Making a Mummy
Experts at the British Museum are presently investigating an Egyptian mummy dating from the 6th century BC. Purchased in 1820 by the explorer Archibald Edmonstone from diggings at what were euphemistically called "the mummy pits" of Qurna - in reality probably the Tombs of the Nobles - it was brought back to Britain still sealed in its wooden sarcophagus.
The following year Archibald happened to fall ill, probably with some bug picked up in Egypt, and summoned a local doctor, Dr Augustus Granville, to examine and treat him. The two men fell into conversation and Augustus happened to mention his mummy. It was like catnip to a cat.
Dr Granville was an interesting character. His grandmother was English, but he had been born in Milan, in Italy, and was christened Augusto Bozzi. He grew up and studied medicine, but when Napoleon's armies threatened to conscript him, he ran away with a group of travelling actors and ended up in Venice. As the French were in control of Venice, however, he found it expedient to go further afield and went to Greece and Turkey, where his medical skills enabled him to maintain himself. Life under the Ottomans, however, was not entirely to his taste, so his next stop was Spain, but when the French occupied that country he fled to Portugal and enlisted in the British navy. After a spell in the West Indies he ended up in London - and who can tell where his wanderings might have taken him next had he not fallen for a beautiful English girl, married her and perforce settled down in London, where he adopted his grandmother's name of Granville.
At the time London was the capital of the world, not only because of the developing British Empire and the impact of the new technologies of the Industrial Revolution, but also because of Britain's role in the defeat of Napoleon. The young Dr Granville found himself mixing with a wide variety of intellectuals - scientists, writers, politicians on the make, explorers and artists. In his spare time he dabbled widely in the various arts and sciences and when he heard of Archibald's mummy he saw his opportunity to make a name for himself.
Only two years before a fellow Italian, Giovanni Belzoni, had returned to England and published an account of his adventures in Egypt, which included excavations at Luxor, breaking into the pyramid of Khafre, and finding the tomb of Seti I. At that very time London society was thrilled by a life-size reproduction of the famous tomb, set up in a building in Picadilly that is now the home of the Egyptian Tourist Board.
Granville explained to his patient, now his friend, his desire to examine a mummy scientifically in order to discover the secrets of the embalming process. Little did he realise that he was to uncover a scientific mystery instead.
Our knowledge of embalming comes mainly from Herodotus, who had visited the embalmers workshops of his day and left a full description of how the process was carried out. The body of a wealthy person had the internal organs removed through a slit in the left side before being soaked for a month in a solution of natron. When the moisture had been extracted from the body it was then padded to give it a life-like appearance and wrapped in bandages before being returned to the relatives for burial.
This process was time-consuming and therefore expensive, so the bodies of poorer people were treated differently. A acid solution was injected through the anus, which was then plugged until the internal organs had dissolved, after which the mess was drained via the same aperature. This is his description:
"Mummification is a distinct profession. The embalmers, when a body is brought to them, produce specimen models in wood, painted to resemble nature, and graded in quality; the best and most expensive kind is said to represent a being whose name I shrink from mentioning in this connection. [Almost certainly Osiris - KKD.] The next best is somewhat inferior and cheaper while the third sort is cheapest of all. After pointing out these differences in quality, they ask which of the three is required, and the kinsmen of the dead man, having agreed upon a price, go away and leave the embalmers to their work.
"The most perfect process is as follows: as much as possible of the brain is extracted through the nostrils with an iron hook, and what the hook cannot reach is rinsed out with drugs; next the flank is laid open with a flint knife and the whole contents of the abdomen removed; the cavity is then thoroughly cleansed and washed out, first with palm wine and again with an infusion of pounded spices. After that it is filled with pure bruised myrrh, cassia, and every other aromatic substance with the exception of frankincense, and sewn up again, after which the body is placed in natron, covered entirely over, for seventy days - never longer. When this period, which must not be exceeded, is over, the body is washed and then wrapped from head to foot in linen cut into strips and smeared on the underside with gum, which is commonly used by the Egyptians instead of glue. In this condition the body is given back to the family, who have a wooden case made, shaped like the human figure, into which it is put. The case is then sealed up and stored in a sepulchral chamber, upright against the wall.
"When, for reasons of expense, the second quality is called for, the treatment is different: no incision is made and the intestines are not removed, but oil of cedar is injected with a syringe into the body through the anus which is afterwards stopped up to prevent the liquid from escaping. The body is then pickled in natrum for the prescribed number of days, on the last of which the oil is drained off. The effect of it is so powerful that as it leaves the body it brings with it the stomach and intestines in a liquid state, and as the flesh, too, is dissolved by the natron, nothing of the body is left but the bones and skin. After this treatment it is returned to the family without further fuss.
"The third method, used for embalming the bodies of the poor, is simply to clear out the intestines with a purge and keep the body seventy days in natron. It is then given back to the family to be taken away."
To his delighted surprise, the very next day Dr Granville answered a knock at the door to find a cart on which was Archibold's mummy, a gift from his friend. Granville had the whole thing carried into his house and laid on a table - I can only hope for his wife's sake that it was not the dining room table! For the next six weeks he spent every spare minute working on the mummy.
One he had prised open the sarcophagus he removed the mummy and began to carefully unwrap it. At this time public unwrappings of mummies were a popular spectacle and Granville could, undoubtedly, have made a fair amount of money by performing in a theatre before a paying audience, but as his aim was scientific rather than commercial, he kept the door locked and worked slowly and in private. He carefully recorded the objects wrapped in the bandages, which in this case amounted to no more than a few blue beads and some grains of wheat. He noted that "the bandages had been applied with a neatness and precision that would baffle the imitative power of the most adroit surgeon."
Once the bandages were removed he began to examine the body, discovering that it was female and still supple - both skin and joints were flexible - and well-formed. Folds of skin over the abdomen told him that the woman had been what we would call overweight - or, as he put it, "before death this part of the body must have had very considerable dimensions". To his surprise he discovered no sign of an incision in the side of the corpse: the quality of the bandaging as well as the decoration of the sarcophagus had led him to consider that the woman had belonged to a wealthy family.
The next surprise came when he made his own incision in the woman's abdomen, because he found that her internal organs were in as good conditon as could be expected after 2,000 years. In fact, they were so well preserved that he was able to pronounce on the cause of death - "ovarian dropsy", which was the 19th century term for ovarian cancer. The most puzzling find, however, was a waxy substance which, combined with the other circumstances, led Granville to deduce that the mummifiers had employed a technique not described by Herodotus - soaking the body in a mixture of beeswax and bitumen.
To test his theory Granville experimented with still-born babies, keeping them simmering in a mixture of wax and bitumen over a gentle heat for hours and days. The results were entirely satisfactory, as he reported in a paper read before the Royal Society and published in the "Philsophical Transactions". When he was invited to give a public lecture at the Royal Institution he displayed the remains of the mummy and carried out practical demonstrations of his method by the light of candles made from the wax scraped from the mummy.
In 1853, with both public interest and his own heading in other directions, Granville sold the mummy case and the remains of the mummy itself to the British Museum. It wasn't much of an acquisition, as little more remained of the mummy than the lungs, heart, some bones and other soft tissue, and some of the famous wax. The mummy and its case were docketed and stored away in the basement of the museum where they lay until the museum's storerooms were emptied to escape the blitz.
Even when the evacuated items were returned to the museum after the war Granville's mummy still wasn't unpacked and it wasn't until the 1980s when a new recruit to the Egyptian Department of the British Museum, John Taylor, began to poke around in the basement and discovered the huge packing case and was curious enough to open it. It took him a while to track down the history of his find, though he had the advantage over Granville that he was able to read the hieroglyphs on the sarcophagus and discover that the dead woman had been called Irtyersenu and that she had been a "lady of the house" - a posh name for housewife! He was also able to date the sarcophagus on stylistic grounds to the 6th century BC, a date which was confirmed by radio-carbon dating.
In the twenty years since he found Irtyersenu, Taylor had been calling on his colleagues in the museum to help him investigate the remains. Dr Eddie Tapp, a pathologist, discovered that the "ovarian dropsy" had been benign and unlikely to be the case of Irtyersenu's death. He was not able to determine exactly what had killed this ancient housewife, but he found that she was suffering from malaria, TB and pneumonia, any of which could have been fatal.
The most macabre finding, however, was that the waxy substance had nothing to do with the process of mummification. Granville's theory has been completely disproved, as analysis of the substance showed neither beeswax nor bitumen to be present. Instead it was adipocere, an entirely natural product of the breakdown of body fats. The method used to preserve Irtyersenu's corpse is still unknown, but her story proves that there is nothing new under the sun.
A Californian cosmetic surgeon recently hit the news when he disclosed that he was running his car with biofuel made from the fat removed from his patients by liposuction. Granville beat him by 180 years by using the fat removed from his "patient" to light his exhibition.
© Kendall K. Down 2009
