Unwrapping Egyptian mummies

so to speak

May 06, 2025

Before we dive into this fascinating/lightly horrifying topic, please indulge me as I plug the two (!!) in person events I’ve got coming up in London. The first is Floralia on Saturday the 14th of June, a reimagining of the ancient Roman fertility festival with dancers, live music, acrobats, poetry, a jewellery-making workshop, and a whole PILE of food. I’m going to dedicate a full newsletter to this ancient festival next week to provide you with a decent chunk of historical context but you can check out the event listing here: Floralia 🌷

If the thought of drinking cocktails amidst flowers/crafty workshops/a whole bunch of performances isn’t quite doing it for you, my summer symposium may be more up your street. On Saturday the 30th of August we are hosting a Bacchanalia, an ancient occasion of wine-fuelled excess (justified by the fact that it was technically religious worship BUT they got so out of hand they were eventually banned by the Roman senate in 186 BCE). We’ve secured an insane location (London’s first urban winery), we’ll have a DJ, my partner is going to roast an entire animal over fire, and I am going to force everyone to play kottabos (the drinking game from the ancient Greek symposium where people would fling wine at targets/each other). Read all about it here: Bacchanalia 🍇

Now onto the MEAT of this newsletter.

I don’t know what it is about mummies but they’ve always freaked me out. Actually I know exactly what it is, they are preserved dead bodies that are sometimes SMILING at you, the whole thing is just too spooky. And UNNATURAL.

Actual image of me every time I have encountered a mummy.

Also anytime I see one in the flesh (writing that made me shudder), I really struggle to avoid the thought that we have disturbed someone’s final resting place and disrupted or outright destroyed all the care and attention these people dedicated to their funerary rites. But I’ve saved my ✨thoughts & feelings✨ for the end of this newsletter so let’s get into some FACTS (because even I have to admit it’s pretty damn cool).

This all started with a note I wrote (for those of you that have an email-only relationship with Substack, Substack Notes is like Twitter 10 years ago) and a whole pile of you were as intrigued as I was. I am NOT an Egyptologist so I am learning right along with you (did you know there were crocodile mummies????).

The note in question:

Thanks to a cursory google, I now know that not only is this very much a thing, the technical term for it is cartonnage, the layers of fibre or papyrus that, once wet, were used to wrap the irregular surfaces of the human body in the mummification process. So yes, a bunch of what we know about the ancient world comes from corpse papier-mâché.

Essentially imagine the ancient Egyptians rummaging through their recycling bin to find spare papyri that they could use as cartonnage, that’s where and how miscellaneous bits of informations (remnants of official papers, etc.) have managed to find their way to us. Berkeley have a whole bunch of this stuff, specifically texts from guards and village officials from Oxyrhyncha dating to the 2nd century BCE. Their collection also has a petition to Ptolemy and Cleopatra (two copies of it were found in the same bit of cartonnage, P. Tebt. 771), written by a man who appears to have an issue with a squatter and wants them to step in. There are also some tax documents but they are not nearly as interesting to me as the man asking the literal king and queen of Egypt to help keep an opportunistic interloper out of his damn house.

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Berlin also have a bunch of Ptolemaic papyri that were discovered in cartonnage; the texts came from the archives of two royal scribes (basilikoi grammateis) of the Herakleopolite nome, a district of Middle Egypt. Most of them are about tax and grain so, again, not super thrilling but I bet they perked up a bunch of Egyptologists. There are also some endearing annotations in the margins which shed some light on the scribal process in ancient Egypt and add a dash of personality to and intimacy with the texts.

The British Museum did a write up on the Aswan cartonnage, a coffin from around 300 BCE made entirely of cartonnage, but they haven’t exactly popped the hood so we don’t know what scintillating scrap paper may be hiding inside.

Now that’s all cleared up, let’s circle back to crocodile mummies because there’s no way I’m going to drop that in and NOT talk about them.

Crocodile mummy, ca. 664-332 BCE. © 2014 Musée du Louvre, Dist. GrandPalaisRmn / Benjamin Soligny.

Look at this little SWEETHEART. An ancient, reptilian burrito.

But WHY did the Egyptians mummify crocodiles?????

These dangerous beasties were scuttling all over the place in ancient Egypt, hiding in swamps, marshes, and the Nile. There’s even some tomb-art that shows ancient Egyptian herdsmen performing spells to protect against them before crossing the Nile. It is thought that mummified crocodiles may have been votive offerings to the crocodile gods (unsure if presenting them with their swaddled cousin would have the desired effect but hey ho). There were even specific crocodile-priests whose whole thing was just mummifying crocodiles and presenting them to Sobek, the main crocodile god, to ensure a decent flood (fun fact, female crocodiles always managed to build nests for their eggs safely above the flood-line so the ancient Egyptians, as well as the Greeks and Romans, thought they were able to magically foretell the height of the annual inundation). To make sure the mummified crocs kept their shape, the priests would stuff them with discarded papyri, so we also have crocodile-specific cartonnage. Stuffed crocodiles serve an apotropaic function in Egypt to this DAY (if you read last week’s newsletter, you know how I feel about apotropaic anything).

'Book of the Dead', Papyrus of Ani [detail], © The Trustees of the British Museum.

Above is a creature that is part-crocodile, part-lion, and part-hippopotamus. It’s tangentially related to this newsletter, at best, but I stumbled across it and it’s too absurd to not share it with you.

Pivoting back to human mummies, hands up if you knew that rich people used to eat them? 🙋‍♀️

If you thought it couldn’t get WEIRDER, it always can. And if you were unaware of this, I am truly so sorry to be the one to break it to you. There’s been creepy stuff going on with medicinal cannibalism for hundreds, if not thousands of years, but it really took off in the 16th and 17th century. Powdered up mummies were prescribed by doctors to cure ailments (as well as a whole host of other things that I’m not going to list because researching this is making me a tad queasy).

This takes us to my final point, the ✨thoughts & feelings✨ section, specifically the ethical side of all this. As I said, I am not an Egyptologist so I have no doubt there are swathes of things I’ve missed (does the fact that I binge-watched Moon Knight help or hurt my credibility) BUT the moral and ethical implications of unearthing mummies and putting them on display is something I really want to discuss. And I really do mean discuss, because I’m very torn. You may have noticed I haven’t included any images of actual human mummies in this newsletter. I’ll level with you, a large part of that is because they gross me out. But another reason is because that’s literally a human being that’s been exhumed and now is on display. It feels… wrong? I don’t consider myself a delicate flower when it comes to this kind of thing but I can’t help but feel a bit uneasy, particularly because the ancient Egyptians took so much care when it came to burying their dead — the intricacies of the funerary rituals, the details of mummification, organ removal, canopic jars, the Book of the Dead, etc. They could not have been more clear when it came to how important these rituals were. I feel differently about bog bodies, for example, which are corpses that get naturally mummified by literally being in a bog. They still gross me out but digging them up doesn’t feel nearly as violating.

The immediate counterpoint is, of course, how much we’ve been able to learn about Egyptian burial practices and how much that has, in turn, revealed about the ancient world. I’ve been to Egypt, I’ve visited the sites and the museums and been completely awestruck, as have so many before me (the whole Egyptomania thing and how it’s arguably colonialism in a different outfit is a whole other can of worms). Also, from a practical standpoint, tourism is obviously a huge source of revenue for Egypt. People come from all over the world to visit their absolutely stunning tombs so, in terms of what to do with the actual mummies once they’ve been removed, would it be a waste to just hide them in the basement of a museum? The National Museum of Egyptian Civilisation in Cairo handles it well; the Royal Mummies’ Hall is underground, dimly lit, and people are broadly reverent, speaking in hushed tones as they walk around. I think I’ve got more of an issue with mummies that are housed in European collections — at least the ones in Cairo are still in the same country where they were buried.

Unsurprisingly, writing this has not helped me commit to a position either way. It would be ludicrous for an ancient historian (who has participated in multiple excavations 😬) to argue that archaeologists should’ve just left well enough alone. Also Egypt are of course entitled to present and market their heritage however they’d like. And some people are really into mummies?? And maybe that’s okay?? If it’s the gateway for developing an interest in the ancient world?? But, counterpoint, should human remains ever be publicly displayed??? I’m aware that I’m tying myself in knots but it’s a dense, endlessly complex topic that I want your thoughts on. Ultimately, I think there’s room for more sensitivity when it comes to displaying them, ESPECIALLY in the case of non-Egyptian museums.

But I’ve blathered on for long enough, what do you think? Do you think mummies should be displayed? Do you want to be buried wrapped up in your favourite book? Do you think mummified crocodiles are strangely adorable?

Unwrapping Egyptian mummies

so to speak

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