Oh hey, it's still that guy at the gym who's using a foam roller on his IT band and trying not to cry.Allie Ward, here we are, part two of a two-guest episode on mummification.All your juicy, all your dry, dusty questions.
Obviously, start with part one in which we navigate ancient tombs, we decipher coffin engravings, learn about natural and less natural mummification techniques, we discuss the terminology around the word mummy,
and we find out how these two guests' careers and their friendship go way back.
Now again, we have returning guests from the Egyptology episode, Dr. Cara Cooney, who's a professor of Egyptian art and architecture at UCLA, and she's an Egyptian coffins expert and author of a new book, Recycling for Death, Coffin Reuse in Ancient Egypt, and the Theban Royal Caches, among many other books.
And since this is a twofer, as we discussed, it's a bogo, and it's a two-parter, two experts, we also have Cairo-based professor of Egyptology and Archaeology at the American University in Cairo and author of the new book, Let a Cow's Skin Be Brought, Armor, Chariots, and Other Leather Remains in Tutankhamen's Tomb, among other books.
So we're going to get to it, but I want to thank all the patrons who sent in their wonderful questions for this.This episode is just wall-to-wall curiosities of yours.
and you too can join and submit yours before we record at patreon.com slash ologies.Also do get your merch for the holidays from ologiesmerch.com and thank you to everyone for zero dollars who leaves us reviews which helps so much.
I read every single one including this freshie from
starts with an H, ends with a D. Long-time listener, first-time reviewer, and brand new rat fan who wrote that our recent encore about sewer rats, Urban Rodentology, deserves whatever the Oscars of podcasts get.
I giggled, I teared up, I had so much fun, I got a whole new perspective on sewer rats.That's the goal.So thank you ever so much, new rodent lover.And now let's get to part two of Mommyology where we will delve into a menagerie of mummified animals,
the death cult of afterlife preservation, resins, mummy perfume, why Victorian white people wanted to eat them, pardon me, the debate around human sacrifice, the ethics of Egyptian archeology and the display of remains, changing attitudes toward museum collections, coffin reuse, sexy hippos, the worst temple gift shop in history, and what happens if you're late to your own funeral, with mommyologist Dr. Salima Ikram and Dr. Cara Cooney.
Okay, first up, many of you, including Tabitha D'Angelo, Janie Jones, Becky DeSassi Seagrass Scientist, Sarah Metzger, Leanna Schuster, and Sedoni S. asked, in Becky DeSassi Seagrass Scientist's words, are the spirits of mummified kitties floating and purring around us like right now?
You know what, we'll go to animals because we mentioned that already.Emily Powell, first time question asker, animals as mummies, what is thought to be their role, and what are some of the more rare animal mummies that have been found?
I could go on for hours, but I'll try not to.You have different kind of animal mummies.So one is food, because you could take it with you.So the Egyptians would prepare meat and poultry ready to be snacked on.Take some beef jerky and hush.
But the more common mummies are, of course, your pets. Because once your pet dies, you want to take it with you and enjoy its company in the afterlife.So if a pet dies before you, it's mummified first and kept carefully and put into your tomb.
Or afterwards, if it dies after you do, often they're put into the courtyard.Then you have sacred animals.And those are creatures where you believe that the soul of the god enters into the body of the animal.
And upon the animal's death, the soul migrates.It's like lighting a candle in a church. instead of lighting a candle, you give an animal mummy, and the animal, of course, each god has an animal associated with it.
So if you sacrifice, and it's a blood sacrifice in many cases because these animals have to be killed, not all of them die a natural death, the blood sacrifice counts more perhaps than a pottery
statue or a wooden statue or what have you because an animal has given up its life to be with the god and of course once the animal is mummified it becomes like a god itself and takes in perpetuity your prayers to the god.
So instead of lighting the candle you kill a kitten?
Yes, well.That's one way to do things. or you just mummify a dead one that you find.And so that's what you have with the majority of them.
And we mummify all kinds of things, from teeny weeny shrew mice to scarab beetles, which don't take much in the way of mummification.They just dry out in a convenient way.
But we have crocodiles that are 15 feet long, monkeys, baboons, and the odd lion and leopard and dogs and cats.
So in the BBC article, Unwrapping the Ancient Egyptian Animal Mummy Industry, Salima is quoted as saying that it's easier to say which animals the Egyptians didn't mummify.Like, there are no mummified pigs, as far as we know, and no mummified hippos.
But the rest, pretty much fair game.And I was like, I wonder why they didn't mummify hippos.
And this one article, Egyptian Hippos, Ancient Symbol of Protection and Rebirth, explains that in ancient Egypt, hippos were both respected and honored, but people were also scared shitless of them because they could kill you.
And there was also this Egyptian goddess named Tauret who's depicted like not a goddess like say a Nefertiti runway model type with cheekbones for days, but Tauret is embodied
as a quote pregnant hippo and her name means the great one and she's the goddess of childbirth.Woof.
Now there are other hippo goddesses but Tyra is my favorite because according to your friend wikipedia she has quote pendulous female human breasts and she's kind of depicted with this partially open mouth looks like she might be going like which maybe that's a nod to the labor that she oversees but yeah
Not a lot of mummified hippos they've found.I guess that's just like a lot of resin and probably not a ton of volunteers wanted to wrestle and slaughter a hippo.But the sign-up sheet for the kitten harvest was probably much more popular.
It's grizzly.It's spooktober.
Given that this is for the Halloween episode, I would like to point out the death cult aspect of this, that this was a magical practice.It is like lighting a candle in a church, but it's also magic.
And when you do magic, you need the blue stone and the red thread or whatever magical spell you're doing.In this case, you need to have life force that is extinguished and given as a gift in exchange for something else.
And so you are sending that life force to the other side, whatever that is, to communicate what it is that you want.But there has to be a sacrifice made.And that sacrifice then was thought by the ancient Egyptians to get you your salvation.
I mean, you need to have that sacrifice, so that you can get the energy to create the good things for the people on the other side.
And you could argue that the Egyptians were working with death cults for a long time, very long time and really perfected it.Well, I would say Cara also, the one thing I disagree with, I wouldn't call it magic, I'd call it religion.
Oh, I'm sticking by magic.No, no.I'm sticking.Magic is nothing more than a religious set of spells that get you to a certain material or emotional thing on the other side.
And so if you have a prayer that you want, it can be understood as a magical spell.This is something Egyptologists argue about all the time.We could argue.
All I'm saying is if you're going to call Christianity or Judaism or Islam a religion, then you call this a religion.Otherwise, you call everything magic.
The Eucharist spell is magic.OK.You have to say the right thing at the right time.You have to have the bread and the wine.And if you don't have the right bread and wine, it's not going to work.The Jesus soul will not go into the bread.
So the people cannot eat it if you don't do it correctly.It is absolutely a magical spell.
Fine.As long as you say for all of it.That's cool.
I love this debate, so I just hung back and let these academics and friends of three decades hash it out.This is my dream interview.
So Salimah's saying everything else isn't religion and this is magic, and Cara, you're saying it's all freaking magic, all religion is magic spells.So you're both right, and I love it.
Yeah, you're going to go around the Kaaba stone.What is the Kaaba stone?Where does it come from?And it's shielded with this cloth, and then everyone has to go around it a certain number of times and say a certain number of prayers.
I agree. I agree.The only thing is that in the past, people sort of say, oh, we have religion, but those people who are not quite okay and not enlightened had magic.So that's why I object to the terminology.That's all.
So we must radically, we will radically reclaim magic.
Absolutely.We can reclaim magic.Absolutely.Magic's more fun.
I love that observation.As someone who was raised Catholic and literally thought if I didn't do the sign of the cross right, I would go to hell.
Yep.That's what they teach you because it has to be done with the right hand gestures and the right incantation at the right time.You enter the sacred space.You better create that sacred space around yourself as you come in.Yeah.
Yeah.So which terrified me as a child.And you know, you're like anointing yourself with the holy water.It is very much a magical spell.
For more on paganism and Wicca and witches and magic-based spirituality and its intersections with indigenous cultures too, you can see last year's two-part Witchology episode, which pissed off a lot of you because you're like, hexes aren't real.
This is a science podcast.The whole point was we were asking an expert guest about these sets of beliefs. Also, a lot of those questions came straight from y'all.But we touch on these topics also in our Indigenous Phytology episode about ethnobotany.
And for more on spiritual history, we've got a demonology episode and a two-part scholastic look at historical lore related to vampires.Honestly, this is why I do Spooktober every year.We got real experts giving
academic info on the nichest of topics.Oh, also, Phelanology has some info about Black cats, but back to that, actually.Earl of Grammalkin and Dion Needham and Kay Lucas had questions with Kay saying of their partner, she likes cats.
But getting back to cats, though, Hannah Gorey wanted to know, they heard that ancient Egyptian temples would farm cats for purchase to be mummified as offerings to the deity.Is that true?Is that kind of how the cat distribution system worked?
Cat distribution system.Oh, it gets dark.Salima, go.I love that.Actually, sadly, the temples probably did that, but they also had kitten and puppy farms so that people in the surrounding areas of the temple
would raise animals for slaughter and then they would become, I mean, it was part of the big economy.This whole cult, animal cult thing, is a major, major part of temple and general economy, especially from 600 BC onward.
So as soon as they cut off the funding, the temples are like, oh my God, what do we do?So it's an alternative funding source.It is.And they create an income stream through this.And it works very, very well.They sell all kinds of things.
And you know, when we talk about Christianity and selling indulgences and getting your sins paid off, this is that kind of thing that the Egyptians were doing, again, a thousand years before Christianity.
And some folks would argue that this could include all kinds of offerings to gods or to the church or tithing or votive candles, whatever it takes to say to the realm of the beyond, hey, I got a little something for you.
I mean, all the religion is transactional.Yeah.It's very transactional.Energy in, energy out.Mm-hmm.Yep.
So we did have catteries and we did have doggeries.Well, on that note, Helios wants to know, did they really kill a bunch of people like servants to be buried with a pharaoh?If so, were all of those people mummified?That seems like a lot of work.
They say if they only mummified the pharaoh, what do they do with the rest of them?Patron Nikki G also wanted to know about human sacrifice, as did the aptly named Hanna Gori.
Okay, so there is this time period known as the First Dynasty, starting around 2900, 23,000 BCE.You have this dynasty that when the king dies, they demand that the courtiers and servants be buried with the king.And there is great disagreement here.
So if Salima and I argued about whether or not something is magical or religious, there are Egyptologists that will go to the mat saying, yes, there was human sacrifice and these people were sacrificed to attend the king in the next life.
And there are other people who are archaeologists working on the ground right now who say absolutely not.There's little evidence for it.And I will say that one of UCLA's alumna, Rose Campbell, she worked on the skulls.They only kept the skulls.
Petrie only kept the skulls of the bodies that were buried with the king at the site of Abydos.
For more on the research of Dr. Rosalind Campbell, you can see her papers such as The Poetics of Human Sacrifice in Ancient Egypt and The Social Context of Human Sacrifice in Ancient Egypt for just some light bedtime reading.
And Dr. Karakuni highlights some of Dr. Campbell's work.
But looking at those skulls, she found 30% of them approximately had perimortem trauma, which suggests that indeed there was some sort of a slightly violent aspect to their death.But most of them don't show any violence on their bodies at all.
That seems really sketchy.
And so the main argument that these people were sacrificed to accompany the king is architectural, which means that they were interred and roofed at the same time.
And that's the argument to say that you don't inter hundreds of bodies at the same time, unless they all die at the same time.And unless there's some sort of epidemic, which we don't have evidence for, then they must have been sacrificed.
And you can imagine the debates go fast and furious back and forth.But let's assume that there was a moment of human sacrifice when kingship was new.It was there to
to create the idea that the king's death was so important and his revivification needed so much energy that you had to sacrifice people to create enough of that energy to help the king be reborn and then to sustain him in the afterlife.
And as for the mummification part, I'll let Salima hit that obviously, but I don't think they're mummified.
So first of all, there is no real proof that everyone was put into that tomb at the same time, into each of their individual tombs simultaneously.So that's something we don't really know.
And then the idea that all of them were needed to revive the king.The other idea is the king might need service in the afterlife.And also at this point, these people would be guaranteed an afterlife if they went with the king.
There is an interesting thing because in Mesopotamia, they did actually sacrifice people and they did it for a hell of a lot longer than we did in Egypt.
And we know that because the king was there and within the area, within his burial chamber, these people were placed around him.And then as the archaeologists were digging, they first, in fact, didn't find the king in his court.
They found this young woman lying in the corridor and her hands were up at her neck and she was lying on the ground.
And basically she had been trying to fasten her necklace when she had fallen on the spot, probably because they all had been given poison and she had been late to her own funeral.
So Salima is referencing this Mesopotamian tomb, the Royal Cemetery at Ur, which was active between 6 and 3,000 years ago.And one particular area in the archaeological site is called PG1237. a.k.a.
the Great Death Pit because it's just lousy with bodies.There's 74 attendants buried in it in these neat rows in the same curled up positions.Many are wearing jewelry and formal headdresses and scarlet clothing.
Most were women, although six male servants who died there on purpose were found near the entrance as guards holding weaponry. And half of the women had cups or vessels next to them, like something you would be drinking from at a banquet.
And in the 2011 Cambridge Archeological Journal paper titled, Royal Cemetery of Ur, Patterns in Death, it notes that this servant that Salima mentioned, and it describes her as a woman who had no time to fix a silver ribbon in her hair and hurried to die with her companions, keeping the rolled ribbon clutched in her hand.
Why would one die with their boss?Well, anthropologists believe it offered a better life than they could experience on Earth.Why would someone be late to their own funeral?Well, you can see our three-part ADHD episode with Dr. Russell Barkley.
Is there a lot of trying to piece together the narratives of what was happening with individuals trying to figure out what their position was or what their history was or who buried them that way?
Yeah, absolutely.Most of these people had little tomb markers that would give a name and a title what their job was.
And so there's a lot of work being done and more needs to be done about how these people were connected to the Egyptian court, what kinds of jobs they had. Who was, if they were sacrificed, sacrificeable?
There were also animals, pets.So you have a dog with a little stela with a picture of a dog and his name on it.And also some of the early kings were buried with lions because lions were symbols of kingship.
And they might have been killed deliberately to go in with the king.Though killing a lion is quite complex.
Were lions hard to come by?Did they breed lions for that also?
They probably did do some degree of breeding because at that point there were lions running around Egypt in 2900 BC.Before the bad humans made them extinct there.Yeah.Exactly.
But then what the humans did was I think they had game parks because people were going hunting or they needed lions for religious rituals.And sometimes kings had pet lions.So they were breeding lions in enclosures as far as we can make out.
And we had some questions, obviously, about sarcophagus.
Just a shout out to patron Marlis Cheesophile who shared that as a homeschooled child in the early 1980s, they did a unit on Egyptology and built a miniature pyramid to scale and, quote, eviscerated and embalmed a shrew that our cat caught and killed.
And yes, we put the tiny organs in those canopic jars. and the shrew was entombed in a clay sarcophagus.Marlis shared that they found this entombed shrew decades later in their parents' basement.Quote, still holding its own.So rainy day project.
Anyway, what is the difference between a coffin and a sarcophagus?Mike and Abby wanted to know what the boxes are made of that mummies are put into.
And Ezra wanted to know if experimentation has been done to determine what conditions a sarcophagus will or won't survive.
Yeah, this is the kind of thing that coffin experts go to conferences and argue about, which is really tedious.A lot of the time, when you hear the word sarcophagus, it's just a matter of a different language.
The Italians prefer to use the word sarcophagia rather than saying the term for coffin, and it really means coffin in the Italian language.But in English, I would say the difference between a coffin and a sarcophagus is a coffin is the inner piece
or pieces, and they can be nested.They're meant to be nested, probably two or three.And it can be made of wood, usually, but it can also be made of stone.So you can have all kinds of different materials.
And then the sarcophagus, I would argue, is the outer box that you put the coffins inside of.And that can be made of a stone, but it can also be made of wood. But sarcophagus is also, it's a Greek word, right?
And it means flesh eater, which is the exact opposite of what the Egyptians wanted their coffins to do.They wanted their coffins to be flesh preservers and flesh containers.And so in some ways, it's not the appropriate word to use at all.
But Egypt isn't the appropriate word to use.It's also a Greek bastardization of a name for a Memphis temple.
And so all the words that we use are compromised and difficult and show our own rediscovery of an ancient past that we don't completely understand.So it's complicated.
So yeah, there was a Memphis in Egypt and it was right on the Nile River.And then Memphis, Tennessee is on the Mississippi.So they were like Memphis, like the other one.
And for more on word origins, you can see our wonderful etymology episode with Helen Saltzman of the Illusionist podcast, Whom's I Love.
But yes, sarcophagi are usually the outside ones, sometimes carved in stone and coffins tend to be wood and nested inside each other.
Shoshana Freedman wanted to know if you can speak to the meaning of the texts and maps inside of the mummies' coffins.
You know, different times, the Egyptians would include different texts, but in short, they're including texts that are cheat sheets in a way to give you the answers to interrogating questions that you would be asked when you were in the next life.
So when you were stepping into the underworld space, you would go before a tribunal of gods, which were terrifying to behold that had eyes of fire and heads of fire and snakes and different things.
and you were interrogated and you needed to know the answers to certain questions to make it through certain gates, to make it along certain paths.
And so the coffin texts of the Middle Kingdom made sure to give you a map to show you what direction to go and when you got to certain spots, what to say, what information you needed to know.
And then the texts on the coffins of the New Kingdom, they're very similar.They're more prayers and invocations that make you into a deity that allows you to pass.
So the New Kingdom period was 3,500 to 3,000 years ago during the 18th, 19th, and 20th dynasties, when Egypt was a real military force.And for more on Egyptian history in general, of course, we have Dr. Karakounis' whole Egyptology episode.
It's wild, curses, tiny wieners, it's a lot.
But it's all trying to solve the same conundrum of what do you do in the underworld space when you're confused and lost, you have no recollection even of who you are, of your name.
The coffin is there to give you your name, give you your title, give you your gender, remind you of who you are and help you along your way.
So it's the most important document that you can bring with you and so just surround yourself with that sacred and protective text, it's everything.
It's like GPS in a car, essentially.Is that like a dashboard in a car?
Yeah, GPS in a car plus the exam answers for that exam that we all dream we're late to and taking naked.It's that horrible anxiety dream that we all have.
And the Egyptians came up with a plan A, a plan B, and a plan C to solve that anxiety dream that they actually thought would happen when you died.
Well, one other particular about just the actual logistics of the wrapping, Shannon Cody, Diana Sterisanktine, Corrina Regan, Tanya Magic Fingers, Nina Evesey, really would like to know what type of cloth was used.
And Diana's husband asked, why are mummies in the movies able to walk around when their legs were actually wrapped together, usually?But was it linen?
Was it paper?Was it papyrus? It was linen.It had to be linen.It had to be linen.
It was pure linen.Yeah.And linen is grown from flax, and flax only grows in places where it's very wet, and Egypt's inundation allowed flax to grow very well.You would weave that.
If you were a very special dead person, you would have bandages woven with a selvedge on either side, those people who weave know what I'm talking about, such that you would actually have a linen bandage that was perfectly woven to be just that.
So non-sewers, I gotcha.Selvedge and fabric means that there are no fraying ends and that your linen bandage is crisp and tight.It's on point.So selvedge means self-edge.It's like if fabric had no flyaways.
but most people had bandages that were cut up from old shirts and old cloaks and things like that.
Oh.And there was some guy who, in fact, he does have titles on his coffin of being a sailor, and he was wrapped in a sail, which is quite sweet.
And the legs are wrapped individually, each toe and finger is wrapped individually, ideally.Not always.Ideally, right?Yeah, ideally.
And then your legs are wrapped individually, your arms are wrapped individually, and then you wrap the body all unto itself and put a shroud on it. and wrap that all up so it's a nice little bundle.
All right, about those legs.Oh, so underneath the full wrapping, maybe they were individually wrapped.
You needed to make the mummy something that could go about and leave the tomb and have agency and be able to move its limbs.
And so many of the texts that talk about revivifying the dead are about wake up, lift yourself up, shake the earth off your bones, get going, move around, take some food. You have to be able to use your arms and your mouth and your nose and eyes.
And so the bandages are as much about making the dead come to life as they are about protecting the dead.
You mentioned Shake Yourself Off too.Mags Aroni wanted to know that someone told me in historical eras mummy dust was used in drinks for vitality, truth or flim flam.Also, several people wanted to know about eating them in the Victorian era.
More of you than I would have guessed are familiar with drinking and eating mummy dust.And I'm not gonna ask how your curiosity was ignited.
Max Zeroni, Zedd, Shirogane, Mika, Evelyn Roberts, Miranda Panda, Bee, Lee Wang, Audrey, Mandy Hobson, Nehemiah Miles, Bethany J, Emily Totaro, Iso Parti, Alan, Bjorn Fredberg, Denny, It's Just Sarah, Mouse Paxton, Camellia Gamino, Brenna Hull, Olga, Coles, Nikova, and R.J.
Deutsch, who asked the gag-worthy question about it being considered a delicacy. And Lise Bacher asked the question, what precisely in the 19 separate hells possessed the Victorian to decide that mummies were the special secret sauce of eternal life?
So yes, all of you wanted to know about eating them.We're gonna get to that in just a moment, but first a quick break from sponsors of Ologies, who make it possible each week to donate to a cause of the Ologist's choosing.
And this week, Dr. Cooney selected the Yellow Hammer Fund, which is a 501c3 abortion advocacy and reproductive justice organization serving Alabama, Mississippi, and the Deep South.
and they're committed to community education, policy advocacy, and mutual aid.
And Dr. Selina 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, and exclusion from healthcare in more than 70 countries.
So donations went to those organizations in honor of her experts.And now a quick break, after which we'll talk about ingestion that I wish I did not know about. Okay, back to it.A question in patron Claire Mower's words.
Why the fuck did white people eat them?
Ali, it was in fact used for medicine from like by the 11th century AD onwards.
And there was a King Francis I of France, he used to have a little bag of mummy powder because he thought if I get assassinated, I can staunch the flow of blood and eat some mummy dust for strength because they thought that it would magically
make them endure, and partially they thought it was because it was made with bitumen, which was a very important medical element, but also because they probably thought mummies were things that were meant to live forever.
Yeah, any good apothecary would have a jar of mumia, and it was so valuable and expensive that a lot of that mumia in the apothecary, medieval apothecary, was faked, and was just some sort of brown dust or dirt.
But if you got the right stuff, then it was meant to have magical, revivifying properties that would help you to, yes, staunch the flow of blood, deal with certain diseases.This was special stuff.And Mumia brown was used as a pigment.
And until relatively recently, you had paint tubes that were supposedly filled with ground up mummies and you got a particular brown from it.
And that is not just the dust that collects, that's actually like mortar and pestle style tissue?
Often it's the wrappings as well as some of the possibly flesh.I don't know how much of the bones they've ground up but certainly any of the soft tissue.
And for some of the mummies it just falls off anyway because they've gotten wet, they've dried, wet, dry. And yeah, I went on the hunt for mummy dust in magic shops in the US.And I found some in Brooklyn, which did not smell at all convincing.
And then there was some in Philadelphia that was really convincing.And they said, oh, we've had this.
Kalima, really?They're still selling this stuff?
Well, it was in two shops that was in the 90s.
And in 1924, if you didn't have time to scour shops that sold bongs and nag champa, you could just hit up the pharmaceutical giant Merck & Co, who sold it for a price of 12 gold marks per kilo, which I understand is a lot.
And that's why historically kings and nobles tended to carry pouches of it to cure ailments from epilepsy to gout.And this is conjecture, but probably dick issues too.
Now in this modern age, you can order a fragment of Egyptian mummy wrapping encased in resin from a business called Engineered Labs for the low price of $89.99 or four installments of $22 if you're on a budget but you need that fragment of dead person bandage and a jiffy.
And if you need to touch and feel it though, there are websites that will sell you a tiny beige colored tatter in a vial with a cork for as little as 20 bucks.And I guess you could probably open it and just inhale the desecration.
Well, on that thought, Ellie Goulding wrote in, intrusive thought for the night, what does a mummy smell like?Surely just like earth and oldness, or do they have a deathly stank to them?
And Kyla C. Wynn-Elliott, Chris Brumgardner, Jillian Tainjan, Michelle Vu, Megan Walker, and Scott Sheldon all wanted to know, do they have a smell?
It depends on the kind of mummification because sometimes some mummies actually do smell nice.They smell of the resins and the herbs and the spices that were used to make them.But other mummies are less delightful to smell.
It's a nice way of putting it. And it's a pretty distinctive smell mixed with some spices and death.And yeah, I guess in a way, old death.
Not new death.New death smells different than old death.And it's hard to explain how that works.New death is like- It's fresh.It's like, I need to get away from here.This is horrible.It's rotting.There's maggots there.You know, get away, get away.
Old Death is, it's got a musty sort of smell.You know it's not something that you should be around, but it's not repelling you in the same way.And, you know, like a musty cupboard. musty cupboard, musty cupboard, but it's still got a pungency to it.
Like when I'm working with coffins, usually in museums, but sometimes on site, and you know, if they're opening a museum case in the Cairo Museum, for instance, and they open that glass case, you know, immediately if there's a mummy inside by the smell, it's it is that strong.
And do the coffins retain that smell at all?
They do, they do.I mean, it's important that the Egyptian kings were buried in cedar coffins and cedar of Lebanon was specifically chosen because of its smell.
And that cedar smell is retained to this day, even thousands of years after those trees were cut down and worked.And to put a mummified body into that cedar container was also meant to keep insects at bay and just like a cedar closet.
to keep the creepy crawlies away from destroying that mummified body.But the coffins can absorb that smell also because you put the body in there and then you pour all kinds of resins and things.
And that might make the mummy, you know, it makes the mummy smell go into the coffin wood, potentially.Yeah.
And for more on creepy crawlies, you can see our forest entomology episode.
But if you want fewer creepy crawlies in your life and more cedar, you can get a big load of the 2024 paper, butylated hydroxy toluene and ethylene diamine tetraacetic acid combined with cedarwood oil as wood treatments for protection from subterranean termites and wood decaying fungi, which gave props to cedarwood oil for repelling wood and paper eating bugs.
So if you'd like to read that, we'll link it for you for sure.
Now, as for the contents of that black goo resin that we touched on in episode one, so according to this 2023 paper, biomolecular characterization of 3,500-year-old ancient Egyptian mummification balms from the Valley of the Kings, some of the richest and most complex balms analyzed revealed a mixture of beeswax, plant oil, fats, bitumen or tar, pine resins, some balsamic substance, and pistachio tree resin.
And when you're saying you're pouring resins, is that just on the linen or is that kind of like filling it up like a shallow bath? It depends.Salima, it depends.
It changes through time.Basically, you paint the body with a mixture of resin and oil and sometimes wax.And you might put in some herbs and powdered herbs to smell better and to preserve.Something like fenugreek is a great preservative.
So then you coat the body with this and then you can put the bandages on and then you can coat those bandages.So you create this almost a carapace around the body. using the resins.
Julia Butka and I were looking at one of her coffins and that had a whole lake, a shallow lake of resin or black goo because we don't always know what it is and until you test it with GCMS or FTIR.
This means gas chromatography, mass spectrometry, and Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy.So I gotcha.And until you analyze it chemically,
You basically call it black goo in a truly professional way.And then you can put the body onto it.So we had this incredible time, in fact, getting the body out because it was so stuck to the coffin.
Oh, wow.And you know, I study coffin reuse, where they didn't have access to wood.And so they would take the body out, do, I'm sure, all kinds of magical spells to make sure the angry dead didn't come at them.
That's not what I want to deal with today.
and then re-commodify the coffin, re-plaster, re-paint it and all of that.And after this time period of coffin reuse, people were so freaked out by the practice.
By the time they stopped doing systematic mummy reuse, they were trying to show that they weren't going to reuse the piece.And so in the 21st dynasty into the 22nd dynasty, really 22nd dynasty, you start to see them pouring this black substance
over an inner piece like the cartonnage papier-mâché sort of container of the mummy itself, as if to say, look, we're not going to open this up, we're not going to steal the amulets that are put on the inside of this piece, this piece is going to be connected to the coffin, everything's safe.
Because the black stuff was also, in my opinion, kind of like that purple dye that they put on money when the bank robber comes.It was a way of making sure that
if somebody did try to do something to the body, there would be a marking, a black mark on the person who had done it.And Salimah's worked with bodies that show how jewels or amulets were removed from a matrix of resins.
And you can see the imprint of the piece in the resin that's on the body.And it didn't seem to stop the thief from doing it.But there's an attempt, there's an attempt
Because the thing is that the resin is dry, so it's not going to get onto you.Unless you're one of the priests who are applying the resin and stealing simultaneously, then you will be resined.But otherwise, you won't.
But yeah, I've worked with them, and I do not come away covered with resin.But sometimes I smell a lot like a mummy.
Well, that's, I mean, you could bottle that up and sell it, apparently.I wonder if anyone's made a perfume that is that essence.I'll have to look into that.Don't worry, there is.
Simply saunter over to aromaprime.com for a $30 bottle of something called Egyptian Mummy Tomb Aroma Oil, which is described as sweet, floral, and woody to reflect the fragrances used to preserve bodies.
It's also based on the presence of floral garlands and collars left in tombs.And it's reminiscent of the scent of palm wine, spice, the citrusy notes of pistachio tree resin, honey, beeswax, and myrrh.
Now, the site also offers, I don't know why, this bit of focus group trivia explaining that, quote, when tested with an audience who did not know what this scent was based on, the participants described decay, age, and looming spirits, but also flowers and funerals.
One participant even said, it was what they imagined embalming fluid would smell like.We were pleased that the scent invoked these ideas.
Now to do this research, obviously olfactologists and scent experts had to convince museum curators to let them past some velvet stanchions to whiff some bodies that are stored in collections or maybe even just crack open a display case.
So how do we feel about the whole museum thing, charging admissions to view humans that did not expect to be continents away from their final resting place, perhaps under fluorescent lighting and nude?Y'all had ethical questions.
Patrons, Reigning Emily, Allie Vessels, Kylie Shay, Rachel Silber, Chicken Chomper, Pavka34, Erin Bagley, Scott Sheldon, Emma Doyle, Anna, Ploy Keener, Chelsea Loves Chocolate, Avron Keating,
Annie Mercury, Sarah Moore, Comical Next Door, and Tiger Udy.Now, patron Alessandra Kempson shared that a visit to the Vatican featuring the display of a mummy gave them the ick.
And Mallory Albee raises this excellent point that the fact that mummified human remains are in so many museums across the world as a result of a history of colonization, exploitation, and scientific racism.
We objectify them and think they're cool, but really they should not be on display anywhere, says Mallory.
You mentioned, too, a lot of these tombs would be raided, and a lot of people had questions about the controversy, essentially, of museums having mummified people and mummies on display.What are your thoughts about repatriation, about
people being uneasy in Egyptian exhibits.What are the ethics of that, and how has that changed your work?
I mean, I think that some people are very uncomfortable, increasingly in the West, and I use the West of Egypt, shall we say.People are uncomfortable with the idea of death.And now there's a great furore about we don't want to see dead bodies.
Part of it is they feel that it's disrespectful, which is understandable.But part of it is I think people are terrified of their own mortality.
And as Cara said earlier, you know, no matter how much surgical work you have done to yourself, you are going to die.You can't pump yourself full of preservatives and expect to live forever.
And so I think that people are increasingly just uncomfortable with the idea of death, with the idea of decay, with the idea of old age.
You know, how the elderly are viewed in these societies is a slight indication of how death is viewed to some extent.
For more on aging, you can see our biogerontology episode, which is the most thrillingly awkward interview we've ever put out.Maybe the most awkward conversation I've ever had.It's really special.
And nowadays, people then feel that also it's shocking and it's scary, they want trigger warnings and all sorts of things which I'm not entirely sure are necessary because if you look at how people are watching news or just
television programs, the amount of death, havoc, destruction that you see there without a trigger warning makes me wonder why do we need one in a museum when you're going to see something about an exhibition about dead people.
So just a side note, in our recent Suicidology episode, we discussed actual research showing that trigger warnings increase anxiety of students and trauma survivors.
And for more on that, you can see the 2023 study titled, A Meta-Analysis of the Efficacy of Trigger Warnings, Content Warnings, and Content Notes, which found that those things are fruitless, although they do reliably induce a period of uncomfortable anticipation, and that trigger warnings should not be used as a mental health tool.
However, that anxiety is very individual.
So I think that maybe people who are uncomfortable should be given a choice in a museum and certainly if you're trying to show remains, human remains, there should be a reason for showing them and if they have descendants then certainly consent or non-showing is perfectly reasonable.
In the case of mummies, if they are respectfully shown,
I think that, in fact, it's a very valuable thing for people to really come to grips with their own mortality, their own humanity, and to better understand the ancient Egyptians and feel a commonality with them, both through the processes of death and mourning, as well as by just looking at, in a way, this Egyptian celebration of going on to this next phase of existence.
Yeah, I'll jump in to say that it's one of the biggest problems of Egyptology.When somebody hears the word Egyptology, they'll think of mummies, pyramids, King Tut, right?
And you're looking at a study that is incredibly colonial, that was invented by white Europeans when they colonized and occupied this place, French and British people primarily, and then it spread from there.And so you're dealing with
a disrespect, but also a kind of ownership of somebody else's body who cannot give their consent for its display, for how it's displayed.
And a lot of the 19th century unwrappings of just taking all of the coverings off and just showing a naked body were and are, I've still seen bodies displayed that way recently, are incredibly disrespectful.
So it's like, what right do you, an Egyptian might say today, to display one of our dead people in your museum as an object, as a piece like a coffin or a piece like a statue or something like that.And I think that's where it gets tricky.
And yet at the same time, I am of two minds about this because the rich ancient Egyptians, and I'm going to get socioeconomic again, as I often do, but the rich ancient Egyptians socially separated themselves through this preservation of the body we call mummification.
And these bodies last for thousands of years.And they knew they would, they're meant to last eternally and they're meant to be a kind of miracle of preservation.
And so to create something like that and then to be stunned that people are really drawn in and mystified by this process such that they want to collect them and study them.
I think that it's a normal human reaction and we should expect it and respect that as well and allow the study but then there needs to be a respectful display of these bodies with Egyptians as stakeholders of the mummies themselves.
And if you're including Egyptians as stakeholders, then I think that's the way forward.
I would say one thing, Cara.Most of the Egyptians today, apart from the Copts, have limited blood relationship to the ancient Egyptians. If you're in Alexandria, maybe yes, more so.It depends on how far back you go.
There's a National Geographic study that shows that modern Egyptian populations share 70% more or less of genetic material with the ancient population based on the limited ancient genetic work that's been done.
And so I'm not going to... That is very limited.I'm sorry.But 7-0, that's pretty good.
And so this was the National Geographic Genographic Project, which found that, based on their sampling, the genetics of modern Egyptians are 68% North African and only 17% Arab, which was a surprising finding as a large percentage of Egyptians consider themselves primarily Arab, especially after the Arab occupation of 642.
And while this research from Nat Geo spanned a decade, as Salima notes, it was limited to hundreds rather than thousands of samples.
Kara, however, thinks it's still significant when it comes to repatriation of remains and cultural ties to artifacts of the past.
I also think that it's the living, whoever we are from whatever time period, making decisions about other people.But I think that the
The more point is that we are making decisions about people who are long dead, who cannot necessarily speak for themselves.We can make assumptions based on what we know.Also, it's a matter of, you know, at that time, is it cool?Is it not cool?
In the 1970s in Egypt, they shut down the Royal Mummy Room.
This was in the Royal Mummy Room in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo.
And then at a different point, they in fact put the royal mummies into a proper mausoleum, but that was a political move.
So I think that a lot of the display of mummies, whether they are displayed or not, does change depending on the temper of the times.And it is a big question.
Yeah, and you should know that when Salima says it's political, there was just a parade of the royal mummies from the Egyptian Museum at Tahrir to the National Museum of Egyptian Civilization.
And this parade moved these mummies and their coffins in little rolling boats through the streets of Cairo.And they were received by President Sisi at the new museum and received in skate.So right now we're in a time period when
display of the mummified remains in a respectful way is completely acceptable, whereas, as Salim is pointing out, in the 70s, it wasn't.
So these things change with how people feel about the human bodies in question, whether or not you want to connect with them politically and socially, and it seems that the Egyptians do right now.
Yeah, and over here, in fact, there are, in every provincial museum, they must have a mummy.So while in other places they're like, oh, let's take them all off display, over here it's not.
And when you say over here, you mean in Egypt?I mean in Egypt.
What's also interesting is I went to speak in Belfast, and there's one mummy there who is slightly on display, so the coffin is listed so you can see a little bit of her.
Everyone goes to visit her and there's a small Egyptian display, but there's a lot about her because she's been studied repeatedly.
And I think the ancient Egyptians would have kind of liked that because they were being visited in the ways that they wanted their tombs to be visited.Their name was being repeated.
But then again, that's just my assumption and interpretation of what we know from ancient Egypt.
So this is Imami Takabuti, and she was a noblewoman and the mistress of this great house who is thought to have died from perhaps an assassination.
And for more on her history, you can see the 2021 book, The Life and Times of Takabuti in Ancient Egypt, Investigating the Belfast Mummy.
And some think that telling her story and loving on her from the other side of a glass display is enough respect to justify her remains being taken across oceans.
Now, also in Belfast, however, is a $35,000 ancient Egyptian mummy head listed for sale in a quirky antiques shop.So really, in terms of respect and desecration, things are all over the map, all over the map.
Now, what do other archaeologists have to say about this?
In 2021, the Egyptian archaeologist and Minister of State for Antiquities Affairs Zahi Hawass noted that modern scientists do not excavate the graves of Muslims, Christians, or Jews, and they don't defy modern religions and desecrate graves of those who practice those religions.
But that the function of studying ancient Egyptians is to revive the greatness of ancient people and introduce their civilization to people of today.
And he also noted that archaeologists work to immortalize these people as they restore their coffins, graves, and mummies because the presence of these coffins inside the wells exposes them to decomposition and fragmentation.
So by excavating, they're actually helping preserve them.And Hawass also agreed that some displays of mummified people have been humiliating. and that exhibitions should include as much humanizing information as possible.
And Salima and Kara mentioned that opinions waver and that politics, of course, do matter.And Egypt's tourism industry is a huge part of its economy.
So politically, there has been a push and pull about exhibitions, especially as the region recovers from pandemic lockdowns that really stifled tourism income in the last few years.
Chrysalis Ashton wanted to know, if you were mummified, how you would feel about future archaeologists finding you and putting you on display.Do you think that that is an honor of sorts or is it a disruption?
And I'm like, I know I wouldn't look my best and I wouldn't be made into worms necessarily.But yeah, I'm like, that might be kind of cool.But also, is it a desecration and will I curse people is the other question. Side note, my thoughts.
Okay, so if your religious faith truly believes that your wealth can help you live for all eternity, and then some knob lock sells you in an antique shop, that is certainly a real fuck you and a wrench in your eternal plans.
Now, if raiders have typically disturbed and robbed you already, and a scientist studies your remains with respect to learn more about your culture, is that an honor?
But also, if immortality means mattering to the people left on Earth for generations and generations, is being displayed and fascinated over, is that a win?
What if your corpse is stripped of linens for visitors to shuffle past in between tourist attractions and hot dogs? And this aside is feeling like one of Carrie Bradshaw's sex in the city columns.
That's just a series of questions without any conclusions.
But the truth is we will never really know exactly how these humans, usually the most powerful and wealthy in their society or their sacrificed servants or animals would think about their theft and their displacement and international fame.
Even experts can't say how they would feel, but yes, If it feels icky, that's because they were usually obtained in very sketchy ways and studied in a depth that was probably not intended.
I mean, as the coffin expert, I have to come in and say that the ancient Egyptians wanted to have an idealized and perfected face forward, which is why the coffin and the mummy masks exist.They show the dead youthful and perfect.So while I think that
the display of the mummy is something that we want and need.I don't think it's something that the dead Egyptians necessarily would have wanted.Because Allie, you're thinking right now like, well, I don't want people to see my old dead face, right?
And I don't think I would want that either, right?And Salima wants the worms.
I don't know.If I were mummified, See, I don't mind if I were mummified, and if I were displayed decently, and there was some scientific work being carried out, and it was of some use, then I have absolutely no problem with it.
I think the Egyptians invented the mummy mask in the coffin for a reason to show a perfected every young, an ideal person.
Absolutely idealized self.
Again, opinions vary expert to expert and person to person.But as for the nested coffins and the stone sarcophagi, those outer husks were meant to be revered and show the person at their best.Speaking of the best, let's talk about the not best.
Last one.Favorite, least favorite part of your jobs?
Yeah.Cara? I love working in the field.I love working with graduate students.I am chair of the department at my university at UCLA.And as Salima says, administration is, yeah, it's brutal.It's brutal.Brutal.
The rest of it's great.The rest of it's great.Favorite? Fieldwork, yeah.
Yeah, fieldwork is great.I do love fieldwork, but I like writing and I like teaching because the teaching helps me to put all of the fieldwork together.
The teaching is the call and response where you learn new things or you think of things in a different way than you had before.
And if one is just navel gazing and doing the fieldwork, I don't think that I at least can really analyze it or come to terms with any sort of rigorous interpretation until I try to explain it to other people.
And the best place to try to do that is with students.And then they're like, you know, my child who will always make me reconsider every conclusion I've ever come to and learn to explain it better.
So I think strangely, teaching, even though teaching is exhausting, and I hate putting a syllabus together.
Yeah, I mean, I perfectly get all the rest of it, but the most fun when you get to be rather responsible in that part is the excavation, where you don't have to necessarily do anything else other than focus on the work. and then teaching comes next.
You're both doing such beautiful work and you've opened up this portal into so much history and culture.So thank you so much for what you're doing.
I think you both handle your work also just so perfectly in terms of trying to explain the importance of this too.So thank you guys for what you do.Thanks so much, Allie.Thank you very much.
So ask brilliant people bonkers questions and you'd be surprised that the answers are even weirder, which is what we love.
Now as long as you're in the mood, please enjoy more Spooktober episodes at allywar.com slash ologies slash spooktober 2024, which is linked in the show notes and includes links to things like vampire and monster lore, pumpkins and bats and apples and bones and tombstones and mortuary makeup and death and dying.
Also, we'll have so much link for this episode at alleyward.com slash ology slash mommyology.You'll find links to the guests social media and their books in the show notes or on our website.
Thank you so much, Dr. Selina Akram and Dr. Cara Cooney for being here this week and last week.We adore you. We are at ologies on Instagram.I'm at Ali Ward with one L on both.
Smologies are shorter, kid-friendly versions of ologies, and you could subscribe wherever you get podcasts.Ologies merch is available at ologiesmerch.com, and you can join our patreon.com slash ologies for as little as a dollar a month.
Thank you to Aaron Talbert for adminning the ologies podcast Facebook group. Noelle Dilworth is our scheduling producer.Aveline Malick makes our professional transcripts.
Susan Hale did so much extra research and managing directs this entire show, keeping us all together like resin-y goo.And our editors and wonders of the world are Jake Chafee, Mercedes Maitland of Maitland Audio.
And this week we had help from Jarrett Sleeper of the award-winning podcast production company Mindjam Media.Also, Jarrett has launched a shirtline for all of October releasing one per day and I love it.
He made one of the designs just for me and it's about bugs.But you can see all of them at JBstink.com and he releases again a new one every day in October.They're bonkers.
You can see his Instagram at jared underscore sleeper to learn the inspiration behind each design.He's been working on these for a year. I love them.JBstink.com has all of his designs up.It's genius.Spread the word.
Also, 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 my friend Mackenzie and Josh, they got married this past weekend in the Catskills, and it was like three days of lawn games and campfires. and coffee on a porch as it drizzled outside.
And I thought ahead, I took my Stanley thermos, this old school thermos, everywhere I went, I kept refilling it with hot tea.And actually, I got hazed for being the thermos lady.One guy was like, go enjoy your lukewarm water.
I like to think it was in a friendly way. But I told that person that it was really chilly with beans and I carry it wherever I go.But my point is, having a thermos full of hot liquid everywhere you go in the winter is tits.
Bury me in my yellow sweater with a thermos of matcha.Please don't kill my dog, Grammy, to go with me.Or I'm going to bust back through that veil of mortality from the afterlife and I'm going to destroy you with flames that come out of my eyes.
Either way, Thermos during the winter, 10 out of 10.Mackenzie and Josh's wedding, 12 out of 10.I loved it.I'm so happy for them.Maybe I'll buy them Thermoses as a wedding gift.Love y'all.Okay, buh-bye.
It's called mummification.You'll be dead when they do this.
