Mummified: The Stories Behind Egyptian Mummies in Museums - Hardcover

by Angela Stienne (Author)

The unsettling stories of how Egyptian mummies came to be held in British and French museums.

We all know what a mummy is - or do we? In Mummified, Angela Stienne explores the little-known stories behind the Ancient Egyptian remains displayed in British and French museums.

Taking the reader on a journey between Egypt, Paris and London, Stienne exposes a murky world of grave-robbing, theft and black-market deals over human remains. Mummies have been unrolled in public, dissected for race studies and even eaten for their supposed health-giving properties. But does the fact they are thousands of years old mean they can be treated as objects, or do we owe them the same respect we would any other human body?

Investigating matters of life and death and the ethics of collection and display, Mummified offers a fresh perspective on these ancient bodies, which have fascinated Europeans for centuries.

Back Jacket

A coffin that rotates, a man collecting preserved heads, skulls amassed in a natural history museum for dubious research: what if the most interesting stories behind Egyptian mummies in museums are not the ones you already know?

Mummified explores the curious, unsettling and often controversial history of the Egyptian mummies held in museums in France and Great Britain. From powdered human remains eaten as medicine and bodies hastily buried in gardens, to mummies unrolled in public, dissected for race studies and DNA-tested in modern laboratories, there is a lot more to these iconic figures than meets the eye. The book travels from Paris to London, Leicester and Manchester, from the apothecaries of the Middle Ages to the dissecting tables of the eighteenth century, and behind the screens of today's computers, enriching our understanding of these bodies that have fascinated Europeans for so long.

Mummified explores stories of life and death, of collecting and viewing, and of interactions - sometimes violent and sometimes emotional - that question the essence of what makes us human.

Author Biography

Dr Angela Stienne is a cultural historian, museum researcher and storyteller. In 2016 she created the website Mummy Stories, which aims to reshape the discussion around human remains in museums by collecting people's stories of their own encounters.