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Episode: Momiology (MUMMIFICATION) Part 1 with Kara Cooney & Salima Ikram

Author: Alie Ward
Duration: 00:52:23

Episode Shownotes

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

Summary

In this episode of 'Ologies with Alie Ward,' Dr. Kara Cooney and Dr. Salima Ikram explore the intricacies of mummification in ancient Egypt, discussing its significance, techniques, and socio-economic implications. They share personal anecdotes from their fieldwork, revealing how these experiences shaped their paths in Egyptology. The episode examines the relationship between burial practices and social status, highlighting that mummification evolved from an elite practice to broader access. The conversation also touches on the ethical implications of studying human remains and sets the stage for further discussions in Part 2.

Go to PodExtra AI's episode page (Momiology (MUMMIFICATION) Part 1 with Kara Cooney & Salima Ikram) to play and view complete AI-processed content: summary, mindmap, topics, takeaways, transcript, keywords and highlights.

Full Transcript

00:00:00 Speaker_02
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.

00:00:08 Speaker_02
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 momiology.

00:00:20 Speaker_02
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.

00:00:31 Speaker_02
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 Theban Royal Caches.

00:00:45 Speaker_02
So she's a professor of Egyptian art and architecture at UCLA. She's written several books about Egyptian history.

00:00:51 Speaker_02
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, Hatshepsut's Rise to Power in Ancient Egypt.

00:01:05 Speaker_02
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.

00:01:19 Speaker_02
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.

00:01:33 Speaker_02
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 going to get to it.

00:01:43 Speaker_02
But I want to 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.

00:01:56 Speaker_02
Also, you can get some merch for the holidays from ologiesmerch.com.

00:02:00 Speaker_02
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.

00:02:17 Speaker_02
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 spinoff show we just started recently called Smologies,

00:02:27 Speaker_02
that you can find in any podcast app. They are kid-safe and classroom-friendly versions of ologies. They are trimmed of any adult language, so get those wherever you get podcasts. Speaking of language, though, okay, momiology. It's a real word.

00:02:42 Speaker_02
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.

00:02:53 Speaker_02
But honestly, we're preserving it here, and we're hoping it enjoys a very prosperous afterlife 130 years later.

00:03:01 Speaker_02
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,

00:03:18 Speaker_02
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 mummiologists Dr. Cara Cooney and Dr. Salima Ikram.

00:03:57 Speaker_02
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. That's so nice.

00:04:06 Speaker_02
Unless you do a good job faking it, in which case... Yeah, you know she's really a terrible bitch. So again, you may recognize Dr. Cooney from her Egyptology episode, but quick intros here.

00:04:18 Speaker_03
Cara Cooney. Salimah Ikram. She, her, for me. Me too.

00:04:24 Speaker_02
Well, are all mummies in sarcophagi or can they be in any type of coffin?

00:04:33 Speaker_00
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,

00:04:50 Speaker_00
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.

00:05:02 Speaker_00
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.

00:05:16 Speaker_02
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.

00:05:26 Speaker_00
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.

00:05:43 Speaker_00
And it's hugely problematic. So yeah, but I'll let Salima jump on there.

00:05:48 Speaker_03
I mean, because I dig a lot, I get a lot of my bodies are in the ground 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.

00:06:01 Speaker_03
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.

00:06:14 Speaker_03
And of course, over here also, a lot of the mummies we find, It's from robbed tombs because about 150 years after someone was buried, their tomb would be robbed and robbers would rip out the bodies, the coffins would be separated.

00:06:28 Speaker_03
Sometimes they just burn the coffins in order to get the gold. So it's a mixed bag of things.

00:06:35 Speaker_02
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?

00:06:45 Speaker_00
How long have we known each other, Salima? Oh, we met in Dashur. We met in Dashur. You were still a grad student. Yeah, I was probably fourth year grad student. We met in 1997. Yeah, we're going on 30 years that we've known each other.

00:07:01 Speaker_00
And we met at we met at a dig that you would stay at this dig house in Lisht, drive to Dashur, 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 air mail.

00:07:21 Speaker_00
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.

00:07:29 Speaker_00
And we would all pile into the Land Rover Land Cruiser type vehicle and drive to Dashur, which was probably how long, like 35, 40 minutes away.

00:07:41 Speaker_02
Just a quick note here, so Dahshur is just outside of Cairo. This was a cemetery in what was called Memphis, which used to be the capital of ancient Egypt.

00:07:50 Speaker_02
And kings during the Old and Middle Kingdoms from 4700 to around 3700 years ago were buried in this cluster of pyramids, some of which are crumbling and decaying back into sand and stone as this

00:08:06 Speaker_02
vast, golden, desert-scape horizon kind of reclaims them.

00:08:10 Speaker_02
Now these Dashur 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.

00:08:24 Speaker_02
But yes, the site of Dashur is historically a really important necropolis that's full of tombs of quite important and wealthy people. A lot of VIPs.

00:08:35 Speaker_00
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. It's true. Of course.

00:08:49 Speaker_02
And was it hard at the time to get your hands on a dead body?

00:08:54 Speaker_03
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?

00:09:07 Speaker_00
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 my room? And I'm like, yes, bitch, I can.

00:09:19 Speaker_00
And so the essential oils saved the day from the sand fleas, but the mice, I, I, oh my God, the mice. couldn't handle. And I remember there's this eminent Egyptologist by the name of Dieter Arnold.

00:09:31 Speaker_00
And you know, he has the German accent and I'm due to Arnold and you know, very, very important eminent Egyptologist. And at two in the morning, the mouse attacked me and was in my bed.

00:09:39 Speaker_00
And I remember knocking on Dieter Arnold's door at two in the morning, but 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

00:09:53 Speaker_00
Yes, but there were mice everywhere. It was scary.

00:09:56 Speaker_03
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 turn right around and race back in. I'm home!

00:10:11 Speaker_03
And if they were in his room, no one cared. But it was like they also got trapped in the bread bin. That was a bit gross. Oh, I remember that.

00:10:20 Speaker_00
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.

00:10:30 Speaker_00
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.

00:10:45 Speaker_03
We named them Fred and Essel.

00:10:46 Speaker_00
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 field work, which is a problem because now I'm learning not to drink. You really get to know each other and you do.

00:11:02 Speaker_00
Either you hate someone or you grow to love them. There are enemies made in the field. This is so true. I bet.

00:11:10 Speaker_02
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.

00:11:24 Speaker_03
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.

00:11:36 Speaker_03
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.

00:11:47 Speaker_03
And I fell in love with it and decided to be an Egyptologist. And that was it. It's a very short story. What do they smell like? Well, in those days, they smelled of piss and some kind of cleaning solution. And it was unbearable.

00:12:07 Speaker_03
But the monuments were so fantastic that you would not, you know, after a while, you'd get used to it and think, this is great.

00:12:14 Speaker_02
It's probably not unlike the Luxor in Vegas, to be honest. Cleaning solution and piss, I'm sure.

00:12:21 Speaker_02
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.

00:12:34 Speaker_02
And then another one for the Red Pyramid of Dashur warns, 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.

00:12:50 Speaker_03
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.

00:13:02 Speaker_03
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.

00:13:14 Speaker_03
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.

00:13:33 Speaker_03
And so that's how- This is the animal mummy room in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo.

00:13:38 Speaker_00
Yes. Oh, okay. Oh, sorry. Yes. Thanks, Kara.

00:13:41 Speaker_02
No, I'm here all day.

00:13:42 Speaker_03
You're here all day.

00:13:44 Speaker_02
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.

00:13:57 Speaker_02
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.

00:14:13 Speaker_02
So Selima 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, what do we call them?

00:14:31 Speaker_03
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

00:14:47 Speaker_03
mumia, 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.

00:15:01 Speaker_00
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.

00:15:18 Speaker_00
And mummy is now considered that kind of problematic term. However, I think standing by it is interesting because it was meant to objectify a person.

00:15:27 Speaker_00
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.

00:15:37 Speaker_03
It's making a simulacrum of the individual or the animal. So it's a transformation.

00:15:44 Speaker_02
And this use of the term mummy versus mummified remains or mummified person is kind of a hot topic all over the globe.

00:15:52 Speaker_02
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.

00:16:11 Speaker_02
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.

00:16:30 Speaker_02
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?

00:16:44 Speaker_02
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.

00:16:56 Speaker_02
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.

00:17:13 Speaker_02
The whole point is that they've transcended.

00:17:15 Speaker_03
And in fact, by being transformed, you're supposed to be much greater than you were when you were alive.

00:17:21 Speaker_02
And did ancient Egyptians consider that body to be the person, or 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?

00:17:35 Speaker_00
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. of vessels for the spirits that are meant to go in and out.

00:17:49 Speaker_03
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.

00:17:58 Speaker_03
So really your body has been, as Kara said, it's just a container for a bunch of spirits.

00:18:04 Speaker_00
I mean, it's a sacred container. It's an expensive container.

00:18:07 Speaker_00
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. sad little corpse.

00:18:22 Speaker_00
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.

00:18:34 Speaker_02
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.

00:18:51 Speaker_03
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.

00:19:11 Speaker_02
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?

00:19:25 Speaker_03
Anyone who could afford it, basically. And I think that varied and became increasingly

00:19:31 Speaker_03
Democratic over time when more of the materials were easily available but ironically in fact people who are just buried in the sand wound up off and being far better preserved in terms of their physical bodies then people with a lot of residents and so on to common boy had so much.

00:19:51 Speaker_03
black goo poured over him that he wasn't quite as well preserved as others who were more poorly mummified or as in terms of rich versus poor.

00:20:02 Speaker_02
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

00:20:20 Speaker_02
molecular analysis of black coatings and anointing fluids from ancient Egyptian coffin 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

00:20:45 Speaker_02
of bitumen, 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.

00:21:02 Speaker_02
And other studies have found animal fat and beeswax tossed in the mix. Now for the most iconic mummy cases you may have seen,

00:21:12 Speaker_02
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.

00:21:29 Speaker_02
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.

00:21:50 Speaker_02
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

00:22:10 Speaker_02
of this very expensive resin. And the boy king's body was adhered with it to his innermost chamber of that coffin.

00:22:18 Speaker_02
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,

00:22:37 Speaker_02
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.

00:22:47 Speaker_00
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.

00:23:04 Speaker_00
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.

00:23:16 Speaker_00
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.

00:23:31 Speaker_00
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,

00:23:51 Speaker_00
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.

00:23:59 Speaker_00
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.

00:24:11 Speaker_03
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.

00:24:27 Speaker_00
But you know I'm always going to put the social with the religious and the religious with the social, and who knows?

00:24:31 Speaker_03
And the chicken or the egg, and which came first? It's always like that when you're talking about any human system.

00:24:37 Speaker_02
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.

00:24:51 Speaker_00
You will lose if price is right. If price is right, you just went $3. And we're like, no.

00:25:01 Speaker_02
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?

00:25:21 Speaker_03
So there are theories that say that what happens is that they were corpses that had been buried in sand, were accidentally exhumed because animals do it or the wind does it or what have you.

00:25:32 Speaker_03
But I mean, even those corpses, they were always, at least since 5000 BC, if not earlier, They had great goods. So the idea of an afterlife was there.

00:25:43 Speaker_03
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,

00:25:57 Speaker_03
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.

00:26:09 Speaker_03
And that's why they came up with the idea of artificial preservation using all of these fancy ingredients. So like do less.

00:26:17 Speaker_02
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.

00:26:33 Speaker_00
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.

00:26:47 Speaker_00
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.

00:27:00 Speaker_00
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.

00:27:13 Speaker_00
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.

00:27:29 Speaker_00
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.

00:27:39 Speaker_00
And that's a much more complicated story that I've told in a tiny, simplified nutshell.

00:27:44 Speaker_02
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

00:27:54 Speaker_02
Funerary data sets are the chief source of social history and Egyptology. So these coffins, these mummified folks tell historians and scientists a lot about what ancient Egypt was like.

00:28:09 Speaker_02
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.

00:28:24 Speaker_00
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.

00:28:37 Speaker_00
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.

00:28:53 Speaker_00
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.

00:29:08 Speaker_00
I think people knew this and word was spread and social power was gained.

00:29:12 Speaker_03
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?

00:29:29 Speaker_03
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. Save. I am not going for a coffin at all. Straight into the ground in a shroud.

00:29:44 Speaker_00
You're burning. You just want to burn.

00:29:46 Speaker_03
No, no, no. Shroud. Ground. That's it. Worms. I love it. Worms. Worms are welcome.

00:29:54 Speaker_02
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.

00:30:01 Speaker_02
And Dr. Karakuni, who again has written extensively on Egyptian queens and ancient gender roles, selected the Yellowhammer Fund, which is a nonprofit, which is an abortion advocacy and reproductive justice organization that serves Alabama, Mississippi, and the Deep South.

00:30:17 Speaker_02
And it's committed to community education, policy advocacy, and mutual aid. So that is Yellowhammer Fund.

00:30:24 Speaker_02
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.

00:30:42 Speaker_02
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.

00:30:57 Speaker_02
Okay, next week will be wall-to-wall Patreon questions, which are so good, but let's get back to existential crises. Does your work make you reflect on that? Like, is there an oh shit

00:31:08 Speaker_02
death, death, death, or do you put that in a separate sarcophagus in your own brain and try to compartmentalize?

00:31:17 Speaker_03
I think it's very comforting because, I mean, 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, Cara.

00:31:30 Speaker_03
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.

00:31:40 Speaker_00
Yeah, I agree. My parents are 80 years old right now. They just turned 80. They got old really fast all of a sudden.

00:31:47 Speaker_00
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.

00:32:04 Speaker_00
You're gonna do it. And it's something that I'm very comfortable discussing and discussing for my own I think the more you work with it and the more you chat with the dead, as Selima puts it, because we do all talk to the dead.

00:32:17 Speaker_00
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.

00:32:30 Speaker_00
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.

00:32:41 Speaker_02
Mm-hmm. We're gonna get to that smell. We're gonna 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.

00:32:49 Speaker_03
Yeah, it's distinctive, 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.

00:33:02 Speaker_00
Salima, you're always talking to the dead. You're talking to the dead animals. 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.

00:33:15 Speaker_02
Salima, what are you saying to them?

00:33:16 Speaker_03
Oh, it depends what I'm doing, you know. Like Kara said, excuse me, or I say I'm going to move you, and we're going to flip you around now, and you know, how old were you, and various other things.

00:33:28 Speaker_03
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.

00:33:39 Speaker_00
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?

00:33:52 Speaker_00
And I've heard her have these conversations with the animal dead.

00:33:57 Speaker_02
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.

00:34:05 Speaker_02
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.

00:34:17 Speaker_02
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?

00:34:34 Speaker_02
What was the process of actually preparing someone for mummification?

00:34:41 Speaker_03
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.

00:34:51 Speaker_02
P.S. if you are wondering about ancient Egyptian potties, think about a stool with like a little peekaboo 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.

00:35:05 Speaker_02
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.

00:35:18 Speaker_02
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, no, actual mummified people were not sent into the afterlife in cocoons of shaman.

00:35:35 Speaker_02
Now, how did they manage it? It varied by geography and era.

00:35:40 Speaker_03
So I guess it depends. We used to think we had a really clear timeline as to how these things evolve.

00:35:46 Speaker_03
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.

00:36:00 Speaker_03
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.

00:36:16 Speaker_03
To make a mummy that is somewhat successful, you have to take out the internal organs, otherwise you bloat up and explode. And you have to, you know, wash the body out and then pack it with this natron in handy dandy balls.

00:36:31 Speaker_03
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.

00:36:47 Speaker_03
And that's what's the real point of transformation.

00:36:51 Speaker_02
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.

00:36:58 Speaker_03
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 drying and you know how people in many cultures have 40 days of mourning.

00:37:10 Speaker_03
So it's nice to see how that sort of evolved from the ancient Egyptian tradition. And then the 30 days of

00:37:17 Speaker_03
Rapping is what it's really cool is because when you rap you're saying prayers you're burning incense and these prayers are sometimes even inscribed on the bandages and what you do is you're creating this.

00:37:31 Speaker_03
sort of carapace around the body, which is physical and protective with amulets put everywhere.

00:37:39 Speaker_02
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 like the evil eye or wickedness or disease.

00:37:52 Speaker_02
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.

00:38:01 Speaker_02
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.

00:38:10 Speaker_02
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.

00:38:18 Speaker_02
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.

00:38:30 Speaker_02
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.

00:38:41 Speaker_02
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.

00:38:53 Speaker_02
And to that person, I would like to note we have a recent Ambystomology episode all about these water salamanders. And yes, I'm going to link it in the show notes. And yes, black axolotls totally exist.

00:39:05 Speaker_02
They look metal as hell, and they're called melanoid axolotls. We also have an episode on melanin, which I'm going to 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.

00:39:20 Speaker_02
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.

00:39:31 Speaker_03
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.

00:39:40 Speaker_03
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

00:39:54 Speaker_03
jewellery or sometimes you just have one blue bead or nothing. Sometimes you have lots of very nice linen and sometimes you just have, you know, two crappy pieces. So it does depend and as Cara said, it's sort of a socio-economic kind of monitor.

00:40:13 Speaker_03
But if you could even get a simple mummification, they would get something done. And sometimes they took out your brain as well.

00:40:22 Speaker_02
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?

00:40:35 Speaker_03
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 a knitting needle and break through your ethmoid bone through your nose.

00:40:48 Speaker_03
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 to sit the corpse up.

00:41:00 Speaker_03
and help, gravity helps the brain come out through the nose using the crochet hook.

00:41:06 Speaker_03
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.

00:41:20 Speaker_03
And so, yes, they did do that, but not everyone had it done, but that would be part of the most fancy kind of mummification.

00:41:28 Speaker_01
Oh, fancy, fancy.

00:41:30 Speaker_02
This is a word I don't like, excerabration. And it's close to celebration, but excerabration means the removal of a brain. And it's thought that the instrument that was used, always thought it was an iron hook.

00:41:43 Speaker_02
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

00:41:53 Speaker_02
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 mystery.

00:42:08 Speaker_02
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?

00:42:20 Speaker_00
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.

00:42:31 Speaker_00
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.

00:42:43 Speaker_02
I think so, yeah. It's okay if syncretic vivification is not a term that you use frequently.

00:42:50 Speaker_02
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.

00:43:01 Speaker_02
You don't want to 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.

00:43:09 Speaker_00
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, and they threw away the brain. which is ridiculous. It is absolutely ridiculous.

00:43:26 Speaker_00
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.

00:43:51 Speaker_02
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.

00:44:08 Speaker_02
There were also several coffins in there, but they were all body-free, they just contained more supplies, kind of like how you'd throw some stuff in a big Rubbermaid tub and put it in the garage.

00:44:19 Speaker_02
But still, exceptionally thrilling for mommyologists 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?

00:44:35 Speaker_00
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.

00:44:50 Speaker_00
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. They're fragile.

00:45:02 Speaker_00
A mummy, you need to x-ray it, because what did they used to do in the 19th century is unwrap them. And so, you know, x-rays, I think, are Salimah's jam, and she works with x-rays, I don't know, on a daily basis, but pretty often.

00:45:17 Speaker_03
But I mean, what you do is you x-ray, you CT scan, you can take samples from

00:45:24 Speaker_03
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's wax involved, and if it's resin, where does it come from? So that is all very cool stuff.

00:45:36 Speaker_03
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?

00:45:46 Speaker_00
She 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.

00:45:55 Speaker_00
They mummified ptero beetles, they mummified crocodiles that were ginormous, they mummified all kinds of things.

00:46:02 Speaker_03
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

00:46:21 Speaker_03
trauma, disease, anything that we can find that shows up. It's looking at health. It's looking at how people or animals were mummified, what materials were used. So there's a lot of chemical testing that goes in and on surrounding it.

00:46:36 Speaker_02
During this conversation, there was a part of my squishy brains that was just cringing for disturbing these people. However,

00:46:43 Speaker_03
We try and be very nondestructive 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.

00:47:05 Speaker_03
I think if you want to look at a large group at a decent sized 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 a big.

00:47:19 Speaker_03
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.

00:47:28 Speaker_02
Is anyone looking to find relatives of or descendants of any of these mummies? I don't think you can do that.

00:47:38 Speaker_00
You mean like family groups or?

00:47:40 Speaker_02
Yeah, like finding a lineage where maybe now this person is a accountant in Cairo or something.

00:47:48 Speaker_03
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,

00:47:58 Speaker_03
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.

00:48:06 Speaker_02
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.

00:48:20 Speaker_02
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.

00:48:37 Speaker_02
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.

00:48:51 Speaker_03
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.

00:49:02 Speaker_03
So I think unless it is a remote village, one would be hard pressed to find any direct descendants. But it would be kind of cool.

00:49:11 Speaker_02
Can I ask you questions submitted by listeners? They're all over the place and very fun.

00:49:17 Speaker_01
Go ahead.

00:49:20 Speaker_02
So ask brilliant people basic questions and you may discover some really dark and fascinating stuff.

00:49:26 Speaker_02
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.

00:49:48 Speaker_02
All of that awaits next week. Now, in the meantime, you can please enjoy more Spooktober episodes. We have a bunch up at allywar.com slash ologies slash spooktober 2024.

00:49:57 Speaker_02
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 death and dying and dancing spiders.

00:50:09 Speaker_02
Also, we have so much more research linked for this episode at alleyward.com slash ologies slash mommyology. You'll also find links to the guests social media and research and books.

00:50:20 Speaker_02
Thank you so much, Dr. Salima Ikram and Dr. Cara Cooney for being here this week and for coming back next week. So we are at ologies on Instagram. I'm at alleyward with one L on both.

00:50:30 Speaker_02
Smologies 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.

00:50:39 Speaker_02
Patreon.com slash ology is for as little as a dollar a month. Thank you to Aaron Talbert for adminning the Ologies podcast Facebook group. Noelle Dilworth is the scheduling producer. Aveline Malik makes our professional transcripts.

00:50:51 Speaker_02
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.

00:51:02 Speaker_02
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.

00:51:11 Speaker_02
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

00:51:19 Speaker_02
that whenever I see concert photos or video on social media, I just assume that everyone has like bonkers expensive, really good tickets.

00:51:28 Speaker_02
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.

00:51:40 Speaker_02
And I never realized that people were just zooming in and they didn't have front row seats. What? I never said I was smart.

00:51:49 Speaker_02
Also, Lisette 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.

00:52:20 Speaker_00
No coppin' please, just wet, wet mud. Bay.