FOR MONTHS AFTER I RETURNED from Arica, I kept recalling strange snippets of things I’d heard and seen at the congress. Even as I slipped back into the world of the living in Vancouver, the mummies and all those obsessed researchers continued to haunt my imagination. I’d be standing in a line at Starbucks watching a mother gently tuck her fretting infant into the canvas seat of a stroller and I’d suddenly remember the photo of the wizened baby mummy from the time of the Crusades with its chubby, bowed baby legs and its tiny clenched fists. Or I’d be alone planting nasturtiums in a common garden I sometimes helped to tend, when a strangely famous story about the British philosopher Jeremy Bentham would pop unbidden into my mind.
Bentham was a strong proponent of utilitarianism. He believed, among other things, that the goal of human life should be to do the greatest good for the greatest number of people. In keeping with this philosophy, he willed his body after death to a prominent London anatomist, though that was not the end of Bentham. To spare admirers the expense of commissioning a stone sculpture of him, he asked that his body be preserved and displayed. After a public dissection of his remains in 1832, his body was skeletonized and his head mummified with a pair of glass eyes. The result was so grim, however, that his friends swiftly arranged to have a wax head made. This they placed atop his reconstructed skeleton. Then they dressed Bentham in his old topcoat and breeches, arranged him comfortably in a chair with his walking stick and put him on display in a glass case at University College London. As a finishing touch, they laid his mummified head between his feet. For decades after, admirers reportedly trundled Bentham to college council meetings, making note of his presence in the minutes. Even today, the curious can still gaze at these bizarre remains in their case at University College, though Bentham’s mummified head has been discreetly removed. Students had been in the habit of stealing it for pranks.
Such tales from the congress had incredible staying power, playing as they did on some deep chord in my imagination. I didn’t mind so much being possessed by them; they seemed more quirky and eccentric than disturbing. But as I reflected on the congress I realized that something much more powerful had also lodged itself deeply in my brain. It was a strange new hunger, a desire really, for the fleeting but intense feeling that had flashed in the darkened conference room each time someone produced a new slide showing an exquisitely preserved mummy. There were many of these photos at the congress. Sometimes the photographer had zoomed in on a telling detail, such as a startlingly lifelike hand with its blunt calloused fingers and ragged fingernails. Or sometimes he or she had stepped back, taking a loving head-to-toe picture of a four-thousand-year-old person with tousled ginger-colored braids and felt-covered toes. Yet the response in the room was always the same. There was a sharp intake of breath, an audible gasp. Then a deep, primeval kind of thrill, almost something orgasmic, passed through the room. I think everyone felt it. It was the shock and wonder of glimpsing—even briefly and even secondhand through the camera’s eye—immortality.
Mummy experts don’t always like to admit to this fascination: it seems terribly unscientific and unprofessional. To make it more presentable, researchers have developed code words for exceptional preservation. It took me a while to realize what they were actually talking about. Sometimes they referred only to the presence of dermal ridges on a mummy. These are the tiny grooves and elevations on human fingertips that yield police fingerprints. An exceptionally well-preserved mummy still has them. Or they pointed to the existence of fine down on a child’s upper lip or a fringe of eyelashes on an adult. Occasionally, they spoke in more abstract terms. They boasted about the number of DNA base pairs that their team had succeeded in retrieving from a mummy tissue sample. Among mummy experts, it seemed generally understood that the greater the number of base pairs, the finer the preservation and the more closely the mummy resembled a living human being. As I learned later, this has never been proven.
But although preservation was never far from anyone’s mind at the congress, few people made any mention of how this wondrous transformation had taken place. To my frustration, none of the books I read about mummies came close to answering my questions. I was intensely curious about the grim laws of death and decay, and how they combined to strip someone in the bloom of life to bare bones. What normally happened to a body in the first few hours after death? What exactly took place in the days that followed? How had nature and ancient human embalmers subverted these laws? Egypt, I reasoned, would be the best place to search out the answers: it had a long, celebrated history of preserving the human body. And the dead, I realized, were bound to be the most eloquent sources. I considered all the possibilities. In the end, I decided to head off to a small makeshift morgue in the middle of the Sahara Desert. I suspected the mummies there could answer my questions.
ON AN EARLY December morning in the ancient Egyptian town of Kellis, Art Aufderheide contemplated his next move. Outside, along the abandoned streets, bitter gusts blasted fallen columns and forgotten temple walls, reducing everything to sand and dune and desert. But Aufderheide paid little heed to the cold fury that surrounded him. Taking a swig from a smudged water bottle in his small morgue, he studied the body of a man lying on a plank. The dead man’s face looked hard and smooth, as if cast in molten metal, copper perhaps. His features, all sunken hollows and sculpted cheekbones, possessed a strange unyielding strength. Aufderheide pored over the corpse, then reached for a red Swiss Army knife. Sharpening it with long strokes on a whetstone, he tested its edge against his thumb. He turned back to his subject, sliding the gleaming blade into the crook beneath the man’s chin. Then he commenced sawing. It was quick, easy, bloodless work, decapitating an ancient Egyptian mummy.
At eighty years of age, Aufderheide is one of the world’s foremost experts on ancient preserved bodies. He knows more about the arcane science of outwitting natural human decay than just about anyone else alive. Aufderheide had come to Kellis to study preservation in a little-known trove of two-thousand-year-old mummies. But for the elderly pathologist, there was a deep irony in this work. Understanding immutability in the ancient dead often meant slicing them into pieces. Propped up beside the corpse were some of the fruits of his morning labors—dozens of clear plastic bags of various sizes. Inside were a miscellany of body parts—two dessicated human ears; ten fingertips complete with fingernails; ten toes complete with toenails; one penis; numerous samples of muscle tissue; and bits of lung tissue, heart tissue, and a thin scrap of liver. All this withered flesh belonged to the man on the table, or at least it once had. Aufderheide had claimed it for science.
In pursuit of mummies, the aging pathologist had journeyed restlessly from one desert to another—arctic deserts, tropical deserts, island deserts. He had traveled from Alaska to Italy, the Canary Islands to Chile, and by his own estimate had dissected nearly eight hundred ancient preserved bodies. He took this work very seriously. With fellow researcher Conrado Rodriguez Martin, he had written the bible of his trade, The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Paleopathology, and he continued to publish diligently. Still spry, with a pair of alert blue eyes framed by thick horn-rimmed glasses and a thatch of unruly white hair, he is the first expert most people call when they stumble on a new mummy trove. If there were a Kevin Bacon game in mummy studies, Aufderheide would be Kevin Bacon. He has worked with just about everyone and has the inside track on most major recent mummy discoveries. “Ask Aufderheide if you have a question,” said Bob Brier at the mummy congress. “He knows everything. He does.”
Until fairly recently, however, Aufderheide had never worked in Egypt. No Egyptologist had ever invited him, perhaps because so few were terribly interested in mummies. But in the early 1990s archaeologists working in Dahkleh Oasis, some five hundred miles southwest of Cairo, came upon a series of ancient tombs cut into the cliffs behind Kellis. The chambers were small and dark and stuffy. They reeked of the sickly sweet smell of decay. Inside team members discovered snaking piles of linen bandages on the floor. Tangled within were human bones and smashed bits of gilded mummy masks. These were the leftovers of grave robbers. But in a few tombs, the team found mummified heads, arms, torsos, and occasionally whole mummies, only partially unwrapped and still finely preserved. They called Aufderheide at the University of Minnesota in Duluth, where he heads his own paleobiology laboratory. They asked if he would like to study them before looters caught wind of the discovery.
Aufderheide didn’t have to think about the proposition for long. Others had studied mummies in Egypt. Before engineers began raising the level of the Aswan Dam in 1907, for example, the Australian anatomist Grafton Elliott Smith and his associates examined and autopsied eight thousand ancient bodies. But Smith’s studies were relatively simple by current scientific standards. The researchers who followed him concentrated mainly on the mummies of kings and queens and nobles, giving short shrift to the ancient cadavers of ordinary folks. They also devoted their energies to tombs lining the Nile Valley, paying little heed to those dotting the rest of Egypt. Aufderheide knew there was a lot left to be done. He wanted to see how embalmers carried out their work among the forgotten lower classes. He also wanted to take tissue samples for future medical studies. The Egyptian government rarely permitted such exports, but it was prepared to do so for Aufderheide. So the pathologist booked his ticket to Dahkleh Oasis and paid for it himself, as was his practice. He didn’t like to go cap in hand to the funding agencies. He’d discovered years ago that they didn’t really understand mummy research. As a result, he and his wife, Mary, lived in the smallest physician-owned house in Duluth.
Aufderheide liked Dahkleh very much. A tiny shred of green life in desert so barren that the ancient Egyptians believed it a land of the dead, Dahkleh had long struggled against invading sands. But some two thousand years ago, when the Romans plucked Egypt from its Greek pharaohs and added it to their own sprawling empire, they introduced a new form of irrigation. In Dahkleh, the town of Kellis enjoyed a brief fling with prosperity. It had a painted temple dedicated to a local god. It had estate agents literate enough to leave their accounts in what might be the world’s oldest book. It had two-story houses and Egyptian inhabitants with fashionable Roman names like Hilaria, Matrona, and Valerius. It had fields that produced wheat and olives and vineyards that made a popular wine. And, of course, it had mummies. Just because a Roman emperor ruled Egypt didn’t mean the Egyptians were about to give up something as dear to their hearts as mummification.
In Dahkleh, Auderheide rose each morning at 5:30. He grabbed a quick breakfast of Egyptian flatbread, jam, and eggs in the field camp dining room, then clambered into the back of a dusty panel truck that shuttled him and other crew members to Kellis. A good thirty years older than most of the archaeologists, anthropologists, and Egyptologists at Dahkleh, Aufderheide was clearly the grand old man of the camp. But he refused to trade on his age in any way. He asked for no special treatment—no shorter workday, no softer seats in the cab of the truck—and he received none. For this, the crew greatly admired him, although it soon became apparent that no one, with the exception of the camp physician, was keen on hanging out with him in his makeshift morgue. Even around the boisterous dinner table at night, Aufderheide seemed enveloped in solitude, an isolation imposed not only by his dissections, which disturbed people, but by the deafness that had begun to plague him. It was becoming an effort for him to converse with others.
He stood out in other ways too. Unlike most of the members of the team at Dahkleh who had donned some form of convenient Arabic clothing, pulling on long djellabas or wrapping Palestinian scarfs around their faces to keep out the sand during the frequent sandstorms, Aufderheide conceded not an inch to local custom. He was dressed, as he had been since he arrived a week earlier, in a cotton Tilley hat, a blue cotton bandanna, an immaculately clean pair of beige work pants, and a similarly immaculate beige work shirt. The pocket bulged with a small black notebook labeled “Egypt 1993 1999” in handwritten letters. Aufderheide looked like an aging car mechanic, or perhaps a retired Maytag repairman sent out on a call to the middle of the Sahara. All that was missing was the bow tie and the name “Art” embroidered on his pocket. He was astonishingly dapper in that dusty place. Everyone else looked grotty by comparison. Perhaps he felt he owed it to Dahkleh’s dead to keep up professional appearances.
On the second day I was in Dahkleh, the panel truck deposited us on the outskirts of Kellis, near the ruins of what must have once been an elegant stone mausoleum. Aufderheide dropped his knapsack at the morgue, then hustled off to a small roofless magazine. Inside were half a dozen or so tattered linen bundles. They looked like giant cocoons. He gently nudged first one, then another with the toe of his boot. He didn’t say so, but he was clearly thinking of snakes, specifically sleeping cobras and vipers. Standing beside him, I thought of all the dead people inside these bundles. I couldn’t see their faces, but somehow that anonymity made them seem all the more doleful. Aufderheide hunted around, trying to find the best preserved one to show me. When he finally spied it, he waded gingerly into the tangle of tea-colored shrouds and lifted the bundle into his arms. He looked like a man cradling a load of firewood.
We set off briskly for his makeshift lab. The sun was beginning to rise over the eastern horizon by then and Kellis looked spectacular, like a giant stone Lego set scattered over the tan-colored desert. There were bits of ruined houses and lines of stone walls in the sand, vivid testaments to the fleeting nature of human ambition. There were painted reliefs crumbling to dust on temple walls. Aufderheide said that one of the things he liked best about working at Kellis was being able to gaze out at the ruined streets where the people on his autopsy table once strolled. I didn’t doubt it: for all his brisk clinical manner, Aufderheide had a streak of romanticism in him.
When we reached the morgue, Aufderheide laid the mummy on a wooden plank supported by two sawhorses. On a low bench at the back of the morgue, two mummified heads rested companionably against the wall. One, dusty rust-red in color, was a boy with long silky eyelashes. The other was a man with a permanent scowl and a mass of tiny perfect auburn curls. “I saw him in the tomb and he had such a pretty hairdo, I decided I wasn’t going to dissect him,” remarked Aufderheide. “I was just going to take him out and photograph him.”
But these were definitely the exceptions. Over in a corner was a mound of nearly two dozen large Glad bags. Each was carefully labeled with its own number and each held the remains of a dissected mummy, or rather, the parts that Aufderheide had not chosen for his samples. It was not easy to stuff the rigid body of an adult mummy into a standard green garbage bag. It took some cutting of limbs and folding of torsos, and even then there were awkward moments of cramming brittle flesh down so the bag could be closed with a twist tie. But Aufderheide had managed. In some of the bulbous green bags, the jutting angle of a shoulder or the jagged edge of a knee pressed outward against the green. But Aufderheide didn’t pay them much attention. Eventually, he explained, archaeologists would re-inter all of them in the nearby tombs.
Shrugging at this, he began rooting around in his knapsack. It was filled with all the tools of his itinerant trade—a wrinkled sheet of black velvet; a camera; various lenses; a selection of plastic Whirl-pak bags that dairies generally used to collect milk samples for testing; two Swiss Army knives; a set of scales; and a Home Depot–style whetstone, chisel, and hacksaw. In the absence of electricity at Kellis, he explained, he had to keep his gear simple. Turning to one side he set a dusty bottle of water on a ledge. A week earlier, he had worked all day without stopping for as much as a drink of water. Between dehydration and jet lag, he had keeled over right beside a mummy. When a member of the crew dropped by a few moments later, he was shocked to find Aufderheide sprawled motionless on the table. “He thought I was dead,” recalled Aufderheide with a grin. This struck him as terribly funny.
Aufderheide, after all, is on intimate terms with death. The son of a small-town businessman in New Ulm, Minnesota, he had devoted his entire adult life to teasing out its secrets. As a medical student during the Second World War, he had gravitated to pathology as surely as a magnet to iron. It wasn’t that he disliked living patients or that he lacked the right bedside manner. Aufderheide is far too affable to have trouble relating to patients. But as a young man he had been fascinated by the conundrums that pathology, the study of disease processes, continually posed. Other doctors rely on pathologists to make difficult diagnoses: Aufderheide loved being a doctor’s doctor and after the first few dissections he performed, something strange happened. He began to see dead bodies as little more than decaying lattices of proteins. He didn’t think of them as human beings anymore. He had become a death professional and some part of his mind had permanently disconnected. “I have virtually no corporeal identification,” he explained. Although he had loved and admired his mother, for example, those emotions had not transferred to her corpse. “If I’d been in the same room when my mother died, I’d have autopsied her. I just view a dead body as a broken-down car.”
That didn’t mean he accepted death, however. He was vigilant for the least sign of its encroachment. When he was in his forties, he had detected the first traces of stagnation in himself. He had a wife, three bright kids, and a good living. But he no longer felt the familiar quickening of his pulse as he walked through the hospital door. His life was slowly taking on a gray pall. So he made a remarkable decision. He resolved to try living off the land with the Copper Inuit in the Canadian Arctic. To make contact with the Inuit, he rafted down the Mackenzie River with a few friends all the way to the Arctic Ocean, a wild thousand-mile ride. Two years later, he spent the winter living with an Inuit family on remote Bathurst Island. His hosts taught him how to hunt caribou on the tundra and harpoon seals on the sea ice. He feasted on raw meat when his companions were successful and he drank up as much as he could of what he calls “four thousand years of distilled survival method.”
The experience gave him a new lease on life. At an age when many of his hospital colleagues were collecting stocks and bonds and polishing their golf game, Aufderheide began venturing farther and farther afield in the remote north. In 1967 and 1968, he skidooed to the North Pole with a small party of fellow adventurers in the Plaisted Polar Expedition. This was the first time anyone had been insane enough to try motoring over hundreds of miles of polar ice floes and crevasses to reach the far ends of the earth.
Finally, when he’d had his fill of the great north, he returned to pathology and to his little house in Duluth. There he began scouting out intellectual pursuits that would rival his Arctic travels. He finally settled on studying mummies, something that he could do together with his personable wife, Mary. It was a good choice for a man who hated lassitude. Mummies just happened to lie in some of the most exotic and legendary real estate on earth: the Sahara, the Gobi, the Taklamakhan, the Atacama deserts. There was no better place for an adventurer.
CLIMBING UP A stepladder, camera in hand, Aufderheide clicked away at the tightly wrapped mummy. Then he was ready to get down to business. He brought the bundle back inside and slipped the blade of his Swiss Army knife under the first few layers of bandages covering the mummy’s chest. Lifting up, he ripped the ancient cloth, showering the table with particles of ancient linen. He dug in a little deeper and ripped again. Then he tried yanking the severed edges of the upper layers apart. It was hard, dirty, scrabbling work, nothing at all like the smooth unraveling one might expect. The undersides of the mummy bandages were smeared with an oily black resin that had hardened like cement and fused onto the linen. Aufderheide’s fingers and shirt cuffs were soon filthy.
During his first visit to Dahkleh some years ago, he explained, he had taken detailed notes on the way in which each mummy was wrapped. As time passed, he discovered that the packaging seldom varied. As a rule, the wrappers began by slopping resin onto the back of the cadaver and lying two or three long sheets down the back of the corpse, folding them over the head to cover the face. Then they wrapped the neck, arms, torso, and legs in horizontal bands, using whatever scrap linen they had at hand, including patched and worn-out clothing. So uniform was this method of wrapping at Dahkleh that Aufderheide now checked it only by glancing at the layers revealed by an incision. As he cut deeper into the bandages, he tossed aside the linen strips, stuffing them in yet more plastic garbage bags. He hoped a textile expert might arrive one day to study them.
As I stood back, watching him huff over the bundled body, I felt strangely divided. One half of my brain reeled at seeing something so old and beautiful so roughly treated. Each rip echoed terribly. At the congress I had agreed with the conservationists: it seemed so clear that unwrapping and carving up an ancient human being in the search for knowledge was a kind of sacrilege, like smashing a Ming vase in order to discover exactly how it was made. Moreover, I couldn’t help but worry about what might be lost. At one point, Aufderheide tossed aside a large square bandage on the heap of linen beneath the table. A few minutes later, camp physician Peter Sheldrick popped in for a visit. Idly, Sheldrick picked up the square bandage, then shook it out with growing excitement. It was a patched man’s shirt. An Egyptologist in camp later said it was one of the few pieces of ordinary Egyptian clothing ever recovered from the Roman era.
But my sense of horror at watching this rude unveiling was attenuated by something else: an insistent, overriding sense of curiosity. I could barely look away from what Aufderheide was doing. I desperately wanted to see who lay swaddled in so many layers of cloth. It was not just the anticipation of seeing something forbidden nor a simple fascination with death. Nor was it the tantalizing thought of finally laying eyes on the face of someone long hidden away, although this certainly added piquancy to my desire. This curiosity was altogether far more visceral and urgent. It was an innate craving to connect with the long dead, to pass through some kind of portal of time. It was a desire to go beyond history and the dry, bloodless words on the page and make contact with someone who had lived in an alien world, who had worshipped strange gods and bowed to the power of the pharaohs, who had worn faience and kohl and striped linen tunics, and who had spoken the languages of the papyri. A mummy is eminently, recognizably, a person, an individual. That he or she would look at me with unseeing eyes did not matter. I wanted to slip under the barrier of time and step over the edge of a lost world.
That was the desire. But the reality, half an hour later, fell a good deal short of this. On the table sprawled the naked body of a young man in the prime of life. Stripped of the tightly wound cloth and resin that had protected him like a placenta for two thousand years, he looked strangely frail and vulnerable, a lesser being than he had been only an hour before. I felt ashamed that his eternity had been sacrificed for our selfish pursuit of knowledge. It seemed an act of cruelty. But I remembered that the Egyptians themselves had been pragmatists. More than two millennia ago, Egyptian physicians had conducted autopsies on the dead for the benefit of science and medicine, just as Aufderheide was doing at Dahkleh.
I was still intensely curious. I wondered who this young man had been. His fingers were long and slender, his nails neatly manicured. His dark brown hair was curled and slicked to his scalp with resin. His features, fine and delicate, seemed almost pretty but for one thing. Those who wrapped the bandages about his face wound them so tightly they broke his nose. Viewed from the side he looked like a boxer who had taken a wicked jab.
In the midmorning heat, a pungent fragrance like fenugreek wafted up from the discarded linen on the sand. It smelled both acrid and smoky. As Aufderheide took a break from his exertions, I asked him if he knew what the fragrance was. He shook his head ruefully. “You would know better than I,” he observed. “I have almost no sense of smell. In fact, people accuse me of going into this field because of that.”
LEFT TO ITS own devices, death shows scant respect for the human body. Almost from the moment it winks out breath, stills the heart, and glazes the eye, it begins inflicting a million small cruelties. Within hours, it stiffens all the major muscles—first the eyelids, then the jaw, neck, and shoulders, until all the body is racked with rigor mortis. Within days, decay transforms a familiar face into something nightmarish. Within weeks, it corrodes skin, dissolves tissue, and pares away flesh, leaving only hard white bone. But for all this mayhem, death goes about its work with a certain fastidious orderliness, inflicting injuries in a roughly prescribed pattern. The ancient Greeks believed that this systematic insult was the work of stone coffins, which they dubbed sarcophagi, literally “flesh eaters.” But the truth, as Aufderheide explained, is rather more insidious. Almost all of these injuries are perpetrated by death’s principal henchmen, protein molecules known as enzymes, which are invisible to the naked eye.
The word enzyme itself comes from the Greek word enzumos, meaning “leavened,” and this gives some clue to the special properties of these molecules. Like the yeast that encourages bread to rise, enzymes are powerful catalysts that trigger key chemical reactions in the body. During life, they reside largely in our cell nuclei, where they serve as our allies, gobbling up bacteria and other harmful foreign invaders. But when death strikes, these enzymes are suddenly freed from their cellular yokes. They begin seeping out of the nuclei like drops of acid, digesting everything in sight. In the days following death, hardly a cell in the body escapes disfigurement.
Sadly, this is only the first modest wave of destruction. Bacteria in the gut are armed with enzymes, too. After death, they begin digesting the intestinal wall. Spreading out through the network of veins, the body’s superhighways, these bacteria start feeding to their hearts’ content. They devour connective tissue, fatty tissue, muscle tissue, nerve tissue. All the while, they belch out a foul gas that living humans instinctively find repulsive. Nothing can mask this hideous stench, which is largely due to the presence of butyric acids. “Bathe a decomposing cadaver in sweet perfumes,” wrote anatomist F. Gonzalez-Crussi, “and it will smell of rotten carrion on a bed of roses.”
But while putrefaction assaults the nostrils of the living, it ravages the body of the dead. Within days, the epidermis loses its waxy pallor. It turns a delicate shade of green, then purple, finally black. The face, scrotum, and vulva swell and the abdomen bloats. In some cases, the body puffs up like a balloon to three times its normal size. Then it cracks open like a cocoon. A bloody ooze trickles from the nose and mouth. Eyeballs liquefy. Blisters bubble along the skin and burst. Nails fall off and the upper layer of skin comes sliding away at the first touch. On occasion this poses problems for forensic pathologists trying to identify a partially decomposed body. They must delicately remove the shed skin of the cadaver’s hand and roll it like a translucent glove over their own to ink it for fingerprints.
In the midst of all this decay, death calls in reinforcements. Long before humans can detect the first fetid traces of human rot, insects are attracted to the odor from as far as two miles away. They turn up in a predictable order. First come the carrion flies, such as the aptly named Sarcophagidae, or flesh flies, and Calliphoridae, or blowflies. They light on the body and lay tiny eggs in wounds, gaping mouths, and other available openings. These hatch within two or three days into writhing maggots that often move together as a teeming pack through the body, feeding on flesh. Then the Dermestids and other beetles appear. To liquefy flesh so that they can feed, both the carrion flies and beetles exude a battery of powerful enzymes. This is a very efficient way of dismantling a human body. Finally, when these creatures have picked a skeleton almost clean, spiders, mites, and millipedes arrive at the human dining table. In the tropics, a cadaver completely exposed to the air and to insects will be stripped to bone in just two to four weeks.
ANCIENT SOCIETIES WHO wished to preserve the dead and put a stop to all this corruption, said Aufderheide, had to find a way to break the terrible chain of decay. In essence, that meant switching off the enzymes. There are two main ways of doing this. The first is to deprive enzymes of the water they need for their chemical reactions. The second is to destroy the precise chemical environment they require. Although early societies such as the ancient Egyptians had no knowledge of the complex chemistry of enzymes, they had a great deal of practical experience in preserving food and extending the shelf life of animal flesh. Hunters, for example, knew that to keep the meat of a gazelle or a brace of ducks, they had to gut the slain animals. By this one step, they curbed the spread of enzyme-carrying intestinal bacteria. Fishermen knew that to store their catch, they needed to dry or salt the fillets. By these simple acts, they deactivated enzymes.
Over time, human societies devised many ways to sabotage these protein molecules. In Babylon, ancient embalmers preserved the dead by immersing them in honey, which not only desiccated their flesh but destroyed bacteria. In Southeast Asia, Buddhists saved the bodies of beloved monks by coating them in a thick layer of powdered sawdust and earth to wick away the moisture. Then they sheathed them in silver and paint. Others resorted to alcohol. After the great British naval hero Horatio Nelson breathed his last during the Battle of Trafalgar, his men immersed his body in a cask of brandy. But their grief did little to assuage their thirst. According to one story, the men could not survive the voyage home without their accustomed tots of brandy, so they stealthily siphoned the cask until it ran dry. This desperation produced a memorable turn of phrase still heard in the British navy today: “Tapping the admiral” is slang for pouring a drink of rum.
In ancient Egypt, a special guild of death professionals arose. Known as embalmers, these dehydration experts took the basic knowledge of preserving game and fish and gradually perfected it to create an elaborate technology of immortality. Just when this happened in Egypt and under what circumstances is still woefully unclear. What is known for certain, however, is that expert embalmers began practicing their craft along the Nile at least 4,500 years ago, preserving select members of the royal family. One early client was Queen Heteferes, whose famous son, Khufu, built the Great Pyramid at Giza.
So enamored were Khufu’s successors with mummification that they tried to reserve the privilege for themselves and their families. As pharoahs, they were assumed to be living gods, and perhaps they wished to keep up appearances for as long as possible. A ruling king could not easily claim divinity as his birthright, after all, if it became known that his father and ancestors were simply moldering piles of bones like the kin of everyone else. But the pharoahs could not maintain their monopoly on immortality for long. Some four thousand years ago, Egypt’s nobles usurped the right, and from then on mummification percolated downward through Egyptian society. As the demand grew, Egypt’s embalmers thrived, setting up special workshops along the outskirts of towns, near tanneries and other such businesses. The “industrial park” location was probably no accident: the ancient Egyptian word for embalmer includes a hieroglyph commonly tacked on to words that denote smelly things.
The Egyptians did not sneer at these early death professionals, far from it. The embalming workshop was euphemistically referred to as “the pure place” or “the beautiful place.” The embalmers themselves were deemed priests and as they worked they chanted magic spells. This was because the Egyptians viewed embalming as a deeply religious act. Every living human being, they believed, possessed a spiritual force and a life force, as well as a body. At death, the bond between these three elements was shattered. To be reborn and to live forever in a land where everyone remained lithe and young and beautiful—surely a notion of paradise with universal appeal—a person’s spiritual and life forces had to recognize his body and re-unite with it. The sweet hereafter depended on the skill of an embalmer, who alone could maintain the body in recognizable form.
As priests, Egypt’s embalmers were not in the habit of discussing their practices with the uninitiated. As businessmen, they guarded their trade secrets zealously, passing down the knowledge in their families, from father to son. Consequently, we have only a few brief contemporary accounts of mummification, and most of these were penned by foreign travelers, such as Herodotus, who were forced to glean their information where they could. But these outlines, together with detailed anatomical studies and experiments conducted over the past century, form the basis of what we know today about Egyptian mummification.
For their wealthiest and most powerful clients, Egyptian embalmers used every trick of their trade. They likely began their operations by piercing the cranial vault of the corpse. Threading a metal tool—most probably some form of cylindrical tube—through one of the nostrils, they punctured the tiny porous ethmoid bone between the eye sockets and either drew or poured out the gray viscous folds of brain. Then, with an obsidian knife, they made a small, fist-sized incision on the left side of the abdomen. They reached inside the abdominal cavity and began slicing the sticky webs of connective tissue. Blindly hauling out fistfuls of ropy intestines, they excised the slippery spleen and moved on to other organs until they had removed most of the rapidly decaying viscera. The heart they generally left, and they often refrained from cleaning out the kidneys and pelvic structures.
With the evisceration done, they began stuffing the abdominal and chest cavities with dozens of small linen bags. Each contained a substance deemed divine by the Egyptians: natron. A naturally occurring compound of sodium carbonate and sodium bicarbonate that was often riddled with salt, natron was a superb desiccant. Egyptian embalmers were very fond of it. After packing the abdominal and chest cavities, they poured jar after jar of natron over the body to cover it. The amount needed was staggering. When American researchers Bob Brier and Ronn Wade tried replicating the ancient methods on a modern cadaver in 1994, they used 550 pounds of natron on the body and ran out before they could properly cover the feet. These they tucked into natron-filled booties. Then the pair locked the corpse in a storeroom set to the temperature of an average Egyptian summer day, 104 degrees Fahrenheit. When they opened the door five weeks later, the room smelled like sea air. Only a trace of a spicy, pepperlike odor lingered on the body itself as they removed the upper natron crust—suggesting exactly why the Egyptians considered natron divine.
For ancient embalmers, however, there was still much to do. They washed the desiccated flesh with sterilizing alcohol, thereby killing remaining bacteria, and rubbed the body with fragrant imported spices, such as cassia, a type of cinnamon from Asia, and myrrh, a tree resin from the Horn of Africa and southern Arabia. Then they painted the cadaver with a thick liquid coat of something that researchers generally call resin today, although this gives little sense of the diverse substances Egyptians used and their sometimes wondrous complexity. Not surprisingly, Egyptologists have argued for decades about the exact nature of this substance, and in the 1970s, a team of scientists led by an American epidemiologist, Aidan Cockburn, tried hard to answer this question by dissecting an Egyptian mummy from the Pennsylvania University Museum.
As part of the project, Cockburn and his colleagues took samples of the resin coating the mummy’s skin. They subjected these samples to X-ray diffraction tests to separate out the main ingredients and managed, with great difficulty, to detect three compounds: myrrh, oil from the camphor tree, and oil from a member of the juniper family. But what struck Cockburn’s team was the way these ingredients had naturally melded and polymerized to form “a vast and continuously molecular form,” as they noted in one of their reports. It looked very much as if the mummy were preserved in amberlike layers of organic glass. This fascinated Cockburn and his colleagues. “Embedded in glass, as it were,” they noted, “there is no reason why the body, as long as it is kept in a warm, dry, or cold place, should not survive until the end of time.”
The Egyptian recipe for resin was never hard and fast, however. Over three thousand years of mummification, embalmers had a lot of time for tinkering and tweaking and depleting key ingredients. In the 1990s, an Israeli researcher, Arie Nissenbaum, ran molecular tests on resin from four Egyptian mummies. The results startled many Egyptologists. The Israeli researcher detected asphalt in the resin on all three bodies from Greek and Roman times. Further studies showed that the asphalt came from the Dead Sea, the salty lake that straddles the border of present-day Israel and Jordan. Huge blocks of the tarry substance still occasionally float to the surface of this lake from subterranean faults.
Aufderheide suspected that the resins at Dahkleh also contained asphalt. Some of his radiocarbon test results had revealed the presence of hydrocarbons, and to study this further, Aufderheide had dispatched samples to Nissenbaum. In his makeshift morgue, Aufderheide conjectured that later Egyptian embalmers had been forced to resort to asphalt. Tree resins would have been far preferable as an ointment: they smelled sweet and would have bathed the dead in a beautiful golden amber. But after millennia of mummification, he suggested, Egyptian embalmers could have depleted the junipers and other conifers that produced such resins. This shortfall likely caught them at a bad time. The dehydration business was booming in Greek and Roman times. Egypt’s embalmers serviced not only native Egyptians, but also Europeans living in places like Alexandria. The embalmers had also begun preserving children, a practice unknown in earlier periods, attracting many new customers. “By this time,” observed Aufderheide, “mummies had become an industry and there were only so many trees to go around.” So embalmers had stretched and diluted the resins with small amounts of asphalt. The black stuff reeked, but it effectively waterproofed the mummy, ensuring that desiccated tissues would remain so for a very long time.
Intriguingly, this simple change in the resin formula may have exacerbated political tensions in the Middle East. To acquire asphalt, Egyptian traders journeyed to the Dead Sea, where they bartered for supplies from the local Arab merchants. Before long, news of the Egyptian gold to be made from Dead Sea tar circulated in the Middle East. Listening enviously to this, the king of Syria dispatched a military expedition to seize control of the lucrative Palestinian trade. This enraged the Egyptians. Worried that the Syrians were about to jack up the price of asphalt, or, even worse, turn off the tap, they responded by sending troops of their own in 312 B.C. According to Nissenbaum, the ensuing battle was likely the world’s first oil war. Be that as it may, the Egyptians trounced the Syrians soundly, and from then on asphalt again flowed freely to the Nile.
* * *
IN THE MIDMORNING light, Aufderheide pushed aside the mound of tangled bandages at his feet. Picking up a large paintbrush, he began gently brushing off the body on the table, sending small clouds of fine linen dust aloft. Satisfied, he studied the ancient cadaver. Often, he explained, it was difficult to sex a mummy merely by looking at it. If the body had not dried properly, the genitalia rapidly rotted away, and mummification was hard on breast tissue. It was a simple fact of chemistry. After death, all the fat in this tissue turned into fatty acids. These acids were soluble, so they quickly evaporated with the body’s stores of water. Frequently all that remained of a once generous bosom after dehydration was a miserly fold of skin, easily confused with wrinkles caused by overzealous wrapping. Sometimes, researchers could make an educated guess at gender based on the size of the nipples, a woman’s areola being larger than that of a man’s. But this was a judgment call—in less than half of all females could sex be established on the basis of breasts.
There was little question, however, about the body on the table. Nestled between the thighs was a perfectly preserved penis. It was clearly circumcised. Aufderheide jotted down the sex on a lengthy form he filled out for every mummy. He had devised this document himself and, like nearly everything that he put his hand to, it was meticulously organized and very thorough. It had a myriad of little boxes to check off and complex charts to fill in, complete with places for recording the presence or absence of mummy tattoos, beards, pierced ears, pubic hair, tumors, fungal growths, abcesses, bone fractures, rectal prolapses, umbilical cords on infants, and foreign bodies in mouths. There were also spaces for marking off one of forty-three different hairstyles and dental charts for recording tartar, lost teeth, and caries. Aufderheide was not one for missed opportunities. At home in Duluth, he was compiling a biomedical database of the mummies he had autopsied.
Putting down the pen and clipboard, he moved on. He cut a large oblong-shaped hatch on the man’s chest and pried it open like a lid on a manhole. He peered inside. A dark, oily, crumpled mass of linen rags and chunks of crystallized black resin filled the abdomen. Aufderheide tried to pick out some of the largest pieces with his Swiss Army knife, but it was almost impossible. The linen stuffing had fused to the walls of the man’s abdomen. Aufderheide shook his head, clearly disappointed. The embalmers, he said, had scooped out all the organs, even the heart that ancient Egyptians believed they needed for the final judgment.
Wiping off his hands, he jotted down the findings. Then he began severing the head. In Aufderheide’s view, modern imaging techniques, developed for diagnosing ailments in living patients, could not hold a candle to the knife for obtaining medical information from mummies. CT scans, for example, recorded the minutiae of internal organs in living patients by detecting tiny differences in tissue density. They were much less capable of picking up minor variances in mummified organs. “Once you take the water out of tissues, they’re all about the same density.” The resulting uniformity obscures the delicate signatures of many diseases. Moreover endoscopy is little better. It gathers images by threading a small flexible fiber-optic tube into various body cavities and collecting tissue samples with tiny metal jaws. But the internal architecture of a mummy bears little resemblance to that of a living person. Often the dessicated visceral and pleural tissues have collapsed, leaving no space to insert even a small tube. And even if one could position the endoscope properly, it is extremely difficult to interpret its close-up images. “You’ve lost color, you’ve lost texture, and you can only identify something based on its location.” Moreover, the metal jaws frequently crush brittle samples.
Turning back to the work at hand, Aufderheide started peeling off brittle patches of the scalp with its dark curls attached. This made a hideous ripping sound, a little like fingernails on a chalkboard. But Aufderheide quietly ignored it. Individual hairs, he explained, could be tested for the presence of ancient drugs or analyzed isotopically for clues to ancient diet. They were valuable samples. So too were fingernails and toenails. Made of keratin, the same substance as hair, they could also be tested for trace molecules of drugs. Aufderheide slipped the knife beneath the free edge of the man’s right thumbnail and tried popping it loose, but it wouldn’t budge. Neither would the nail on the next finger. So he took a hacksaw to these fingertips. They sounded like marbles as they hit the plank.
Next came the ears. Almost transparently thin, they dried swiftly after death, and this meant that they often retained the outermost layer of skin, the epidermis. Aufderheide bagged them in a single Whirl-pak. Then he began matter-of-factly severing the penis. The sight of this reminded me uncomfortably of a story I’d heard about Grafton Elliott Smith, the Australian anatomist who conducted thousands of mummy autopsies, including those on the bodies displaced by the Aswan Dam work in 1907. Smith had apparently taken an unusual interest in mummified genitalia. He had sketched them in his notebooks and amassed a large personal collection of private parts. His obsession seemed to have greatly disturbed his family. After Smith’s death, someone tried destroying all records of it. This bowdlerizer ripped out the sketches from the notebooks and destroyed Smith’s drawerfuls of shriveled penises. But the destruction wasn’t complete. The bowdlerizer hadn’t read the facing pages in the notebooks: these described in Smith’s own handwriting the genitalia that had fascinated him.
Working away, Aufderheide explained his own reasons for this dissection. The penis, he observed, was the best place to find residues of ancient blood. “It has very little tissue other than vascular channels. That’s all that’s there. So it isn’t subject to the enzymatic decay process to the same degree as the heart is. It’s much more apt to survive intact.” Aufderheide wanted samples of ancient blood in order to test for blood-borne infections and the like.
Satisfied that he had collected all he could, Aufderheide began sawing off the top of the skull. Inside, a skim of black resin coated the interior. At the base, a few rust-red maggots curled, themselves perfectly mummified. The cadaver, it seemed, had already begun rotting before an embalmer went to work on it. Then Aufderheide plucked a splinter from the wooden plank. He eased it gently into the nostril, probing until he found the small hole that the embalmers made to extract the brain. “Most people think the Egyptians used a hooked rod to pull the brain out,” he observed, “but a normal brain is the consistency of a half-set gel. Those of us who have done forensic work and who’ve had the experience of working on a body that has sat in a summer room for three or four days know that you can just open the skull up and pour the brain out. So I suspect that’s all they did.”
When the elderly pathologist had finished, the cadaver on the table was a headless, ragged mass of bone, torn tendons, shorn muscles, and oily resinous rags. It scarcely looked human anymore. What two thousand years of nature, with all its insect hosts and its invisible armies of bacteria, had failed to accomplish, Aufderheide had managed in the space of just a few hours. The young man with the broken boxer’s nose was now well on his way to joining the rest of humanity, turning first to carrion, then to whitened bone, and finally to a sad handful of dust. Eyeing all this devastation, I felt a deep sense of regret. The table looked like a miniature battlefield.
People who dissect mummies have different ways of justifying what they do. For the most part, however, they are pragmatic researchers who firmly believe that the pursuit of knowledge among the living takes precedence over the faith, beliefs, and hopes of the dead. They go about their work quietly, in out-of-the-way places, and choose their subjects carefully. They seldom dissect the most spectacularly preserved mummies, for these are often claimed by museums, institutions that have vowed to protect their collections. Nor do they often dissect the mummies of royality or nobility, for these are now treasured too dearly to be subjected to the dissector’s knife. Instead, they largely confine their autopsies, as Aufderheide does, to the mummies of ordinary people that have turned up by chance in recent excavations.
Aufderheide sincerely believes that such procedures make the best of an impossible situation. A developing country like Egypt, he noted, could not possibly find sufficient funds to preserve Kellis’s linen-wrapped mummies indefinitely. To purchase just one climate-controlled mummy case would set back the Egyptians somewhere between ten thousand and fifteen thousand dollars. Moreover, an Egyptian museum would then have to spend several thousand dollars more to put the case into operation. To properly house all the fifty or so mummies that Aufderheide had autopsied at Kellis would run to nearly three-quarters of a million dollars. “There’s not a museum in the world, not even the Smithsonian Institute in Washington, that could deal with that situation if you drove up with a truck full of mummies,” he noted.
Nor was it likely that the mummies could enjoy eternity undisturbed in their tombs. Grave robbers in Egypt and in many other parts of the world frequently tear apart such ancient bodies in search of gold, jewelry, and amulets. “The international ancient art market is insatiable,” observed Aufderheide sadly. He had seen this for himself in Chile, when a peddler turned up at his hotel door one night with a box of antiquities. “When I examined his items closely, I was astonished to find that, while we were excavating a cemetery during the day, this man was looting it at night.” The only solution, he concluded, was for archaeologists to stake out a cemetery and dig it quickly, recovering everything possible. Excavators could then set aside a few mummies for long-term preservation and rebury the rest, once a medical researcher had autopsied a small number. This was exactly what had happened at Dahkleh.
Aufderheide made a good case for dissection, but it occurred to me later that there was another, even more fundamental issue raised by such autopsies. Such destruction was only tolerable if it had the potential to benefit many others in some significant way. To take apart and ruin the body of a person who believed that all eternity depended on a whole, intact, preserved body was no small ethical problem. Indeed, such a radical act seemed impossible to justify for the sake of mere scientific curiosity about matters such as mummification techniques. But if, by this destruction, one could achieve something for the clear benefit of all humanity—if, say, one could find a cure for some cruel, wasting illness that had no cure— then perhaps all this cutting and ripping and savaging was not too high a price to pay. Aufderheide hoped to do just that.
He brushed the powdered linen from his shirt and pulled out a green garbage bag. It was nearly two o’clock. The panel truck would be back soon. It was time to wrap things up.