Unwrapping a Mummy

John H. Taylor
University of Texas Press
Austin
1996
ISBN: 0-292-78141-5


In the winter of 1904-05, Edouard Naville, on behalf of the Egypt Exploration Fund, was excavating the Eleventh Dynasty temple of King Mentuhotep II against the limestone cliffs of Deir el-Bahri, when his team discovered the burials within the temple of four wives of Mentuhotep. The tombs constructed early on in the building of the temple were later built over by a wall, and when located by Naville in that winter, all four had been anciently plundered. We are told:


"A tomb pit, subsequently numbered 7, was located behind the third of the shrines from the northern end, that of Sadeh. Descending the vertical shaft, sixteen feet deep and choked with broken blocks from the temple, Ayrton's men entered the rock-cut burial chamber."


The men found the original lady's burial destroyed, including the fragmentary remains of the king's wife shoved into a corner of the room, while in the center was a garlanded coffin, a thousand years later than the lady, the Twenty-First Dynasty coffin inscribed for the mummy of Horemkenesi. From here, the author tells of the known data about a priest named Horemkenesi through six graffiti left around the Theban necropolis and the inscriptions with matching titles on the mummy's coffin.


Next, we are onto the period of the life of Horemkenesi in the late eleventh century B.C., a period of decline in Thebes' fortunes. The always powerful High priest of Amun-Re had now installed themselves with the regalia and titles as King of Upper and Lower Egypt, even though there was a ruling king, a relative, in the delta, making the same claims.


In this climate, we find the priestly class buried in mass tombs at Thebes, along with the rescued and thoroughly robbed mummies of the New Kingdom royals. Mr. Taylor is on to the role Horemkenesi would have played in his duties among the necropolis, as well as who his relations probably were.


His titles indicate he was Chief Workman in the 'Place of Truth' (Valley of Kings), a title usually handed down from father to son, indicating that Horemkenesi was likely related to the community of tomb builders at Deir el Medina. His job in the valley and surrounding necropolis was probably as one of the officials rescuing the royal mummies and perhaps appropriating what was left of value in their burials for the state.


The home of the scribe Horemkenesi may well have been in a dwelling within the walls of the fortified mortuary temple of Ramses III, where the house of his contemporary Butehamun still exists. Mr. Taylor goes on to tell what the responsibilities of a minor priest like Horemkenesi would be in the service of Amun-Re at the temples of Karnak and Medinat Habu.


The vignettes on Horemkenesi's coffin are charming insights into the dress and style of the priest and the values likely encompassed by its owner, though the coffin was a stock piece with the spots for the person's name left to be filled in by the buyer. Here we are presented with an outstanding picture of a Theban mummy of a priest of Amun, which Anatomist Elliot Smith examined and left displayed with its chest wall cut away to show the mummy's internal organs, which were replaced back into the body after their treatment and wrapping during the embalming.


Two-thirds of the way through the book, Horemkenesi's coffin and coffin board are pictured in color, as well as a number of nice pictures of the mummy. The author now contends with the scribe's modest funeral and burial in the temple.


With the next chapter, we are on to the subject of the book, the unwrapping and study of the mummy, laying out first the protocol that was to be used in this rare event. The poor condition of the mummy of Horemkenesi made the decision to autopsy it in an attempt to get as much information about him as could be retrieved before his ultimate destruction.


This information was especially important as it is extremely rare for a mummy to be known outside tomb information, as Horemkenesi was from the various graffiti he left around Thebes. A series of half-page pictures shows the mummy in various states of unwrapping, including an inscription on one of the mummy's linen wrappings confirming that the mummy was indeed Horemkenesi.


After the outer wrappings are removed from the body, there are found insect holes and casings, indicating that the mummy was infested with bugs before being wrapped. Once completely unwrapped, it appeared that Horemkenesi was likely already in an advanced state of decomposition when the embalmers started their work.


Thankfully, the book contains many images of the unwrapped mummy during its dissection certainly some of the best pictures in the book. The author lays out from the unwrapping how Horemkenesi was embalmed, which appears to have been frugal, with no luxuries such as amulets.



Once unwrapped, Horemkenesi's badly deteriorated head is removed and cleaned of all remaining mummified flesh so that the skull can be used in a reconstruction to show how he may have looked. From all the findings, Mr. Taylor sets forth what evidence there is to the cause and circumstances of Horemkenesi's death.


John Taylor has put together this short book, at only 105 pages, a rare and worthy read for anyone ages 10 and up, and regardless of how old you are, this is one of the few times in your life you will have the experience of Unwrapping a Mummy!

King Khufu's Port

Recent discoveries at the Wadi El Jerf have revealed a 4500-year-old port on the Red Sea coast from the Old Kingdom, including the Fourth Dynasty King Khufu's name on stones used to seal dozens of nearby caves. Best of all, a stash of rare Old Kingdom papyrus has been discovered.

Photo: Luxor Times

Mummies: Death and Life in Ancient Egypt

James Hamilton-Paterson and Carol Andrews
Penguin Books Ltd.
U.S.A.
1978
ISBN 0 14 00 .5266 6

I found a bookmark about a third of the way through this book, and apparently forgot I was reading it. I wish I could say it was the first time this happened. The introduction was capable. In Chapter I, we find the author telling the reader about the typography, climate, and people in the Nile valley. The author recounts the various animal cults going on to say


       "The Greeks' name for the Furies who hounded people mercilessly was the 'Eumenides' or the 'favorably disposed ones', and they named the Black Sea, infamous for its violent storms, 'Euxine' or 'good to strangers'".


I have no idea what this has to do with Anubis, the jackal-headed god of embalming? Directly below, the author goes on to say:


      "But such a theory would not explain what the Egyptians found sacred about a frog or a baboon." ?


The authors are next on to the king, including his position in keeping Egypt in a state of Maat, a perfect harmony, and if this harmony was not met, the king alone was to be blamed. Of course, there would always have been enough blame to go around. This Maat in the Old Kingdom, good or bad, was probably a symbolic reaffirmation of the god-king's power and wrath, where only the king had an afterlife.


The book is next on to mummification with a well-written overview of the evolution of techniques, including Herodotus' words on the subject. The goal was to reproduce the natural actions of burial in the Egyptian desert, which over time led to more and more sophisticated burials, including the theology of burial itself.


Interestingly enough, the authors relate Mr. Mathey's French account of the unwrapping of the mummy of unknown man "E" in June 1886, which he was present for:


      "Once the bandages had been stripped off, we found the mummy was encased in a sort of whitish material rather like dough, which was extremely caustic and covered the body from head to toe. "At this moment, we all had to overcome a release of noxious gases which had been trapped inside,".


The chapter is well supplied with images in black and white of seven human mummies and a number of animals. In chapter 3, we are on to funerary equipment, dealing with everything from pyramids on down to boats including the evolution of objects over time,  the limestone servant statuettes of the Old Kingdom to the much more varied wooden models of the Middle Kingdom where the introduction of a peg like figure would replace the models and grow in numbers in the New Kingdom as shabti.


The printing of the book is quite crude, and a number of the images are obstructed by the blackness of the pictures, and such a shame, as I would have liked a good view of the mummy on page 80. The authors put on a good show, breaking down the meaning of some of the most common amulets.


I am impressed with the description of the characters participating in a ritual party of a nobleman's funeral of the New Kingdom. The evolution of the tomb is next from the simple pit used to dispose of the poor. The authors explain:


      "For the poor, there were yawning trenches always ready. Their rites were hurried, and in the evening a thin layer of sand was spread over the day's burials.", "One Theban poor pit was unearthed in which sixty layers of bodies were discovered without the bottom layer having been reached."


The mastaba burial of the nobles of the Old Kingdom evolves into the pyramid age, with the fall of the Old Kingdom democratizing the pyramid on a much smaller scale for not only the kings of the Middle Kingdom but also onto an even smaller venue in the graves of the New Kingdom.


We are next onto the pyramid texts of the late Old Kingdom, a series of spells of which some must have been very old already when carved in the burial chambers of these kings at Saqqara. The evolution of funerary texts that followed included the required texts, which were to personalize the books of the dead of elite mummies of the New Kingdom onward to the Late Period.


The authors write about the content and purpose of tomb decoration is from the reliefs of the Old Kingdom to the wall paintings of the later periods. We are told:


      "they become more or less profane during the 18th Dynasty, being mostly concerned with everyday life and the dead person's own earthly career. After the end of that Dynasty's Amarna period, however, there was both popular and 'state' reaction against the heresies of Akhenaten", "and the pictures became more exclusively religious as the cult of Amun was re-asserted."


Mortuary contracts played a part in many tombs as the owners wished to be remembered forever with offerings. Perhaps the contracts carved on the walls of Hepdjefau's tomb, a 12th Dynasty noble, are most famous. Unfortunately, these contracts eventually fizzled out, probably pretty soon after burial, as descendants couldn't care less about the dead person.


The gaudy displays of nobles being buried with all their goodies were likely noticed by the poorer classes, who naturally coveted the better life these corpses could bring to them. The authors include the arm found in the tomb of Djer and the empty sarcophagus of King Khufu's mother, Hetepheres.


The story of the scandal of the tomb robberies of the late New Kingdom and the rounding up of the royal mummies into their caches is told; the ensuing effect of these robberies is that the economy of Thebes improves during the 21st and 22nd Dynasties. We are then onto tales of the nineteenth-century discovery of these robbed burials and the related documents, including the discovery in 1881 and 1898 of the royal mummies.


In chapter six, the authors deal with the rise of the cult of the Aten in the reign of Thutmosis IV, with its ultimate climax as the God of the King Akhenaten, leading to the battle with the powerful Priests of Amun and the building of Akhenaten's capital far away from Thebes in the desert at Tell el Amarna. The surviving royal burials are discussed, including the Valley of Kings tombs 55 and 62, the tomb of Tutankhamun.


At this point, the discovery of Tutankhamun's tomb is explained, and the authors go on to compare the find with those kings' tombs Pierre Montet found at Tanis twenty years later, of the 21st and 22nd dynasties. The final chapter deals with mummies and their value to Europeans as ground-up powder for medicinal purposes.


Early 19th-century explorers such as Belzoni left colorful descriptions of tombs full of mummies, yet by this time, the mummy as medicine was at an end; instead, now the mummy was a star at events or unwrappings in Europe. The authors tell an amusing tale of a Polish traveler who cut up 2 mummies and put them into 7 boxes of dried tree bark,


      "a priest bound for Jerusalem came aboard. Once at sea, he began his customary prayers, but almost immediately a great storm blew up and he was additionally harassed by the vision of two specters. The crew promptly put this down to the dismembered mummies stowed below in their bark boxes, but the Pole resolutely refused to believe such nonsense until the priest again said his breviary and a second storm arose. The ghosts appeared once more.."


At this point, the author's remarks are on seances, a haunted coffin lid, and pyromidiates, including one who believed the Great Pyramid was a huge water pump in which the sarcophagus would float around the king's chamber, clanking against the walls and roof of the room, telling how full the tank was.


The book turns to X-ray technology used on mummies and their dentition, interesting as the authors include the research on bread and wheat of the ancient Egyptians about their teeth.


In the end, the cheap production of the book, along with a shaky beginning, did not say continue, the authors, however, did pull it together for the overall content of Mummies; Death and Life in Ancient Egypt was a worthy read which was deserved of a far better binding.


      "Behold", "The King has been taken away by poor men. He who was buried as a divine falcon is now laid on a simple bier. What the pyramid hid has become empty,"

Gods, Men & Pharaohs: The Glory of Egyptian Art

Irmgard Woldering
Harry N. Abrams, Inc.,
New York
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 67-26468
1967

This large, beautiful coffee table book is, by its very size, difficult to read, so I am going to be propping the book up with pillows. The book begins with the prehistoric era, an overview of the climate and its effects on the cultures that existed in the two lands at the time.


The book will require a second bookmark, as there is a catalog referenced frequently at the back. The opening full-page photo of a wavy handle Nagada II pot with loops for suspension is decorated in red with Ibexes, a treasure from the Roemer-Palaiszaeus museum.


 More interesting to me is a Nagada I pot from the Brussels Musées Royaux d'Art et d'Histoire. The 5500-year-old vessel has white decoration that includes a man with his arms raised high above him, while on his head are several, perhaps feathers or horns, his penis is prominent, and he has two people around him. In sculpture, we find that in the late prehistoric period, colossal statues were being raised for the fertility God Min.


The author lays out the development of slate cosmetic palettes at the dawn of history, in particular, the royal and historic palettes, which demonstrate a turbulent period and the rise of central authority in the king of the two lands. The temple deposit at Hierakonpolis yielded the most important of these, being of the unifier King Narmer.


The pictures feature beautiful pieces from various museums, many of which are new to me, though some old favorites are present, including the British Museum's tiny ivory figure of a king dressed in a Heb Sed garment. The two photos are large, showing the figure in great detail. The author is clear and puts forward the development of the gods and the importance these gods had on the local and national population.


Ms. Woldering closes off the Archaic period with a most interesting granite statuette in Leyden's Rijksmuseum van Oudheden. The statuette, dated to 2600 B.C., is masterfully rendered in hard stone. In the next chapter, we move on to the Old Kingdom and the pyramid age, beginning with the accession of the first king of Dynasty III, Zoser.


King Zozer, known as "the opener of the stone," is given this title as the first king to build his monuments in stone, including Egypt's first pyramid at Saqqara, the king's tomb, and the court for his afterlife are all hewn in stone. The enchanting paste-filled sunk reliefs from the tomb of Nefermaat are always a pleasure to see, and here the reader is presented with a color picture of men catching ducks in a net., This technique had a flaw of the inlays drying up and falling out, and so the experiment ended where it started at Meidum.


We are told about the rise of the position of vizier in the Fourth dynasty, occupied by princes of the royal family. The text is a relief from the last couple of books I have read, as it is interesting, presenting many facts that one forgets over time, with the standard overview dominating thoughts, as a complex evolution is easily lost, yet captured here!


The enormous excesses of the IVth dynasty god-kings brought about a strong desire to have and not live at the mercy of kings who had bankrupted the country for their necropolis at Giza. Long through Egyptian history, these god-kings were passed down as brutal tyrants, even though their pyramids must have obtained great reverence, awe, and a proud contribution to the national consciousness as they do today in a ruined state.


The author puts forward the art of this period, the statuary and the reliefs that decorate the tombs of the courtiers, which reflect the desire to live on the sustenance obtained from the reliefs forever in the afterlife. The statuary of the nobles of the period is stiff productions where the heads emerge from the cold plains of the body to present individual portraits of character.


The introduction of the scribal statue created a tradition that would cross all of the remnants of Pharaonic history. It is in the unknown scribe in the Cairo museum of the Vth dynasty that all these come together to present an educated living man wearing only a kilt in the prime of his life.


With the rise of the Prince of Thebes to the kingship of Upper and Lower Egypt under the XIth dynasty, we find a remarkable king in Mentuhotep II in an unremarkable dynasty, complete with his adaptation of the Old Kingdom pyramid in his mortuary temple against the cliffs of Deir el Bahri. It is within the deterioration of the XIth dynasty that a vizier, Amenemhet, accedes to the throne as King Amenemhet I, and with the foundation of the XIIth dynasty, a golden age is born. The author says of the state of royal sculpture of the Middle Kingdom,


      "It affords a picture of the king's frightening isolation, heroic greatness, and maturity, conscious as he must be of his place in eternity, with all the skepticism and inner tragedy to which this knowledge must lead."


This is most evident in the sculptures of the great Sesostris III and his successor Amenemhet III, both bearing faces deep with the lines of age. It is within this dynasty that the block statue came into use, with only the head and feet and occasionally the hands emerging from the squatted figure's garment creating broad plains for elaborate inscriptions. The quality in the reliefs and jewelry of the period was never excelled in the remainder of Egyptian history.


A long line of weak rulers and provincial kings led to an occupation of Egypt by foreign invaders until the King of Thebes finally drove the foreigners from Egyptian soil, re-unifying the two lands under King Ahmosis, the first king of Dynasty XVIII and the period of the New Kingdom. A stunning black and white picture of an exquisite wood shabti of Iy from Hanover's Kestner Museum is rendered in such fine detail.


With the beginning of the New Kingdom, the venue of kingship changes as once again, the Kings of Upper Egypt become kings of a unified country and on to become emperors of Egypt's greatest epoch. These kings are military men who look to the empire as a means of protecting the country and filling the coffers.


Ms. Woldering explains that these kings are great benefactors to the temples of the gods, and it is at Karnak that most of these rulers built edifices to Amun Re and themselves. The author tells, "In the festival hall of Thutmosis III at Karnak, there is a sequence of reliefs highly characteristic of the spirit of the age, showing plants and animals which the king brought back with him from his campaigns in Asia. The life-like accuracy of these pictures and the life-affirming joy in the phenomena of an alien world are the product of the open-minded spirit which prevailed in the Thutmoside era."


With the maturity of the XVIIIth Dynasty, we find its most opulent king in Amenhotep III, the builder of the Colossus of Memnon in front of his long destroyed mortuary temple, as well as numerous other monuments built with the huge funds of the empire, bringing a period of peace with cordial relations between Egypt and her neighbors.


Included within the objects chosen for the book are many infrequently seen masterpieces from Moscow's Pushkin Museum, including the ebony statuettes of the Priest Amenhotep and the lovely singer of Amun. The heresy of Akhenaton destroys the family dynasty, with  Akhenaton's egocentric religion alienating everyone but the king and royal family.


The art of the period departs from the traditional imagery of the warrior king to a family man kissing his children, introducing a luxuriant ruler basking in his own grandeur, playing with his strange-looking family. Perhaps it is the face of the yew wood head of Queen Tiye that best expresses the loss of empire, which the elderly queen had been unable to halt.


Following Akhenaton's fall, a couple of boy kings and an old man struggle to stabilize rule briefly in a vain effort to stop the inevitable. In the last king of this dynasty, Horemheb, we find the erasure of the Amarna kings in this effort not to stabilize the royal house but Egypt itself.


From this rise three strong kings who attempt to consolidate and recoup the empire lost in the end, a general and vizier to Hormheb named Ramses takes the throne, being soon replaced. "After a brief reign, he was succeeded by his son Sethos (Seti) I, who managed to recover Palestine and Lebanon." In Ramses II, we find the penultimate king ruling for almost seven decades of high propaganda.


The monuments of King Seti I, including his temple at Abydos with its delicate reliefs and his tomb in the Valley of Kings completely decorated, revealing the valley's finest monuments. While, too frequently, the hasty craftsmanship of Ramses II produces a gaudy effect. "On the one hand, sculpture reverts to the elegant and graceful style of the late phase of Dynasty XVIII, developing an extra-refined, highly sensitive idiom both in form and in expression. On the other hand, there is a greater fondness for monumental proportions".


Charismatic King Ramses II lived far too long, outliving twelve crown princes until at his death, the elderly and effective Merenptah ascended the throne for a decade until the dynasty fell apart. Of Dynasty XX, we are told of the last flourish of empire in King Ramses III, a son of King Setnahkt. The author explains the statuary of the Ramaside era, "Private statues revert to the absorbed expression of those from Dynasty XVIII. In temple sculpture, which is still more plentiful than tomb sculpture, we frequently encounter the block statue. In its simplicity, it suited the requirements of the age, which sought to express inner contemplation."


With the loss of the Empire, Egypt spent much of its history occupied by foreign rulers up to Alexander the Great and the Ptolemies in the 4th century B.C.  In art, the people look back to the glory days of the two lands, and reliefs reflect scenes taken from the tomb reliefs of the Old Kingdom, with the tomb owner dressed in contemporary garments.


Contributions provided by the Ptolemies in the temples, including at Edfu, Dendera, Philae, and Esna, gone are the free-flowing reliefs, replaced by rows of Ptolemies in front of gods with hieroglyphic inscriptions dividing the scenes. In royal statuary of the period, we find the Egyptian king in all his regalia and clearly Greek or Roman.


The book ends with the aforementioned catalog of statuary from many museums, which had been noted in the margins as the text moved along. I thoroughly loved this read. In it, I found a well-represented timeline of the Ancient Egyptian people, the politics, art, and the gods of the ages all came together in Gods, Men & Pharaohs.