Ologies with Alie Ward - Momiology (MUMMIFICATION) with Kara Cooney & Salima Ikram

Episode Date: October 9, 2024

Linen wrapping. Expensive resins. Sarcophagi. Preserving for eternity – or until someone raids their tomb. It’s a brand-new Spooktober episode with not one but two guests: Dr. Salima Ikram is a professor of Egyptology and expert on mummification of both people and animals, and is joined by veteran guest from the Egyptology episode, professor and author Dr. Kara Cooney. The two chat about mummification techniques, how food studies lead into the pyramids, controversy over the word “mummy,” whiffing the dead, socioeconomic factors in mummification, animal mummies, lingering mysteries, field work, a house mouse, and more. Next week in Part 2 we’ll dive into more ethics of collections, human sacrifice, the people who ate mummified remains, paint colors, coffin engravings and the meaning of “magic.” Visit Dr. Cooney’s website and follow her on Instagram, X, YouTube, and FacebookGet Kara’s latest book, Recycling for Death: Coffin Reuse in Ancient Egypt and the Theban Royal Caches, and browse her other books on Amazon or Bookshop.orgSubscribe to Kara’s Substack Ancient/NowVisit Dr. Ikram’s website and follow her on FacebookGet Salima’s latest book, Let a Cow-Skin Be Brought: Armour, Chariots and Other Leather Remains in Tutankhamun’s Tomb, and browse her other books on Amazon or Bookshop.orgDonations went to the Yellowhammer Fund and Doctors Without BordersMore episode sources and linksSmologies (short, classroom-safe) episodesOther episodes you may enjoy: Egyptology (ANCIENT EGYPT), Taphology (GRAVESITES), Desairology (MORTUARY MAKE-UP), Thanatology (DEATH & DYING), Ambystomology (AXOLOTLS … AND LIMB REGROWTH?), Melaninology (SKIN/HAIR PIGMENT), Spooktober episodes of the pastSponsors of OlogiesTranscripts and bleeped episodesBecome a patron of Ologies for as little as a buck a monthOlogiesMerch.com has hats, shirts, hoodies, totes!Follow @Ologies on Instagram and XFollow @AlieWard on Instagram and XEditing by Mercedes Maitland of Maitland Audio Productions and Jacob ChaffeeManaging Director: Susan HaleScheduling Producer: Noel DilworthTranscripts by Aveline Malek Website by Kelly R. DwyerTheme song by Nick Thorburn

Oh hey, it's the guy at the gym using a foam roller on his IT band and trying not to cry. Allie Ward. And here we are, we are approaching antiquity. This episode rolls us right into Spooktober where we cover everything from bats to pumpkins to dancing spiders. And this month we got you set up with everything from candy history to critters to this one. This is mommyology. It's the study of human preservation in ancient Egypt and also staggering children

wrapped in toilet paper down your street. Now if you're thinking, you've heard this one, think again, you didn't. One of our guests is so charismatic and learned, we have the pleasure of bringing her back to chat about her new work. She's got this book called Recycling for Death, Coffin Reuse in Ancient Egypt and the Thebian Royal Caches. So she's a professor of Egyptian art and architecture at UCLA. She's written several books about Egyptian history. She's been featured in many documentary programs about death rituals in Egypt and

published books including The Good Kings, When Women Ruled the World, The Six Queens of Egypt, and The Woman Who Would Be King, king had Shepshitz rise to power in ancient Egypt. She's one of the world's finest experts in Egypt and Egyptian coffins. Now this is a special episode. We have a second guest. This is a twofer, this is a bogo, and it's a two-parter with two experts whose work intersects. And our second human gem we have is a Cairo-based professor of Egyptology and Archaeology at the American University in Cairo.

She's also been a visiting professor at Yale University. She's authored several books about ancient Egypt, some for young readers. Plus, Ancient Egypt, an introduction. Mommy in Ancient Egypt, equipping the dead for eternity. The knowledge in their brains, we're gonna get to it. But I wanna thank all the patrons who sent in their wonderful questions for this. You too can join patrons and submit yours before we record. That's at patreon.com slash Ologies. It costs a dollar to get into my heart and into the show. Also, you can get some merch for the holidays from Ologiesmerch.com. And for

no dollars, thanks for leaving us reviews, which helps so much that I read everyone, including this just-left one, BethB789, who wrote, "'Even when I read a heading and think I won't be bothered, I end up completely invested in the nichest of topics.'" Thanks, Beth. We do do our best. And also to retired Cutter, who left a review that they love the show but not the occasional swear words,

just a reminder, we have this spin-off show we just started recently called Smology's that you can find in any podcast app. They are kids safe and classroom friendly versions of ology as they are trimmed of any adult language. So get those wherever you get podcasts. Speaking of language though, okay, mommy ology, it's a real word. It's not a common one. It was coined in academic literature in 1894, and I think no one has used it since then, which is embarrassing for the author. But honestly, we're preserving it here, and we're hoping it enjoys a very prosperous afterlife 130 years later. So in this Spooktober or good for any time episode, we're going to navigate ancient

tombs, we're going to smell eternal resting, we're going to question what eternal resting is, decipher coffin engravings, learn about natural and less natural mummification techniques, discuss terminology around the word mummy, and listen to these two experts dish about socioeconomic factors in mummification, animal mummies, lingering mysteries, field work, and the debate around human sacrifice, plant resins, fragrance, flim flam, so much more with mommy-ologists, Dr. Kara Cooney and Dr. Salima Ikram. I was saying how sweet both of you guys are when you talk about the other one.

You both say such sweet, nice things. I can tell that you guys are actually friends and like each other. That's great. Unless you do a good job faking it, in which case, excellent. Yeah, you know, she's really a terrible bitch. So again, you may recognize Dr. Cooney from her Egyptology episode, but quick intros here. Kara Cooney. Mm-hmm.

Selim Iqram. She-her for me. Me too. Well, are all mummies in sarcophagi, or can they be in any type of coffin? It's an unfortunate thing that as bodies came into museums, as things are dug up out of the ground, how they're found is not necessarily the way they're stored in museums

and other storage facilities. And the way that I work with coffins, generally they don't have a mummy inside of them anymore, which is a shame because it's ruining their reason for existence. The reason for the coffin's existence is to hold a dead human body. And when you work with one of these coffins in a museum, it's a good thing because then you're able to see the inside of the piece, particularly if it's a decorated piece on the inside, it's all kinds of polychrome paint. Removing that mummy is great. So for someone who collects data on coffins,

finding an unoccupied one is nice. If you're the person who was taken out of the coffin by someone else, it's probably less nice. But for example, the coffins in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, all of the mummies were taken out of them and sent to the Peabody Anthropological Institute where they're preserved in pieces and not very well. So they're in different cities even. And it's hugely problematic. So yeah, but I'll let Salima jump on there. I mean, because I dig a lot, I get a lot of my bodies are in the ground

and as they are buried. So some of them in fact are indeed in coffins, but some of them are just wrapped up in mats, which is what the ancient Egyptians did. And then as Kara well knows, sometimes the ancient Egyptians would reuse a coffin, so they just take a body out and put it down on the floor next to the next batch that was coming in and someone else would get the coffin. And of course, over here also, a lot of the mummies we find, it's from robbed tombs because,

you know, about 150 years after someone was buried, their tomb would be robbed and robbers would rip out the bodies, the coffins would be separated, sometimes they just burn the coffins in order to get the gold. So it's a mixed bag of things. Now, as long as we're going back in time. Well, first off, I'd love to ask how you all met. How long have you known each other and where does your work intersect? How long have we known each other, Salima? Oh, we met in Dachshund. We met in Dachshund. You were still a grad student. I was probably a fourth-year grad student. We met in 1997. We're going on 30 years that we've known each other. We met at a dig it you would stay at this dig house in Lysht drives it offshore, but you would stay there for four months. And this is before

the interwebs and connections. Nobody had a phone. I wrote to my family on that blue airmail. Airmail. Like, yeah, we had we had actual mail and I would write long letters as if it was like, you know, the 1960s and it was all very romantic and we would all pile into the Land Rover, Land Cruiser type vehicle and drive to Dachshur, which was probably how long, like 35, 40 minutes away. Just a quick note here. So Dachshur is just outside of Cairo. This was a cemetery in what was called Memphis, which used to be the capital of ancient Egypt. And kings during the old and middle kingdoms from 4,700 to around 3,700 years ago were buried in this cluster of pyramids, some of which are crumbling and decaying back into sand and stone as this

vast golden desertscape horizon kind of reclaims them. Now these Dachshund pyramids, side note, they served as kind of practice architecture for what would later become the great pyramids in nearby Giza, which you have probably seen in so many books, people's Instagrams. But yes, the site of Dachor is historically a really important necropolis that's full of tombs of quite important and wealthy people. A lot of VIPs. And there we would work and I was working on the limestone fragments of the funerary chapels and the queen's chapels. And Salima was working on any dead body she could get her hands on. That's true.

Of course. And was it hard at the time to get your hands on a dead body? No, no. When you dig them up, they're there. I was looking primarily first at dead animals, but I was also looking at a bit at dead humans. Did we have a mouse infestation in the house that year, Kara? Yes, and sand fleas. And the sand fleas I solved with my essential oils. And then everyone who made fun of me for my essential oils was like, could you please essential oil in my room? And I'm like, yes, bitch, I can.

And so the essential oils saved the day from the sand fleas. But the mice, I- Oh my God, the, I couldn't handle. And I remember there's this eminent Egyptologist by the name of Dieter Arnold, and he has the German accent, and I'm Dieter Arnold, and very, very important, eminent Egyptologist. And at two in the morning, the mouse attacked me and was in my bed. And I remember knocking on Dieter Arnold's door at two in the morning, like, please save me from the mouse.

And he sweetly came in, he grabbed the mouse with both of his open hands and then put it out into the wild. And yes, but there were mice everywhere. It was scary. That part was terrifying. Only to have it find its way back. Oh, it did.

It would come back because Dieter loves animals. So he would take them and gently put them outside. And of course, they just turned right around and raced back in. I'm home! And if they were in his room, no one cared. But it was when they were also got trapped in the bread bin. That was a bit gross. Oh, I remember that. And I was also at that point making my own skin creams with a blender and shea butter, and I don't know what the hell I was doing.

And they thought they were delicious. They loved them. And the mice would all go into my toiletries bag and they would eat the shea butter lotions that I so carefully whipped up in my blender at home in Baltimore. Once I learned to put those far away, then the mice didn't, they didn't come into my room.

We named them Fred and Essel. Do people tend to bond doing fieldwork? Yeah, because you're there alone and there's nothing to do, right? I learned to drink doing fieldwork, which is a problem because now I'm learning not to drink. You really get to know each other and you do. Either you hate someone or you grow to love them. There are enemies made in the field. This is so true. You really get to know each other and you do. Either you hate someone or you grow to love them.

There are enemies made in the field. This is so true. I bet. It's so true. Other than just mice. Salima, I know we've gotten to talk to Kara about a book series that inspired her lifetime love of Egyptology.

I'd love to hear how you ended up in this field. Well, it was the Time Life Book of Ancient Egypt that first introduced me to Egypt. And then I got it for my eighth birthday and I thought these were the coolest people. And then we went to visit Egypt and I still remember going into the pyramids. And I remember what they smelled like, too. So that wasn't as nice, but it was just the most extraordinary, extraordinary place. And I fell in love with it and decided to be an Egyptologist. And that was it.

It's a very short story. Wait, what do they smell like? Well, in those days, they smelled of piss and some kind of cleaning solution. And it was unbearable. But the monuments were so fantastic that you would not, after a while you'd get used to it and think, this is great. It's probably not unlike the Luxor in Vegas, to be honest. Cleaning solution and piss, I'm sure. And I'm not sure what the inside of a pyramid smells like these days,

but a 2015 review of the Great Pyramid on TripAdvisor was titled, Lifelong Dream Shattered by the Pungent Smell of Urine. And then another one for the Red Pyramid of Dachour Warren's right up top, Smelly Pyramid. So man, it's a tough crowd. But your experience may vary. So take that with a grain of salt.

Speaking of, let's get into how Salima found her way into her field. I started out as a settlement archaeologist and quite accidentally strayed into mummies by way of food because my dissertation was called Choice Cuts Meat Production in Ancient Egypt. But one part of that whole thing is that the Egyptians didn't have refrigerators, so it was all about preserving food, which is basically using salt, which is basically akin to mummification. So I strayed into mummies and also because when I moved to Egypt, I had loved the animal mummy room and it was closed.

And so I decided that I would renovate it and raise funds and do all sorts of things and then study the animal mummies. And so that- This is the animal mummy room in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo. Oh, okay. Oh, sorry. Yes, thanks.

No, I'm here all day. You're here all day. And Salima started with previous work studying food preservation, and it's thought that ancient Egyptians were the pioneers of this when it came to realizing that by removing water from something you're cutting off the supply to bacteria that can spoil it. And if you've ever had prosciutto or salami, you have enjoyed this side of science. So what works for dinner can also be applied to your body and remains were embalmed by heavily, heavily salting the body inside and out. So Salima followed

this salt trail into her dream job. And so that's how I sort of have kept on with corpses. Now mummies, mummified persons, mummified specimens, how, what do we call them? So I call them mummies. And if they're animal mummies, I will say a shrew mummy because a mummy is essentially an artificially preserved body of a human being or an animal made in a very particular way.

The word comes from Arabic, moumiya, which was used to describe the black substance that covers a lot of these mummies, which is actually a kind of resin and oil mixture. So I think it's a perfectly good name, unless we want to go for the ancient Egyptian name, which is sah. You know, it's interesting that the act of mummification

makes something into an object, and that now I've heard criticism of the word mummy because it objectifies the dead person if it's a human, and that we're supposed to say mummified person. And mummy is now considered that kind of problematic term. However, I think standing by it is interesting because it does, it was meant to objectify a person. It was meant to turn a person or an animal into something that

was beyond the human body that was like a statue effigy that could last forever. It's making a simulacrum of the individual or the animal. So it's a transformation. And this use of the term mummy versus mummified remains or mummified person is kind of a hot topic all over the globe. And some museums are changing all of their public facing communications, while others like the British Museum was in 2023, at least reportedly still using the term across their galleries, though they tried to include when available the name of the person to convey that, yes, this object was once an alive human being. Though the colonialist acquisition of human objects

is not something every museum wants to highlight or address, for sure. Now, others, at least in Britain, argue that because mummy is their word for mother, mummy is a deeply humanizing term. Not sure if that applies for everyone. Now some folks also note that only the very wealthy were mummified. Thus, if you have a keychain that says eat the rich, why would you mind if researchers study their very, very deceased remains? At least of the royalty being studied, although we will talk next week about how not everyone in those tombs was a high roller. Experts themselves seem to think that the terminology is less important than just making

sure each individual artifact and the human remains are shown respect and that the researcher's work adheres to professional protocol. And scholars argue that the remains themselves are very much not the people they once were. The whole point is that they've transcended. And in fact, by being transformed, you're supposed to be much greater than you were when you were alive. And did ancient Egyptians consider that body to be the person? Are they like the actual person's long gone, they're over a river, they're in an underworld, they're in an afterlife,

and this is just kind of like a snail shell. Well here the mummy and the body become the same thing in a sense, right? Yeah. Because they're both containers now. They're both sacred vessels for the spirits that are meant to go in and out. Because you yourself are really made up of different components, your name, different aspects of your spirit, plus your body, plus your shadow, plus all of this stuff. So really your body has been, as Kara said,

it's just a container for a bunch of spirits. I mean, it's a sacred container. It's an expensive container. It's a container that's been made with expensive salts imported in from the Western desert and really expensive resins brought in from the Mediterranean and maybe even other parts of West Asia. This is no sad little corpse.

This is an entity that is meant to nobly contain your spirits for all eternity, and the coffin is meant to then represent that permanency of containment. So a mummified person, the act of mummification, provides this journey to another place. Some people rode that journey in the equivalent of a Mercedes G-Wagon with diamond dashboards. Others, like a 1989 Toyota Cressida. Whatever gets you there, man. And also, in fact, once you become a mummy, it means you've become deified. So you have transformed yourself, or been transformed, from something of this earth to something that is divine. And so that really is again,

a superior being. And who was mummified? What class of people or gender or status tended to have all these expensive materials poured over them after they died? Anyone who could afford it, basically, and I think that varied and became increasingly democratic over time when more of the materials were easily available. But ironically, in fact, people who were just buried in the sand wound up often being far better preserved in terms of their physical bodies than people

with a lot of resins and so on. So Tutankhamen poor boy had so much black goo poured over him that he wasn't quite as well preserved as others who were more poorly mummified or in terms of rich versus poor. Black goo, you should know, is the actual terminology used for this sticky thick substance that coats the remains of kings and of society's upper tiers from ancient Egypt. And as for the exact secret recipe of the black goo, please see the 2021 paper,

Molecular Analysis of Black Coatings and Anointing Fluids from Ancient Egyptian Coffin Mummy mummy cases and funerary objects, which took 100 samples of black ritual liquids and then using gas chromatography, mass spectrometry to figure out on a molecular level what's in this stuff and how much of it. The researchers found that the majority of the black substances were found to comprise a complex mixture of pitchman, which Americans call asphalt or solid crude oil from the Dead Sea, conifer resin, and pistachio resin. And the researchers think that that shows there was a trade between Egypt and the Eastern Mediterranean at that time.

And other studies have found animal fat and beeswax tossed in the mix. Now for the most iconic mummy cases you may have seen, King Tutankhamen was laid to rest in a carved stone sarcophagus. And then in that was a gilded wooden coffin. And that contained another wooden coffin, which was coated in gold and precious stones.

And then inside that was his final coffin, which was made of 263 pounds of solid gold. It was made of solid gold. Now, inside that he was, and then resting on his head was a death mask, a golden death mask that you have seen innumerable times. Like, picture a gold bust in Egypt. That's the one.

And when the explorer, and some say the British plunderer Howard Carter, discovered this tomb, it was noted that all of that golden buttery shimmer was coated with, in their words, bucketfuls of this very expensive resin. And the boy king's body was adhered with it to his innermost chamber of that coffin. So naturally, explorers removed him from it and dismembered his body to study it and found out that he had been carbonized from some sort of slow internal combustion, likely from fungus and poor preservation because of the black goo. But yes, royals and elite members of society could be kind of packaged like Russian nesting dolls covered in semi-precious stones and

gold and then dipped in tar. Well, the coffin competes with the mummy. And the coffin's creation as probably a social separator to show people how rich you were and you have this beautiful box made of wood that is also very rare in ancient Egypt, if not also today, it disturbs that natural mummification process. So as soon as rich people are like, I'm mummified and I have this beautiful box, the box stops the natural mummification because you're not putting the body into direct contact with the desiccating sands. And so what Salima does and what I do, the core objects that we work with are at odds with one another in terms of how they preserve the human body.

And yet they together create the ensemble that every rich person was trying to get. A beautifully mummified body stretched out, laid out usually, certainly in later Egyptian history, and put into a box that then contained that effigy, that made permanent effigy. And yet, if you looked at 5,000, 6,000 years ago, ancient Egyptian bodies were perfectly preserved if they were placed directly into the desert sands. But that's not fancy. It doesn't do what the

rich people need to do. They need to socially separate themselves and say, look, people, I am a god compared to you. I will be preserved forever compared to you. Mummification is a social flex, and a coffin is also a social flex. It's a social flex, but it's not just that, because I think that some of it is also involved with changing religious ideas. So it's not just a social hierarchy, but it is also something to do with religious belief systems. You know I'm always going to put the social with the religious and the religious with

the social and who knows? The chicken or the egg and which came first. It's always like that when you're talking about any human system. What is the timeline here? Because I understand that this spans hundreds of years. Thousands. Thousands of years. I didn't want to overshoot it, so I undershot it.

So I was wrong either way. But thousands of years. You will lose if price is right. If price is right, you just went $3. You're like, no. No. How? How?

Like, when did it start formally? And was it inspired by accidental exhumation of sand-buried corpses where they're like, that's tight, that's preserved, how can we replicate this in a formal burial setting? Or where did it kind of begin? So there are theories that say that what happens is that they were corpses that had been buried inside were accidentally exhumed because animals do it or the wind does it or what have you. But I mean, even those corpses, they were always at least since 5000 BC, if not earlier, they had grave goods. So the idea of an afterlife was there. So when these corpses were accidentally exhumed and their preservation was perfect, I think

people thought, yeah, this is great and we will all live forever and it's good for the soul. But when they started to bring in containers, which was also relatively early because once you start wrapping people up in animal skins, then you've got that separator right there. And then by the time you get to Kara's coffins, it is a marked separator. And that's why they came up with the idea of artificial preservation using all of these fancy ingredients. So like, do less.

This is such an important lesson. Do less. Do less. Keep it simple. And sometimes very wealthy people go a little overboard because they just have the resources to do so. And then you end up with sadness and decay, I guess. It's basic capitalism. It's really a conundrum because the living want to take care of the dead. When one of our beloved

loved ones passes into the next realm, drops their body, goes someplace else. We want to care for their body. And to just put it naked into the ground is not something that most people would ever do with their mother, their father, their grandparent, a child, right? You want to wrap them lovingly into something that will contain them, that will embrace them. You're not just putting them into the ground in a cold way. So as soon as you start containing, which is a human instinct, then you have to figure out how to preserve that body with other methods. And given that those methods are so expensive and demand trade,

it does become a social separator and quite quickly. And mummification and coffins seem to develop side by side, mummification first, arguably, and then the coffin next, but it develops along with Egyptian state formation and the idea that there are elites who are more important, who are running things, and then there are the peasants who do what those elites say. And that's a much more complicated story that I've told in a tiny simplified nutshell. For a more expansive dive into it, of course, you can see Kara's newest book titled, again, Recycling for Death, Coffin Reuse in Ancient Egypt and the Theban Royal Caches, which notes

that funerary data sets are the chief source of social history in Egyptology. So these coffins, these mummified folks tell historians and scientists a lot about what ancient Egypt was like. And that book covers evidence of coffin reuse and the social collapse of later dynasties. And it also has photo essays of over 60 Egyptian coffins which are in the collections of Cairo's Egyptian Museum. It goes hand in hand, this development of a social idea that everyone would come to a funeral and look at the great man or great woman, because both men and women had access to mummification and coffins.

They would come to that funeral of the great man or woman and witness a different kind of body being lowered into a tomb or put into the ground. That's also where the coffin comes in, because you can't witness the body unwrapped. And even a body unwrapped, it's not for you to see. So the coffin is there to shield the body from view. And it was exclusively seen by close inner family circles, that this body had special treatment so that it would last forever. I think people knew this and word was spread and social power was gained.

I think they knew about it because certainly it's just like going to a funeral home nowadays because you can say, you know, do you want the deluxe, I don't know, mahogany with velvet or satin, or do you want this really cheap chipboard? And do you want the full thing where you personally, you know, do the whole makeup and the this and the that of the deceased? I'm so going for chipboard and compost. Yeah. I am not going for a coffin at all.

Straight into the ground in a shroud. You're burning? You just want to burn? No, no, no. Shroud, ground. That's it. Worms. Ah, I love it. Worms, worms are welcome. Bon appetit, worms. Now, while you ponder your existence for a moment, we're going to take a quick detour and send some money to some causes of theologist's choosing. And Dr. Karakouni, who again has written extensively on Egyptian queens and ancient gender roles,

selected the Yellow Hammer Fund, which is a nonprofit, which is an abortion advocacy and reproductive justice organization that serves Alabama, Mississippi, and the deep South, and it's committed to community education, policy advocacy, and mutual aid. So that is the Yellow Hammer Fund. And also in regard to regional medical care,

Dr. Salima Ikram chose Doctors Without Borders, which provides independent, impartial, medical humanitarian assistance to the people affected by conflict, disease outbreaks, natural and human-made disasters in more than 70 countries. So donations went to those organizations in honor of our experts. And now a quick sponsors break, after which we will talk about whether or not these experts'

jobs make them stare down the barrel at death and live their lives any differently. Okay, next week will be wall-to-wall patron questions, which are so good. But let's get back to existential crises. Does your work make you reflect on that? Is there an oh shit, death, death, death? Or do you put that in a separate sarcophagus in your own brain and try to compartmentalize? I think it's very comforting because when I meet a mummy, I generally chat with them. Of course, they probably don't speak English either,

but never mind. My Egyptian is not quite competent. But I don't know, Kara. I mean, I feel quite comfortable with the idea of death as a result of being around it constantly. And it is something that happens to everyone. It's a unifier. Yeah, I agree. And my parents are 80 years old right now. They just turned 80. They got old really fast all of a sudden. And I think I'm the only one out of the four children

who's actually able to talk with them about what they want, are they afraid, and that passage into the next life that none of us get to avoid, no matter how much plastic surgery we have in the United States, you're going to do it. And it's something that I'm very comfortable discussing and discussing for my own self. I think the more you work with it and the more you chat with the dead, as Salima puts it, because we do all talk to the dead. Yes, if I'm working with a coffin and there's a body on the inside,

I say maybe in my head so I don't freak out the people around me, but sorry for disturbing you. Just going to look around a little bit. I hope you're doing okay kind of thing. You know, you're there looking at a dead individual and they smell dead and there is a smell that goes with these mummies. Or sometimes they smell quite nice.

Mm-hmm. We're going to get to that smell. We're going to get to it so hard in part two, and it's worth the week-long wait. It's maybe my favorite part of this episode. Yeah, it's a distinctive order, but you know, and especially when I'm working on a mummy, one does chat and I say, excuse me. And nowadays, of course, because everyone has earbuds, no one thinks I'm crazy when I'm talking to someone who is dead. Salima, you're always talking to the dead. You're talking to the dead animals. You're

talking to the dead humans. You're talking to the dead humans. You're always chatting as you go about your work. So I think the steady stream of conversation, it makes a lively, joyful research process. Salima, what are you saying to them? Oh, it depends what I'm doing. Like Kara said, excuse me, or I say, I'm going to move you, and we're going to flip you around now,

and how old were you? And various other things, you know, after the x-rays you can see that someone had been sick or they've broken something. You can sort of have a dialogue, slightly one-sided, about how they might have done that or compare notes. And Salima works with lots of younger baby mummies, particularly the animals. So she recently worked with a baby lion cub and will talk to the lion cub and say, oh, poor you, what's happened? And I've heard her have these conversations with the animal dead. And yes, we will get to mummified animals in a bit because it's one of Salima's passions. And also it is a world I did not know existed.

So boy, how do you wait. I want to talk a little bit about what data you're gathering and how that's passions. And also, it is a world I did not know existed. So boy, how do you wait. I want to talk a little bit about what data you're gathering and how that's done. But I want to go back a little bit and talk about the actual mummification and the coffin placing process. I know that we are very accustomed to, especially in October, seeing a lot of toilet paper wrapped mummies that are essentially like in bandages from head to toe. How often was that actually employed? Was that papyrus? How often was resin employed? What was the process of actually preparing someone for

mummification? So I'm going to start off by saying there was no toilet paper. I'm so sorry. Had there been toilet paper, there would have been a hell of a lot more mummified people or animals. Yes, if you are wondering about ancient Egyptian potties, think about a stool with like a little peek-a-boo hole that's cut into it and kind of a dish of sand underneath. It's like a litter box, but it's for you. Also heads up, if you do go to Egypt, I have done a tiny bit of research

and I understand that toilet paper is not great for the sewage systems there, and a bathroom attendant may give you a modest square or two for a nominal fee. But also popular are bidet nozzles next to the throne, which most of the world considers more hygienic than they're like just dry paper? Disgusting. But anyway, you know, actual mummified people were not sent into the afterlife in cocoons of shaman. Now, how did they manage it? It

varied by geography and era. So, I guess it depends. We used to think we had a really clear timeline as to how these things evolve But in fact even in the last three years we have found some things that have completely turned it all topsy-turvy Which is sort of the fun of excavating because then all your brilliant ideas are shot down When you get a new piece of evidence but basically if you are mummifying someone in a basic, basic way, it's all about drying you out, desiccation. And that's when you use this salt called Natron, which is basically like regular salt and baking

soda combined. To make a mummy that is somewhat successful, you have to take out the internal organs. Otherwise, you bloat up and explode. No thanks. And you have to, you know, wash the body out and then pack it with this Natron in handy dandy balls. And then you bury the body in it for 40 days, and then you remove the body and then you can put oils or resins or not, depending on what your social class was and what you could

afford. And then you would wrap it up over 30 days. And that's what's the real point of transformation. And when you say over 30 days, is that a 30 day long process? Are you like wrapping, are you checking on it? Really? Okay. So it's supposed to be, but you know,

having done some experimental work, it's a bit hard to manage. Because for 40 days, you do the drawing, and you know how people in many cultures have 40 days of mourning. So it's nice to see how that sort of evolved from the ancient Egyptian tradition. And then the 30 days of wrapping is what it's really cool is because when you wrap, you're saying prayers, you're burning incense, and these prayers are sometimes even inscribed on the bandages. Oh.

And what you do is you're creating this sort of carapace around the body, which is physical and protective, with amulets put everywhere. If you're not sure exactly what an amulet is, and an amulet sounds like a medical device, I got you. So it's a charm or an ornament to protect against bad stuff, exactly what an amulet is, and an amulet sounds like a medical device. I got you. So it's a charm or an ornament to protect against bad stuff like the evil eye or wickedness or disease.

And it's also a baby name if you want it to be. For some reason, I found myself on a baby name site wondering if anyone has ever named their child after a spooky pendant. And I found a parent to be on a message board asking, okay, so in a name group on Facebook I said how I love amulet for a name and I got hardcore made fun of. I love it because it sounds whimsical and I know an amulet is an object but so are stone names and nature names and animal names that people love. Now this person put out a plea for honest hive-mind opinions on the name

amulet for their baby, resulting in some responses, I love it. Someone else said, object names are becoming more and more popular. I've even seen people use names like sock recently. Someone else said, my honest opinion is I don't like it at all. It makes me think of a museum display case or something Indiana Jones is tracking down. Another person chimed in, amulet is a beautiful name, but it might not work for a child. I would suggest using it for an animal. For some reason a black axolotl comes to mind. I don't even know if black axolotls are a real

thing they say. And to that person I would like to know we have a recent ambistomology episode all about these water salamanders and yes I'm gonna link it in the show notes. And yes black axolotls totally exist. They look metal as hell, and they're called melanoid axolotls. We also have an episode on melanin, which I'm gonna link. But one more thought on the name Amulet. One person chimed in, I actually quite like Amulet.

It has a pleasing and namey sound. Cool. But yeah, it takes a few months to mummify your loved one. And during this time, you're going through a lot of incense, a lot of yards of linen ribbons while you're praying over them. But it is also a metaphysical ones because you're saying spells or, you know, religious chants to make sure that the body is protected from everything. So you're making a magical as well as a physical binding, which is part of the

whole transformation process. And then after that's done, it would be put into a coffin. And sometimes you have, you know, tons of jewelry, or sometimes you just have one blue bead or nothing. Sometimes you have lots of very nice linen and sometimes you just have two crappy pieces. So it does depend and as Kara said, it's sort of a socioeconomic kind of monitor. But if you could even get a simple mummification, they would get something done. And sometimes they took out your brain as well. I learned in seventh grade that they put essentially a crochet hook up there, which made me think that the brain was just one big ball of yarn.

So do you want to bust any flim flam with that? So we used to say, oh, yes, and in an ideal mummification, you would have your brain removed. It wasn't always removed. So what you did was you take a more knitting needle and break through your ethmoid bone through your nose and then you poke about with this knitting needle quite a lot and then you can use a crochet hook kind of thing to pull out your brain. And you also have to remember at this point you have sit the corpse up and help, gravity helps the brain come out through the nose using the crochet hook.

And then, because you don't want your skull to implode, you have to melt resin and pour it into this cavity, the cranial cavity, and plug up your nose, both of your nostrils, with little balls of linen. Until yes, they did do that, but not everyone had it done, but that would be part of the most fancy kind of mummification. Oh, fancy, fancy. This is a word I don't like, exceribration.

And it's close to celebration, but exceribration means the removal of a brain. And it's thought that the instrument that was used, I always thought it was an iron hook, but other researchers argue that it could have been a wooden stick made out of bamboo, and they posit that because they imaged the remains of a 40-year-old mummified person and found that her embalmers had accidentally left some of that tool right up in there.

So I guess everybody has kind of a bad day at work sometime. But some kings were mummified with their brains intact. Others weren't. That's still kind of a bad day at work sometime. But some kings were mummified with their brains intact, others weren't. That's still kind of a mystery. But once a body is prepared, but before it's laid to rest, is the coffin blessed and what Kara calls enlivened? Or is it only when the person and the coffin are put together? And I would say given the evidence that we have, that the coffin really only gets to come alive when it's filled with its juicy mummy center. And when the mummy goes in, you make that come alive.

So I think that the two have to go together, that it's the divine spirit that's put into the box. So it's a syncretic kind of vivification for both. I think so, yeah. It's okay if syncretic vivification is not a term that you use frequently. It means bringing back to life or vitality through a combination of means. Because prepping someone you love

for the road trip to forever requires some foresight and some gear. You don't wanna forget stuff, because in this thing there's no U-turns, unlike the Mummy movies, where they just flip a bitch and they're back to ask questions. This is meant to be a secretive, exclusive sort of thing that not everyone gets. Like we were just talking about the brain. How many times, Salima, have you and I read that they threw away the brain?

Which is ridiculous. It is absolutely ridiculous. And you're working on KV63, which is this cache of detritus from mummification, or one of these many mummification caches, which could have matter from a human body that isn't encapsulated or contained like a liver or lungs, but instead is this thing that is more amorphous that you can't keep in one piece, but you can't just toss it out.

Just a heads up, KV63 is this chamber discovered about 20 years ago in Egypt. And the prevailing theory is that it was a materials warehouse and workplace of the royal embalming team who left these huge jars of linen wrappings and salt behind. There were also several coffins in there, but they were all body-free. They just contained more supplies, kinda like how you'd throw some stuff

in a big rubber-made tub and put in the garage. But still exceptionally thrilling for mamiologists and coffinologists and Egyptologists. How is that discerned? Can you tell me a little bit about how these thousands of year old objects are being studied now? Coffin studies are not as complicated as mummy studies because if you take the mummy out, you can open up the coffin, you can look at it, you can get a microscope out, you can use different light frequencies like infrared or UV and look at the varnish. I think it's useful to put things through x-ray,

but with coffins, it's really hard to transport them. And these are plastered and painted wooden objects. It's, you know, they're fragile. A mummy, you need to x-ray it because what did they used to do in the 19th century is unwrap them, which, and, and so, you know, x-rays, I think, are Salima's jam, and she works with x-rays, I don't know,

on a daily basis, but pretty often. But, I mean, what you do is you x-ray, you CT scan, you can take samples from the mummification materials to figure out if it is resin or if it's bitumen or if it's just oil that's turned black or whether there is wax involved and if it's resin, where does it come from? So that is all very cool stuff. We look at how things were wrapped or whether, you know, it's a shrew mummy, is it wrapped in the same way as a human mummy? Do they use the same materials?

If you just said shrew mummy, I'd like to point out, like mouse mummy. The Egyptians mummified all kinds of things. So I just want to clarify shrew as in the animal. Yes. They mummified tera beetles. They mummified crocodiles that were ginormous. They mummified all kinds of things. Yep. Even lions. Even lions, monkeys, birds of all kinds.

So we look at things through imaging, and now if you have exposed bone, we do isotope analysis to try and see where people might have been from. And by looking at the bones, we look at, you know, trauma, disease, anything that we can find that shows up. It's looking at health, it's looking at how people were, or animals were mummified, what materials were used.

So there's a lot of chemical testing that goes in and on surrounding it. During this conversation, there was a part of my squishy brains that was just cringing for disturbing these people. However. We try and be very non-destructive now. But of course, often when you're digging things up, they've already been robbed. So you are getting them in fragments and portions.

And sometimes then unwrapping is in fact unavoidable because the linen is falling off and people always talk about DNA analysis. But for humans, that's only really relevant. I think if you want to look at a large group at a decent size population or a family group to check out relationships, or if you have very specific questions, because even though you can get the DNA, it doesn't always come out in a big, long enough string, as it were, and you can't answer all the questions you would like to, but we're getting closer and closer to that. Is anyone looking to find relatives of or descendants of any of these mummies?

I don't think you can do that. You mean like family groups or? Yeah, like finding a lineage where maybe now this person is an accountant in Cairo or something. So Ali, in fact, in England, they had dug someone up and then they were doing DNA because this was a remote village. And they found that indeed there was one person, I don't think he was an accountant, but something else. And he was related to this guy they had exhumed. So this was the thrilling story of Cheddar Man, who was a resident of the Cheddar Gorge in Somerset, England, who lived 10,000 years ago and apparently died by blunt force to

the head in his early 20s. And his remains were discovered kind of curled up in a cave by some workers digging in there in 1903. And some pulp from one of his molars was analyzed, as was the DNA of some locals whose family have lived in the area for eons. And a man named Adrian Target had a genetic connection. He lives in the area. He's not an accountant, but he did very aptly teach

high school history. And that's a flex if I've ever heard one. So that was cool. Oh, wow. In Egypt, I don't think anyone's tried that yet. But we do know because over here, the population was very mixed and has there been waves and waves of people coming in. So I think unless it is a remote village, one would be hard pressed to find any direct sentence, but it would be kind of cool. Can I ask you questions submitted by listeners? They're all over the place and very fun.

Go ahead. So ask brilliant people basic questions and you may discover some really dark and fascinating stuff Now more with these two next week as we get to all your questions Regarding things like the smell of a mummy why people ate them in Victorian times the ethics of research and collections the scientific analyses used to study them if these experts Themselves would be okay becoming mummified and then displayed.

All of that awaits next week. Now, in the meantime, you can please enjoy more Spooktober episodes. We have a bunch up at alihwar.com slash ologies slash spooktober 2024, that's linked in the show notes, including episodes on vampire and monster lore and pumpkins and bats and apples and bones and tombstones and mortuary makeup and apples and bones and tombstones and

mortuary makeup and death and dying and dancing spiders. Also we have so much more research links for this episode at alleyware.com slash ology slash mommy ology. You'll also find links to the guests social media and research and books. Thank you so much Dr. Salima Ikram and Dr. Karak Kouni for being here this week and for coming back next week. So we are at Ologies on Instagram. I'm at Alley Ward with one L on both. Smology's are our shorter, kid-friendly versions of Ologies, and you can subscribe

wherever you get your podcasts. Ologies merch is available at ologiesmerch.com, and you can join our Patreon, patreon.com slash ologies for as little as a dollar a month. Thank you to Erin Talbert for adminning the Ologies podcast Facebook group, Newell Dilworth is the scheduling producer, Aveline Malik makes our professional transcripts, Kelly Ardwire does the website, Susan Hale did so much extra research and managing directs this entire show, Jake Chafee edits beautifully, and our great pyramid is lead editor Mercedes Maitland of Maitland Audio, Nick Thorburn wrote the theme music, and if you stick around to the end, I tell you a secret.

And this week, it's that I recently enjoyed a little Spooktober outing myself. I went to go see the Darkwave Goth Club staples, Sisters of Mercy, and I went with my friend, Lisette, and I took a picture to send to our other friends, and I realized that whenever I see concert photos or video on social media, I just assume that everyone has bonkers, expensive, really good tickets.

But in recent years, cameras have improved so much, you can have nosebleeds and it still looks like you're a rich person with VIP orchestra seats. And I guess screens are just like the new opera glasses. And I never realized that people were just zooming in and they didn't have front row seats. What? I never said that people were just zooming in and they didn't have front row seats. What? I never said I was smart. Also, Lizette pointed out that you can tell the average age of the crowd based on if they are recording horizontally or vertically and she's right and it's brutal. Okay, bye bye.