Interview: Bob Brier On How To Read A Mummy

Bob “Mr Mummy” Brier is an American Egyptologist and the world’s leading authority on mummies. He’s a familiar face from documentaries on channels such as National Geographic and Discovery Civilizations, and has investigated some of the most famous embalmed corpses in history, including Tutankhamun, Ramesses the Great, the Medici (a powerful ruling dynasty of the Republic of Florence) and Eva Perón. In 1994, he carried out the first mummification in 2,000 years achieved exclusively by use of Egyptian tools and techniques.

Brier talks to Heritage Key about how to “read” a mummy, his involvement with Jean-Pierre Houdin’s endeavour to prove that the Great Pyramid of Giza was built using an internal ramp and his current work on Egyptian obelisks. He also reveals which celebrity mummy keeps him awake at night.

HK: How did you first become interested in mummies?

BB: Well, it’s a funny question ‘cause it’s almost backing up how I became interested in Egyptology. I never went to school for Egyptology. I had attended medical school, I had a PhD in philosophy, but my real love was basketball – that’s what I did, I played basketball. After I graduated I was still playing basketball in tournaments, and then I injured my knees, and I was having these operations on my legs – I was in casts from my ankles to my knees for months and months, and someone gave me a copy of a hieroglyphic textbook, and I started learning hieroglyphs. After a year of this, I started teaching it at the university, then people started asking me to do translations.

So I got involved in Egyptology that way. And then one year, my students said to me “gee Dr Brier, we really got to go to Egypt.” So I said “okay,” and we had a class trip – we all went to Egypt, me and a load of university students. It was fabulous, and when we came back, I started reading a lot about mummies – because I had a little bit of a medical background – and I realised what people were saying about mummies just wasn’t right. You know, they weren’t coming up with the right answers, or sometimes they just weren’t asking the questions that should have been asked. That was when I got into mummies, just realising that there was something missing there.

HK: And how did you get from there to becoming a recognised expert on mummies?

BB: Well, I teach the language – I teach Middle Egyptian. So, because you can translate you have access to the documents and the text and things like that. So I started doing my book on Egyptian mummies and it was well received. I was still an outsider I think – you know, I hadn’t been published in other journals and stuff like that, and just this book on mummies came on the scene. But everybody realised it was pretty good, and it was saying things that nobody else had ever said.

So then I was asked to go to conferences and do this and that, and it just broadened out in terms of my interest in Egyptology. Then I started publishing in the regular journals. So it was a gradual process, from legs being operated on to learning hieroglyphs, to realising that mummies had to be studied better, then my book on Egyptian mummies, then it just sort of took off from there.

HK: How do you “read” a mummy, as you describe it?

BB: Something I often tell my classes is that mummies are like little encyclopedias if you know how to read them. There’s an amazing amount of information stored in a mummy, and for many years, people didn’t realise this – I mean, I wish if when they had discovered Tutankhamun they had known that, and they could have handled the mummy a little more delicately, done a few more studies before wrecking it.

If, for example, you want to know how a person was mummified, you do an x-ray – just a simple X-ray – then you can reconstruct the mummification. You can see for example, “oh, the head was positioned here first, and the resin was put in the cranium through the nose.” I did that with Tutankhamun’s mummy, because there was some very nice X-rays of Tutankhamun’s mummy, and I was able to reconstruct the whole mummification process.

So that’s one thing you can learn if you X-ray a mummy, and know how to read it. Another then, for example, we do diseases – palepathology is another area that’s very, very important to us, and we study diseases in the ancient world. With new techniques we can really do amazing studies on mummies and find out often – not always, but sometimes – what killed them. Often we can get lucky and see the organism that killed them. We might be able to see form an X-ray a tremendous infection – for example Ramesses the Great, who ruled Egypt for 67 years, he died in his 80s and he probably died from septicemia, a massive infection which started around the mandible, his jawbone, which is worn away by disease.

Then, if you’re lucky, you can take some soft tissue samples. We can rehydrate them and see if there’s any organisms, any microorganisms. You can learn an awful lot from them – you can learn status for example. If you look at the bones you can see if they’re well mineralised, as we say, and you can tell if they had a good diet. We can tell that from an X-ray. So if a person had a good diet that was rich in protein, that means they were wealthy. Mummies are like little encyclopedias, I’m telling you.

HK: Can you learn much about the time they lived in, and the culture surrounding them?

BB: Sure. Even from the wrapping techniques for example, or the mummification technique itself, you can often tell what period the mummy’s from. If they don’t come neatly labeled, you’ve gotta do a little detective work. For example in later period mummies, they’re usually mummified very poorly but wrapped very fancily. The idea is that really fancy wrapping hides the very shoddy workmanship. So often, by just the wrappings you can tell things. Mummies are wonderful things.

HK: You’ve been working with mummies for about 30 years. Technology has obviously come on a long way in that time – which new technologies have you found to be particularly useful in your work?

BB: Oh, there’s been a lot. For example, MRIs, where you look at soft tissue so to speak. Well, you can’t do a real MRI on a mummy, because MRIs work off the hydrogen and the water in a body. We’ve got something that almost takes its place in a sense. What we can do is rehydrate tissues now – we have new solutions, better solutions, and what we can do is if we get a little sample of tissue of a mummy, we can rehydrate and test for organisms and found what killed a person.

For example, I once worked on the bodies of the Medici. Recently, we were able to show that some of them died of malaria. It was believed that some of them killed each other – murder, violence, all of that. Clearly some of them died of simple malaria. We were able to tell that by doing a simple histological test, as we call it. So there’s all kinds of new tests and new lab procedures. We can find diseases that we never dreamed of being able to find, so it’s really quite exciting.

I’ll tell you one thing that doesn’t work. This has a lot of hype, and I don’t understand it – I see it mentioned all the time in newspapers and magazines: DNA studies. We really don’t get interesting information from DNA studies of Egyptian mummies. Or we haven’t done yet. You hear a lot of talk about it, but you don’t see it in the scientific journals, because we haven’t had any solid results yet. In a few years, it’s gonna come. But so far, no one has got any important information from DNA of an Egyptian mummy.

Is it because of 3,000 years of degradation, or is it because of the mummification process? We’re not sure. We’re hoping to figure it out, because my mummy – the mummy that I made 14 years ago or so – that mummy is just like an ancient Egyptian mummy in every way, except it’s not 3,000 years old. So now we’re trying to replicate the DNA from our mummy, and we’re hoping to be able to answer that question.

HK: You touched on mummies such as King Tut who were studied a long time back with primitive techniques. Do you think there are certain things that we can never discern about him because of the way he was treated?

BB: The thing that I really feel bad about is that they literally ripped the body apart. They couldn’t get it out of the coffin – he was stuck in the coffin, because at the time of burial, they poured sacred oils on him, and those sacred oils have congealed over 3,300 years, and he was stuck solid. So they eventually came in and just sawed him out and ripped him apart. Which is just a horrible thing to do to a royal mummy.

So that’s what really bothers me about King Tut. But I still think we’ll be able to do some pretty good studies on him. But he’s been really manhandled, and that’s just a shame. The head is disarticulated, and there are little pieces missing. But we’ll still be able to do some studies, and the big thing is, find out who his parents were eventually.

HK: Could that be something that advances in DNA studies will one day help to clear up?

BB: Exactly. Yes.

HK: Are there modern challenges to studying mummies now – certain restrictions in terms of access, for instance, that didn’t exist previously?

BB: Not too many, no. One of the problems is that, a famous mummy like Tutankhamun, you have very limited access and they don’t give out samples. One of the things that’s difficult about working with Egyptian mummies especially is you’re not allowed to take samples out of the country. So that’s a little bit difficult. But there are plenty of mummies in the United States where I work, where we can get access. It would be nice to take some samples back with us to the States where we have better lab techniques and things like that. But that’ll change.

HK: As you’ve already mentioned, as well as studying mummies, you also made one back in 1994. That must have been an amazing experience?

BB: It was, it really was. We did it with all ancient tools. And when I started to make my first incision on the cadaver, I really did feel like: wow, this is about as close to an ancient Egyptian embalmer as I’ll ever get. So it really was exciting, it was a real high. And we did it with very specific questions we wanted to answer. It wasn’t just, you know: “let’s mummify!” We asked: “how do you take the brain out through the nose,” and “can you take a liver out of a three and half centimetre incision in the abdomen,” and “how much natron does it take to dehydrate.” And even things like: “why does a mummy look the way it does – is it because of 3,000 years in the tomb, or is it because of the mummification?”

So there were lots of specific questions, and it was very exciting. Frankly, there was a little bit of tension there. I don’t mean between our team members, but there was tension in that we didn’t know if we’d succeed. We could have ended up with a rotting cadaver.

HK: Is it something you would do again? If you did, is it something you think you could do better?

BB: The answers in that order are no and yes (laughs). I don’t wanna do it again – it was a big project, it took a lot of people. Everyone always talks about it like it was my mummy that I mummified. But I had a huge team behind me, and a lot of really skilled wonderful people working with me and coordinating everything. So I really don’t want to do it again.

But I do hope somebody else does it again, because I think they’ll do it better. I think they’ll be able to take careful records, learn from our study what are the next questions to answer. So there’s no doubt – it should be done. And I think it will be. There’s a Swiss colleague, Frank Rühli who’s thinking about doing it. He just mummified a human leg, which is pretty good. Maybe he’ll do a whole body?

HK: How could that further advance the study of mummies – i.e what more can be learned?

BB: If I were to do it again, it would be very interesting to monitor the body throughout the process. The body was placed in this special salt called natron for about 35 days, and it would be very interesting to monitor the body day by day and find out how much dehydration takes place and when, so that you could get an idea of what were the parameters of when a body might turn bad – when it might really be in trouble – or when it could just keep going forever. We could learn so much more by monitoring the body day to day, and we didn’t do that during my study. When we mummified, we took out the internal organs, we covered the body with natron, and we just left it for 35 days. But I think somebody should carefully see what areas dry out first. There’s a lot that can be done.

HK: Your work as an Egyptologist obviously extends beyond mummies too – one other project you were involved with was Jean-Pierre Houdin’s endeavour to prove that the Great Pyramid of Giza was built using an internal ramp. Houdin recently spoke to Heritage Key and he was very complimentary of you and your involvement with his project. What drew you to Houdin and his work, and made you want to co-author a book with him?

BB: It was a combination. First of all, I thought it was a very worthwhile hypothesis, the idea that there was this internal ramp – it made a lot of sense to me. The other reason that I got involved was it was clear that this guy needed help (laughs)! He wasn’t an Egyptologist, he’s a bit of a dreamer – really brilliant, and really terrific at what he does, and I really admire him. But I just though: goodness, this guy needs help!

I sort of gave up my research for a year, and I tell you: I’m glad I did it. I learned an awful lot about the pyramid, and it was really, really interesting working with him. It’s one of these central questions; it’s hard to believe that we know so much about Egyptology, but we don’t know for certain how the pyramid was built, after all these centuries of studying it. You know, when people think of Egypt they think of the Great Pyramid. But we don’t really know how it was built, and I thought Houdin had a real advance towards solving that problem. So I felt a moral obligation to help.

HK: Houdin believes he’s very, very close to proving his theory. Do you think he ever will succeed?

BB: Yes, I do. I don’t think there’s gonna be a problem getting access – it may take a year or so. Because of the nature of the test he wants to do, which is non-destructive; he doesn’t even want to touch the pyramid, he just wants to take an infared camera and take pictures of the pyramid, and hopefully detect if there’s an internal ramp there. I think he’s going to get his permission within a year or so.

HK: Do you think it could really draw a line under this debate?

BB: Absolutely, I think it can end it. I’m not saying he’s 100% right – I think it’s the best theory we’ve got right now. And I think he will end it. I think it can be really decided, I don’t think it’s going to be wandering forever. Either the ramp’s in there or it’s not. We’ll detect it if it’s there. It’s going to be finalised within the next couple of years, and that’s going to be exciting.

HK: One person who is slightly less enthusiastic about Houdin’s work is Dr Zahi Hawass…

BB: Who’s he? I’m kidding!

HK: In another interview with Heritage Key, he said that the internal ramp theory is “completely wrong” and “really Bob Brier doesn’t know anything about pyramids. He’s a good guy, he knows about mummies, but pyramids are not his field.” What do you have to say to that?

BB: Well, I think it’s true – pyramids aren’t my field (laughs)! Mummies are not so much about pyramids. Zahi’s an old friend of mine, it’s okay. I think that the theory really is worth testing. Let me put it this way: I have spoken to the pyramid experts, the big boys, and they all think it’s worth testing too. It’s not just the case that you’ve got a mummy guy saying it’s a good theory.

One of the first things I did was take Jean-Pierre Houdin to a friend of mine, Dieter Arnold, who’s a real pyramid expert, and one of the world’s acknowledged authorities, and he thought it was worth testing. Zahi may not want to test it, he may be working on his own projects now – I don’t know. But I have no bad feelings whatsoever about Zahi, and as you can tell, he has no bad feelings about me. I think we just disagree on the value of the theory. I think Jean-Pierre really has a shot at something important. And it costs so little to test it, so why not?

HK: What area of research are you concentrating on at the moment?

BB: Right now, I’m actually writing a kind of historical book, about obelisks. You know, pyramids are fabulous – but obelisks are pretty good too! And believe it or not, nobody knows how they were erected – nobody actually knows how they got them up. They’re really remarkable things, because obelisks are just these single chunks of stone, and they were just balanced on the pedestal, there’s nothing holding them there.

I’m writing a book that’s historical, meaning it’s about ancient Egyptian obelisks, but it’s also about how the three obelisks were moved in modern times to Paris, London and New York. Each of those stories is just a remarkable adventure. Each one involves drama, heroes, all kind of things, and I really think the public should hear about it. But it’s more of a historical work than a research topic, if you know what I mean. So that’s what I’m working on now, and having a great time with it.

HK: When can we expect to see that published?

BB: I think it’s going to take about a year. I’m a fast worker.

HK: We’ve seen you on many TV documentaries. Do you have any TV projects in the pipeline at the moment?

BB: Zero (laughs)! As you know, I’ve done a lot of television, but right now I don’t want to do any more. I had wonderful experiences with it – the people I worked with were fabulous, they let me have the final word on everything so it’s pretty accurate, I didn’t have to worry about saying things they wanted me to say. I had an ideal experience with TV for 10 years. But now I’ve been there, done that, got the T-shirt. I’m just concentrating on my research now – although it was great for my research too, because the TV companies paid for me to go places that I wanted to see. But right now, I’m happy to stay home, so I’ve got no plans at all.

HK: Not even if there was interest in your obelisks book?

BB: Obelisks? Well, maybe (laughs)! We’ll see, we’ll see! But right now, I don’t have any plans for TV.

HK: You’ve studied some of the most famous mummies in history – King Tut, Ramesses the Great, the Medici. Are there any mummies that you’ve not yet had the opportunity to get your hands on that you would one day like to?

HK: Yes, ha. One that I think is quite interesting that I haven’t examined up close, it’s non-Egyptian – Eva Perón. Evita is a unique mummy – she’s perfused with wax and paraffin. I don’t mean she’s coated with wax – she’s actually filled with wax. They did capillary perfusion – they got wax into her by heating the body with hot water and perfusing it with paraffin. She’s basically a big candle! I would love to see her, but I’m not likely to do that since she’s below about 20 feet of concrete at La Recoleta Cemetery in Argentina. But that’s one that I think about every so often, late at night – which mummy would I really like to do? It’s Evita.

HK: What could you learn about Evita if you were allowed to “read” her?

BB: You know, it’s less scientific than personal. I just would like to see the mummy and how amazing it is and how well-preserved it is. I don’t think I could do very many studies on it; it would just be amazing to see. I’ve done so many studies on so many mummies with different techniques. But this is one that may be the gold standard of them all.

Great Pyramid of Giza picture by Swamibu; Mummy in its case picture by Andre Nantel; Eva Peron tomb picture by Dan Noon. Some rights reserved.

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