Book Review
Beyond bandages
By Lyla Pinch Brock
The Mummy in Ancient Egypt: Equipping the Dead for Eternity, Salima Ikram and Aidan Dodson. Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 1998
It's time to squeeze apart the mummy books on your Egyptology bookshelves to make room for yet one more volume. The Mummy in Ancient Egypt joins the ranks of an army-load of books on mummies, a topic of apparently endless fascination for the general public.
Identifying mummiesEVER SINCE Napoleon Bonaparte visited Egypt and his savants took an interest in mummies, the remains of Egypt's dead, preserved through natural desiccation and human invention, have been telling tales. They were used and abused -- as train fuel and Victorian parlour entertainment, ripped up, looted and rooted for booty. Others were gobbled up by bugs or stripped of their valuable wrappings, a loss underscored by the photo spread on pages 158-159. These were sometimes made of rare linen garments, but since they hid amulets, they were cut away as more or less standard procedure, even though X-raying was available.
Attempts were also made to save and study mummies. The Qasr Al-Aini collection, built up early this century, contains a number of royals and their relatives, apparently including princess Sitamun, Queen Apouit, Queen Aashait, the mother and father of Senenmut, a princess from the Mentuhotep temple, a third-dynasty princess, and the pharaohs Djoser, Sheshonk, Amenemope and Pseusennes and two of the foetuses found in the tomb of Tutankhamun, although some labels have been mixed up. Most of these are included in The Mummy on the chart on page 317, "The Kings of Egypt: Their Mummies, Coffins and Sarcophagi." The official Qasr Al-Aini list includes a number of unnamed individuals from Tanis, which may be those the authors have marked "stolen."
To add to this chart are the recently discovered remains of King Neferefre in his pyramid at Abusir, the possible bones of King Haremhab in his coffin in the Valley of the Kings, and some yellow-coloured bones from tomb WV23 on the Theban necropolis belonging to King Aye, according to Belzoni -- all placed in the Luxor stareroom.
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Since Elliot Smith and Warren Dawson published Egyptian Mummies in 1924, books on mummies have rolled from the presses like endless mummy wrappings. Egyptian Mummies (Carol Andrews, British Museum), The Egyptian Mummy: Secrets and Science (O'Connor et al), Mummies: Myth and Magic (El-Mahdy) and Egyptian Mummies (Bob Brier) are only a few of the titles released in recent years. The 352-page The Mummy in Ancient Egypt is printed in large format and embellished with an eye-catching cover.
The authors, Salima Ikram and Aidan Dodson, are both prolific writers. Within a few years Ikram, assistant professor of Egyptology at the American University in Cairo (AUC), has to his credit a tiny book on the pyramids, one on meat in ancient Egypt, a visitors' book on the mummies in the Cairo Museum, and a couple of children's books on ancient Egypt. Dodson, an English civil servant and part-time lecturer in Egyptology at the University of Bristol, published a book on the rock-cut tombs in the Shire Egyptology series, a history called Monarchs on the Nile, and, with Otto Schaden and Edwin Brock, a reference work on canopic equipment.
Ikram and Dodson have now donated their mines of information to produce this weighty tome. It is faintly subtitled "Equipping the Dead for Eternity," apparently to encompass Dodson's section on coffins, shrines and canopic equipment. This inclusion is a bit of a surprise, since the title suggests the book is entirely devoted to mummies. It is also unnecessary, since there is certainly enough new information on mummies to fill a book this size.
Pictures of the pitiful remains of these desiccated humans pepper the pages of the book. These may offend some readers, but lest one get too depressed, the layout is lightened with coloured photos of gold jewellery and coffin gold work. Some of the lithographs of the discoveries and characters of Egyptology taken from the pages of the Illustrated London News will elicit quite a chuckle. However, some of the photographs seem superfluous, like the one of the Step Pyramid, and the double-page spread of the Giza Pyramids.
Long pages of text are broken up nicely with side-bars about "corn mummies," "drugs" and other info-bytes such as the cost of mummification.
Mummy history is well-covered in the Mummy in Ancient Egypt. The tombs, the robberies, and the discoveries take up most of Part I. The bulk of the Royal Mummies were found in three caches in the Luxor area in the last century and were put on display in the Cairo Museum in 1902. Most were X-rayed and studied up until 1980, when President Anwar El-Sadat, abashed by criticism for displaying the bodies of the dead, called for the closure of the Mummy Room. In 1993 a rebuilt display was opened with much fanfare, with the mummies enclosed in decay-proof containers. The new room has been doing brisk business ever since, and there are plans for expansion. However, many more important mummies exist than just those of Egypt's royals, and some of these are discussed in The Mummy in Ancient Egypt.
Ikram's sections include burial practices, mummification, wrappings and ornaments for the deceased. Mummy fans are always after the nitty-gritty, and the section on "Mummies and the Art of Mummification," is perhaps the most interesting part of the book. It contains fascinating tidbits like the fact that onions were used as false eyes. Some descriptions of embalming methods may have a predictable effect on your own digestive tract, but the diagrams showing how mummies were wrapped and embalmed and where incisions, padding and line plugs were inserted are illuminating, as is a diagram describing the placement of amulets on the mummy.
Many scientific advances, like DNA analysis and CAT-scanning, have been made recently, and the reader should rightly expect up-to-date information on who is doing what, where. Dentistry and disease are dealt with, but only a page is devoted to DNA work, notably the controversial testing for ancient viruses on the monkey and baboon mummies from the Sacred Animal Necropolis in North Saqqara. DNA analysis can establish familial relationships (as it did with mummies found at El-Hagarsa by Kanawati in 1989) and is crucial to identifying the royal mummies, in some cases not found in their own coffins.
DNA facilities do not exist in Cairo, but Brigham Young University, which has royal mummy material, will apparently disclose its findings very soon. CAT-scanning, mentioned briefly on one page, cannot only provide detailed anatomical information, but can also be used to produce a replica of the skull for facial reconstruction. Much of the latter work has been done by Richard Neave, but is not covered in this volume.
The detailed examination of mummies in several museum projects is also given relatively short shrift, considering the fact that whole books have been published on the subject. To the list of expeditions focusing on human remains, add Dakhla Oasis project, directed by Anthony Mills, which has a long-term physical anthropology section, and the Hierakonopolis project directed by Renée Friedman, scrutinising some of the earliest human subjects and revealing much about health and hygiene.
Awed by Ramsis II, exhibited in the Egyptian Museum. Did he really look like this?
photo: Sherif Sonbol
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Reference works are much in demand in Egyptology because the amount of information, past and present, is almost overwhelming. As such, their prime purpose should be to help the reader find facts fast. The Mummy in Ancient Egypt charts and graphs are particularly useful. Sections in the back on the "Cemeteries of Egypt," "Royal Burial Caches" (showing who was found where), and maps of the sites are good, quick sources. However, the section on "Chronology of Significant Mummy, Coffin and Sarcophagus Finds" does not tell the reader if mummies were found at the sites mentioned. The section on "The Kings of Egypt: Their Mummies, Coffins and Sarcophagi" could have been combined with "The Royal Mummies: A Descriptive Catalogue." The extensive bibliography would have been easier to use if it were arranged under sub-headings such as "health and disease" etc. The listing on "Mummies in the Media" adds nothing and is dealt with much more effectively in Brier's book.
None of this, however, will deter mummy fans from buying The Mummy in Ancient Egypt, nor should it. Although sometimes confusing, sometimes amusing, this book is nonetheless a useful tool for anyone researching this aspect of Egyptian history.
Just a final word of advice: don't read it while eating dinner.
