Looking After Mummy: The Ethics of Preserving Human Remains
Spending time at the KNH Centre, Manchester, UK, studying Biomedical and Forensic Techniques for Egyptology with Professor Rosalie David, gave me a different perspective on how and why we should care for ancient human remains. Besides the usual curiosity people have everywhere for ‘mummies’ and the fascination for Egyptian tombs and mysteries, there is a real aspect to what they can give us in return.
A brief deconstruction: from the time of death of a human to the finding of human remains, all forensic techniques apply, but common sense has recently turned into professional behaviour and techniques, allied to ethics when dealing with human bodies.
For centuries, travellers to Egypt associated mummies with medicines as explained below. Since Napoleon’s Expedition more and more mummies were brought from Egypt, carelessly, by anyone of means, to serve both as a souvenir and a curiosity to display publicly. For many years the Egyptian government offered items of its heritage or sold them on the international market. Only after the end of the Second World War, several international conventions (UNESCO) have been enacted to combat the theft, illicit exportation and trafficking of cultural property as well as to promote the repatriation of artefacts to their countries of origin.
Egypt issued Law 117/1983 making museums and other institutions housing mummies start to worry about their conservation and public exhibition. According to this law, all antiquities in Egypt are the property of the state and their unlawful removal from the country subsequent to that date is theft. I learned from an Egyptian scientist working in a Cairo research facility that there is a warehouse somewhere in Cairo that is filled with body parts, complete bodies, heads, and the authorities don’t even allow scientists to take anything from there. If you are to study one of those, it has to be by picture. Come on... it's one thing is to smuggle them out of Egypt, and quite another to be able to study them!
To have a preliminary and optimal possible diagnosis in paleopathology it is advisable to perform an analysis of the remains in situ, before any type of removal from its archaeological context. Changes might also have occurred post-mortem and those have to be recorded. Also the body position and surrounding environment may alter human tissues and so what we find is not necessarily what was placed there originally.
The deterioration of human remains starts prior to the excavation at the burial site; it is necessary to follow forensic osteological procedures whether these human remains are skeletized or mummified. Deterioration conditions can damage the bodies beyond restoration and that excludes the possibility of future sample retrieval. There are also possibilities of damage by careless excavation procedures at the site, such as the mishandling of the artefacts or rodent attack, or, in the case of King Tut, decapitation of the body.
Some inept conservation attempts also damage the mummies and skeletons. Every body is an archive of information that has to be preserved as so, as little as possible should be put inside a mummy, and a record of all steps must be made and updated.
In handling mummies we should never forget that, as Dr. Anthony David, an expert on human remains conservation says, human bodies are an excellent source of information, both medical and cultural; we can have an idea of how ancient peoples lived, ate and socially interacted just by studying their physical remains.
Depending on the conditions of the soil, humidity, air ventilation, heat, animal action, human intervention, and natural disasters, there can be several types of state in which the human remains can be found. Mummies are nothing more than mummified tissue, which is desiccated tissue. The word mummia, according to Abdel Latif, an Arab doctor of the 13th century, who travelled to Egypt, originated from a substance flowing from a Persian mountains’ top, mingling with waters that carried it down, and coagulated like mineral pitch, but the term continued to be used on preserved bodies such as the mummies from ancient Egypt. In Latin, (mumia), means to lie down in aromatic resins, one of the last stages of mummification procedures, loaned from the Arabic mūmiyyah, مومية, which means also bitumen.
From the 12th century onwards, travellers going to Persia spoke about mummies with miraculous properties, healing wounds instantly and mending broken bones. When Persian travellers went to
A real ‘hunt for Egyptian mummies’ began, which peaked in the middle ages and again in the 17th and 18th centuries. Many boticaries diluted the substance in wine, honey or water for human consumption. In some cases the substance was not powdered, but as pieces of the body or in a paste. Many Egyptian mummies have already disappeared from the face of the Earth due to this practice. Even kings thought they would become more ‘royal’ when ingesting mummy powder. The French king Francis I (1515-1547), took a dose of mummy mixed with dried rhubarb daily and kept a small packet with him (amulet?), to stay strong and deter assassins. King Charles II (1630-1685), rubbed ground up mummy powder on his skin as he believed this would turn him into a ‘Pharaoh’. The following phrase written by James Shirley in Bird in a Cage, appears to refer to this practice: Make mummy of my flesh and sell me to the apothecaries.
Dr. Angelique Corthals, a specialist on mummy DNA retrieval and analysis, has come up with an idea that should be widely used. Thinking that, whenever possible, the specimen records must be linked to digital images connecting sequence data and visual identity, museums should be at the forefront of preserving molecular information, as, if a vouchered sample of the original DNA is kept, it will allow the reproducibility of results, being also a back-up sample.
The repairing, cleaning and displaying of mummies have also options that better preserve our specimens. But that is very technical for me. More and more technology allows us to choose how to better preserve our ‘jewels’, it is just a matter of deciding that human bodies are as important as gold or precious stones or even more.
But we should never forget that we are dealing with human bodies and, although they are ancient, decayed, dried out and quiet, they all were the envelope of somebody’s soul one day...
In Manchester Museum, UK last year (2008) there was a big poll both online and at the museum so people could give their insights and then the museum would decide whether displaying a ‘naked’ Asru or not. I had the opportunity to follow this closely and the Museum Egyptian Collections’ Curator, Dr. Karen Exell was very positive about the outcome. Now Asru is even a star for a German documentary shown already on German TV but also available online
I read many of the cards left by people at the Museum and those that were most impressive were the children’s. They all want the mummies to be as visible as possible, as for them, the mummies are the highlight of their trip. Several years ago The Petrie Museum did a survey about whether human bodies should be widely displayed and visible to the public or not, and concluded that most people did feel that exhibiting human remains was acceptable, although Aboriginal and Native American remains were more contentious.
I believe truly that this desire to prevent the exhibition of human bodies must have come from someone with a religious agenda. The ICOM states the code of ethics for museums in general. This is what they have to say about human remains (see also points 2.5 and 4.3):
“Human Remains and Material of Sacred Significance: Research on human remains and materials of sacred significance must be accomplished in a manner consistent with professional standards and take into account the interests and beliefs of the community, ethnic or religious groups from whom the objects originated, where these are known. “
Adequate conservation of human remains and the appropriate techniques has been the object of several presentations by specialists in some of previous Mummy Congresses, a meeting happening every four years. We can conclude that ethics and technology may go hand in hand to achieve a perfect preservation of our past, both as cultural artefacts remaining from vanished important cultures but also as a reliable source of information for human evolution, and the evolution of diseases.
Have a look at the video below in which Dr Zahi Hawass reveals the secrets of mummification
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Comments
The topic picture is most definitely not Amenhotep II. It is the so-called "Elder Lady" from the tomb of Amenhotep II.
Your top picture is more than likely Queen Tiye of the 18th Dynasty who was the wife of Amenhotep III. They had tested a lock of the hair on the mummy and found that she was more than likely Queen Tiye who is also thought to be Akhenaten's mother.
You're both indeed correct - that isn't the mummy of Amenhotep II, but was in fact one of the mummies found in the tomb of Amenhotep II. Thanks for spotting it!
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