Where's your Mummy? The Business of Mummification in Late and Roman Period Egypt

Summary

It is often said that the practice of mummification became a veritable business during the Late and Roman periods, when it was extended to include not only the elite, but also those on the lower end of the status scale. The increase in the number of bodies being embalmed led to the widespread adoption of more expeditious techniques, sometimes resulting in mummies that, though outwardly pleasing in appearance, concealed nothing but a jumbled mess of bones beneath their wrappings. The non-elite Late through Roman Period cemetery of the Wall of the Crow at Giza has yielded several examples of such presumed shoddy workmanship. In one example, a coffin contained one primary individual and three additional lower legs. In others, the bodies had been heavily manipulated or were missing altogether. Scholars have often interpreted such ‘fake’ or ‘composite’ mummies as false advertising on the part of the embalmers. However, archaeological finds accompanying the Giza burials and the appearance of some of the coffins suggest that the mourners must have been at least somewhat aware of their imperfect contents, rather than unwitting victims of ‘embalming fraud’, perhaps influencing the way their loved ones were represented in death more than previously thought.

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This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)   •
• The Practices of Death: The Archaeology of Mortuary Ritual in Ancient Egypt and Sudan

Keywords

Spatial Coverage