Gaston Maspero working on a mummy in Cairo, 1886. Artist unknown. Wikimedia Commons.
Uncovering a centuries old stench
Last month I went to an archivist conference in Toronto, where my friend Jean recently moved to take a job as Conservator of Organic Materials at the Royal Ontario Museum. “I have my own lab,” she told me, “You can come see my mummy!”
I left the conference early one day and walked from the hotel through Queen’s Park, into the giant rotunda entrance of the ROM. Jean came through a side door to come get me. I signed in, passed through security, and ended up the twenty-fifth visitor of the day to the staff-only area.
Jean’s lab was around 350 square feet, a square room with windows that faced onto the length of greenspace known as the Philosopher’s Walk on the University of Toronto campus. Against the walls of the lab stood shelves that carried small artifacts on white trays covered by clear plastic, and supplies, including plastic and cotton sheets, sorbents, paints and labelled bottles of chemicals. There was a counter with a sink, an eye-washing station and a microscope next to a Plexiglas isolation workspace with a ventilation hood. Her desk was in the corner closest to the windows. It was covered with pieces of paper and various conservation books, including Fungal Facts and Conservation of Leather and Related Materials.
The centre of the room was filled with several tables and a couple of carts. On one table lay a mummified gazelle; on another lay paintings made of wire and wood, some felted wool dolls and shoes made from rabbit. And on the table closest to her desk was a coffin-shaped object covered by an opaque plastic sheet.
Jean lifted the plastic sheet to reveal the mummy: a dark brown figure, about four feet tall, surprisingly well-preserved, and still very human looking. A frame surrounded the mummy, to keep the plastic suspended above it, and the body lay on a bubble-wrapped piece of plywood. The thing I noticed first was the smell: a bit like wet beef jerky, very strong. Jean told me that the two components of the smell of a mummy are cadaverine and putrescine, chemical compounds produced during the putrefaction of animal flesh, putrescine being the smell of rotting fish. “You never get used to it,” she said.
Some of the linens on the mummy were cut open and frayed. Jean pointed to the mummy’s spine, which was broken; the mummy isn’t completely whole. “His name is Jutmosa,” Jean said. “We used to call him Jeremy, until the museum’s Egyptologist stepped in to give him a less ridiculous name.”
Jean said that Jutmosa died sometime after 1320 BCE and before 320 BCE. He was brought over from an undetermined site in Egypt in 1910. ROM staff believe that Jutmosa’s grave was robbed, and that the grave robbers smashed in his skull. He likely had jewels resting on the depressions where his eyes (now packed with linen) were and amulets resting like necklaces on his collarbones—all taken. Jean said that the coffin he was found in had been used previously for the burial of a woman named Ta-Khat, who died around 1320 BCE, so there was no contextual information about who Jutmosa was when he was first collected by the ROM. Egyptians often would reuse coffins; they would remove a mummy and leave it in a tomb, and use the coffin again for a newly mummified body.
Jean told me that apparently the ROM has a photograph from the 1920s of a museum technician posing with scissors, cutting some of the linen wraps off Jutmosa’s body. In the 1920s and 1930s, mummy unveiling parties were popular museum events; you weren’t considered a legitimate museum without an Egyptian mummy in your collection. Everyone wanted one. The demand was so great, Jean told me, that some enterprising dealers would dig up relatively young (800-or-so-year-old) Coptic Christian corpses naturally preserved in sand, wrap them in linens, and sell them to institutions as if they were real mummies from Ancient Egypt. Those corpses weren’t embalmed, just naturally mummified, so they rotted very quickly.
Jean told me an apocryphal story about Dr. Augustus Granville, an Italian physician and writer, who led a mummy unveiling party for the Royal Society of London in the mid-nineteenth century. For ambience, he lit several candles that he constructed using the wax he found in the coffin of the mummy, believing it was authentic Ancient Egyptian wax. “That candle,” Jean said, “it was actually the mummy. Mummies melt!” She explained that human fats, flesh and collagen can saponify and become a waxy, soapy liquid. When that happens, the original form of the mummy’s corpse is only held up by ancient, encrusted linens. With bones inside.
I looked down at Jutmosa, at his eyelashes, the expression on his face, a laugh line more pronounced on one side of the face than the other, and the beautifully posed hands, fingernails intact. Jean said that she’s not sure what will be under him if she ever gets him off that bubble wrap. Maybe only pools of mummy liquid. This image gave me a strange feeling in my stomach.
“Do you ever try to give them back?” I asked.
Jean said that there is no repatriation program for human remains from Ancient Egypt. Egypt has enough of their own mummies, and they don’t need any back from anyone else. But displaying human remains has changed since the days of mummy unveiling parties; museums are questioning the ethics of exhibiting people for other people to look at. It’s difficult and fraught to get rid of an item once it is in your collection. So they remain with the institutions who collected them, and their staff care for them the best they can. “They deserve our respect and study and care,” Jean said. “And mummies are still very popular with museum-goers. The kids especially love mummies, anything Ancient Egypt really.”
The thing that’s really unusual about Jutmosa is that, unlike most mummies, he hasn’t been X-rayed. Ionizing radiation, used for X-raying, kills DNA. This means that it is possible, though very unlikely, that Jean could get a viable DNA sample from Jutmosa’s petrous pyramid, a part of the temporal bone behind the ear. Jean’s colleague recently gathered a sample and sent it for analysis in the ROM’s ancient DNA lab. Tests of ancient DNA, or aDNA tests, are long and labour intensive and require a lot of amplification. They are also easily tainted. If a cat had been in the tomb with this mummy, she explained, the results would probably just read cat, cat, cat.
Until about twenty years ago Jutmosa was on semi-permanent display in good climate-controlled conditions, in a positive pressure case with filtered light. Then he was put on this bubble-wrapped slab in temporary storage. There he stayed, until ending up here in Jean’s lab. Whoever put him there probably never intended to leave him there for so long, but things happen, conservation work supporting exhibitions and loans and events can easily take priority over other collections-related activities. I think of some of the neglected collections at the archives where I work: there’s never enough staff, never enough funding.
At this point Jean and I took a break and Jean checked her email. I thought about the last time Jean and I looked at human remains together, on a trip we took in the early 2000s, when we visited the corpses of Mao and Lenin on either end of the Trans-Siberian Railway. After that trip we’d spent a lot of time reading about Lenin’s embalmer, who consulted on other Communist embalming projects, possibly including the embalming of Mao. The bodies of Lenin and Mao are kept under glass, regularly treated with embalming liquid, and they are only exposed to brief periods of low light during viewing hours. You can’t get close enough to really see the texture of the flesh, and you don’t know what’s under the clothing they wear. It struck me that the only dead bodies I’d seen in person were those of my grandmother, shortly after her death, Mao, Lenin and Jutmosa.
“This mummy,” Jean said, “is right on the verge of being preservable.” She said she plans to rewrap the cut linens, store Jutmosa as best as she can, in a non-acidic, dry environment, and deal with any beetle infestations she may find lurking underneath him; mummies are particularly attractive to the dermestid beetle. She will put the pieces of the skull back together and try to prevent further damage to the body from acid hydrolysis and other deteriorations. She is hopeful that maybe they’ll get some usable results from the aDNA lab and be able to learn a bit more about him.
Ideal storage for mummies like Jutmosa is in a bag made from polyethylene laminated with a siloxane layer, to keep out all oxygen and maintain a low relative humidity. But then, because such bags aren’t perfectly clear, they make the mummy less accessible for research and study. What’s the balance between accessibility and preservation? As an archivist, this question informs my job as well, as I work, not with human remains, thankfully, but with photographs, documents and artifacts made and used by humans; there are enough ethical quandaries and preservation difficulties around the collecting of this documentary evidence of human activity. Like the items in the collection I care for, the artifacts in Jean’s lab each have their own chemical composition, their own preservation requirements and scheduling demands, and their own stories.
It was the end of the day and we began to pack up to take the subway to Jean’s house. Her co-parent was making lasagne for dinner. I had a presentation to prepare for the next morning. Jean put the plastic over the mummy and the centuries-old smell was contained again.
