After Dark: Myths, Misdeeds & the Paranormal - Dark Truth About Ancient Egypt's Mummification

Episode Date: September 11, 2025

The Ancient Egyptians had a very different idea about death than most people do today.And the idea of mummification is (excuse the pun) wrapped up in so many modern ideas, that we can lose its real purpose.Joining Anthony and Maddy today to take us through the gory details of mummifying a body, and explaining where the term 'mummy' even comes from, is Dr. Campbell Price, author and Egyptologist at University of Liverpool.Edited by Tom Delargy. Produced by Stuart Beckwith. Senior Producer is Charlotte Long.You can now watch After Dark on Youtube! www.youtube.com/@afterdarkhistoryhitSign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe.  You can take part in our listener survey here.All music from Epidemic Sounds.After Dark: Myths, Misdeeds & the Paranormal is a History Hit podcast. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hello and welcome to After Dark, I'm Maddie. And I'm Anthony. And in today's episode, we are heading back to ancient Egypt with a recurring guest to explore one of the most infamous death rituals in all of human history. Of course, it is mummification. But first, to set the scene, here's Anthony. In the flickering lights of a silent chamber beneath the sands of Thee, a group of men stand motionless, their heads are shaved, their bodies are cloaked in linen,

the scent of resin and death hangs thick in the air. One of them kneels beside a lifeless form laid out on a slanted stone table, the body of a nobleman, once beloved, now awaiting transformation. This is no ordinary funeral. This is mummification, an ancient ritual that would take 70 painstaking days to complete. It is not just a preservation of flesh, but a gateway to eternity. To the ancient Egyptians, to die was merely to step into the next phase of existence, but only if your body was intact, your name remembered, and your soul judged worthy. And so, with whispered prayers to Anubis, God of the dead, the priest slides a hooked tool through the man's nostril, stirring until it cracks bone.

Slowly the brain is pulled out, discarded as waste. This is just the beginning. Layer by layer the flesh will be dried, perfumed and wrapped, every amulet placed with care, every spell spoken in time. Because to get this wrong isn't just a mistake. It's a spiritual disaster. Without this process, the soul could be lost forever, or worse, devoured. This is after dark, and this is the sacred and gruesome world of mummification, where death was only the beginning.

Oh, I'm excited for this episode. We are joined by returning front of the pod, Dr. Campbell Prize. Hello again. Hi. Hello, welcome. I should give your official title as Egyptologist at the University of Liverpool and curator of Egypt and Sudan at the Manchester Museum. That's got to be a dream job. It is. It is. It is. Just not mine. No, no, absolutely.

I was really wrong. Since I was a child and it was a mummified body in my native city of Glasgow that I encountered. And I was five years old and that was it then. I didn't understand about universities and studying and museums, but I knew I wanted to be an Egyptologist. And that is what I do now. At one of the most significant collections of Egypt and Sudan, anywhere in Britain, Manchester Museum, part of the University of Manchester.

That just speaks to the power of museums, doesn't it? Was it a museum for you, Anthony? Because for me, it wasn't necessarily one particular museum, but it was a childhood of going to see old stuff in glass cases that cemented my interest in history. And I do think a lot, if you ask a lot of historians, that would be the start point for them. Yeah, maybe not like a museum, but maybe a ruin or a, you know, definitely something heritory. She's out doing field work. She's outdoorsy, that's all I could say. And definitely, I definitely had that Egypt time as well.

I think it's one of those first really impactful things because it's, quite visual. And even within that history and that story and that lore, one of the things that's so remarkable because it excites the imagination for probably very misplaced reasons when you're five or six is the figure of the mummy. And just so we're very clear on this, I suppose, to begin with. What is a mummy? Well, the term mummy in some ways in certain UK museum circles now has gone out of favour because it has certain colonial associations. objectifying associations with horror movies and threat and danger and things which the ancient Egyptians wouldn't recognise.

But fundamentally, if you say mummy, you mean a body which has been treated. I'm going to use my words very carefully here because I want to push back on a lot of the assumptions, which were kind of embodied in your introduction, that are, I think, unhelpful in actually understanding what the ancient Egyptians were trying to do. But if you say mummified body, you tend to assume it was the body of a person that was intentionally preserved. And a lot rides on the meaning of the term preserved. And actually,

your introduction put a question mark in this, which I enjoyed. Ancient Egyptian mummification is about transforming the body into something else, something that will survive for eternity. but not necessarily to preserve it because it's a theme I think whenever I come to talk to you that we've got to acknowledge the kind of modern stuff, the modern assumptions, the modern cultural baggage we impose on all of these topics. So it's not too much to say that our modern experience of death, you know, going to see grandman a funeral home, is not what I think the ancient Egyptians were concerned with. And it's interesting that the first first accounts, I don't want to jump too much straight into this, the first accounts of mummified

bodies, you know, 17, 1800s, are medical people, surgeons who are interested in investigating, refining, improving modern embalming techniques, and they are back projecting the modern need or desire to preserve the body. That's so interesting. On to ancient evidence which might have had completely different. This is amazing. I talk about it in my book.

Golden Mubbies Reader to a book called Well, well we had an exposition at Manchester Museum quite recently now finished for which there was a book to accompany it called Golden Mommies of Egypt and it tried to take some of these assumptions which lots of

museum visitors bring. I was a five-year-old child who was fascinated with seeing a corpse. And when we're wrestling with that a lot now at Manchester, the only ancestral remains we have on display now is the mummified body of an ancient Egyptian woman called Azru. And for some people, it is shocking and deeply distasteful that you can go and take your five-year-old in the year 2025 and see the body of someone from Egypt.

two died two and a half thousand years ago. Yes, I want to talk more about this towards the end of this episode because I do think the current ethics and the questions around that of the display of these bodies is very, very interesting and very important. But Campbell, I want to get to the origins of mummification and what the Egyptians actually believed it was doing. You talked about transformation there because this is quite an unusual way to treat a body even for the ancient world, isn't it?

It's quite a specific process. So where does this idea come from? Well, I mean, the origins, I mean, I'm always skeptical. I'm trying to pinpoint origins because they go back into pre-recorded history. But there is the special treatment of the body. And so when we're considering this, we must also consider the mass of the Egyptian population that is not represented archaeologically. So the treatment you opened with, the nobleman at Thebes,

three and a half thousand years ago, that can't have been the expectation for most people. And so just right off the bat, I suspect ancient practice was not dissimilar to modern practice in Egypt. Obviously, Egypt is a majority Islamic country now. But if people die, they are wrapped in a shroud and buried within 24 hours. Something happens early on, and by early on, I mean before 3,000 BC. So that's beginning of phoronic history, where people are buried in the fetal. position. I mean, again, that has modern connotations. They're not thinking of it as the fetal position. That's the position you sleep in. And then there are later texts that say, you sleep to wake,

you die to live. So the transition is leading to something else for sure. Things become a bit more formal when we have, I mean, there are graves preserved, which have these fetal positioned bodies in. And then there are, you know, there are cases where people are stitched into a leather bag. And this is, this is at the same time as some of these aristocrats are... No, this is pre-the-aristocrats. This is before 3,000 BCE still. And is this something that's just happening to the elite or is this across the board? Do you know, it's, to be honest with you, it's difficult to say because unless you're buried with a great shit ton of stuff,

you can't really say this person is richer than this other person or is more important. important. We have at Manchester Museum some objects from a burial at the site of Mahazna, so the south of Egypt. And so there were two apparently female figures, two female bodies, and they are buried with imported amber beads, weird pottery with hippos on. We've got this incredible hippo bowl. They've got objects which are made of hippo ivory. Hippo is very important, scary animal. These hippo tusks are variously described. as magic wands or penis sheaths. Oh, not again.

We're back to it again. Don't shake your magic wand at me. But altogether it questions, right, okay, what is going on here? Because there's no written account saying, who are these women? Are they priestesses? Are they magicians? Are they princesses? Like, what's the story?

We do not know. So we've got to put our hands up. With recorded history, so where there are texts, early doors there is the treatment of the body with resin so resin can be sourced from minerals that come out of the ground or plant resin and this is so important and it's so obvious to me now but it's really important to emphasise

that the treatment of the body after death goes hand in hand with the treatment of a divine statue so there's the image of a god that is wrapped in linen it is perfumed with incense and resin it has its eye makeup done eye makeup that's very distinctive you know Liz Taylor Cleopatra style

eye makeup I don't think everyone's running around in ancient Egypt with the classical eye makeup like Hollywood would make out it's performed on statues of gods and it's performed on the dead because we have the palettes with the colour the Malachi or the Led Galena and applicators buried in tombs.

So the idea is by putting the colour, the green colour on your dead relative, you're turning them into something which will survive the terrible rupture of death. Because what you want to do is in some way survive, not to preserve someone as they were, but to project them into this other state of being. And I'm conscious that in the modern world, you know, to say you're turning the dead into a statue carries this implication of objectification

that you're turning the body into an object. But we live in a world where objects are just things and objectification is a negative pejorative thing. In ancient Egypt, to turn something into an object where an object is so powerful is your only chance to survive eternity. I have about a million questions.

I'm so fascinated by this. So when mummification begins, even if in its earliest practices, whenever that is, and obviously can't quite pinpoint it, is this something that's happening to statues and that is associated with gods initially and then it transfers to dead human beings? Or is it the other way round that human beings are being preserved like that and then they start to treat the statues of gods like that?

Is this something that happens in tandem? Because treating a normal human being, even if they're incredibly important, unless to the pharaoh, I guess they're not understood in divine terms, to treat a human like that, a dead human, the remains of a person, not even a living one, and then to treat the statue of a god like that. Those are quite different things, but where does the overlap begin? I really like the way you framed that. Maddie, I mean, the answer is we don't know for sure how statues or statue images are being treated early on, but I mean, I think

there's something really profound to acknowledge here that it was clearly observed that if you have the statue of a person made of limestone or granite, that is going to last much longer than a biological body. So it's about longevity. Yeah, but there's a difference here between saying, I'm preserving grandma the way she used to be. As I remember her, that's a modern sentimental notion. But I want grandma to join the realm of images

because images will last beyond human life. so you are saying you are taking the human body and treating it in a way to change it and I really emphasise this it's not about making it lifelike it's about making it statue like yeah this makes so much sense because they look like that yes that's what they look like they look at statues especially with those painted panels yes yeah yeah yeah yeah the masks are never depictions of people as they were I mean people come into the museum and it's quite a normal human reaction. You said, you know, you see things in glass cases. Oh, wow. Mom, that looks like Auntie Sue. Oh, that mask of the man looks like the guy in the coffee shop downstairs.

That was not the intention. It's not like Oliver Cromwell or a death mask. And that's a pet peeve. People talk about Tutankham's gold death mask as if he sat for the portrait or it was molded on. As if that he's looking in the mirror. No, no, no. This is a he's shown as a perfect being plus, plus, plus because gods have gold and flesh, and so by rendering it in literal gold, you are giving the king his true golden face. Gods have golden flesh. Gods of golden flesh, bones of iron or silver, and hair of lapis lazuli. Wow, okay. That's why mummy masks, funerary masks, often have this very androgynous looking head covering.

That's not just hair. That's meant to be the blue covering of a god's head. And that's so interesting because that's, again, the objectification in the Egyptian sense of divinity. Yes. But it's sort of tangible materials that you know in the world, not some kind of abstract idea of a man in the clouds. Precisely. Precisely. I think you, exactly. It's something you can deal with. Yes, they're precious materials. You have to get lapis from Afghanistan or wherever. But gold is unturnishable. Just a small deal of doing that. Yeah. But precious metal has that analogy with eternity because it's, It doesn't tarnish, it doesn't rust.

Talk to me then, Campbell, about the distance between the sort of spiritual realm, I suppose. I'm talking about that in the broadest sense of how people understood spirituality, divinity, the afterlife. That kind of the magical, supernatural elements of Egyptian life. And then the physical, because we seem to have this great importance place on objects. Yes. And this idea that objects can hold power. Yes. Whether that's a statue or a person who is turned into a statue, essentially.

But then we're also dealing with the partially decaying bodies. Obviously, they're preserved to an extent. But the bodies of people who are going to, they're not going to stay that way forever. There is going to be some deterioration, as there is of all the objects associated with this belief system and this time. So when people are turned into statues, is there an understanding, they exist in the human realm of life and that they have been transformed, or is there some kind of transformation that's happening that's sending them? Because obviously the Egyptians have such a belief in the afterlife that's very specific as well. So where are these people who

are now statues going? What's happening? And what's that? What is that distance between the spiritual and the object? Because again, there's a lot of crossover. But I'm not quite grasping how that relationship works in terms of the living and the dead. I adore you. But that is the longest question you've ever asked in your entire life. It's a great question. But I'm struggling to articulate it because there is that kind of the living material world and the dead spiritual world essentially is what I'm saying. But there's this weird crossover and people understand the spiritual world is existing in these material objects. And then the material objects as reaching into the spirit world. But like, what? So I think ultimately the question boils down to what?

Yes. But I mean, we are dealing with such a profound set of questions that human beings face. And we have so much evidence from Egypt that it seems natural to ask these of the Egyptians, these kind of questions. And I really do like the way you frame that. I think it's best to think in terms of a motivating factor is, and in dealing with one's own family, you want to create an ancestor that is effective and will help you with your problems. That is the motivation. So it's about the living, really. It is absolutely. Isn't it always?

Yeah, selfish. Who really cares about grandma and what happens to grandma? As long as she's pulling some strings and doing us favours in this life. But that stands now. Oh, absolutely. We only go through these processes, not really for the people who've not. But to feel better ourselves. It's a better ourselves.

Yeah, yeah. It's true. So I think early on, if we're thinking even before texts, tell us we think what's going on. and even when we have texts interpreting them as a nightmare. So there is evidence, archaeological evidence of the development of simple grave, where you have the body of fetal possession covered up,

then the grave acquires bits and pieces, tools, pottery. Which is the same across all of human history, essentially. This is fairly universal. But then there's an architectural development where the grave kind of is delineated and then covered and then that little chamber that is developed round the grave has a little kind of annex, a little extra bit that becomes a little chapel.

And it is clear, absolutely clear, on archaeological plans I can show you, those little chapels attract later people bringing offerings. Why are they bringing the offerings? Is it to give the person food in the afterlife? Might be. Or is it to get the dead? It's a two-way bartering system. person on their side

to answer a question. And I have thought about this recently and I think it is a good way to frame the discussion. Yeah, the dead don't bury themselves. It's the living. And the living believe no one having gone to the other side to know that to

join the gods or to join superhuman beings allows the dead to in some way put in a good word with even more powerful beings. So if you have a problem, in this world, you know, I want to buy a new thing or I want to hurt someone or I want to defend myself from something. You want some help. And in the pre-modern world, you ain't

Googling for help. Yeah. You know, if you've got some medical condition, you need to ask an ancestor. And if you've invested all that time and effort in, I don't want to say laying them to rest because that implies that they're being ignored. The whole concept of being at rest is not really... There's not that finality at all. You are, if anything, you are powering up the deceased. The real sense of that. In order that they will, and we have texts that talk about this,

do something beneficial for you. So the whole motivation of Egyptian religion is reciprocity. You scratch my back and I'll scratch. in a world where swords were sharp and hygiene was actually probably better than you think it is two fearless historians me Matt Lewis and me Dr. Eleanor Yonaga dive headfirst into the mud, blood and very strange customs of the Middle Ages

so for plagues, crusades and Viking raids and plenty of other things that don't rhyme Subscribe to Gone Medieval from History Hit wherever you get your podcasts Before we go on we want to talk about the process of what we term mummification but before we do

you mentioned at the start you said what we term mummies Yes If that's what we termed them When did we start doing that and why? And did they have a specific term for them? Okay, you go and then we'll come back to them. Yes, I'm so glad you asked that.

So the term mummy comes from Mumia, which is a very old, centuries old, pre-15-16th century-old, term for a black mineral substance with reputed curative properties from the area of the Levant, modern, into the area of modern Iran. So it's in Shakespeare. It's mentioned in, I remember studying it in school, Othello.

Desdemona has some mummy on our handkerchief. So it followed that this reputedly curative substance had been found or identified a substance very close to it, had been identified on human bodies buried in Egypt. And it's an irony, perhaps, that a lot of biomedical interest here, a big focus on how did the Egyptians do it? What was there a secret recipe? What was it? Let's crack the code. In analyzing that, I think it has been established that actual bitumen, this, this Mumia, tar, black stuff, is a component of the black goo that was applied during the mummification process. But, you know, in the 1600s, there does seem to be, you know, a mental connection, a linkage between curative stuff that we know of from Iran, the desire to be well and needing some medicine, and then this stuff that's found in Egyptian bodies that look like they're really well preserved and they're really old. So if that substance preserved the flesh of an ancient person,

well, maybe if I grind it up and consume it, I will benefit from that longevity-inducing power. Obviously, it is, you know, I'm not a medic, but grinding up human flesh and consuming it. No, let's do that. Do not try that at home. Not great for syphilis, apparently was a curative for cephalis. James I gave it a go.

Yeah, yeah. But not so much. And so what did they call If they're not mummifying, what are they doing? So in the ancient past, the closest term and it's one of great interest to me I'm working on something right now about this. The ancient Egyptian term is a sach.

That sounds so much more appropriate than mummy. That sounds so much more serious. Mummy now sounds silly, I'm all saying. Yeah. Yeah. And there's something kind of dismissive about the term mummy, which is why in museums I would. never write a label with the term mummy on it now. I would describe a mummified

body. Sure. And, you know, that's just to recognise that it is the body of fellow human being we're talking about, but also to allow this sense of the treatment of that person. But the ancient Egyptian term, and this has started to come in in some museum

interpretation, is Sark. So Sark is the perfect bound form, radiantly, brilliantly, dazzlingly white linen inbound form. It's a contradiction, it seems, to a modern Western mind, that you have someone who is wrapped and who is kind of constricted and isn't able to move. But Sark can also mean the spiritual capacity to act in the way I just said as an intercessor, as someone, as an

effective ancestor. So if you're imagining a totally different cultural perspective, Sark, to describe the physical blue head covering, long curly be. signs of divinity, golden flesh, radiant white linen bandages. That is the ancient Egyptian term for the thing we call a mummified body. And it's a, as you said, it's the kind of powering up of the dead and that transformation into something other. An object, yes, but an object in ancient, I understand this now. It's an object in terms of ancient Egyptian understandings of objects that are imbued with power. An object is not just a thing.

It has great capacity. Yes, yeah, yeah. And it can move between, not physically move, but it is exerted. influence in different realms at any one time. Precisely. Okay, let's look at the details then. Let's look at how this process, we kind of talked about it in the beginning narrative section, which was blending those mythological elements and hinting at some other elements

that are more historically grounded. But let's talk about the ins and outs of socking. Soarkifying somebody. What are we talking about here? What's the how to sarcify a body? Right. Well, as we have consistently said, we're talking about a period, pharaonic period itself that's 3,000 years. Egypt is big. It is by nature regional. So there's a lot of variety. Okay. So there is no standard recipe. This is what you do.

It's not the Mary Berry for a month. It's not preserving. Why is Mary Barry your first thought of mummification? She's quite old. I feel like, wow, wow, wow. I'm sure. That's just factual. Can you imagine it? It'd be better than Nigella doing it. She'd be like, oh, it's lovely. Just make it up as you go along. Just do a couple of bandages and a bit of wine and it'll be grand.

Momify someone in a micro wavy. I would trust Mary to sock me. She would do it properly, too far. Gosh, this has gone really strange. It's fine. Forget about it's happening. Okay, tell me what. There's loads of different ways.

Right. So, yeah. You know, if you're an eight-year-old who comes into Manchester Museum, you have expectations that you want to know, right? So it takes many weeks. as you said, 70 days is the kind of standard length of time. And the reason we know about it is not just the survival of bodies and huge numbers actually from ancient Egypt, but also because outsiders like Herodotus, who's from the area of modern

Turkey actually writing for Greek audience in the 400s BCE thinks, the Egyptians are really weird and that motivates almost all discussion and perception of this practice. Can I just say Horace just comes up a lot, Campbell, in our chats. As someone who just hates ancient Egypt has only negative things to say about it. You know, I think there's a contrast there between oh, the ancient Egyptians are wise and they're great healers and the civilization is very old and they're weird and they do completely alien things to us. Yeah. The world's upside down. You know, women go to market and men urinate sitting down. Crazy stuff.

Herodotus and some of his fellow historians think it is just weird to do this. And bear in mind for Greeks and Romans, you know, yeah, you maybe bury someone, you maybe cremate someone. It's just dealing with the body, getting rid of it. Actually, the concept of an afterlife is not very interesting or sexy. To an ancient Egyptian, there is a vivid set of ideas about the afterlife. so the nuts and bolts of it are the body needs to be yes it's going to be transformed but there is the clear challenge of having a corpse in a hot country so you immediately need to deal with that so you need to dehydrate it easiest way is to take out the wettest parts which are in your chest and your head those parts well we think as you described well metal hook goes up the nose swizzled about and then the brain is scooped out using a little spoon

having destroyed the ethmoid bone in the nose which the kids love so you seem to throw away the brain matter is there a reason for not just cutting the head open does this body have to be as intact as possible because it seems like a palava to pull someone's brain out their nose right if you can just chop off the top of the skull

and literally just pick it out integrity of the appearance of the body for the turning it into a sack seems important yes so you don't want to damage the appearance but the appearance is going to be transformed anyway So there is a conundrum there that I'm not quite sure of So yes the internal organs are removed

Treated separately And then they are associated After a certain period Maybe about 2,600 BCE With jars, four jars The Canopic jars It's a pub quiz question This is what every kid learns

And sometimes they have different animal heads, the four sons of forest. But actually, the point of the four canopic jars is to add extra power to the divinization of the deceased. So you take a part of the person and you activate four images of gods. So it's not just handy storage, like rather than just slopping it on the floor upon the bin, this is really significant spiritually. And this is a whole thing about. more modern experience of embalming where we know in the 1700s there were conopic boxes

of stuff that was taken out of cadavers and then buried with people. So the modern expectation of what that is all about about preservation and actually trying to sanitise and preserve the body is back projected onto the ancient Egyptians who were trying to activate the divinity of the dead, you know?

So, of course, we have to look at things through our own eyes and through our own more recent experiences. There seems to be an attempt to keep the heart in the body. But exactly whether the Egyptians understood about the heart, it's related to judgment. Again, every eight-year-old knows. Your heart is weighed on a set of scales against a feather. The feather is the feather of truth. And if, in some sense, it balances, then this is a positive. But again, all of this description, especially of expectations of the afterlife, come through a Judeo-Christian sense of judgment about the dead.

Yeah. So we're just describing the ancient Egyptians doing what we expect. Yeah. Yeah. We would do. Do we know in any ancient Egyptian art or writing what they understood the heart to mean? Was it associated, for example, with love as it is in European cultures? No, no.

There's some sense of intelligence, but it doesn't seem to have. that association with romantic love as we would think of it. That's so interesting. So we're dealing with a completely different set of understandings of what everything means. Different understanding of anatomy, different understanding of associating different body parts with gods. This is a consistent thing in Egyptian religious texts. So your eyebrows are a certain god, your buttocks are a certain god,

each part. Because it's the only way you're going to survive the terrible rupture of dying. is to cling to whatever divine association you can. So the whole body is linked to certain divine things and you hope that that will be enough to propel it into whatever existence is expected beyond. So the actual treatment of the body, removal of the organs, then the dehydration now, again, misconception here, it's not just to dry things out to preserve.

So the Greeks think the Egyptians are treating their human bodies like we treat fish to salt fish, to consume fish ultimately to preserve it. The substance that we know is natron, which is a sodium compound, which is a dehydrating agent, is associated almost exclusively in ancient Egyptian religious texts, not with drawing things out, but with purifying them. Okay. What do you do to a divine statue? You need to purify it.

What do you need to do to a human body? You purify it. And what if the effect was not intended, the life-like effect, is just a symptom of all these treatments that you would do to a divine statue? So in the classical, actually very problematic developmental history of Egyptian mummification, it's like they do experiments experiment experiment experiment for centuries and centuries and centuries until they reach the peak around I don't know 1,200 BCE

that's the peak, that's the best and then everything after that has declined Wow I mean it is mind-blowing to me that you would look at a culture that lasted 3,000 years it is so patronising to say oh you tried it's an experiment it was a bit rubbish

and then for a few years you got it right well done slap in the back and then it was just rubbish after that are you being serious sadly they were that's the thing right this is if you read most Egyptology books this is how it is framed

development development development peak everything after is decline in fact what I think we're seeing just with the way certain treatments were applied so the body of the father of Ramesses the Great a guy called Setti the first

I've seen him his mummified body in Cairo. And he does just look like someone who has fallen asleep. Wow. So you've seen the not the rapt. He has been unwrapped. He has been unwrapped in the late 19th century. And he still looks like somebody who has just fallen to him. So that is praised from a modern point of view. That it's so well preserved. They've done a successful job. So they must have done it deliberately and it was a success. But if you bear in mind, the whole point was to wrap the body up so no one would see it. So you have to then unthink, obviously, the ancient Egyptians didn't prepare their dead

for them to be in glass cases in museums. Let's be clear on that as well. So the dehydrating goes on, the purification. And then we know from some texts that talk about the wrapping of the body. So there is no text that describes how to do the evisceration or the other gory texts. Because that is a modern, morbid, curiosity that is not a concern of ancient Egyptian people, it seems. When the Greeks and the Romans come along, they're like, tell me more. Do you think there's something as well about that

whole process not being written down, that it is a practical thing that you have to learn and that's so sacred you don't need to record it? It's just a knowledge that you have if you are in the presence of people doing it and you pass it on, you carry it on. Precisely. I think as you just said, Maddie, I think it's a taboo. And Let's be honest, modern undertaking is still a taboo. You do not want to ask what you're doing to grandma to make or look like that in a funeral home. And there are things that are done. And there are very inventive things.

And we don't want to know that. And we have a very clinical attitude to death. But I think it's true also, as you say, the reason there are no accounts of it is because it is a trade. and it is a priestly trade. It is associated with service of gods and secrecy. It's a mystery. It's a mysterious process. You're not meant to look behind the veil at that.

But practically speaking, if you were an ancient Egyptian embalmer, you're not studying for your embalming exam, your mummification exams. You're watching your father do it and learning from that. So we've got this wrapping process is started now. So that comes to fruition. And then the oiling and perfuming has happened before the wrapping? Yes. It's happening throughout, I think. So it smells nice.

Again, why does it smell nice? Well, because incense does smell nice and it will cover odors. But the word for incense in ancient Egyptian, seneture is grammatically a causative to cause to be divine. Oh, my goodness. So you're burning incense to turn the deceased person. into a god. And again, that whole multi-sensory experience is for the living

not for the dead, necessarily. Even though it is a transformational process on the dead body. It is still transforming them. But it's something that the living can share in. Yes. And there's something about the application, particularly of this blackened substance, which

as Egyptologists now, we're calling this black goo. That's the term we use. And colleagues at the British Museum have investigated the composition of black goo and very grateful to them for showing that results. This is something where it doesn't obey what we think the Egyptians should be doing. Black goo is applied in great profusion on the body of Tutankhamen. It's sloshed over his golden coffins. Howard Carter, when he's extracting Tutankhamen's body, as we talked about when we talked

about Tutankhamen, has to use chisels, the equivalent of blow torches to extract his body piecemeal. So that is where modern science has trumped ancient ritual. The ritual was designed to transform to it and come and into a god. And that was the state he would be in. It was not to be undone. And modern unwrapping and modern investigation undoes it. So there's another case where we don't have a good example in Manchester, but in other museums. So this black goo, which is often described in Egypt's logical literature as a way of covering up a bad

job. If you didn't properly mummify the person, you slosh on the black goo. This is nonsense. The black is the colour associated with Osiris, the god of rebirth. Emphasis on rebirth, regeneration, new life, not with death. He's not the god of death and dying.

The myth of Osiris is often cited as the divine precedent or the kind of antecedent, a model after which mummification is practiced. No, it's the other way around. Mammified bodies are the inspiration probably for the myth of Osiris rather than a historical Osiris really being. I mean, we're very gullible. We're very trusting of ancient Egyptian sources. But also of later sources that were like, well, this must have been what was going on. We're actually, we're like, well, it doesn't actually look like that's what was going on at all.

Yeah, really push back on whatever the given narrative is. So Osiris is sometimes depicted as having, yeah, just jet black flesh. Let's be clear, none of these images depict people as they wear. They're not living, they're gods. There are women with lioness-headed women. There are men with crocodile heads. There are gods and goddesses with blue flesh. You cannot read anything into how the people are depicted.

So there are images of bright white or jet black, images of Osiris. The jet black has a particular association with fertility. So putting the black goo not just on the body and the flesh, some flesh in later periods is even gilded directly in imitation of golden flesh. But you have a coffin to us to modern museum visitors, beautifully painted, finely decorated coffin that has had a bucket of black goo. put on it to activate it as an image of a sa'ach as an eternal image for the deceased, a godlike image. An Egyptologist get their knickers in a twist saying, oh no, but this was varnish and it was

originally meant to be clear and it's gone black with age. No, no. It was designed to be black because it wasn't designed to be in a museum. It was designed to be buried. And that is the transformation ritual in its final form. In a world where swords were sharp. And hygiene was actually probably better than you think it is. Two fearless historians. Me, Matt Lewis. And me, Dr. Eleanor Yonaga, dive headfirst into the mud, blood,

and very strange customs of the Middle Ages. So for plagues, crusades, and Viking raids, and plenty of other things that don't rhyme, Subscribe to Gone Medieval from History Hit wherever you get your podcasts. There's just one thing before we kind of start to head towards a bit of a discussion about how these things are being displayed. And that is, and this is such a evocative name. And then we have an image to go with it. But that name being the opening of the mouth ceremony.

Yes. I think you have a copy of this image somewhere there can. Oh, God. Shall I even try to describe this? I'll try, okay? And we can bear of mind that I am coming way, way, way outside my comfort zone here. That's good. But you can tell me what's really going on.

I'm going to need to make it bigger, first of all, because I'm blind. So we have an image where one, there seems to be a figure that has been sucked. Yes. Blue, blue head covering. We have the chin beard. White dazzling weight. White dazzling wrapping wrapping has happened. Behind there is a figure wearing some kind of a dog wolf mask thing. I'm not sure what that person is doing.

Holding it up or maybe rubbing something on it. I'm not entirely sure. We're definitely making contact with it. In front of this figure, there is immediately in front There are two women who are actually bare-chested, I think, wearing white, and they are very much venerating this image. Then behind them, we have two young men who are, what is that? There's a receptacle thing that looks like it's being held open. There's another thing that looks like a stick that's being shook in its face or something. I don't know what that is.

You're going to need to help me there. And then there's one person behind them again who is dressed, ooh, in like leopard skin. and has more bits and pieces in his hand. Is that a mirror? It's something like that. There's a lot of gold and decorative stuff going on in some of these items. And then there's this thing. To me, it looks like some kind of furry teddy full of plates.

And I'm telling you now that's not what it is. But it's very... That's the title of this episode. Wow. It's very dramatic. It is very ceremonial. What is going on? So what we're looking at is the most well-known depiction

of the ritual of the opening of the mouth. And I think your description was very evocative. The central figure... Like, not right, but be provocative. Completely correct. But let's go with it. So on the right-hand side of the image, you're seeing a tomb.

So this is a tomb chapel, right? And this is the final... episode in the funeral ceremonies. So you have, again, I don't think it's a coincidence, the tallest figure is the mummified body and you notice

actually of the group of figures those on the left are all living and they're looking towards the right. But the ones on the right hand side on a little stage. Yes. If you'd like of pure white sand or maybe Natron, who knows,

is the jackal headed god anubis, maybe a performer in a jackal mask and the deceased, the mummified deceased. And they are looking towards the left because they are of the world of the gods. And we know this ritual which is otherwise attested in ancient Mesopotamia in a form. The idea of opening the mouth is to restore the senses of sight, of hearing, of taste, of speech, of touch,

not so that the mummified body can come to life and start shuffling around like a Nabat and Costello movie but so that they can have those capacities in the afterlife to help as we said their relatives who are doing all these nice things for them so that teddy with plates is a pile of offerings and that's like fruit and vegetables

are any of those offerings plates what about teddy that's really so vivid thank you You don't have to say thanks, Campbell. But so this is the world of the living and the dead encountering one another, right? And it's bidding farewell, you know. The women are shown yes, you're right, a bare chested

because they're kind of renting their garments and they're pulling at their hair and throwing dust over their heads and mourning because there is genuine emotion here. Yes, it's highly ritualized. Yes, it's a transformation. But someone has died. So there is a human emotion.

at stake. But that figure, and I think it's very interesting, so the figures of the living are coded male and female, men are red, brown, women are yellow pink, but the figure with the jackal mask and the deceased themselves are gold and yellow, because they are gods. And so it's basically, and I like the suggestion, maybe Anubis is rubbing something on the outer part of the mummified body, but he's also claiming the deceased into the world of the gods. I see. That makes more sense, to be honest, than... And there are no teddy plates. No. So that ritual we know is done in temples for the whole building, the whole building or statues of gods are activated. Their capacity is activated. That's new to me. But it seems so central

to the whole concept of what's happening here is activation. No, no, I think this is really something which asks you a bit more to try and think as the ancient Egyptian think rather than the point is to preserve the body for eternity so they can have in a happy afterlife. That is more a Judeo-Christian thing. So let's try and unthink some of those presumptions. I spent my entire life trying to do that. It's hard. It's hard. And I think it's fine for us as historians. But it's so rewarding, actually, if you do it, if you go to a museum and you try and think, I'm looking at this painting. And what were the the intentions of the person who painted this rather than my modern 20-25 vision.

So I think, yeah, activation is what you're seeing here for the capacity of the deceased. I have loved listening to all these different processes and I have such a different understanding now of how this worked. And the word mummy for me is gone now. This is so interesting. Camel, before we go there, we've talked about how mummies were understood and treated in the centuries between then and now. But I'm just wondering, you alluded at the beginning to the difficulty, the complication, I suppose, as a modern curator working in a museum now and across the museum community. The question of how to deal with what are human remains and human remains that within that belief system were never meant to be disturbed, what is the current thinking? And is there huge debate still?

Is the community at large moving in a particular direction when it comes to the treatment and display of these objects? Objects in that ancient sense of capacity. Absolutely. we wouldn't describe we have 20 people at Manchester Museum and 30 animals who are mummified

and they were collected under various circumstances and I think in the case of the lady I mentioned before who is on display you can go and see her face and her toes the rest of her is covered in ancient linen the lady's name is Azru

when she was first unwra in April 1825 so we've just marked 200 years since that moment and we use that anniversary now for the rest of the summer to talk about ancient intentions her modern history and we're inviting visitors to tell us what they think about her display we've never done that before Manchester Museum has never done that before and I would say when she was unwrapped in 1825 people in 1825 said should we really be doing this so they'd did. So they did. So this idea that we live in, dare I say, a modern woke society and we're only questioning this now because we're naval gazing.

These questions, I can tell you, were happening in the Manchester Press over 100 years ago, for sure. So it is about balance, it's about care, it's respect. I as a child encountered, albeit a rapt mummified body in Glasgow

and that was fundamental for me. It is definitely true, and I've witnessed this in museums, parents and children have, or adults and children have conversations about life and about death that they would never have in normal daily life. And of course they are drawn to the displays in the museum of the Egyptian mummified bodies. This is the number one thing. But the fact that the body of Azru, a lady from Egypt, a lady from Africa, ancient Africa,

is on display for all to see no one gave us permission to put her body on display. So the debate is just one we want to encourage in a more explicit and transparent way and I think I speak

for other colleagues in the sector that this is something especially talking to colleagues in Egypt itself these are Egyptian ancestral remains they're not my own

family remains and I think you know If you've ever experienced death or loss and you've encountered the body of a loved one, maybe that does change your attitude to seeing bodies on display. One thing I've tried to fathom since working at the museum is what is it specifically about Egyptian mummified bodies that makes them so attractive? And I've been in that space and heard adults and children question whether the body of Azru is real.

And I think initially when I started working at Manchester Museum, gosh, 13 or 14 years ago, I thought, oh, that's silly of the public to think we'd mock up a mummified body. But when you think that the other big attraction in the museum is a T-Rex and the T-Rex skeleton is a cast, it's not so silly. And thinking about the future of 3D printing, for example. And who knows about the future of visualization? And the other thing also, you know, when you go into that space and you encounter a mummified body, I don't know if you're a child or if you're an adult, mummies exist in the same universe as werewolves and vampires and the creature from the Black Lagoon. Fictional things. So you're being asked to believe that you're seeing something that you know from the hammer, horror, universal universe of monsters.

Which in of itself has come from the legacy of the 1920s and Howard Carter and that golden age, quote, unquote, of colonial archaeology. exploitation and daring do and all that white male archaeologist. The othering of ancient Egypt and the monstrousness of it as it is interpreted by Westerners. Absolutely. And I think there is something that the fear of the mummified dead comes out of absolutely colonial guilt and feeling that we did something terrible to the Egyptians and they're going to get their own back. But hopefully you see the contrast between those modern mummy movies and what you see in this image, which is the deceased is triumphant, perfect, in some ways generically divine and without personality. There is no concern to record anything about the individuality of that person. And that makes us very anxious as modern people because we're so obsessed with ourselves. And I like this and I don't like this and I want. myself to be like this and I identify in this way. Based on the sources we have, transition into being a god means giving up your personality and your identity and your individuality. It's a transcendence, isn't it? This transcendent divine being and only divine beings are immortal.

So we all have our human foibles and in a way mummification is about giving those up and transitioning into something permanent, which involves being like a god and gods are gods. We are silly, basic little things, aren't we, in so many ways? And I wish, although I'll never experience it, I wish it could be around in like 3,000 years if there's a planet left, where I can hear people talk about our belief systems in this way, because we are headed that way. Like, don't think for a second we've landed on the answers.

And we do by default. It's our absolute arrogance that that's kind of what we do. Campbell, this is only the beginning of a much broader conversation. If people want to read a little bit more about your research, where can they find you, what can they read, what can they see? Well, I'm on social media at Egypt, MCR, and I'm always happy to engage with people. I've just written a little book called Brief History's Ancient Egypt, and one of the chapters in the book is what happens when you're rich and you're dead, which deals with some of the

things that we've been talking about. And currently, I'm working on a book about faces. Maybe I can come back and talk about faces, because for reasons we've outlined today, we see very distinctively ancient Egyptian faces, and we're also. spawned in a certain way. We assume there are people as they were. We've even done facial reconstructions. Recreating people in the image of ourselves. So that's my next thing is faces. Oh, that's great. I can't wait for that. Definitely come back to talk about that. Thank you very much for being on today Campbell. And thank you for listening at home. If you enjoy this episode and you

have suggestions about ancient Egypt or any other topic, you can get in touch with us at afterdark at history hit.com. And don't forget to leave us a five star review wherever you get your podcast. It helps other people to discover us.