated into real research money. There are few salaried jobs and very few full-time mummy experts. Most delegates are professionals—anthropologists, archaeologists, or pathologists—who dip into their own pockets to cover their field expenses and who spend their summer holidays, Christmas vacations, or retirement years flying to Egypt, the Canary Islands, and Peru to work on mummies. More than a few had exhausted the patience of their bewildered spouses. Some had ended up marrying each other. Most had paid their own fares to Arica, and they were squirreled away in half a dozen budget hotels scattered around town. At seventy dollars a night, the Hotel Arica was simply too rich for most of the crowd.
No one seemed to mind, however. Most were just enormously happy to be in attendance at the world’s largest regular gathering of mummy experts and eagerly awaited what lay ahead over the next five days. The South Americans, explained Reinhard, didn’t believe in wasting time. Sessions on subjects as diverse as ancient human disease, animal mummies, ancient DNA in mummies, Mexican mummies, high-altitude human sacrifices, and mummy conservation would begin each morning at 8:30 A.M. and end eleven or twelve hours later. In between, papers in two languages—English and Spanish—were scheduled every fifteen minutes. Moreover, the organizers planned to keep the congress dead simple: there would be no concurrent sessions. To ensure that every delegate could hear every paper, the sessions were scheduled consecutively in one large room. To ensure that everyone could understand everyone else, the organizers had flown in a team of interpreters from Santiago. Attendees would be issued headphones.
It sounded perfect, but not everyone was happy. At the far end of the table, a howl of protest rose as Cartmell flipped through a faxed program of scheduled papers he’d managed to find. “I can’t believe it,” he moaned, betrayal stamped all over his face. He looked as if he’d just lost his best friend. His session on mummified hair had been scheduled from 4:25 to 6:20 P.M. the day after tomorrow. It was just about the time the overheated brains of delegates would require a serious soaking at the hotel bar. It was one of the worst time slots of the conference.
THE MUMMY CONGRESS is held every three years, and, in between, it is the subject of much fond talk and anticipation among mummy experts. But the Congress is not well known outside the small circle of delegates. For nearly twenty years, I had made my living as a science journalist covering the arcane world of archaeology and during that time I had met and talked to hundreds of archaeologists. I had spent countless hours sitting in conference halls, slouching in train stations, and excavating side by side with archaeologists. I had subscribed to archaeological journals, pored over archaeological Web sites, and joined archaeological news groups. I had never heard so much as a whisper of the Mummy Congress and I am quite sure I would not have been the wiser even now were it not for a rambling conversation that I had with a Canadian mummy expert.
At the time, I was casting around for a mummy story. My editor at Discover magazine had asked me to keep an eye open for new research on the preserved dead: stories about mummies are very popular with readers. So I began making phone calls. Despite the line of work I am in, I had encountered few mummy experts. In Canada, where I live, and in the United States, archaeologists seldom investigate the ancient human remains they happen upon: strong sentiments prevail against such studies. The reasons are religious, social, and political, and they are rooted in history. For many decades, anthropologists and archaeologists had plundered native cemeteries to gather up collections of skulls, skeletons, and mummies for study in universities and museums. Outraged by this desecration of their dead, native activists had fervently demanded the pillaged bodies back. As the outcry reached a crescendo in 1990, American legislators passed a sweeping law, the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, protecting native graves and ordering many museums to return bones and mummies to native bands. This righted some old wrongs, but the bitter controversy had left an unfortunate scientific legacy: the study of North America’s ancient dead had become virtually taboo.
As a result, I didn’t encounter many researchers who openly professed an interest in mummies. But a few years back, I had interviewed a loquacious paleopathologist from Canada, Patrick Horne. Horne was a bona fide mummy person. Like others of his ilk, he considered a mummy to be any ancient cadaver whose soft tissues had partially or wholly resisted decay. He had studied many of them. During the 1980s, he had examined the spectacular frozen body of an ancient Inca boy, known today as the Prince of El Plomo, who had been recovered by climbers atop a mountain peak in Chile. During the 1990s, Horne had worked with Egyptologists in the Valley of the Nobles, identifying parasites in the dessicated tissue of Egyptian mummies. The day I called him, we chatted for almost an hour about the latest mummy research. Finally, just as we were about to hang up, Horne mentioned, as an afterthought, an upcoming conference that he dearly hoped to attend. It was the Mummy Congress in Arica.
Just from the note of longing in his voice as he described it, I knew I had to go. I had no idea what to expect, but I was sure it would be worth the trouble it would take to get there. I wanted to know, after all, who these people were who studied the bodies of the ancient dead so unabashedly. And I wanted very much to see what I had been missing in all my years of writing about the distant past. I had described and recounted at length many of the clever things that archaeologists had deduced from the humblest of clues—tiny bits of broken pottery and stone, scatterings of ancient fishbones around a hearth, imprints of nets in Ice Age clay. I had gleaned as much as I could from the things that humans had left behind on their long twisting journey through time. Now I wanted to see their ancient faces. I wanted to know what they had looked like, how they had frowned, squinted, arranged their hair, tattooed their skin, draped their tunics, shaped their fingernails, and tied their shoes. I began scrambling to find a way to get to Arica.
BY LUNCH THE first day of the congress, I had begun surfacing from a bad case of jet lag. For four hours that morning, I had perched on one of the posh brocade-covered chairs provided by the Hotel Arica, taking in the first session on human paleopathology, the study of ancient disease processes and injury. Framed between two huge maroon-colored conference posters—each featuring the cracked and crumbling mummy of a child unearthed just behind the hotel—the speakers had wasted little time in getting down to business. An Italian researcher had described a new immunological technique for diagnosing malaria in an ancient mummy. A Canary Island physician had clicked through several slides of grimacing, half-decayed Guanche mummies exhumed from the holiday island of Tenerife, then launched into a brief account of their demographics. An American neurologist had prefaced his talk by describing how the great sixteenth-century Flemish painter Peter Paul Rubens once employed a withered Egyptian mummy as a model for his drawings. Then he proceeded to describe all the ailments—from diabetes to inflammatory bowel disease—that modern researchers could track through time, thanks to the ancient blood clots and wizened nerves of mummies.
It was a broad, eclectic collection of papers, and this, I quickly discovered, was a hallmark of the congress. Session topics served more as rough guidelines than real defined categories. Moreover, one never knew for sure what was coming next; speakers continually vanished from the program without much explanation, while others unaccountably materialized. Indeed I had the distinct impression that if someone just walked off the plane in Arica with a good paper in hand, he or she would be swept up instantly and scheduled in wherever a spot could be found. All that seemed to matter was that a researcher had something interesting and new to contribute on the subject of mummies. The audience was very accommodating. It was also very attentive; some delegates were even jotting down notes. After four hours of papers, they seemed reluctant to break for lunch. Small groups milled at the back of the room, chatting quietly.
In the front row, Bob Brier grinned as he held a small impromptu press conference. Curious, I slid into a chair beside the international press corps. This consisted of just one reporter, a Londoner named Steve Connor, who had stumbled as I had upon the congress and claimed that he’d managed to wangle a ticket to Chile by promising his editors a true story on mummies that came back to life. Connor was good company—wry, hardworking, and sociable. But I was rather amazed: I had expected to find a noisy mob of television and newspaper reporters running riot in Arica. Neither I nor Connor missed them, however; there was a relaxed, unguarded air to the delegates that would never have survived a prolonged media scrum.
Brier, for example, was clearly enjoying himself as he answered a few questions. A self-taught Egyptologist who had learned to read hieroglyphs while recovering from a serious sports injury, Brier joked about the documentary that he and colleague Ronn Wade had made as they were experimentally embalming a modern corpse by the methods of ancient Egyptian embalmers. The pair had succeeded admirably—their modern mummy would soon be exhibited alongside ancient corpses in a museum in San Diego. The resulting documentary had made Brier quite famous. “National Geographic, called the program ‘Mr. Mummy,’ ” he grinned, “and I was never sure if the title was referring to me or the mummy.”
In recognition of this fame, Brier had opened the congress, giving a brief measured report on Queen Weret, recently discovered in a dark tomb sixty-six feet underground in Egypt. Weret, it seemed, had lived a life of pampered sloth. Her bones were so slender and underdeveloped, observed Brier, that she had probably enjoyed an existence “virtually free of labor.” She had seldom walked, likely lounging in a litter wherever she wished to go. But what excited Brier most was the fact that her shriveled brain still clung to the curve of her crania: he could see it there when he looked into a hole at the base of her head. It surprised the hell out of him. Most Egyptian morticians had tossed out such gray matter while mummifying the dead. Brier hoped to gather brain-tissue samples from other periods and examine them to see whether elderly Nile dwellers in the time of the pharaohs were plagued with Alzheimer’s disease. But Brier and his colleague Michael Zimmerman had a long way to go. So far they had found only three Egyptian brains.
As Brier hustled off for lunch, Connor and I amicably compared notes. We were both surprised by the small number of papers from the place generally thought of as the fount of mummy research: Egypt. Only two Egyptologists had signed up for the congress. I had begun to discover that most scholars of ancient Egypt regarded mummies about as favorably as a gem collector does a bag stuffed with cubic zirconium. There are good reasons for this. Egyptologists spend years of expensive university training boning up on minute details of Egyptian art, history, and language. The last thing they want is to sink their trowels into a tomb of linen-wrapped dead folks: such a find would invariably bog down excavations on things nearer to their hearts—temples, houses, stelae, and stashes of papyri.
The congress did not suffer because of the lack of news from Egypt, however. It merely looked farther afield. For decades, the world’s mummy experts had been recovering ancient preserved bodies in a host of unlikely places, from ghoulish-looking bog bodies submerged in Dutch fens to pristine mummies of saints exhibited in Italian churches, and from Inca children sacrificed on Andean mountain peaks to Buddhist monks venerated in Japanese temples. Indeed, every continent on earth, it seemed, had once possessed a trove of mummies. Even Antarctica could boast of a few: the frozen bodies of the failed polar explorer Sir Robert Falcon Scott and his men still lie entombed beyond human reach under the creeping glacial ice.
During the morning session on the first day, Guita Hourani, a slim, vivacious Lebanese historian, had described in glowing detail a previously unknown trove of medieval Christian mummies from the Crusades in the Middle East. Exhumed from a cave floor in the Valley of the Saints in northern Lebanon, these thirteenth-century mummies, she explained, were victims of a brutal seven-month siege by invading forces. Exquisitely dressed in embroidered silk and cotton clothing and interred with coins, manuscripts, necklaces, combs, house keys, and other goods, the defeated Christians had outlasted their foes. Hourani’s slide of a four-month-old infant, preserved down to the tiny wisps of hair caught between her toes, brought a sigh from the audience. The hairs, Hourani explained, likely came from the grieving mother. Hourani had seen many women pull out their own tresses as they tearfully kissed the bodies of their dead children.
But the Crusades mummies were not the only sensation. Just a few papers after Hourani’s, delegates had gasped at slides of the mysterious bodies from the northwestern corner of China. Sporting blond and ginger-colored hair, beards, fair skin, and prominent noses, these mummies appeared far more European than Asian. Indeed, one willowy woman sported what seemed to be a tall black witch’s cap. No one knew who these people were, much less how they had gotten to China some four thousand years ago. And delegates were similarly enrapt by a video of dozens of ancient mummies recently recovered from the humid cloud forests of the Peruvian Amazon. Dating to the time of the Inca, they were wonders of ancient mummy making. “Even in that humidity,” marveled researcher Federico Kauffman Doig, “you get almost perfect preservation. Even the genitals and eyeballs are preserved.”
BY DAY THREE of the congress, I had begun to notice some of the invisible lines that divided the delegates. As united as they were in their grand passion for mummies and their singular dedication to their studies, the world’s mummy experts did not coexist easily as a big extended family. They were, on the whole, too stubborn, too wayward, too headstrong, too intense, too in love with the ancient dead—and this had led on occasion to bitter professional disputes. The most notorious of these battles had taken on all the trappings of venomous personal combat as researchers fought tooth and nail for the right to investigate important new troves of mummies.
For the sake of appearance, the combatants tried to ignore one another in the halls and corridors of the Hotel Arica. They kept to different sides of the conference hall and studiously avoided one another in the small hotel restaurant, but these seemed awkward truces. All the senior mummy experts knew exactly what was going on—it was their business to know, after all—and I began hearing stories of the ugly mudslinging matches that had taken place in private and in public in the past. One expert, I was told, had even gone so far as to accuse an opponent of sleeping with a high-ranking cultural official in order to obtain control over a major mummy find.
It sounded bizarre, this unseemly feuding over dead bodies, but in the small impecunious world of mummy experts, it made perfect, if unhappy, sense. Most mummy experts yearn to take charge of a find as wondrous and rare as the bodies of the Peruvian cloud forest: the scientific possibilities are dazzling and the public announcement invariably attracts world attention. Within weeks, offers begin flowing in from television producers, magazine editors, book publishers, lecture tour organizers. After toiling for years on their own savings, few mummy experts can resist. A major book contract, after all, can subsidize much valuable new research. (During the early 1990s, the German publishing house Bertelsmann paid a $400,000 advance to publish the story of Europe’s famous frozen mummy, the Iceman, as told by the research team’s principal investigator, Konrad Spindler.) A vitriolic battle is almost inevitable after every major find, as researchers jockey for control and clash over the extent of media access.
Acrimonious as these rivalries can be, they were not the only flash points in Arica. An even more divisive controversy effectively separated the congress into two politely warring camps. On the surface, the debate hinged on the rightness or wrongness of something that mummy experts had once taken for granted: mummy autopsies or dissections. Such invasive procedures, undertaken to glean medical data, pose a difficult ethical question: Does science have the right to destroy an ancient human body in its quest for knowledge for the living? Or should researchers respect a human’s inherent dignity, even after death, conserving and protecting ancient flesh?
Nearly everyone at the congress had a strong, carefully reasoned opinion on the matter. The opponents of dissection seemed to far outnumber the advocates, and each group spoke a rather different scientific language. The dissectionists consisted mainly of medical people, primarily pathologists, with a few physical anthropologists thrown in for good measure. They included several of the most senior mummy researchers in the field. The conservationists, on the other hand, were mainly archaeologists, cultural anthropologists, and museum curators. As a whole, they were a far younger group: indeed, they struck me as the wave of the future.
Before arriving in Arica, I had never heard of a mummy autopsy, and the idea sounded rather antique and barbaric. Like most other people, I shied away at the thought of someone laying a knife to the recently dead, even in the service of science. And my qualms grew stronger still at the thought of subjecting ancient cadavers to such procedures. After hundreds or thousands of years, the everlasting dead had been granted a rare dispensation. They had escaped unscathed from all the regular forms of destruction—the nibbling of maggots, the blistering of bacteria, the gnawing of dogs, the ransacking of grave robbers. So it seemed hideously callous to subject them to the scalpel, carving open ancient flesh to bare all secrets. It also seemed terribly unwise. Exquisitely preserved mummies are becoming increasingly rare as looters continue to plunder ancient tombs indiscriminately, destroying fragile mummies in the frantic search for gold and jewels.
Conservationists abhor the idea of cutting up mummies and refuse even to unwrap them. Most collaborate with medical-imaging specialists who peer into coffins and ancient mummy bundles with three-dimensional computer-aided tomography (CT) scans or with tiny fiber-optic tubes, techniques that offer little if any insult to the ancient dead. They see mummies as frail elders deserving of protection. “The mummies,” explained one Chilean archaeologist, “were actual people. They lived their lives, they died, they suffered, they ate, they made love, as people do today. What we want is for people to keep this in perspective. We are dealing with human beings and not with samples.”
The dissectionists view matters very differently. As medical people mostly, they owe their loyalties to the living. They see the world’s mummies as an immensely valuable repository of scientific data on matters as diverse as ancient mummification methods, ancient parasites, ancient diseases. To glean such data, they regularly dissect the ancient dead, examining their organs and gathering tissue samples for testing. These surgeries are often extremely destructive, however, something that increasingly distresses cultural officials around the world. As a result, dissections are becoming rare. Some medical people at the congress made open pitches at the end of their papers, asking for tiny scraps of ancient tissue for their studies. Others were more discreet, schmoozing behind the scenes for bits of shriveled intestines, nerves, and lungs.
BY THE CLOSING banquet on Thursday night, delegates were ready for some serious unwinding. The final session of the congress, a series of papers on Mexican mummies, had stretched on so long that the team of interpreters had been forced to rush out in the middle of it in order to catch their plane back to Santiago. Undeterred, discussants had pressed on for another hour or so, seemingly oblivious to the fact that half the audience was unable to understand a word that was said. But now everyone seemed primed for a good time. In the hotel banquet room, a local band played an eclectic but infectious mixture of tangos, sambas, rumbas, bossa novas, and old Beatles standards. At the evening’s end, the dance floor was jammed with bodies; there was hardly a person left sitting at the tables.
I hated to see the congress come to an end. After five days in Arica, I had become immersed in the bizarre world of mummies and mummy science. I was strangely reluctant to return to the grayer realm of the living. The people I had met at the congress were fascinating and, in listening to their stories, I had begun to see how much a part of our lives the preserved dead are. The deep, almost primal fascination we feel at the sight of such bodies is almost inescapable. Humanity, after all, has always regarded mummies, with their gaunt cheeks and their slender limbs, their long thin hands and their soft tresses, as something separate and distinct from the scraps of bone that constitute other human remains. Still recognizable as individuals, even after hundreds or thousands of years, mummies call to our imaginations, and we readily impart something of ourselves to them. We give them stories, histories, names, moments in time. We marvel at their immortality and we dream of sharing it. We explain how it was that they came to be the way they are and we connect with them on visceral, emotional, and intellectual levels. We see each one of them as one of us.
I was keen to explore this intimate relationship between the living and the everlasting dead and to do so through the lens of science and the research of some of the world’s most accomplished, dedicated, and unheralded mummy experts. So I set out to learn how mummies came to be and how the capriciousness of nature and the adroitness of ancient mummy makers bestowed this strange form of immortality on something as frail as the cells of our soft tissues. And as I did so, I tried to pick out the still intelligible voices of the dead from the din of the living, to hear what they have to tell us about ourselves.