α My name is...
β what does it matter?
α My country is…
β And what does that matter either?
α I am of noble birth…
β What if you came from the working-class?
α When I died my reputation was high…
β What if it had been low?
α And I now lie here.
β Who are you and to whom are you telling this?Sepulchral Epigram
attributed to Paulus Silentiarius
“The Egyptian mummy is both dead and alive: physically and in the collective consciousness. And yet, so many see Egyptian mummies today and forget about the crucial part: an Egyptian mummy is a corpse. Behind their astonishing preservation, their fine wrappings and ornate cartonnage, behind the beautifully rendered mask, from the golden ones to the Fayum portraits, when we peer at ancient Egyptian mummified bodies, we stare at death.” Angela Stienne
In
January media outlets of every stripe were reporting, as CNN put it, that “some
museums in Britain are now using words other than "mummy" to describe
their displays of ancient Egyptian human remains. Instead, they are starting to
adopt terms such as "mummified person" or to use the individual's
name to emphasize that they were once living people.” The Sun, who were one of
the first newspapers to pick up on the story, ran it under a typically
provocative headline; MUMMY'S A CURSE Woke museum chiefs stop calling
embalmed Egyptian dead ‘mummies’. The Daily Mail’s version was Don't use
the word 'MUMMY'... it's offensive to ancient Egyptians: Museums stop using
age-old expression out of 'respect' for 3,000-year-old dead. Where the
tabloids lead these days, the broadsheets seldom fail to follow; The Times
reported that “Museums are removing the word “mummy” from labels that describe
human remains in their Egyptian exhibitions because it is deemed “dehumanising”
and has a colonial past.” It is not difficult to imagine the comments the story
provoked amongst readers; “Does anyone have a real job nowadays, or is everyone
just paid to worry about how someone might be offended? Although if you're
worrying about offending someone who died 3,000 years ago, I fear you've
watched one too many Tom Cruise movies”, was the most popular reader comment in
The Times.
 |
| Paul Dominique Philippoteaux’s 1891 painting shows the mummy of an ancient Egyptian priestess being unwrapped before members of the French Egyptology Society |
The title of Dr Angela Stienne’s book tells you immediately which side of the debate on mummies she is on. The book is an extremely well-argued polemic for not only making changes to the way we describe mummified persons but for rethinking the way human remains are displayed in museums. Dr Stienne is French but has studied and worked in the UK for a number of years and ‘Mummified’ engages equally with both French and British cultural history. Her history of Western engagement with the Egyptian mummy focuses largely on the two centuries that have passed since the invasion of Egypt by Napoleon’s grande armée of soldiers and scholars in 1798. Her central argument is that popular and scholarly engagement with mummified remains shows “a fundamental lack of respect for their status as the remains of human being.” There is, she says a “core idea that bodies could be poked at, studied and made fun of as innocent entertainment – a pretend innocence that masked a political reality. The French and English were colonisers, and colonial activity only makes sense when the colonisers consider themselves superior to the people whose lands and cultures they have decided to control.”
Dr Stienne
points to the European fascination with ‘otherness’ and cites the examples of the
public displays of Saartjie Baartman, the so-called Hottentot Venus, and Julia
Pastrana, the Mexican 'wolf-woman', to argue that “the viewing of real people,
dead or alive, in fairs, shows and national exhibitions was not just a morbid
curiosity inherited from the anatomy museum: in the nineteenth century, this
began to carry an insidious political message. It was to be understood that
some people were not just different – they were inferior. And in this sordid
display of racism and othering, the Egyptian mummy became a powerful took of
persuasion.” She sometimes takes her arguments in unexpected directions. In
a chapter entitled ‘The (White) mummy returns’ she moves from a discussion on
Flinders Petrie’s involvement, with Francis Galton and Karl Pearson, in the
creation of eugenics to Erich von Däniken’s batty theories that aliens built
the pyramids. Despite being discredited both types of thinking, she argues, are
as prevelant today as they ever were; “the alien trope is a recurring one,
and yet few realise how rooted it is in deep racism and the exclusion of
Egyptians from their own narrative” she says. Because there is widespread incomprehension that
ancient peoples may have possessed skills and knowledge that we do not possess
today there is “the pervasive idea that civilisations evolve and progress
and that therefore we are entirely superior today in skills and intelligence to
people who lived before”.
 |
| The good doctor contemplates the conundrums in displaying human remains |
While
Dr Stienne is clear sighted about the past her vision regarding the future is
slightly more clouded. Something needs to change in the way human remains,
including mummies, are displayed and she looks at some recent developments and
initiatives that have tried to tackle the issues she has raised. But she
clearly does not find these completely satisfactory; her own fascination with
mummified remains seems to stop her from accepting what seems the logical
conclusion of her arguments, that if it is fundamentally disrespectful to put
human remains on public display then museums should repatriate the remains in
their collections to their place of origin, where they should be buried again. Instead,
she says we are faced with the ‘mummy conundrum; a displaced body that
forces us, from within its glass case, to bear witness to a body that is dead,
and yet has survived incredible times’ and which represents ‘the rare
opportunity, to go and visit death, time after time.’ She argues that ‘these
silent bodies are an invitation to have new conversations. Perhaps this
is an imperfect future: one where we share uncomfortable conversations but also
moving stories”. In her Epilogue she tells us how moving she found the 2021
Pharaoh’s Golden Parade where with great ceremony the Egyptian government moved
22 Royal mummies from their then home in the old museum in Tahrir Square to their
new home at the national Museum of Egyptian Civilisation. She also approved of the respect and solemnity
with which Ramses II was received in France when he was sent to the Musée de
l'Homme in Paris to be treated for a dangerous outbreak of parasites, brought
by military plane and received by the Republican guard and senior officials and
then driven to the Place de la Concorde to see the obelisk that was raised in
Luxor during his own reign but has stood in Paris since 1836.
Luckily as well as being a polemicist Dr Stienne is a story teller, and not only that, a story teller that is in love with her subject to boot. She mixes her own personal experience in with her narratives of mummies and whether you agree or not with her arguments her book is always interesting and informative. Personally, I think there are limits to the respect that we owe the dead. I don’t think anyone has the right to demand that future generations treat their mortal remains as though they are sacred. Anyone who hasn’t fully decomposed after a couple of hundred years is fair game for archaeologists as far as I am concerned. This a very good book which has received shockingly few reviews. Highly recommended.
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