Dan Snow's History Hit - The Myths vs Reality of Mummification

Episode Date: October 22, 2026

From the elaborate burial rituals of Ancient Egypt to Victorian mummy unwrapping parties, mummification has fascinated humanity for centuries. But what is mummification really about? Because Hollywood, supernatural folklore and popular culture have muddied our understanding of the real history behind this burial practice. Dan is joined by Egyptologist and curator of Egypt and Sudan at the Manchester Museum to unravel (pun intended) the myths and misconceptions around Ancient Egyptian mummification and explore the morbid curiosity the Romans, Greeks and Victorians all had for this mysterious practice.Produced by Mariana Des Forges and edited by Natasha HughesSign 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 also email the podcast directly at [e-mail] Snow's History Hit is a History Hit podcast.History Hit is part of Little Dot Studios, a Certified B Corp™. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hey friends, if you love this podcast and want to decide what history we cover, then you need to become a Dan Snow's History Hit subscriber. Pitch your topic and if I like it, we'll make it into a subscriber-exclusive episode. So far, we've covered the English Reformation, the Hudson Bay Company, the Trail of Tears, all of which have been decided by dedicated subscribers. So take the reins of your favourite podcast by heading over to history hit.com slash subscribe or sign up in your podcast player. Egyptian mummies. We're obsessed with them. Of course we are. And we have been for thousands of years. And that's what we're talking about on today's episode. But we're going to start by taking you back to the early 1820s. When an audience of Londoners stood a gog as the explorer Giovanni Belzoni, a man had recently returned from Egypt with a trove of ancient treasures, peeled back a pile of dusty bandages to reveal the sunken desiccated. parched face of a corpse. This was one of the first unrolling parties. Yes, they were a thing. A macabre sensation that became the rage in Victorian Britain. As people would gather to unwrap mummies

and have a party. These mummies had been purchased or stolen during trips to Egypt. They've been brought back to the UK. And the wealthy elites of Europe became obsessed with them. And through them the mysteries of the ancient Egyptians. And the prime. process of mummification. What did it all mean? There are stories of Victorian snorting cocaine of mummies, ingesting ground-up mummies, hoping that would be some kind of medical elixia called mummia. But our long relationship with mummies, as you can tell, it's been complicated, it's been riddled with misunderstandings, and so we've often been muddled and wrong. So here we are, I'm going to set the record straight. I'm joined by the expert, the great friend of history,

a best-selling author, and curator of Egypt and Sudan at Manchester Museum, European Museum of the Year, Dr. Campbell Price, he's back on the podcast, to sort out fact from friction when it comes to the myths of mummification in ancient Egypt. Campbell, you're at the Colface, you're where the rubber meets the road. People come to you, they want to know more about Egypt. Presumably mummies loon very large in that conversation. Yes, in a popular museum like Manchester Museum, European Museum of the Year. obviously. It is very common that people associate museums either with dinosaurs or you're right with Egyptian mummies. So there's a lot of misinformation. There's a lot of misconceptions about the ancient Egyptian dead. So is one of them that mummies are somehow, you're just trying to preserve these bodies forever in a sort of macabre way?

Yes, because when mummies first encountered the West and when the West first encountered mummified bodies from Egypt, 1700s, At that time, there were experiments in Europe about embalming procedures. Okay. With the explicit intention of people die away from home, they need to preserve the body to bring it back. So lots of experiments in anatomy theatres to understand the human body and to experiment in mummification, embalming techniques were back projected onto the ancient Egyptians. So one day you might have a fresh-ish, cadaver, and then the next day you might have a mummified ancient Egyptian, and you were

assuming that the people who were embalming both were doing the same thing. Interesting. Just as you said that, my mind drifted off, speaking of the 1700s, early 1800s, to Nelson and his huge big cask of brandy. They saved his body after the Battle of Trafalgar. They didn't throw him overboard to bring him back and bury him in St. Paul's Glegerl, as they should done. Anyways, that's some form of... That's very Dan Snowtick on embalming. So, okay, so we'll discuss it, but it's... not actually, they're not trying to just keep these people, keep this flesh from melting. No, I think this is a modern assumption that the reason you would treat the body is to

keep it like, you know, you see grandma in the funeral home. This may not be the case. Interesting, we'll come to that. Second thing, I think we, we, people like me think about is that there's mummies, there's an element of the frank, the undead, they rise, they run around, they scare people, that there's a, there's a horror element. Is that something the Egyptians would have recognised? Yeah, I think exactly. you describe, there's a threat, and we'll maybe unpack that a little bit. This would have been totally alien to an ancient Egyptian. The mummified dead were meant to be effective and beneficial for you, a living person,

and they would be your kind of foot in with the gods. If you did the mummification rituals correctly, the funeral, and you observed an ancestral cult for a dead relative, then they would do things for you. So it was not about threat or fear, but occasionally there were misunderstandings between the living and the dead. How interesting. So it's the opposite. It's good. You want to be surrounded by mummies. Yeah, well, essentially, yeah. Okay, let's go back all the way. So take me back into the deep past. When do we start seeing these burial practices emerge? If you go all the way back to the old kingdom, even older, how do people bury their dead or dispose of the dead?

So we've got the 3,000 year sweep of ancient Egypt, which is roughly 3,000 BCE, up to Clever. Apatra. Yeah. Just, folks, every time we talk to you, Cleopatra lives closer to the iPhone, then to the pyramids.

Unbelievable. This is because ancient Egypt is a long, long, long, long time. And things were very regional. This is important. They did different things in different parts of the country.

And also, it lasts a long time and fashions change. So when you talk about ancient Egypt, there's a tendency to imagine this big, monolithic, all ancient Egyptians believe X. This is simply not true. So, in answer to you,

question, mummification is such a quintessentially ancient Egyptian thing. The Greeks, the Romans are obsessed. You could say morbidly obsessed with what the ancient Egyptians do to their dead. So it's not just us. Everyone that's come to, even the ancient Greeks, everyone's been fascinated by this technique. Yeah, because obviously if you're a Greek or someone living in the Greek world like Herodotus, you are visiting Egypt and people are still practicing, actively practicing mummification and you think gosh it's weird it's one of the weird things the egyptians do so there's this kind of slightly schizophrenic approach to the Egyptians they have this very long past and they're very clever and they're great healers and they're great magicians but also they're very superstitious and

they do weird stuff and they're kind of to be feared in a way really yeah okay so take me back way before it was, very before, so that's the end of Egyptian, ancient Egyptian history, right back at the beginning, people being buried. Before there are pharaohs. Before they're pharaohs. So obviously people are being buried and they are being treated in a special way. I think that's what we can say from the archaeology. We've got what we would call, Egyptologists would call pre-dynastic graves. So pre-before the dynastic period before 3,000 BC. And there are people buried in a crouched kind of fetal. position, a sleeping position. And we know from later pyramid texts from hundreds of years later

that there's a concept that you sleep to wake, you die to live. So sleep is a metaphor for death from which you are going to wake up into a new life, not in the sense the body is going to get up and move around, but you're going to live in a metaphysical existence in the beyond. And in order to do that you need stuff so people are buried with cosmetic items which seems to be because the body is treated in a certain way that makes it look more divine and that is the fundamental point to understand about mummification it is not about preserving the person as they were as they looked when they were alive but to change them and to change their appearance so they appear as a God, because that's the only way you're going to survive this terrible rupture of death.

Are they becoming divine in some way? Yes, absolutely, absolutely. So it's not just in Rome, emperors became divine, but this is a chance for all Egyptians who can afford it are somehow becoming divine beings in death. Yes, and I think, I'm often asked that, what did most people expect? So we know about kings and queens in the elite. I suspect most ancient Egyptians would believe that the act of burying someone and treating the body and doing the proper funeral, regardless of where in the social pyramid you are, the action, the ritual,

did the transformation. So that answers the question, you know, why is everyone not mummified? The full works is only performed, the wrapping and the oils and the resins and the coffins and the tombs. yeah, that's only the top 5%, but everyone else believes there's the possibility to exist as some superhuman being after death, otherwise it would be quite a sad life.

Yeah, tell me about it. So you, these early tombs there, these early graves, buried with cosmetics, sounds like my daughter's bedroom, I push open her door through a sea of skin care and cosmetics. Yep. And then, what's the next development after that? So there is definitely the wrapping of the body from very early on

But we're not talking you know the Hollywood bandages Wrapped wrapped round the corpse Shrouding not necessarily of linen But of matting and this is a way of marking the body is as as separate So the deceased is existing already separate from society not because I think the ancient Egyptians are afraid of the dead or repelled by decomposition. There may be an element

of that, but there's a way of marking the dead as entering this other world, the afterworld, in which gods exist. So there does seem to be a concept of gods and the dead exist in this other place and they are in communication with one another. So you want to use your own deceased relatives as a means of communication.

So they can intercede with the gods. They can work on your behalf. They can lobby. They can lobby. That's a great word to use. If you have a known, you know, if you had a great aunt who was particularly, you know,

socially powerful. Which I do. I had one, certainly. You would think after she passed on, she would be your kind of conduit. So why worship a kind of impersonal, great, god like the god osiris or the god amun who haven't appeared on the scene yet in the pre-dynastic period i should say why do that when you could actually have a relationship with your deceased great aunt who could as you

said lobby the other divine beings and who could do things of benefit to you so the dead are you're laying them at rest hoping to ease their journey into this afterlife but all they're help you as well. So there's a reciprocity to this. Yes, reciprocity is important and you want to keep the channels of communication open. So we've got archaeological evidence of the grave. So the development after burying someone in a pet basically with some covering, some items around them, a kind of shallow grave. Then there is the development of that quintessentially Egyptian thing, the two part, the bipartite tomb. So you have the sealed bit, which is meant to be secure from, animals and from tomb robbers, potentially, and then the open bit, which is inviting people in

to leave offerings, to speak to the dead, to communicate with the dead, because A, the dead don't want to be forgotten, and the living want that means of communication with the other world, with the divine world. And if it's one of this, if you have particularly illustrious ancestor, perhaps, the one who, the one who got, the great aunt, who really was something, this might continue for generations. Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Beyond living memory. Yeah. Yeah. And if you imagine that the semantics, the same.

because the cemetery would be at a remove from the settlement, you could see, you can just see, my gosh, that grave over there has 10 times as many, you know, pots of figs as that one next to it. That person must have been particularly venerated and particularly effective as an ancestor. And I suppose if your family continue to enjoy wealth and fortune and are able to afford lots of jars of figs, that does suggest that they're doing their job. So it's a self-fulfilling. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's, yeah, self-fulfilling and it's a social contract. It is a reciprocity. It's a kind of, yeah, you scratch my back and I'll scratch yours from beyond the grave. Let's get to, what's the next step on this journey towards mummification? So, tombs become more developed. And the standard explanation, Dan, which I might put a pen in and try and challenge, is that there. The fact that tombs develop and then coffins develop means that the hot dry sand is no longer in contact with the body.

Okay. And so if you leave a body in hot desert, it will naturally desiccate. So natural mummification occurs. And so for Egyptology, there is an assumption that when tombs develop, then artificial mummification has to take place. but I'm rather skeptical about this neat division, this neat development.

Always be healthily skeptical of neat historical explanations. Tell me about it. I think there is more artificial treatment of the body while the body is still in contact with hot sand and there are other religious reasons for doing what the Egyptians do. So the next stage in the early dynastic period. So we're into the old kingdom now. Yeah, we're into...

They're building purists. They're almost building pyramids. They're building big tombs. They're building big tombs. Yes, they're mastibus. And then, you know, there is a chamber. There's a room you can go into in which the body is placed in a coffin. And so the body at this point is still potentially placed in a wooden coffin, which we have an example in Manchester Museum. I think we've looked at it together in the storeroom, which is short, made of wood. And it's, big enough for an adult to be still in this crouched position. So there's the idea of the sleeping to wake, the dying to live. But then it's not this Hollywood idea of the fully stretched body wrapped, but it's crouched still. And the shape of the coffin is often characterized as a house.

It's not a house. It's a shrine of a god or a palace of a king. Now, a king is divine. so a king lives in a sort of a shrine God's statues live in shrines they are periodically brought out for rituals and so the body of the deceased for those that can afford it

is treated in a way like a divine statue so the dead have their divine status assured by being put in a shrine shaped box and will that box be brought out no okay because that's the inker would separate the site well part of the this one, but the Inca would bring them out, wouldn't they? And there are other, yeah, cultures

that are either keeping the dead within visible distance or, as you say, periodically will bring the dead out to participate in life. So that's not coming out? No, these are sealed and closed

and this is the secure part of the tomb. But then there's a tomb chapel developing all this time into the Pyramid Age which starts out as a little room for the pots of figs, develops into a room with a central doorway, a false door, which enables the interaction of the living and the dead, but maintains the security of the tomb beyond

so that tomb robbers can't get it. More from Dr. Campbell Price. After this, don't go away. So now are we approaching mummification here? If by mummification, you mean what we classically think of as the dehydration of the body. I've just got halfway through this podcast and realised a very embarrassing thing.

I'm not really sure what mummification is. I'm sorry, Campbell. No, no, no, no. So what do we mean by mummification? So mummification really is the artificial treatment of the body. Okay. So that is the application of, or the drying of the body

through a chemical means a kind of chloride compound sodium chloride like Egyptologists call it Natron you've heard of Natron I guess I have not but it sounds cool

Well it's called Natron because it's a salt like substance That is extracted from different places But principally from a place called the Wadi Natrune So there's a There's a homophony here Where we're extracting this and this is, and I really emphasize this point, this is something that priests used to bathe.

So it's like having a salt scrub. Yeah. Which makes you feel pure and allows you to go into the temple and do all your rituals in a state of purity. You can even chew balls of natron, apparently. This is what the Greeks and the Romans think is very weird. But this is applied to the body

as a way of purifying it. It has as a, perhaps, as a side effect, a dehydrating effect. So that's good. So it's doing, there's a ritual effect and then there's a physiological effect sucking the moisture out of the skin. So that makes it nice and dry. Yes. And then you come along and you want the body to be divine, more divine. So you apply resin, plant resin, which is burnt in temple rituals as incense. So there is definitely a, a value placed on smelling nice.

So frankincense, the reason these are, you know, in biblical, people will know those terms from biblical accounts. The reason they are so valuable is because they are used in the treatment of the dead and treatment of ritual procedure. So the ancient Egyptians are applying resin, but I really emphasize not to preserve the body, but to make the deceased more like a god.

And then the last stage is to wrap the body in linen. Fine, radiant, white linen. That's how gods appear. Okay. They appear in this kind of amorphous shape. What Egyptology calls mummiform shape. But actually, Egyptology has got the associations the wrong way round. Yes, the gods aren't looking like mummies.

The mummies looking like gods. Exactly, Dan. You've got it in one. That's it. So I think when you understand those procedures, mummification is simply, not that simply, it's quite a complicated process, is the treatment of the human body

and other bodies, animal bodies as well, to make them or to emphasise or enhance their godlike qualities. And so these little statues of the gods that you're talking about that would be brought out on special groups, they would actually look quite similar. Yes. So the mummies would look like them as well. Yes.

So that kind of visual comparison was very important to make that association clear. And so this is, although you're saying 3,000 years of ancient Egypt years ago, a long, long time, mummification actually is a common thread through it, would you say? I mean, does this endure? Yes. Yes, it's culturally, absolutely central. The dead are far more part of society than maybe in modern West. But in terms of, you know, if you asked, when do you attend an Egyptian funeral? and see something that looks like a mummified body from a Hollywood film,

well, the body starts to be stretched out. Okay. In the pyramid age. So, okay. So, Old Kingdom. Old Kingdom. You know, 2,500-ish BCE. Yeah.

And what happens is there's an interesting period of development around the time of the pyramids, Dynasty 4, Dynasty 5, where the deceased is almost completely covered in plaster. And so there are interesting cultural parallels with places like Jericho in the Levant. Those are much older cases where skulls, you know, disarticulated skulls, are treated with plaster. So there is this idea that, again, gods are permanent. Divine images last forever. And it's something I've looked at in my own research. It's clearly something the ancient Egyptians observed.

They were maybe less concerned about observing and monitoring the naturally preserved bodies of people in the desert than they were making the simple observation that a statue or an inorganic form of a god lasted way longer than a biological person because art lasts longer than normal human life. Tell me about it. Tell me about it. That's all we can leave behind, Campbell, at the end of the day.

But with that being the belief, you then want to become an artwork. You want to become permanent. How interesting. So you apply the plaster not as a way of cap, and this is important, not as a way of capturing the person's appearance when they were alive,

but making them into this kind of generic image of a god, and then you dress them with linen. And so people are, we've got archival photos from, you know, tombs that were found at Giza, and they look quite unnamed. Nerving. People kind of stiff. So the corpse is just a useful chassis for creating a godlike image. Yeah. Yeah. So yes, it's not about cherishing grandpa's memory and trying to preserve his essence. It's about,

oh, brilliant, we got a corpse. We can we can turn grandpa into a god. Yes. And you want grandpa to, yeah, lobby on your behalf of the gods. And interestingly, of course, I'm not discounting, you know, personal, you know, emotion. and grief and regret at death. Of course, that's part of the human condition. But beyond that, there is a sense, much later in Egyptian history, that it doesn't really matter what Grandpa's personality was. He is joining one of the gods and the gods are generically perfect. So you want him to be one of those kind of, yeah, generic, lacking in personality,

permanent beings, rather than, oh, grandpa really liked, you know, his, his, um, his, um, his beer in a certain way.

Maybe you still remember that, but you're not memorializing quite the way we think of being important now. Yeah, it's, okay, that makes a lot of sense.

So, so as the ancient Romans, ancient Greeks, discover Egyptian culture, interact with it, they're still mummifying, right the way through to the period of Cleopatra,

the period of people familiar with, what we might call the classical age. But I've seen in your museum and elsewhere, these wonderful paintings, Some of the best human likenesses I've ever seen from the ancient world

are painted on coffins. Now is that a separate fashion? It's related. It's a related fashion. So, yeah, that's the period after Cleopatra because, as we all know, when Cleopatra pops or clogs, in comes Rome.

Octavian becomes Augustus, and that starts Roman occupation of several centuries in Egypt and in lots of the rest of the world. But there is still the practice of mummification for the elite, for people who can afford it, you can definitely still be mummified. There's a lot of bad press in Egyptology

around those mummified bodies. Late mummified. They're late. It's rubbish. They've declined. They don't know what they're doing. They can't preserve anymore, so they slosh on big buckets of black goo. And then they stick on a fion portrait.

Those images you're talking about are those. And yeah, we've looked together at them. They're so striking. they look so lifelike, they look like someone you might see in the street. Those are mainly second century, C.E. So a couple of centuries after Cleopatra, but their function is the same.

And I think it is our sentimental, wishful thinking that makes them into portraits. I don't think they're meant to be godlike. They're meant to be godlike. Oh my goodness. And there are cues. That's why they're all so handsome. Yes, and beautiful.

And there are cues that we, that we can observe that we shouldn't miss in those images. So gold is quite liberally applied in the framing of the of the fine portraits. The style of the hair for the men follows that of the Roman emperor and the women the Roman empress. So if you understand, as you said before Dan, the Roman emperor is a god and certainly in Egypt is worshipped as a god. He's on the temple walls, who are you going to want to look like to ensure, to maximize your chances of going into the afterlife as a god? Well, the Roman emperor, because he is the Pharaoh as he is the emperor, as he is a god. So it's not that, and I really want to emphasize this because it's

something people ask me a lot in Manchester Museum. Oh gosh, she looks like she maybe is in the grips of a final illness. No, no, that woman probably had that portrait, painted, created portrait, created after death. It's AI slop, guys. It's AI slop. An Egyptian version of, yes. It's very beautiful. Some of the finest art I've ever seen from that period.

But that's not what they look like. They're breaking my heart here. I'm sorry, but the point is good. And it's, again, worth really holding on to this idea. They look good because they were meant to be seen. So unlike the Pyramid Age, until Cleopatra, pretty much. much when the ancient Egyptian dead, however they're decorated, however beautiful, however stunning, however good they look in a museum now, they were never meant to be seen after the

funeral. After Cleopatra, in the Roman period, those volume portraits, we have good archaeological evidence, were set up in chapels where they were visited for generations. They weren't buried, they weren't sequestered out of sight, they were meant to be engaged with, because remember, you need your ancestors to put in a good word for you with the gods. So there's a change in practice that might reflect Roman ideas of what it's appropriate to do after death. So mummification, you know, the funeral in Roman Egypt is not the end. You are visiting the dead and then maybe after grandpa has been dead for 100 years

and he's no longer in living memory, then you gather him and his fellow mummified dead up and bury them. More from Dr Campbell Price after this. Don't go away. A mummification comes to an end, Christianity? Christianity is a bit of a party pooper generally. So what? Three, four, five hundred? Yeah, three hundred.

End of the three hundred is when Christianity really takes off. There is still the treatment of the body, and there is still respect of the body. But there is less evidence for the complete wrapping of the body. the body might be dressed in, you know, Sunday best. And the body may inadvertently be preserved due to dehydration in a hot, dry country. But there is not that artificiality in the service of turning the deceased into a god that was pharaonic practice. So that's the end of thousands of years of manfication practices.

Then let's take a break and leap forward to the rediscovery, the, the, the, the European mind being opened up to these mummies. Yeah. 1700s, 1800s? And why do people go so, why does it send people into such a complete frenzy? I mean, I think knowledge of the mummified, ancient Egyptian dead, is, it lurks in the Western consciousness, you know, well, since biblical, biblical accounts, it's in Herodotus. It's in Herodotus.

For as long as people have known. about Herodotus, they've known about monification. Anyone who's read the Bible knows about the treatment of Jacob and these kind of Egyptian ways of doing things. In terms of explorers and archaeologists

finding the dead, there's an account of an Italian explorer traveler called Pietro de la Valli, who in the 1600s is going to Egypt. And he must be in the area of Sakara, so that area of the

cemetery near Cairo. Huge cemetery. Huge. Was huger then. It's been pretty comprehensively emptied since. But he finds Fiam Portras and he describes, he's got a beautiful description of the richly

stitched. He's very impressed by the wrapping. So it's not just gold. It's the wrapping styles. It's these painted faces. And he brings these bodies back to Europe. So there's an idea of the ancient Egyptians doing this based on actual evidence of the mummified bodies from the 1600s.

But there's not always respect for these bodies. They are ground up. They are turned into paper. They are ground up for medicine. Mummy is mummia. Yeah, where did we get the word? So the term mummia is this Persian Arabic word for the black substance, which occurs naturally in the area of modern Iran,

but which dead actually tests have shown form part of the black goo that was applied to the mummified dead as a means of turning them into gods so sometimes you'll see the god of Cyrus has this jet black skin a sign of his power and his rejuvenation and so all the mummified dead

want to look like Cyrus so this becomes very fashionable I mean Shakespeare writes about it I think Desdemona in Othello has this on our handkerchief and it's meant to be a cure-all particularly good for syphilis. Suffice it to say

consuming mummified flesh is not good for sexually transmitted diseases in fact. That's one that you can that's one that you put a pen in that fact it's important. Yeah. Okay so but that's what people were consuming as medicine. Okay.

Yeah. Yeah. Ground up for paper ground up for paint mummy brown paint some of the great pre-raph light canvases the brown is mummified flesh so there is a macarbness obviously I'm getting to that point

where we've travelled quite a long way from that ancient Egyptian idea of the radiant dead being effective for you in the afterlife who are going to promote your interests with the gods who are permanent and enduring and yeah divine that has changed

and then fear creeps in I think you could say it's interesting in fiction in Gothic horror the fear of the mummified dead in the late 19th century does seem to go hand in hand with European and particularly

British colonial ambitions in Egypt so 1882 invasion bombardment of Alexandria that there is a sense, I think it's undeniable in the literature, that there is a fear that the Egyptians, the ancient Egyptians are going to bump back for the colonial exploitation of the country and the control of...

It almost comes from a Victorian guilt somehow. Oh, absolutely, colonial guilt. And so it's interesting, the mummified dead in the earlier 1800s are often characterized as quite beautiful women, just reanimated, but then by the last. late 1800s they're shuffling, dirty, evil, threatening. And of course, it's in the terminology you talk about, if you say to a child, you know, what is a bandage? A bandage is, you know, you graze your knee and you put a plaster on it and it gets dirty. So the idea that a mummified body is bandaged. Covering bandages.

It's shuffling and it's trying to kind of consume you. in its uncleanness. So that's the fear, which I'm sure is related to, yeah, colonial guilt, yeah. And then they had plenty of you guilty about because the Victorians are removing lots of objects from Egypt. And then there's the mummy unwrappings?

I mean, dinner parties, say, I mean, where does this come into it? Yes, yeah. I mean, I think those unwrappings are happening even in the late 1700. So as soon as, I mean, I think you've got to give credit to the people at the time. If you're a learned gentleman in the 1790s,

and you're maybe interested in anatomy, you're interested in the business, the chemistry of embalming. You've heard all these things about the ancient Egyptians. You know the story is about Mammaia. So Mammaia is this cure-all, and there is some concept in which the Mumia substance is thought

to promote preservation of the body. So you think if you've got an ailment or a sickness, then if a whole bucket load of the mummia can preserve a human body, if you take a little bit of it, it'll sort your gammy leg. So by extension, the people who are doing the experiments

in the late 17, early 1800s, want to get to the root of this. So they are curious, they are open-minded, but when they start unwrapping the bodies pretty ruthlessly to get to the good stuff inside, well, they characterize what they find in racial terms. They're very dismissive, actually, about the ancient Egyptians.

And they don't record what they do most of them terribly well. So all of that evidence has been lost. So that's interesting. Whereas now we walk around going, ancient Egyptians, unbelievable, how do they do that? Extraordinary. They were rather dismissive. They thought these primitive savages

Some of them Well there was a debate raging About them being primitive savages Some of them were judged to be Honorary Moderns so they must be You know Caucasian Europeans Supposedly Because there's lots of skull measuring going on

Yeah, yeah of course Which is a pseudoscience But people at the time Throughout the 1800s into the 20th century believed it was a viable means of scientific research. But there's something presumably, but the people wanted to be present when these mummies run, there's an excitement

there as well. Yeah, I mean it was a kind of an after-dinner entertainment where you would, well, the well-to-do who could actually get hold of a mummified body prefer. Well, indeed. Preferably the body would be in a lovely

painted, decorated coffin which if you remember before 1822, no one can read hieroglyphs. Champoleon hasn't done the deed with decipherment. So no one knows what the hieroglyphs say. So you assume, you know, this is going to be the biography of a beautiful, intriguing woman. Which, by the way, we've talked to this for.

I wish they were biographies. I mean, I know that they're, because hieroglyphs tend to be religious, ritual texts. Quite standard. And if they were Roman, it would just the whole thing would be like, then they did this, then they did that, and these are the dates and this who the consul was. which I think would be quite useful. Yes, you do not get to that, I'm afraid. All of that writing, not once they go,

he fought on a battle and this was the result. It makes me a bit sad. No. And culturally, that is just not the kind of thing. I know, it's funny. You want to become a god. You don't want to commemorate what. But actually, that totally reinforced is what you just said,

because it's not about grandpa and his achievements and his life. No, his illustrious life. No, we're trying to get someone the gods here, let's go. This is about the divinity of it. If you're lucky in some elite tombs in Egypt, you might get a boast about a soldier saying, I followed the king in these places. So you get some geographical information and you maybe cut off some hands or were awarded with some hands and some servants. But generally, no, hyroglyphs are not giving you that information. So at the mummy unwrapping parties,

you're left to imagine. Well, you would be helped to imagine by the performer to be very kind of early, although the words didn't exist, early Egyptologists. Early podcast, yes, would be filling in the gaps of what we don't know

with a lot of entertaining information. Imagine that, imagine that, Campbell. Yeah, extemporization. Okay, so, and then, And so they're unwrapped and they're all having, it's a part of it's crazy. It's sort of, it must have been an overwhelming experience.

The candles, you're drinking, there's mummies being unwrapped. The smell. The smell. And I know, still in the rooms we use for storing mummified remains, there is a, there is a smell. So if you were doing it live in a warm, candlelit environment, it would be quite pungent. And occasionally the accounts say, you know, the last wrappings came off and the, the person turned to look at us and the smell was overwhelming.

So it was quite a sensory experience. In some cases, they would give out, you know, little bits of the cloth as a souvenir. Up until, well, 1908 in Manchester, we had a lady called Margaret Murray, very interesting, early Egyptologists, suffragist, folklorist, practicing witch, who lived to be 100. she gave out sections of the scientifically unwrapped, mummified body she'd just unwrapped. So the fashion of people wanting to be part of it, wanting to be part of a scientific endeavour. But when you read those accounts, and this features in fiction as well, Gothic fiction at the time as well, and they're described as experiments. So unwrapping is an experiment.

It's like exploration. We're doing science here, lads. We're doing science. It's all good. We're doing science. Yeah. So we can totally atomize this, poor individual. Have you ever unwrapped a mummy?

Do we unwrap or do we X? No, no, no, no. We put them in the CAT scan today. Yeah, CT scanning is the way today. So you can tell a lot, but I should emphasize CT scanning has its limitations because obviously CT scanners are for living bodies, which are 70% water. a mummified body is very dry

so flesh, dried flesh looks like bone and I've been in the hospitals where we've done the CT scan and the radiologist and the archaeologist and the bio-egyptologist cannot agree what the scan shows

is it paleopathology is it something the person had as a condition that may have hastened their demise or is it an artifact of mummification it's a part of the treatment of the body. So you cannot say in 99% of cases, unless someone has an axe through their head, you cannot say how someone died, really what conditions they had. It's very subjective business

interpreting CT scans of mummified bodies. Let's finish up with the question of how we should treat mummies now. One of my earliest memories is seeing mummies in museums like yours. It's just a profound experience. My daughter is going this weekend to sleep with the mummies in a museum. the sleeping night in the museum? Sleep over, yeah. How do you in the museum world balance the sort of taste, decency, ethics? These are human remains, they revered.

And yet they are an astonishing portal through which most people might discover Egyptology, which is a wonderful thing. Are we allowed to be excited by them? It's a balance, isn't it? And I think there has been a shift from the times we've just talked about

when you're revealing, you're actually unwrapping the dead. with, I mean, today if you go to the National Museum of Egyptian Civilization in Cairo, there are quite strict protocols for not taking photos and trying to be respectful around the mummified bodies of kings and queens. So I know, I mean, at Manchester Museum we're trying to balance up the knowledge and the emotional connection with the dead, with respecting the wishes of Egyptian people today with our visitors. And so I think I was the same. It was a it was a mummified body, a rapt mummified body in Glasgow when I grew up visiting the, the museum in Kelvin

Grove that really spoke to me and connected with a cartoon I watched as a kid. I think we talked about this. Thundercats. Thundercats, really seminal moment. In my childhood was watching Thundercats. It's funny, I think it's especially true with the mummified dead, as we've just said. You don't go into a museum, even as a child, with a blank slate on your mind. You don't go in with a neutral, ready to be impressed. You go in with a lot of cultural baggage, things you are already interested in, images you've seen, ideas you've already, and opinions and prejudices you've already formed, and you look for you. And you look for. for confirmation of your belief in museums. And the great thing about museums is they can push back on some of those preconceptions. So I think especially for the mummified dead, museums, I think, are good places to have debates

about whether we should or shouldn't see those people and how we should care for those people in the future. Well, I'm glad you, Dr. Campbell Price, are the man in those conversations and helping to shape how we resolve these issues. You're such a legend. Thank you very much. Thank you, Dan. Thank you. Well, thank you very much to Dr. Campbell Price.

Make sure you go to Manchester Museum. It's one of the best. You can spend many happy hours look at their collections on Egyptology. Also, make sure you smash all the various buttons. You know you've got to press them so you don't miss another episode of this. See you next time for another episode of Dan Snow's History Head.

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