Mummies: Back from the Dead

Bodies donated to science generally serve as interactive textbooks for the next generation of doctors, providing them one litigation-free chance to let their spectacles fall into a patient's thoracic cavity. But some corpses go beyond the call of duty. Among these, one corpse at the University of Maryland School of Medicine particularly stands out. Thirteen years ago, the donor—then a man in his seventies—died of a stroke, and the body was handed over to Bob Brier, an Egyptologist at Long Island University, and Ronald Wade, director of the Maryland State Anatomy Board. After removing and pickling all the organs except the heart, Brier and Wade buried the body under hundreds of pounds of natron (basically baking soda and salt) for 30 days to dehydrate it. Once they removed the clumps of soggy natron, Brier and Wade sprinkled the desiccated body with frankincense and myrrh. What they ended up with looks a lot like a Hollywood monster, and indeed, it is the first authentic Egyptian-style mummy created in over 2,000 years.

Bob Brier and Andrea Corthals examine the thoroughly modern mummy.
Courtesy of Bob Brier

Brier and Wade took great pains to try to authentically recreate the ancient Egyptian process of mummification, with Brier reciting sacred prayers as they wrapped the body tightly in straps of linen. If the ancient incantations worked, the man’s spirit has long since passed through the treacherous Egyptian underworld and united with his eternal body in the afterlife, where he can now gaze down at his shriveled mortal remains. No doubt he would be proud of what he saw: The "thoroughly modern mummy," as Brier and Wade call it, has helped to decrypt the long-lost Egyptian mummification procedure and provided an invaluable guide for scientists who handle the remains of ancient humans.
Until Brier and Wade discovered the technique, no one was quite sure how the Egyptians had so successfully preserved their dead—nor had anyone really tried for over 2,000 years. Although Herodotus had penned a rough outline of the gruesome ritual in his Histories, the priests and embalmers who actually performed it left no record of their trade. According to Brier, it was almost as if no one thought it was possible to learn more. “When I started going to Egypt, I realized that nobody really knew how mummification took place,” he says. “Nobody was talking about it. So that’s how I realized that you really have to do a mummification to figure it out.”