Resurrecting Pompeii (9 page)

From the time of Napoleon ’s expedition, artefacts found in Egyptian-tomb contexts inspired the arts and the design of objects used in daily life. As already discussed, this was also the case with finds from the sites destroyed by Mt Vesuvius. Well-preserved human remains have continuously exercised influenceinall mediaassociatedwithpopular culture. As with Pompeii, the macabre finds of mummies spawned numerous novels, and later, films. If anything, mummy finds in Egypt exerted greater influence on popular culture than the bodies of the victims from Pompeii. In film alone, mummies provided the inspiration for around 50 productions between 1909 and 2001.
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Apart from the occasional incidental appearance of mummies in Tudor literature, such as Shakespeare’s
Macbeth
and
Othello
, the mummy doesn’t appear as a key character in novels until the nineteenth century.
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Since then, there has been a plethora of mummy literature.
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Most notable, for the purposes of this study, is the presence of Theophile Gautier’s works in the mummy literature. Gautier was one of the pioneers of this genre. He produced two works on Egyptian mummies,
The Romance of a Mummy
in 1857 and a short story,
The Mummy
’
s Foot
, in 1863.
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The latter obliquely refers to the practice of collecting portions of mummies as souvenirs. Like
Arria Marcella
, this story involves a hero with a disconcerting tendency to form attachments with portions of older, long-dead women.

The Mummy
’
s Foot
has the most obvious parallels with
Arria Marcella
. The story is fabulous enough to warrant gratuitous retelling: the tale opens with the protagonist idly entering a curio shop in Paris. His fancy is taken by a beautiful foot, which at first he mistakes for a fragment of a bronze statue. To his surprise, the foot is made of flesh. It transpires that it is, in fact, a portion of a mummy. And not just any mummy; it is an extremity of the Princess Hermonthis. Despite the fact that the foot is human, the hero desires to use it as a paperweight. The wizened old shopkeeper considers that a novel application, which would certainly have surprised the Princess’s father, the Pharaoh.

Undeterred, our hero purchases the foot and takes it home wrapped in a piece of old damask. He is uncommonly delighted with his purchase and immediately puts it to use, placing it on a pile of papers. When he retires that night, he falls into a deep slumber and dreams that he is in his room. Everything appears normal until he notices his paperweight, which has started moving about and hopping amongst his papers. He is somewhat disturbed by this as he prefers ‘sedentary paperweights’.
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The curtains then begin to move and he hears a sound like a person hopping around on one foot. This is followed by the appearance of the singlefooted Princess Hermonthis herself. She is unable to catch her bounding loose foot until she speaks with it. The foot somehow manages to explain to her that it has been bought and no longer belongs to her unless she can repay the price of purchase. Our hero gallantly offers the princess her foot as he has no desire to cripple such a lovely individual. She is then able to reunite her severed foot to her leg. To thank our unnamed hero, she offers to present him to her father, as she is certain that he will be pleased that her foot has been restored. She also replaces his missing paperweight with a

They are transported to a vast chamber in a granite mountainside. There he sees a whole collection of dessicated mummies – kings, their retinues and their mummified animals – returned to life. They all appear to be delighted that the princess is again intact. The Pharaoh asks our hero to name his reward. He asks for permission to marry the princess as it strikes him that it would be appropriate to replace her ‘foot with her hand’.
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Taken aback by this request, the old Pharaoh inquires about his age and provenance. He replies that he is 27 years old. The assembled masses are shocked that one so young could consider matrimony with a woman who is 30 centuries his senior. The Pharaoh informs him that the age discrepancy is just too great to allow the marriage even to be considered. Even a two-thousandyear-old would be a trifle on the young side for such a venerable individual. The ancient Egyptian bemoans the fact that youngsters like him appear to be unable to preserve themselves and he really thinks that his daughter should have a husband who has the capacity to last over the millennia. Our hero awakens and finds himself back in his own apartment but the mummy’s foot is no longer there. It has been replaced by a green clay statue of Isis.

What separates Egyptian popular culture from that of Pompeii is that it really did not have a significant impact on research output. Popularizing ancient Egypt obviously increased interest in tomb sites and the collection of antiquities, including mummified remains. This would have had an impact on funding of expeditions but it did not determine the direction of research. It is in stark contrast with the considerable and continued influence of popular literature, especially
The Last Days of Pompeii
, on the interpretation of human skeletal finds from Campania.

Initial anthropological studies on Egyptian remains were limited to mummy unwrapping and craniometric studies. The latter were the most common analyses performed on skeletal material in the nineteenth century and were undertaken to establish so-called racial types (Chapter 3). One of the key nineteenth-century craniometric studies Morton. Phrenological studies were also research was duly discredited. It is notable that this type of work did not take advantage of the research possibilities provided by preserved soft tissue. This was set to change. The emphasis for future work would shift from typology to more medically oriented research.
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carried out until this type of reaction to public outrage over the construction of the first Aswan Dam in 1902 was a catalyst for this work. When the reservoir behind the dam was filled in 1903, the First Cataract on the Nile and Philae were lost and much of the valley of the Nile was flooded. Many monuments, burials and other artefacts were destroyed both as a direct result of the flooding and because of the ensuing seepage. There was considerable public resentment for these losses. This was exacerbated by a proposal from the Egyptian government to increase the height of the dam by a further seven metres in 1907, as it would result in massive flooding of a considerable area. To stave off criticism about the desecration of Egypt’s cultural heritage, the government made the politically sensible decision to commission a systematic survey of the region prior to the planned deluge. Under this scheme, all monuments were to be documented. Burials were to be excavated and their contents removed before areas were submerged. In addition, all burials were to be recorded in detail, photographed and their contents subjected to analysis.
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Another key factor that determined the direction of Egyptian mummy research was the combination of British dominance and involvement in the foundation of the English-language Government School of Medicine in Cairo. It also established the agenda for mummy research, which to this day is mostly focused on palaeopathology. This medical institution was able to provide both the expertise and the resources to conduct mummy research. Three of the professors at this school exerted a profound influence on the study of mummies in the twentieth century. They were Grafton Elliot Smith in anatomy, Alfred Lucas in chemistry and Armand Ruffer in bacteriology. Elliot Smith only spent seven years in Egypt but continued his research when he moved to England. Ruffer established techniques for the examination of mummified soft tissues for evidence of disease, especially at a microscopic level. Some of his techniques, including that for the rehydration of desiccated soft tissue, are still in use. Among other things, Lucas worked on the chemical analysis of finds from Tutankhamun’s tomb and performed experiments to determine the methods used in mummification.
¹⁸

When the tomb of Tuthmosis IV was discovered in 1903, the mummy of the ruler was subjected to a public unwrapping for the benefit of the upper echelons of Cairo. Unfortunately, this was more an entertainment than a scientific exercise and yielded little useful information. Elliot Smith later was able to conduct a more rigorous study of this mummy, including the use of x-ray analysis to determine age-at-death.

The discovery of rays that were to become the basis of the new method of visualizing internal structures through x-ray technology in 1895, by Roentgen, a German physicist, took mummy research in a new direction. Early mummy investigations involved unwrapping the bandages and ultimately compromising the fabric of the mummy. This new technique had the huge advantage of being non-destructive. This meant that signs of trauma and disease could be recognized without performing an autopsy. It should be noted that the early use of x-rays was at least as important for the discernment of associated artefacts, such as amulets and jewellery, as for the understanding of the lives and deaths of the mummies.

A gentleman by the name of Koenig was responsible for performing the first x-ray investigations of human and animal mummies in Frankfurt in 1896. Flinders Petrie was responsible for the next x-ray of a human mummy, which was undertaken in 1897 and published in the following year. When Elliot Smith undertook to x-ray the mummy of Tuthmosis IV, the only x-ray machine in Cairo at that time was in the nursing home. Elliot Smith and Howard Carter had to transport the deceased pharaoh to this destination, stretched across their laps, in a taxi. Elliot Smith followed this study with an examination of the royal mummies from Deir el-Bahri and the tomb of Amenophis, as well as numerous other mummified individuals.
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By the 1920s and 1930s, x-raying was an established technique for mummy research.
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The research that resulted from the raising of the Aswan Dam required more staff than the Government Medical School could provide and additional English scholars were employed. The two most notable of these were Frederic Wood Jones and W.R. Dawson. Douglas Derry succeeded Elliot Smith as professor of anatomy and was responsible for the examination of the body of Tutankhamun. Large numbers of mummies were subjected to autopsy in the first quarter of the twentieth century.

Outside of Egypt, work was also taking place on mummies in museum collections, most notably in Manchester. In 1908, Margaret Murray, the curator of the Manchester Museum, instigated a multidisciplinary study of two mummies from the same tomb. She worked with a physician, three chemists and two textile experts. This was the precursor of the type of approach that would dominate research in the latter part of the twentieth century.
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This period of intense activity was short lived and mummy studies dwindled for some decades before the next wave of research commenced. There are a number of reasons for this decline. Major events, such as the Depression, World War II and the Middle East conflict, clearly played a large role but other factors also had an impact on mummy studies. Political and economic changes during World War II affected the way excavations were funded and organized, which led to preference being given to non-funerary sites. This was paralleled with an increased emphasis on linguistic evidence.
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Though on a much smaller scale, research did continue. In the 1930s Boyd and Boyd undertook serological studies to attempt to determine blood types from mummy tissues and Moodie x-rayed mummies and identified skeletal pathology from the Chicago Field Museum collection.

One of the by-products of World War II was the development of new technologies, which could then be modified for non-military applications. Electron microscopes, for example, were used to examine mummified tissue by the end of the 1950s.

The 1960s saw new interest in the potential of human remains to provide evidence about the past. The fascination with scientific techniques that could be applied to human remains, including hair and soft tissue, is reflected in the publications of Brothwell and Sandison.
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New developments in blood antigen serology meant that further studies could be made in an attempt to establish familial relationships between mummified individuals. The effect of changes to human tissue after death, desiccation and time on interpretation of ancient remains was also addressed.
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This work led the way to a revival of mummy investigations in the 1970s. The dissection of a number of Egyptian mummies in Detroit by Cockburn and a huge interdisciplinary team of scientists, led to the formation of the Palaeopathology Association.
²⁵
Other major mummy projects were also carried out in the US and UK. Perhaps the most notable was that of the Manchester Museum. Rosalie David reinstated the interdisciplinary programme commenced by Margaret Murray in the first decade of the twentieth century. This type of investigation of mummies in museum collections has now become a global exercise.

Scholars quickly appreciated the bene fits non-destructive x-ray technology provided when it became available. Similarly, CT (Computed Axial Tomography) scans found favour soon after the technique was developed. CT scans enable the production of three-dimensional images. Further, the associated software enables specific features to be isolated. Density differences can be used to produce soft tissue images. Numerous other techniques have been developed and employed since the 1970s to gain information about diet, genetic relationships, diseases and methods of mummification.

The problem of post-mortem changes to some cells initially limited the use of electron microscopy but this has been mitigated by coupling it with an electron probe that is capable of energy dispersive x-ray analysis, known as EDXA. This technique is especially useful in the diagnosis of ancient pathology, as are immunohistological studies and endoscopy. Stable isotope ratio studies in skeletal and soft tissues provide some indication of diet. Small sequences of DNA have been recovered and amplified from ancient soft tissue. These may provide evidence of both genetic relationships between mummies and infectious agents, such as bacteria.
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The main limitation to recent mummy research has been cost. One of the factors that assisted cutting-edge research on Egyptian mummies is the fact that mummies were transported trans-globally during the nineteenth century and eventually found their way into museum collections. This provided two distinct advantages, which enabled research that would not have been possible on finds from a site like Pompeii. First, there were numerous accessible mummies and, second, the expense of working on discrete collections could be more easily borne by individual museums or research institutions. Until comparatively recently, researchers were not compelled to obtain permission from Egyptian authorities to perform x-ray or other analysis on mummies held in collections around the world. This contrasts strongly with the majority of the skeletal material from Pompeii, where access is limited and controlled by the Italian Superintendency. While it is essential for a country to control its heritage, obtaining permission to undertake analysis was limited until the latter part of the twentieth century, when a policy that encouraged scientific research was implemented.