Beneath the Sands of Egypt (9 page)

While the days in the desert are rather tranquil, the night comes alive: The distant yips and howls of roving desert canines in search of prey, the continual slap of wind meeting tent, and the gnawing feelings of apprehension increase as one's imagination is tempered by loneliness and the resonance of the desert night. The discovery of multiple snake tracks around one's tent in the morning is no consolation, but another day is met and the exploration continues.

The desert, with all its hardship and occasional anxiety, was often preferable to the noisy chaos of Cairo. When I arrived in Egypt, I had established myself once again at the Golden Hotel. The hotel had recently shut down, but old Faris was still holding court in his lobby, seemingly unaware that it was no longer in business and the young tourists were no longer passing by. Regardless, for the bargain rate of thirty dollars a month, I leased a room and Faris handed me some keys to a room I could share with another tenant, a homesick businessman from Sri Lanka.

Much of my time, though, was spent outside the apartment and ideally outside Cairo. I made trips to Sakkara and Luxor to photograph tomb scenes, and I spent a good bit of time in between in specialized Egyptological libraries and museums. It was great to be living for a while in Egypt with a relatively flexible schedule
of archaeological pursuits accompanied by the occasional surprise. One day, for example, while collecting my mail at the research center, I read a posted advertisement in which a cruise line was soliciting junior lecturers to give educational chats in exchange for a deluxe ten-day voyage on the Red Sea. A big-league scholar would be brought in for each cruise, and those of smaller credentials such as myself were asked to give talks on the occasional bus trips and to entertain the passengers during dinners and tours. I signed up immediately.

I traveled to the Cairo airport to meet the arriving passengers, and to my amazement the featured scholar was none other than T. G. H. “Harry” James, the Keeper of Egyptian Antiquities at the British Museum. Less than two months prior, I had appeared in London at his venerable department, a letter of introduction in hand from a mutual friend. Harry had graciously come out to meet me and wished me the best of luck with my studies. I left the museum in total awe and grateful for my brief audience with him. The prospect of spending more time with him was thrilling.

In his characteristic sense of wry humor, Harry greeted the cruise passengers as they boarded a bus, soliciting suitcases as he pretended to be the baggage handler. When his bluff was called, he finally announced, “I am Harry James!” Then, pointing to me, “And this is my acolyte.” I didn't mind at all. I was able to spend ten days with this marvelous gentleman, quizzing him for a wealth of insights on Egyptological matters and visiting such wonderful places as the Wadi Rum and Petra in Jordan and sites in the eastern desert of Egypt. Many of the passengers, too, were quite fascinating, including Countess Tauni de Lesseps, the granddaughter of the man who built the Suez Canal, and I would have readily signed up for more, but it was time to move on. I was once again pleased to return home and find Sherry relieved that I'd been off on an
archaeological adventure rather than something more precarious in the mountains.

 

D
ESPITE MY ENTHUSIASM
and growing experience, I wasn't qualified to direct my own archaeological expedition in Egypt at this stage in my career. A Ph.D. and a formal affiliation with an appropriate institution such as a museum or university are among the criteria, and I had a good ways to go before I would achieve either. Apart from continuing my graduate-school education, which I wasn't interested in pursuing for a while, there were other things I could do to keep myself well involved in archaeology, including fieldwork and the constant study of subjects that somehow piqued my interest or just came my way.

 

O
NE DAY WHILE READING
the newspaper in Tacoma, Washington, I learned that there was a mummy being examined with modern medical technology by a local physician named Ray Lyle. I immediately called Ray to see if I could get a piece of the action. I was welcomed aboard Lyle's team as a “consultant,” since I was one of only a few in the Pacific Northwest with a background in ancient Egypt, and it was a fascinating experience. The mummy and its accompanying coffins were examined every which way. While physicians scrutinized his physical characteristics, I helped organize and investigate some of the contextual information regarding his identity and place in time.

The mummy was acquired in Egypt in 1891 by a Tacoma businessman named Allen Mason. Although it might seem strange today, back in the nineteenth century, tourists could buy mummies and coffins, or the two together, and bring them home as
exotic souvenirs. Antiquities dealing was big business, and there was a seemingly endless supply of dead ancient Egyptians to satisfy the customers. As a result there are mummies and pieces thereof—hands, heads, et cetera—to be found in museums, in antiques and curio shops, and even in private homes all over Europe and North America. When you consider that mummification in Egypt was practiced for perhaps three millennia, there were plenty of dead folk whose bodies were embalmed, wrapped, coffined, and interred.

The ancient Egyptians were interested in preserving the actual body because it served as a physical home for a manifestation of the soul known as the
ka
. Not everyone, though, got the same treatment. The average Egyptian laborer was probably wrapped in a mat with a few personal items for the afterlife and buried in a pit. But those who could afford it could have their body prepared by experts to survive the ages in a state that more or less resembled them in life. There are very few Egyptian texts that describe the process of mummification, but the Greek historian Herodotus provides a few insights, indicating that there were three different methods of preparation. His description of the deluxe procedure is morbidly fascinating:

Natron is a kind of salt found naturally in the desert and was used even in the cheapest methods to essentially dry out the body, leaving flesh and bones intact. The difference in quality is easily noted. Some of the more economical treatments resemble bones covered with beef jerky, while some of the royal mummies are astoundingly well preserved. The face of the New Kingdom pharaoh, Seti I, for example, resembles a peacefully sleeping man, even though he's been “napping” for over three thousand years now. His son, the great warrior pharaoh Rameses II, also retains a regal composure—and a head of curly reddish hair.

Apart from humans, the Egyptians also mummified millions of animals considered sacred due to their associations with deities, including crocodiles, certain species of fish and birds, baboons, and the ever-popular cat. Beneath the ancient cemetery of Sakkara, there are mazes of catacombs containing many thousands of mummified ibis birds, each housed in its own ceramic container. At the same site, there are huge subterranean tunnels (resembling subway tunnels) containing numerous mammoth stone sarcophagi that once held the preserved bodies of sacred bulls.

There were plenty of mummies to go around. Mark Twain,
who visited in Egypt in 1867, noted in
The Innocents Abroad,
in his own humorous way, that they were indeed prolific:

Public or private unwrappings of exported mummies became a popular form of entertainment in the nineteenth century. Wrappings were cut and a body was exposed for the awe and wonderment of the audience. But it wasn't all spectacle. The dissections were often conducted by physicians or those with an interest in anatomy and the phenomenon of mummification. With the advent of modern technology, especially CT scanning, mummies can be examined in great detail without disturbing their often intricate wrappings.

The study of mummies has become a passion for a number of scholars, especially during the last few decades. In 1994 a couple of researchers, Egyptologist Dr. Bob Brier along with a medical colleague Dr. Ron Wade, conducted what was likely the first authentic Egyptian mummification in two millennia. With the procedures outlined by Herodotus and other details derived from the study of ancient specimens, a body “donated to science” was prepared in the traditional fashion and then covered in natron.
The experiment provided a lot of insight and, when periodically checked, the corpse's long-term preservation appears likely.

I recall the first time I ever saw a mummy. It was on display in a small glass case in the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County. I was there to see the dinosaurs, but what young boy couldn't resist taking a look at such a spooky side attraction? His name was Pu, and he lived during the time the Greeks ruled Egypt, about two thousand years ago. He, too, had been purchased in Egypt many decades ago and brought to America.

Pu's face and toes were exposed, and he wasn't a particularly pretty sight. In fact, his face looked more like a skull than a preserved visage, and it gave me plenty to talk about. My other youthful encounters with the Egyptian dead were from the black-and-white images on the television screen, such as Boris Karloff as the infamous Imhotep returned to life to claim his ancient love in the classic Universal Pictures horror film
The Mummy
. It both frightened and intrigued me. The rational side of me knew it could never happen, but the notion of reanimated mummies was enough to make me want to sleep with the lights on.

The Tacoma mummy was a surprise to me. I would never have guessed that such an interesting thing was lying about just a few miles from where I lived. What's more, buying a mummy in nineteenth-century Egypt was one thing, but what do you do with it once you return home? Allen Mason kept it at home for a while, then moved it to his downtown office, and finally, after nearly twenty years, donated it to what is now the Washington State Historical Society, a strange item indeed to be found among all manner of items relating to that state's history, including old wagons and political posters. Despite its irrelevance, this white elephant, so to speak, remained a popular attraction at the society's museum. In 1959 it was lent to the University of
Puget Sound, where it served as a kind of curious teaching and research novelty. In 1983 it was returned to the historical society's museum, where it was placed in storage. When Dr. Lyle, a local amateur Egyptologist, learned of the mummy, he put his skills as an orthopedic surgeon to work. The mummy was taken to a local hospital, X-rayed, and run through a CT scanner. Historically speaking, this was one of the earliest mummy CT scans performed in the United States, a procedure that has become increasingly common in such studies.

After joining Lyle's team, I visited the museum to get my first look. The mummy lay in one of his two coffins, still partially wrapped with his head and forearms exposed. His skin was thin and black, and his eye sockets were sunken. I had seen worse. I had once been taken to an abandoned tomb in Egypt where the local villagers disposed of the mummies they would occasionally find. This tomb had a low chamber whose walls were lined with limbless torsos with the heads still attached; another room was filled with a random assortment of arms, legs, and other body parts. It was a horrific sight that was both repulsive and riveting. I didn't stay long, but the memory has certainly persisted.

Back in Tacoma, Ray Lyle's examination revealed some basic facts. The mummy was definitely an adult male who'd died between the ages of twenty-five and forty. In life he stood about five feet three inches tall, and his feet were remarkably small. He'd probably wear a size four or five in a modern man's shoe size. Cause of death? Undetermined.

The body itself lay within a coffin more or less in the shape of a human body, which in turn fit inside another of rectangular shape in the form of a shrine. A botanist friend of mine took some tiny samples from these items and determined that their material of manufacture was primarily wood from the acacia tree. Texts on the
coffins indicated that the mummy's name was Ankhwennefer and came from the town of Ipu, which is known today as Akhmim. Ipu was a major center for the worship of a fertility god named Min. Ankhwennefer appears to have served as “second prophet,” a very high-ranking priest in Min's temple. He lived around the time of the Twenty-fifth Dynasty, approximately 700
B.C.
according to the radiocarbon date of his wrappings. Egypt was in something of a decline at the time, being ruled by Nubians, longtime rivals of the Egyptians who exploited political disunity by sending forces in from the south.

Ankhwennefer is currently being reexamined by a project studying as many of the mummies from Akhmim as can be located (the Akhmim Mummy Studies Consortium). Not surprisingly, given the comings and goings of those nineteenth-century tourists who bought them, they're scattered far and wide. Despite logistical difficulties, studying mummies originating from a single ancient location can provide some interesting comparative information regarding medical practices and religious ideology of the time. Furthermore, the CT-scanning technology is vastly more sophisticated than during our 1985 inspection, and it will likely reveal far more than the basic facts that we were able to determine around twenty-five years ago.