The Mummy Congress: Science, Obsession, And the Everlasting Dead by Heather Pringle
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
I really appreciate my colleague Tony thinking to loan me this book. I love detailed accounts of obsessive subcultures and the insular, scientific world of mummy specialists qualifies. This was a thought-provoking work. One of the controversies in the field is whether to do destructive autopsies on mummies. I had hoped for a middle ground: at most use the accurate, tiny tools of laparoscopic surgery and digital laparoscopes. However, a close look at the work of an avid dissector convinced me: tools for mushy bodies don't work in dessicated corpses hardened to resin. Not fully exploiting some corpses misses unique discoveries like the example of an entire workman's shirt hidden in the wrappings. Other myth's exploded: Twain probably made up mummies as locomotive fuel (I had thought as much) and there never was paper made from mummy linens. This despite its inclusion in multiple histories of paper making.
I never watched the TV documentary on "cocaine mummies", but the discovery of THC and cocaine traces in the hair of Peruvian and Egyptian mummies made me want to believe partying elite were sending brickes of coke and bales of marijuana to each other across the southern Atlantic. But, apparently such trips were not possible at the time and such assaying only tells us how littel we know about the chemical processes involved.
The title refers to a regular meeting of mummy experts and the author, a report for a magazine, attended and following the "threads" from one year to track down those active in the "fields" of bogs, Valley of the Kings, Incan repositories and more. A chapter near the end on the ruthless, police state tactics South American missionaires took to destroy Incan mummy culture, a culturally important form of ancestor worship, was among the most repulsive material of a work that goes for the visceral.
View all my reviews
No comments:
Post a Comment