HYPERPYRUS Archive - Mummymania

Noreen Doyle

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HYPERPYRUS
THE HYPERPYRUS ARCHIVE: Mummymania

9 August 2007
Thursday
Mummy Masquerades
Subject: Mummymania

This past winter, French forensic scientist Philippe Charlier took a close look at the purported remains of Joan of Arc, displayed in a museum in Chinon, France since the 1930s. What Charlier found was anything but relics of France's favorite saint. The fragments, which included a human vertebra and a piece of rib, were alleged to have been gathered from Joan's funeral pyre. In 1869, these turned up in the attic of a building that had once been a drug store in Paris. But, as Charlier discovered and as was widely reported in the news this past February, the remains were those of an Egyptian mummy, with some (ancient) animal additions. Mummy once being a standard medicinal ingredient--more about the misuses of mummies another time--it was readily on hand to concoct a fake relic.

Fakery can run the other way, too. Sometime before 1945, George Fabyan, who owned a curiosity museum in Illinois, committed an act that is today all but unthinkable, not to mention illegal: he purchased the mummified corpse of a "Native American." Unlike Joan's pitiful remains, this was a well-articulated body, with flesh, face, teeth, and a protruding leg bone. Except that the leg bone isn't human. It's dog. (Joan's "corpse" was long known to contain cat remains; people supposed that a bystander had pitched some unfortunate feline into her pyre.) In 1982, X-rays determined that that dog bone was the only bone in the entire Fabyan "mummy." The whole thing was--and is--a clever fake made of straw, wood, and cloth. Shades of Ray Bradbury's "Colonel Stonesteel's Genuine Home-made Truly Egyptian Mummy"!

It--Fabyan's fake mummy, I mean--is still on display in the Fabyan Villa Museum in Geneva, Illinois.

For more about the faked mummy:
Kane County Chronicle
Remodeling Online

For more about the faked saint:
The Telegraph
(I've written about Joan's remains for Calliope, the history magazine for kids. The article will appear in the April 2008 issue.)

24 October 2007
Wednesday
A Private Audience with the King
Subject: Egyptology, Mummymania

September 11, 2002, while most of my fellow Americans were commemorating the first anniversary of that most awful day, I was walking in the nearly deserted Valley of the Kings. Other tourists were there, to be sure, but in no great numbers. Americans were scarce on the ground, and Egyptians tended to be shocked (and pleased, once they recovered) to be encountering an American. I had traveled from England to Egypt as part of a mixed group of tourists, mostly British, but the Netherlands and South Africa were also represented among us. In the hotels and on the sites we passed Germans, French, Italians, and Japanese, but encountered no Americans until a few days later, when I ran into one filming the Step Pyramid at Saqqara. But all tourists, it seemed, were not as thick on the ground as they might have been -- certainly compared to January of this year.

Under other circumstances, I expect that my visit to the tomb of Tutankhamun would have been very different.

September 11, 2002: Valley of the Kings

Entrance to the tomb of Tutankhamun, 1920s-30s
Keystone stereoview card (9864T)

Even before the current ban on photography in tombs and museums, cameras of any kind were not permitted in KV62, as Tutankhamun's tomb is officially known. With some trepidation I surrendered my F100 to the attendant. And with Rosemary, one of my fellow tourists, we stepped down into what is perhaps the most famous final resting place on earth, ready to jam elbow-to-elbow with whatever tour group had preceded us.

The corridor leads to the Antechamber, empty now of the "wonderful things" Howard Carter glimpsed by candlelight on November 27, 1922. When we entered, it was empty of anything. No crowds stood with us. None at all. We two were alone, almost.

The door to the Treasury, formerly guarded by lithe Anubis reclining atop a gilded chest, is walled off. But another wall has been taken down to give a view to the Burial Chamber, which once would have seemed a solid wall of gold. Found occupied by a series of nested, gilded shrines nearly too big for the space, the Burial Chamber, like the other rooms, has given up almost all its treasures to the Luxor Museum and the Egyptian Museum in Cairo.

The king himself remains, as he was ever meant to. Oh, yes, Tutankhamun's intended tomb was never finished and was used to bury his successor (and, as some would have it, murderer), Ay. And yes, Carter's team broke apart Tutankhamun's body so that it is hardly in the condition that his embalmers (or himself) could have wished. But in KV62, for a while, were just the three of us: the king, Rosemary, and I.

Only a few yards, a dusty Plexiglas laid atop the otherwise open sarcophagus, and a solid gold coffin separated us from Nebkheprure Tutankhamun. We three stood (and lay) in contemplative silence, watched over by the few figures that decorate the wall. The simplicity of these paintings provides stark contrast to the opulence of many of the objects once crammed into the chambers.

They record events of the last day Tutankhamun spent in the world of the living, but the king himself is already dead. "The great officials of the palace" drag his mummy to the tomb. Ay, Tutankhamun's vizier and successor, raises an adze to Tutankhamun's lips in a key act of the Opening of the Mouth ceremony, restoring to the dead king the ability to hear, see, smell, and to breathe, like the living.

The breaths of the living have taken a heavy toll on Egypt's monuments. Into the close air of the tombs they introduce heat, moisture, and carbon dioxide, which eat away at the paint, the plaster, even the surface of the stone. And, although he lies within a coffin of solid, incorruptible gold, the mummy of Tutankhamun likewise suffers. Carter is not alone responsible for the king's current state of decay.

Beginning later in November, tourists who pay the extra price of admission to enter KV62 will see something that Rosemary and I could not. The Supreme Council of Antiquities will have the king himself on display. Not his broken, mangled body. That will remain decently shrouded. But those who enter will find his face--the gaze of the royal Presence--staring back at them.

When you see him, take a deep breath. And when you let it out again, be sure to say "I'm sorry."

Al Ahram Weekly reports on the upcoming display of Tutankahmun's mummy

COMMENTS? E-mail me.

9 November 2007
Friday
UPDATE: A Private Audience with the King
Subject: Egyptology, Mummymania

The mummy of Tutankhamun has been put on view. The one time I turned the TV on in the hotel room at the (highly recommended) Carriage House Inn in Saratoga Springs, just before leaving the World Fantasy Convention, was just in time to catch live video of the installation. News stories abound. A selection:

Al-Ahram Weekly
National Geographic
The Associated Press
The New York Times
The Independent (Ireland) (an op-ed piece regarding the ethics of displaying mummies; Philip Hesner's views on the subject are not entirely mine, but I do respect what he writes and believe that all should give due consideration to the issue and decide not only what their own opinion is but why)

COMMENTS? E-mail me.