Momiology (MUMMIFICATION) Part 1 with Kara Cooney & Salima Ikram
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Oh, hey, it's the guy at the gym using a foam roller on his IT band and trying not to cry, Allie Ward. And here we are. We are approaching antiquity. This episode rolls us right into spooktober where we cover everything from bats to pumpkins to dancing spiders. And this month, we got you set up with everything from candy history to critters to this one. This is momeology. It's the study of human population.

preservation in ancient Egypt and also staggering children wrapped in toilet paper down your street. Now, if you're thinking you've heard this one, think again. You didn't. One of our guests is so charismatic and learned. We have the pleasure of bringing her back to chat about her new work. She's got this book called Recycling for Death.

coffin reuse in ancient Egypt and the Thebian royal caches. So she's a professor of Egyptian art and architecture at UCLA. She's written several books about Egyptian history. She's been featured in many documentary programs about death rituals in Egypt and published books including The Good Kings, When Women Ruled the World, The Six Commandments,

queens of Egypt and the woman who would be king had Shepset's rise to power in ancient Egypt. She's one of the world's finest experts in Egypt and Egyptian coffins. Now, this is a special episode. We have a second guest. This is a twofer, this is a bogo, and it's a two-parter with two experts whose work intersects

And our second human gem we have is a Cairo-based professor of Egyptology and Archaeology at the American University in Cairo. She's also been a visiting professor at Yale University. She's authored several books about ancient Egypt, some for young readers, plus Ancient Egypt, An Introduction, Mummy in Ancient Egypt, Equipping the Dead for Eternity.

The knowledge in their brains. We're going to get to it. But I want to thank all the patrons who sent in their wonderful questions for this. You too can join patrons and submit yours before we record. That's at patreon.com slash ologies. It costs a dollar to get into my heart and into the show. Also, you can get some merch for the holidays from ologiesmerch.com. And for no dollars, thanks for leaving us reviews, which helps so much.

Thanks, Beth. We do do our best. And also to Retired Cutter, who left a review that they love the show but not the occasional swear words. Just a reminder, we have this spinoff show we just started recently called Smologies that you can find in any podcast app. They are kid-safe and clean.

classroom-friendly versions of ology as they are trimmed of any adult language. So get those wherever you get podcasts. Speaking of language, though, okay, mamiology, it's a real word.

It's not a common one. It was coined in academic literature in 1894, and I think no one has used it since then, which is embarrassing for the author. But honestly, we're preserving it here, and we're hoping it enjoys a very prosperous afterlife 130 years later.

So in this spooktober or good for any time episode, we're going to navigate ancient tombs. We're going to smell eternal resting. We're going to question what eternal resting is, decipher coffin engravings, learn about natural and less natural mummification techniques.

discuss terminology around the word mummy, and listen to these two experts dish about socioeconomic factors in mummification, animal mummies, lingering mysteries, field work, and the debate around human sacrifice, plant resins, fragrance, flim-flam, so much more with mommiologists Dr. Cara Cooney and Dr. Salima Ikram. ♪

I was saying how sweet both of you guys are when you talk about the other one. You both say such sweet, nice things. I can tell that you guys are actually friends and like each other. That's great. Unless you do a good job faking it, in which case, excellent. Yeah, I mean, she's really a terrible bitch. So again, you may recognize Dr. Cooney from her Egyptology episode, but quick intros here. Cara Cooney. Salimah Kram. She, her, for me. Me too. Well, are all...

mummies in sarcophagi or can they be in any type of coffin? It's an unfortunate thing that as bodies came into museums, as things are dug up out of the ground, how they're found is not necessarily the way they're stored in museums and other storage facilities. And the way that I work with coffins, it

generally they don't have a mummy inside of them anymore, which is a shame because it's ruining their reason for existence. The reason for the coffin's existence is to hold a dead human body. And when you work with one of these,

coffins in a museum, it's a good thing because then you're able to see the inside of the piece, particularly if it's a decorated piece on the inside. It's all kinds of polychrome paint. Removing that mummy is great. So for someone who collects data on coffins, finding an unoccupied one is nice.

If you're the person who was taken out of the coffin by someone else, it's probably less nice. But for example, the coffins in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, all of the mummies were taken out of them and sent to the Peabody Anthropological Institute.

where they're preserved in pieces and not very well. So they're in different cities even. And it's hugely problematic. So yeah, but I'll let Salima jump on there. I mean, because I dig a lot, I get a lot of my bodies are in the ground, right?

And as they are buried. So some of them, in fact, are indeed in coffins, but some of them are just wrapped up in mats, which is what the ancient Egyptians did. And then, as Kara well knows, sometimes the ancient Egyptians would reuse a coffin. So they just take a body out and put it down on the floor next to the next batch that was coming in and someone else would get the coffin out.

And of course, over here also, a lot of the mummies we find, it's from robbed tombs because, you know, about 150 years after someone was buried, their tomb would be robbed and robbers would rip out

The bodies, the coffins would be separated. Sometimes they'd just burn the coffins in order to get the gold. So it's a mixed bag of things. Now, as long as we're going back in time. Well, first off, I'd love to ask how you all met. How long have you known each other? And where does your work intersect? How long have we known each other, Salima? We met in Darsur. We met in Darsur. You were still a grad student. Yeah, I was probably...

fourth year grad student, we met in 1997. Yeah. We're going on 30 years that we've known each other. And we met at, we met at a dig that it, you would stay at this dig house in Lish, drive to the shore, but you would stay there for four months. And this is before the interwebs and connections. Nobody had a phone. I wrote to my family on that blue airmail. Yeah.

Yeah, we had actual mail and I would write long letters as if it was like, you know, the 1960s and it was all very romantic. And we would all pile into the Land Rover, Land Cruiser type vehicle and drive to Dashur, which was probably how long? Like 35, 40 minutes away. Just a quick note here. So Dashur is just outside of Cairo. This was a cemetery in what was called Memphis, which used to be the capital of ancient Egypt.

And kings during the Old and Middle Kingdoms from 4700 to around 3700 years ago were buried in this cluster of pyramids, some of which are crumbling and decaying back into sand and stone as this

vast golden desert scape horizon kind of reclaims them. Now these Dasher pyramids, side note, they served as kind of practice architecture for what would later become the Great Pyramids in nearby Giza, which you have probably seen in so many books, you've

people's Instagrams. But yes, the site of Dashur is historically a really important necropolis that's full of tombs of quite important and wealthy people. A lot of VIPs. And there we would work. And I was working on the limestone fragments of the funerary chapels and the queen's chapels. And Salima was working on any dead body she could get her hands on. It's true. Of course. And

Was it hard at the time to get your hands on a dead body? No, no. When you dig them up, they're there. I was looking primarily for dead animals, but I was also looking at a bit at dead humans. Did we have a mouse infestation in the house that year, Cara? No.

Yes. And sand fleas and the sand fleas I solved with my essential oils. And then everyone who made fun of me for my essential oils was like, could you please essential oil in my room? And I'm like, yes, bitch, I can. And so the essential oils saved the day from the sand fleas, but the mice, I, I. Oh my God, the mice.

couldn't handle. And I remember there's this eminent Egyptologist by the name of Dieter Arnold. And, you know, he has the German accent and I'm due to Arnold and, you know, very, very important, eminent Egyptologist. And at two in the morning, the mouse attacked me and was in my bed. And I remember knocking on Dieter Arnold's door at two in the morning, but please save me

from the mouse and he sweetly came in. He grabbed the mouse with both of his open hands and then put it out into the wild. And yes, but there were mice everywhere. It was scary. - That part was terrifying. - Only to have it find its way back. - Oh, it did. It would come back because Dieter loves animals. So he would take them and gently put them outside. And of course they just turned right around and race back in. And if they were in his room, no one cared.

But it was like they were also got trapped in the bread bin. That was a bit gross. Oh, I remember that. And I was also at that point making my own skin creams with a blender and shea butter. And I don't know what the hell I was doing. And they thought they were delicious. Oh.

And the mice would all go into my toiletries bag and they would eat the shea butter lotions that I so carefully whipped up in my blender at home in Baltimore. Once I learned to put those far away, then the mice didn't, they didn't come into my room. We named them Fred and Ethel. Do people tend to bond doing field work?

Yeah, because you're there alone and there's nothing to do, right? I learned to drink doing field work, which is a problem because now I'm learning not to drink. You really get to know each other and you do. Either you hate someone or you grow to love them. There are enemies made in the field. This is so true. I bet. It's so true. Other than just mice. Yeah.

Salima, I know we've gotten to talk to Cara about a book series that inspired her lifetime love of Egyptology. I'd love to hear how you ended up in this field.

Well, it was the Time Life Book of Ancient Egypt that first introduced me to Egypt. And then I got it for my eighth birthday and I thought these were the coolest people. And then we went to visit Egypt and I still remember going into the pyramids and I remember what they smelled like too. So that wasn't as nice, but it was just the most extraordinary, extraordinary place. And I fell in love with it and decided to be an Egyptologist. And that was it.

It's a very short story. Wait, what do they smell like? Well, in those days, they smelled of piss and some kind of cleaning solution. And it was unbearable. But the monuments were so fantastic that you would not, you know, after a while, you'd get used to it and think, this is great. It's probably not unlike the Luxor in Vegas, to be honest. Cleaning solution and piss, I'm sure. Yeah.

And I'm not sure what the inside of a pyramid smells like these days, but a 2015 review of the Great Pyramid on TripAdvisor was titled, Lifelong Dream Shattered by the Pungent Smell of Urine. And then another one for the Red Pyramid of Dashur, Warren's Right Up Top Smelly Pyramid. So, man, it's a tough crowd. But your experience may vary, so take that with a grain of salt. Speaking of, let's get into how Salima found her way into her field.

I started out as a settlement archaeologist and quite accidentally strayed into mummies by way of food because my dissertation was called Choice Cuts, Meat Production in Ancient Egypt. But one part of that whole thing is that the Egyptians didn't have refrigerators, so it was all about preserving food, which is basically using salt, which is basically akin to mummification.

So I strayed into mummies and also because when I moved to Egypt, I had loved the animal mummy room and it was closed. And so I decided that I would renovate it and raise funds and do all sorts of things and then study the animal mummies. And so that... This is the animal mummy room in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo. Oh, okay. Yeah.

Oh, sorry. Yes, thanks, Cara. No, I'm here all day. You're here all day. And Salima started with previous work studying food preservation, and it's thought that ancient Egyptians were the pioneers of this when it came to realizing that by removing water from something, you're cutting off the supply to bacteria that can spoil it. And if you've ever had prosciutto or salami...

You have enjoyed this side of science. So what works for dinner can also be applied to your body. And remains were embalmed by heavily, heavily salting the body inside and out. So Salima followed this salt trail into her dream job. And so that's how I sort of have kept on with corpses.

Now, mummies, mummified persons, mummified specimens, how... What do we call them? So...

I call them mummies. And if they're animal mummies, I will say a shrew mummy because a mummy is essentially an artificially preserved body of a human being or an animal made in a very particular way. The word comes from Arabic mumia, which was used to describe the black substance that covers a lot of these mummies, which is actually a kind of resin and oil mixture. So I think it's a perfectly good name.

unless we want to go for the ancient Egyptian name, which is Sah. You know, it's interesting that

that the act of mummification makes something into an object. And that now I've heard criticism of the word mummy because it objectifies the dead person, if it's a human, and that we're supposed to say mummified person. And mummy is now considered that kind of problematic term. However, I think standing by it is interesting because it does, it was meant to objectify a person. It was meant to turn a person or an animal into something that was

that was beyond the human body, that was like a statue effigy that could last forever. It's making a simulacrum of the individual or the animal. So it's a transformation.

And this use of the term mummy versus mummified remains or mummified person is kind of a hot topic all over the globe. And some museums are changing all of their public-facing communications, while others, like the British Museum, was in 2023 at least, reportedly still using the term across their galleries, though they tried to include when available the name of the person involved.

to convey that, yes, this object was once an alive human being. Though the colonialist acquisition of human objects is not something every museum wants to highlight or address for sure. Now, others, at least in Britain, argue that because mummy is their word for mother, mummy is a deeply humanizing term.

Not sure if that applies for everyone. Now, some folks also note that only the very wealthy were mummified. Thus, if you have a keychain that says eat the rich, why would you mind if researchers study their very, very deceased remains? At least of the royalty being studied. Although we will talk next week about how not everyone in those tombs was a high roller. Experts themselves seem to think that the terminology is less important in

than just making sure each individual artifact and the human remains are shown respect and that the researcher's work adheres to professional protocol. And scholars argue that the remains themselves are very much not the people they once were. The whole point is that they've transcended. And in fact, by being transformed, you're supposed to be much greater than you were when you were alive.

And did ancient Egyptians consider that body to be the person? Are they like the actual person's long gone? They're over a river, they're in an underworld, they're in an afterlife. And this is just kind of like a like a snail shell.

Well, here the mummy and the body become the same thing in a sense, right? Yeah. Because they're both containers now. They're both sacred vessels for the spirits that are meant to go in and out. Because you yourself are really made up of different components. Your name, different aspects of your spirit, plus your body, plus your shadow, plus all of this stuff. So really your body has been, as Kara said, it's just a container for a bunch of spirits.

I mean, it's a sacred container. It's an expensive container. It's a container that's been made with expensive salts imported in from the Western desert and really expensive resins brought in from the Mediterranean and maybe even other parts of West Asia. This is no sad little corpse. This is an entity that is meant to nobly contain your spirits for all eternity. And the coffin is meant to then represent that

permanency of containment. So a mummified person, the act of mummification provides this journey to another place. Some people rode that journey in the equivalent of a Mercedes G-Wagon with diamond dashboards. Others, like a 1989 Toyota Cressida. Whatever gets you there, man. And also, in fact, once you become a mummy, it means you've become deified.

So you have transformed yourself or been transformed from something of this earth to something that is divine. And so that really is, again, a superior being. And who was mummified? What class of people or gender or status tended to have all these expensive materials poured over them after they died?

Anyone who could afford it, basically. And I think that varied and became increasingly democratic over time when more of the materials were easily available. But ironically, in fact, people who were just buried in the sand wound up often being far better preserved than

in terms of their physical bodies than people with a lot of resins and so on. So Tutankhamun, poor boy, had so much black goo poured over him that he wasn't quite as well preserved as others who were more poorly mummified or as in terms of rich versus poor.

Black goo, you should know, is the actual terminology used for this sticky, thick substance that coats the remains of kings and of society's upper tiers from ancient Egypt. And as for the exact secret recipe of the black goo, please see the 2021 paper, Molecular Analysis of Black Coatings and Anointing Fluids from Ancient Egyptian Coffin, Mummy Cases, and Funeral Objects.

which took 100 samples of black ritual liquids and then using gas chromatography, mass spectrometry to figure out on a molecular level what's in this stuff and how much of it. The researchers found that the majority of the black substances were found to comprise a complex mixture of bitumen, which Americans call nitrate,

or solid crude oil from the Dead Sea, conifer resin and pistachio resin. And the researchers think that that shows there was a trade between Egypt and the Eastern Mediterranean at that time.

And other studies have found animal fat and beeswax tossed in the mix. Now, for the most iconic mummy cases you may have seen, King Tutankhamen was laid to rest in a carved stone sarcophagus. And then in that was a gilded wooden coffin. And that contained another wooden coffin, which was coated in gold and precious stones.

And then inside that was his final coffin, which was made of 263 pounds of solid gold. It was made of solid gold. Now, inside that he was, and then resting on his head was a death mask, a golden death mask that you have seen innumerable times. Like picture a gold bust in Egypt.

That's the one. And when the explorer, and some say the British plunderer, Howard Carter discovered this tomb, it was noted that all of that golden, buttery shimmer was coated with, in their words, bucketfuls of this very expensive resin. And the boy king's body was adhered with it to his innermost chamber of that coffin. So naturally, it

Explorers removed him from it and dismembered his body to study it and found out that he had been carbonized from some sort of slow internal combustion, likely from fungus and poor preservation because of the black goo. But yes, royals and elite members of society could be kind of packaged like Russian nesting dolls covered in semi-precious stones and gold and then dipped in tar.

- Well, the coffin competes with the mummy and the coffin's creation as probably a social separator to show people how rich you were and you had this beautiful box made of wood that is also very rare in ancient Egypt, if not also today, it disturbs that natural mummification process. So as soon as rich people are like, "I'm mummified and I have this beautiful box," the box stops the natural mummification because you're not putting the body into direct contact with the desiccating sands.

And so what Salima does and what I do, the core objects that we work with are at odds with one another in terms of how they preserve the human body. And yet they together create the ensemble that every rich person was trying to get. A beautifully mummified body

stretched out, laid out, usually, certainly in later Egyptian history, and put into a box that then contained that effigy, that made permanent effigy. And yet, if you looked at 5,000, 6,000 years ago,

Ancient Egyptian bodies were perfectly preserved if they were placed directly into the desert sands, but that's not fancy. It doesn't do what the rich people need to do. They need to socially separate themselves and say, look, people, I am a god compared to you. I will be preserved forever compared to you. Mummification is a social flex, and a coffin is also a social flex.

It's a social flux, but it's not just that, because I think that some of it is also involved with changing religious ideas. So it's not just a social hierarchy, but it is also something to do with religious belief systems.

You know I'm always going to put the social with the religious and the religious with the social. And who knows? The chicken or the egg and which came first. It's always like that when you're talking about any human system. What is the timeline here? Because I understand that this spans hundreds of years. Thousands. Thousands of years. I didn't want to overshoot it, so I undershot it. So I was wrong either way. But...

Thousands of years. You will lose if price is right. If price is right, you just went $3. We're like, no. Like when did it start formally? And was it inspired by accidental exhumation of sand buried corpses where they're like, that's tight, that's preserved. How can we replicate this in a formal burial setting? Or where did it kind of begin?

So there are theories that say that what happens is that they were corpses that had been buried in sand, were accidentally exhumed because animals do it or the wind does it or what have you. But I mean, even those corpses, they were always, at least since 5000 BC, if not earlier, they had...

So the idea of an afterlife was there. So when these corpses were accidentally exhumed and their preservation was perfect, I think people thought, yeah, this is great. And we will all live forever and it's good for the soul. But when they started to bring in containers, which was also relatively early because once you start wrapping people up in animal skins, then you've got that separator right there. And then by the time you get to Kara's coffins, it is empty.

a marked separator. And that's why they came up with the idea of artificial preservation using all of these fancy ingredients. So like do less. This is such an important lesson. Do less, do less, keep it simple. And sometimes very wealthy people go a little overboard because they just have the resources to do so. And then you end up with sadness and decay, I guess.

It's basic capitalism. It's really a conundrum because the living want to take care of the dead. When one of our beloved loved ones passes into the next realm, drops their body, goes someplace else, we want to care for their body and to just

Put it naked into the ground is not something that most people would ever do with their mother, their father, their grandparent, a child, right? You want to wrap them lovingly into something that will contain them, that will embrace them. You're not just putting them into the ground in a cold way. So as soon as you start containing, which is a human instinct, then you have to

figure out how to preserve that body with other methods. And given that those methods are so expensive and demand trade, it does become a social separator and quite quickly. And mummification and coffins seem to develop side by side. Mummification first, arguably, and then the coffin next,

But it develops along with Egyptian state formation and the idea that there are elites who are more important, who are running things, and then there are the peasants who do what those elites say. And that's a much more complicated story that I've told in a tiny, simplified nutshell. For a more expansive dive into it, of course, you can see Kara's newest book titled, again, Recycling for Death, Coffin Reuse in Ancient Egypt and the Theban Royal Caches, which notes that

Funerary data sets are the chief source of social history and Egyptology. So these coffins, these mummified folks tell historians and scientists a lot about what ancient Egypt was like. And that book covers that.

evidence of coffin reuse and the social collapse of later dynasties. And it also has photo essays of over 60 Egyptian coffins, which are in the collections of Cairo's Egyptian Museum. It goes hand in hand, this development of a social...

idea that everyone would come to a funeral and look at the great man or great woman, because both men and women had access to mummification and coffins. They would come to that funeral of the great man or woman and witness a different kind of body being lowered into a tomb or put into the ground.

That's also where the coffin comes in, because you can't witness the body unwrapped. And even a body unwrapped, it's not for you to see. So the coffin is there to shield the body from view. And it was exclusively seen by close inter-family circles that this body had special treatment so that it would last forever. I think people knew this and word was spread and social power was gained.

I think they knew about it because certainly it's just like going to a funeral home nowadays because you can say, you know, do you want the deluxe, I don't know, mahogany with velvet or satin? Or do you want this really cheap,

And do you want the full thing where you personally, you know, do the whole makeup and the this and the that of the deceased? I'm so going for chipboard and compost. I am not going for a coffin at all. Straight into the ground in a shroud. You're burning. You just want to burn. No, no, no. Shroud ground. That's it. Worms. Worms.

I love it. Worms. Worms are welcome. Bon appetit, worms. Now, while you ponder your existence for a moment, we're going to take a quick detour and send some money to some causes of theologist choosing. And Dr. Karakouni, who again has written extensively on Egyptian queens and ancient gender roles.

Selected the Yellowhammer Fund, which is a nonprofit, which is an abortion advocacy and reproductive justice organization that serves Alabama, Mississippi, and the Deep South. And it's committed to community education, policy advocacy, and mutual aid.

So that is Yellowhammer Fund. And also in regard to regional medical care, Dr. Salima Ikram chose Doctors Without Borders, which provides independent, impartial medical humanitarian assistance to the people affected by conflict, disease outbreaks, natural and human-made disasters in more than 70 countries. So donations went to those organizations in honor of our experts.

And now a quick sponsors break, after which we will talk about whether or not these experts' jobs make them stare down the barrel at death and live their lives any differently. When U.S. Bank says they're in it with you.

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Because together, they're proving day in and day out that there is nothing as powerful as the power of us. Visit usbank.com to get started today. Equal Housing Lender, member FDIC, copyright 2024, U.S. Bank.

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Start Ritual or add Essential for Women 18 Plus to your subscription today. So that's ritual.com slash ologies for 25% off. Down the hatch and into your body. Okay, next week will be wall-to-wall Patreon questions, which are so good. But let's get back to existential crises. Does your work make you reflect on that? Like, is there an oh shit, death, death, death? Or do you put that in a separate sarcophagus in your own brain and try to compartmentalize?

I think it's very comforting because, I mean, when I meet a mummy, I generally chat with them. Of course, they probably don't speak English either, but never mind.

my Egyptian is not quite competent. But I don't know, Cara. I mean, I feel quite comfortable with the idea of death as a result of being around it constantly. And it is something that happens to everyone. It's a unifier. Yeah, I agree. And my parents are 80 years old right now. They just turned 80. They got old really fast all of a sudden. And

I think I'm the only one out of the four children who's actually able to talk with them about what they want. Are they afraid? And that passage into the next life that none of us get to avoid, no matter how much plastic surgery we have in the United States, you're going to do it. And it's something that I'm very comfortable discussing and discussing for my own self. I think the more you work with it and the more you chat with the dead, as Salima puts it, because we do all talk.

Yes. Or sometimes they smell quite nice.

Mm-hmm. We're going to get to that smell. We're going to get to it so hard in part two, and it's worth the week-long wait. It's maybe my favorite part of this episode.

Yeah, it's a distinctive order. But, you know, and especially when I'm working on a mummy, one does chat and I say, excuse me. And nowadays, of course, because everyone has earbuds, no one thinks I'm crazy when I'm talking to someone who is dead. Salima, you're always talking to the dead. You're talking to the dead animals. You're talking to the dead humans. You're always chatting as you go about your work. So I think the steady stream of conversation, it makes a lively, joyful research process. Salima, what are you saying to them?

Oh, it depends what I'm doing. You know, like Cara said, excuse me, or I say I'm going to move you and we're going to flip you around now. And, you know, how old were you? And various other things, you know, after the x-rays, you can see that someone had been sick or they've broken something. You can sort of have a dialogue, slightly one-sided, about how they might have done that.

Compare notes. And Salima works with lots of younger baby mummies, particularly the animals. So she recently worked with a baby lion cub. And we'll talk to the lion cub and say, oh, poor you, what's happened? And I've heard her have these conversations with the animal dead.

And yes, we will get to mummified animals in a bit because it's one of Salima's passions. And also, it is a world I did not know existed. So boy, how do you wait? I want to talk a little bit about what data you're gathering and how that's done. But I want to go back a little bit and talk about the actual mummification and

And the coffin placing process, I know that we are very accustomed to, especially in October, seeing a lot of toilet paper wrapped mummies that are essentially like in bandages from head to toe. How often was that actually employed? Was that papyrus? How often was resin employed? What was the process of actually preparing someone for mummification?

So I'm going to start off by saying there was no toilet paper. I'm so sorry. Had there been toilet paper, there would have been a hell of a lot more mummified people or animals.

P.S. If you are wondering about ancient Egyptian potties, think about a stool with like a little peekaboo hole that's cut into it and kind of a dish of sand underneath. It's like a litter box, but it's for you. Also, heads up, if you do go to Egypt, I have done a tiny bit of research and I understand that toilet paper is not great for the sewage systems there and a bathroom attendant may give you water.

a modest square or two for a nominal fee. But also popular are bidet nozzles next to the throne, which most of the world considers more hygienic than they're like just dry paper nozzles.

Disgusting. But anyway, no, actual mummified people were not sent into the afterlife in cocoons of Charmin. Now, how did they manage it? It varied by geography and era. So I guess it depends. We used to think we had a really clear timeline as to how these things evolved.

But in fact, even in the last three years, we have found some things that have completely turned it all topsy-turvy, which is sort of the fun of excavating because then all your brilliant ideas are shot down when you get a new piece of evidence. But basically, if you are mummifying someone in a basic, basic way, it's all about drying you out, desiccation. And that's when you use this salt called Natron, which is basically like

regular salt and baking soda combined. To make a mummy that is somewhat successful, you have to take out the internal organs. Otherwise, you bloat up and explode. No thanks. And you have to wash the body out and then pack it with this Natron in handy dandy balls. And then you bury the body in it for 40 days. And then you remove the body. And then you can put oils or resins or not, depending on what your social class was and what you could afford.

And then you would wrap it up over 30 days. And that's what's the real point of transformation. And when you say over 30 days, is that a 30 day long process? Are you like wrapping? Are you checking on it? Really? Okay. So it's supposed to be, but you know, having done some experimental work, it's a bit hard to manage.

Because for 40 days you do the drawing, and you know how people in many cultures have 40 days of mourning. So it's nice to see how that sort of evolved from the ancient Egyptian tradition. And then the 30 days of wrapping is what's really cool, is because when you wrap, you're saying prayers, you're burning incense. And these prayers are sometimes even inscribed on the bandages. And what you do is you're creating this...

If you're not sure exactly what an amulet is, and an amulet sounds like a medical device, I got you. So it's a charm or an ornament to protect against bad stuff like the evil eye or wickedness or disease. And it's a charm or an ornament to protect against bad stuff like the evil eye or wickedness or disease.

And it's also a baby name if you want it to be. For some reason, I found myself on a baby name site wondering if anyone has ever named their child after a spooky pendant. And I found a parent-to-be on a message board asking, okay,

So in a name group on Facebook, I said how I love amulet for a name and I got hardcore made fun of. I love it because it sounds whimsical and I know an amulet is an object, but so are stone names and nature names and animal names that people love. Now this person put out a plea for honest hive mind opinions on the name amulet for their baby, resulting in some responses. I love it. Someone else said object names are becoming more and more popular. I've even seen people use names like sock recently.

Someone else said, my honest opinion is I don't like it at all. It makes me think of a museum display case or something Indiana Jones is tracking down.

Another person chimed in, amulet is a beautiful name, but it might not work for a child. I would suggest using it for an animal. For some reason, a black axolotl comes to mind. I don't even know if black axolotls are a real thing, they say. And to that person, I would like to note we have a recent ambistemology episode all about these water salamanders. And yes, I'm going to link it in the show notes. And yes, black axolotls totally exist. They look metal as hell, and they're called melanoid axolotls.

We also have an episode on melanin, which I'm going to link. But one more thought on the name amulet. One person chimed in, I actually quite like amulet. It has a pleasing and namey sound.

Cool. But yeah, it takes a few months to mummify your loved one. And during this time, you're going through a lot of incense, a lot of yards of linen ribbons while you're praying over them. But it is also a metaphysical one because you're saying spells or religious chants to make sure that the body is protected from everything. So you're making a magical as well as a physical binding. Right.

which is part of the whole transformation process. And then after that's done, it would be put into a coffin. And sometimes you have tons of jewelry, or sometimes you just have one blue bead or nothing. Sometimes you have lots of very nice linen, and sometimes you just have two crappy pieces. So it does depend. And as Cara said, it's sort of a socioeconomic kind of

monitor. But if you could even get a simple mummification, they would get something done. And sometimes they took out your brain as well. I learned in seventh grade that they put essentially a crochet hook up there, which made me think that the brain was just one big ball of yarn. So do you want to

You want to bust any flim flam with that? So we used to say, oh, yes. And in an ideal mummification, you would have your brain removed. It wasn't always removed. So what you did was you take a more knitting needle and break through your ethmoid bone through your nose. And then you poke about with this knitting needle quite a lot. And then you can use a crochet hook kind of thing to pull out your brain. And you also have to remember at this point, you have to sit the corpse up.

Gravity helps the brain come out through the nose using the crochet hook. And then, because you don't want your skull to implode, you have to melt resin and pour it into this cavity, the cranial cavity, and plug up your nose, both of your nostrils, with little balls of linen. And so, yes, they did do that, but not everyone had it done. But that would be part of the most fancy kind of mummification. Oh.

Oh, fancy, fancy. This is a word I don't like, exeribration. And it's close to celebration, but exeribration means the removal of a brain. And it's thought that the instrument that was used, I always thought it was an iron hook.

But other researchers argue that it could have been a wooden stick made out of bamboo. And they posit that because they imaged the remains of a 40-year-old mummified person and found that her embalmers had accidentally left some of that tool right up in there. So I guess everybody has kind of a bad day at work sometime. But some kings were mummified with their brains intact. Others weren't.

That's still kind of a mystery. But once a body is prepared, but before it's laid to rest, is the coffin blessed and what Kara calls enlivened? Or is it only when the person and the coffin are put together?

And I would say, given the evidence that we have, that the coffin really only gets to come alive when it's filled with its juicy mummy center. And when the mummy goes in, you make that come alive. So I think that the two have to go together, that it's the divine spirit that's put into the box. So it's a syncretic kind of vivification for both.

I think so, yeah. It's okay if syncretic vivification is not a term that you use frequently. It means bringing back to life or vitality through a combination of means. Because prepping someone you love for the road trip to forever requires some foresight and some gear. You don't want to forget stuff because in this thing there's no U-turns, unlike the mummy movies where they just flip a bitch and they're back to ask questions.

This is meant to be a secretive, exclusive sort of thing that not everyone gets. Like we were just talking about the brain. How many times, Salima, have you and I read? And they threw away the brain. Which is ridiculous. It is absolutely ridiculous. And you're working on KV63, which is this cache of detritus from mummification or one of these many mummification caches, which could have...

matter from a human body that isn't encapsulated or contained like a liver or lungs, but instead is this thing that is more amorphous that you can't keep in one piece, but you can't just toss it out. Just a heads up, KV63 is this chamber discovered about 20 years ago in Egypt. And the prevailing theory is that it was a materials warehouse and workplace of the royal embalming team.

who left these huge jars of linen wrappings and salt behind. There were also several coffins in there, but they were all

body-free. They just contained more supplies, kind of like how you'd throw some stuff in a big Rubbermaid tub and put it in the garage. But still, exceptionally thrilling for mamiologists and coffinologists and Egyptologists. How is that discerned? Can you tell me a little bit about how these thousands-of-year-old objects are being studied now?

Coffin studies are not as complicated as mummy studies because if you take the mummy out, you can open up the coffin, you can look at it, you can get a microscope out, you can use different light frequencies like infrared or UV and look at the varnish, etc.

I think it's useful to put things through x-ray, but with coffins, it's really hard to transport them. And these are plastered and painted wooden objects. It's, you know, they're fragile. A mummy, you need to x-ray it because what did they used to do in the 19th century is unwrap them. And so, you know, x-rays, I think, are Salima's jam. And she works with x-rays, I don't know, on a daily basis, but pretty often.

But I mean, what you do is you x-ray, you CT scan, you can take samples from the mummification materials to figure out if it is resin or if it's bitumen or if it's just oil that's turned black or whether there's wax involved. And if it's resin, where does it come from? So that is all very cool stuff. We look at how things were wrapped or whether, you know, it's a shrew mummy, is it wrapped in the same way as a human mummy? Do they use the same materials?

She just said shrew mummy, I'd like to point out, like mouse mummy. The Egyptians mummified all kinds of things. So I just want to clarify shrew as in the animal. Yes. They mummified parabeetles. They mummified crocodiles that were ginormous. They mummified all kinds of things. Yep. Even lions, even lions, monkeys, birds of all kinds. So we look at things differently.

through imaging. And now if you have exposed bone, we do isotope analysis to try and see where people might have been from. And by looking at the bones, we look at, you know, trauma, disease, anything that we can find that shows up. It's looking at health.

It's looking at how people or animals were mummified, what materials were used. So there's a lot of chemical testing that goes in and on surrounding it. During this conversation, there was a part of my squishy brains that was just cringing for disturbing these people. However...

We try and be very non-destructive now, but of course, often when you're digging things up, they've already been robbed. So you are getting them in fragments and portions. And sometimes then unwrapping is, in fact, unavoidable because the linen is falling off. And people always talk about DNA analyses, but for humans, that's only really relevant now.

I think if you want to look at a large group, at a decent-sized population or a family group to check out relationships or if you have very specific questions, because even though you can get the DNA, it doesn't always come out in a big, long enough string, as it were. And you can't answer all the questions you would like to, but we're getting closer and closer to that. Is anyone looking to find relatives of...

or descendants of any of these mummies? I don't think you can do that.

You mean like family groups or? Yeah, like finding a lineage where maybe now this person is an accountant in Cairo or something. So Ali, in fact, in England, they had dug someone up and then they were doing DNA because this was a remote village. And they found that indeed there was one person. I don't think he was an accountant, but something else. And he was related to this

So this was the thrilling story of Cheddar Man, who was a resident of the Cheddar Gorge in Somerset, England, who lived 10,000 years ago. And I don't know if you've heard of him.

apparently died by blunt force to the head in his early 20s. And his remains were discovered kind of curled up in a cave by some workers digging in there in 1903. And some pulp from one of his molars was analyzed, as was the DNA of some locals whose family have lived in the area for eons.

And a man named Adrian Target had a genetic connection. He lives in the area. He's not an accountant, but he did very aptly teach high school history. And that's a flex if I've ever heard one. So that was cool. Oh, wow. In Egypt, I don't think anyone's tried that yet.

But we do know because over here, the population was very mixed and has been waves and waves of people coming in. So I think unless it is a remote village, one would be hard pressed to find any direct descendants. But it would be kind of cool. Can I ask you questions submitted by listeners? They're all over the place and very fun. Go ahead.

So ask brilliant people basic questions and you may discover some really dark and fascinating stuff. Now more with these two next week as we get to all your questions regarding things like the smell of a mummy, why people ate them.

in Victorian times, the ethics of research and collections, the scientific analyses used to study them, if these experts themselves would be okay becoming mummified and then displayed. All of that awaits next week. Now, in the meantime, you can please enjoy more Spooktober episodes. We have a bunch up at alleyward.com slash ologies slash spooktober 2024. That's linked in the show notes, including episodes on vampire and monster lore and pumpkins and bats and

apples and bones and tombstones and mortuary makeup and death and dying and dancing spiders. Also, we have so much more research linked for this episode at alibor.com slash ology slash mommy ology. You'll also find links to the guests' social media and research and books. Thank you so much, Dr. Salima Ikram and Dr. Cara Cooney for being here this week and for coming back next week. So we are at ologies on Instagram,

I'm at Allie Ward with one L on both. Smologies are our shorter, kid-friendly versions of Ologies, and you can subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. Ologies merch is available at ologiesmerch.com, and you can join our Patreon. Patreon.com slash ologies for as little as a dollar a month.

Thank you to Aaron Talbert for adminning the Ologies Podcast Facebook group. Noelle Dilworth is the scheduling producer. Aveline Malik makes our professional transcripts. Kelly R. Dwyer does the website. Susan Hale did so much extra research and managing directs this entire show. Jake Chafee edits beautifully. And our great pyramid is lead editor, Mercedes Maitland of Maitland Audio. Nick Thorburn wrote the theme music. And if you stick around to the end, I tell you a secret.

And this week, it's that I recently enjoyed a little spooktober outing myself. I went to go see the Darkwave Goth Club Staples Sisters of Mercy. And I went with my friend Lizette and I took a picture to send to our other friends and I realized that whenever I see concert photos or video on social media, I just assume that everyone has like bonkers expensive, really good tickets.

But in recent years, cameras have improved so much, you can have nosebleeds and it still looks like you're a rich person with VIP orchestra seats. And I guess screens are just like the new opera glasses. And I never realized that people were just zooming in and they didn't have front row seats. What?

I never said I was smart. Also, Lizette pointed out that you can tell the average age of the crowd based on if they are recording horizontally or vertically. And she's right. And it's brutal. Okay. Bye-bye.

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