[I wrote the following around mid-February, 2003, for a private mailing list. I'm still thinking about it, and so decided to include it here and now. Other women on the list at the time made some very good comments, but I dislike quoting them without their permission, so it's still very much a monologue, and the poorer for that.]
Nola and I were recently sucked into a bookstore via their patented Bookstore Mega Vacuum, for which I think they should be required to hold annually-renewable permits cos they get so much money off me with it, and I picked up The Mummy Congress by a local writer (Heather Pringle) and I've been pretty much glued to turning its pages for the last few days. Just about done now, and it's provoked quite a lot of questions in my mind.
The book is basically about the people who study mummies around the world, what they've discovered while doing so, their reasons and their methods. And about the reasons ancient and not so ancient cultures have for mummifying their dead.
There is, to my mind as sparked by this book, a peculiar reverance for the dead juxtaposed with an astonishing degree of callousness toward their physical remains. When one considers the degree of care lavished on a pottery shard during excavation of an Anasazi settlement, it blows my mind to read that a pathologist studying mummies in Egypt will not only dissect them (which may be unavoidable) but will then break their legs so as to fit them within a Glad trash bag once he's through with them.
I did a little bit of work one summer in an anthropology museum as a grunt for the team that set up exhibits, and I picked up a few bits and pieces around the ideals of museum work. The bottom line I understood to be that whatever one did with a relic, the foremost guiding principle is to not destroy it, no matter what knowledge or insight one hoped to gain by doing so. The reasoning went that future innovations, ten or twenty or a hundred years down the line, would likely allow such studies to be done in less invasive or destructive ways, but that if the material were destroyed in the present, there wouldn't be anything to study.
This is why, more than any other consideration, archeological digs and findings are handled with kid gloves. It's that old Hippocrates oath at work—first, do no harm. It's a jolly good thing to keep in mind if one is doing any kind of restorative work, no matter how minor or plebian.
There's two other conundrums which I've been mulling over. One is that in the Tarim Basin in Outer Mongolia, a number of mummies have been unearthed that point to a previously unknown early migration of Caucasian peoples from central Europe. China is blocking all attempts to study or publicise this settlement, and the reason they give, as related by Ms. Pringle, is that it has nothing to do with China. What has naught to do with China? Why, the possibility that at a very early point in its history, the peoples of that part of Asia might have had a co-mingling and exchange of ideas and technology with some roving Caucasian tribes.
Well, maybe they did and maybe they didn't. But the question is not whether they did or didn't, but how important it is to a Chinese sense of national or ethnic identity to assert that all of their considerable accomplishments were attained solely within their own culture. The epitome of Eastern, Oriental, culture is its ability to divine new insights through focusing inward, whereas Occidental focuses outward. Positing an exchange of technologies at such an early state would throw that entire identity into question, even if the actual exchanges were trivial. (That's my interpretation of China's position. My personal feeling is that however those Early Peoples went about bettering their lot, they all done good, however they did it. Talking to themselves or talking to scruffy nomads-- it's all the same to me. They talked, they thought, they learned.)
The other thing has to with mummies in South America, in Peru and Chile. In ancient times, Incas sacrificed their most perfect children on the mountains. They believed that (1) the mountains were gods, or the homes of gods, and (2) only the best they had was good enough for those gods. For all I know, they're right. In any case, some mummified remains of children left up on the very high mountains of Peru have come to light, in the way things left on mountains have of doing, and have been brought down to be studied.
There's not a lot, I would think, that can be discerned about ancient disease cycles and so forth from the remains of these children-- they were the best and most healthy of their families. One might get a fair understanding of why they were left there, and so on, but dissecting them won't tell anyone anything much, beyond that they were entombed in conditions that promoted mummification. Neither will exhibiting them to all paying customers in the US, which is what has been done by the National Geographic Society.
So my thinking is, after reading a bit and thinking a bit more, that the best thing to do would be to cart them back up the mountain. Except that the tombs in which they were placed originally have been closed by the mountain itself. That is how they came to light, after all.
As an aside on that matter, for a long while following the discovery of mummies in Egypt by Europeans (the Egyptians already knew they were there) and a confusion as to what certain Arabic medical texts meant when they wrote of the efficacy of 'mummiya' in healing wounds and curing disease, many European apothecaries took to grinding up mummies and offering the powder as medicine. And as a pigment, since the apothecaries also supplied colour to artists. "Mummy", aka "Egyptian Brown", was available in tubes.
One well-known artist in England, upon discovering that he'd been painting with powdered person, elected to hold a funeral in his garden for the tubes he still had on hand. I think this quite reasonable.
So, one group of people is halting study of mummies due to what they think might be discovered. Another group is willy-nilly taking mummies apart in order to study them, no matter how that might affect future scientists' access. Another is hauling them out of their supposed final resting places and sending them on tour, with scheduled unwrappings and unveilings. Every single one of these groups (and they're not nearly so cohesive as my summary makes them out to be) has good, rational, sensible and morally justifiable reasons for doing what they're doing.
I've left out the mummies unearthed in fens and bogs in Europe and Britain. Returning them is not possible—one would have to row out to whatever's left of the bog and chuck them in. What would come of that? Would they finally disentegrate, or would they simply turn up on another hoe a few years hence? (The fellow who stuffs Egyptian mummies in Glad bags is just trying to facilitate re-interring them somewhere else, after all, if and when that's possible.) And while a lot of cant has been put about, notably by Nazis, as to how and why those people ended up face down and dead in the muck, recent objective studies have concluded differently. The Nazis said they were criminals, but it seems now they were quite the opposite-- sacrifices to local dieties a la the Incas.
It's all a muddle, on so many levels. Most corpses go dust to dust. Some, especially more recently, what with coffins and all, go through an abbreviated process that I won't get into, considering how nearly I lost my lunch reading about it. A very few, mostly by chance though some by design, survive pretty well intact for centuries.
The Incas sacrificed their perfect children on the mountain and then talked to their tombs and listened for replies. The Egyptians knew that if they were to have a shot at the best of all possible afterlifes, they needed to preserve their earthly remains so as to facilitate their souls' re-formations in the next world. The Chincorra people, sometime inhabitants of Chile's coast, encased the corpses of their dead infants in painted clay and laid them lovingly out on the desert dune slopes, so they'd always be there. So they wouldn't go away, because they'd be missed if they died entirely.
It seems a bit rude to take all these survivors and stuff them back in the ground, demanding they disintegrate decently. They'd managed to avoid that for all this time, so respect for the dead would seem to encompass acknowledging that one fact. Studying them, dissecting them, seems rather rude,too, but if no one did, the Nazis would have had the last word on the bog people.
So I don't know what to do with them. I keep coming back to the Anasazi potshards, though. If you happen on one, wandering about the back country, you're supposed to leave it be, so the next person can see it in place as you did. That no one of us has the right or the responsibility to harvest souvenirs, or even disturb the site enough to put the pieces back together. They're broken for a reason, is the thinking, something happened that made the pot break, and the something that happened is as important as the pot.
The same may be so of the mummies. The corpses were put where they were for various reasons, and treated however they were treated, and have come to light recently for yet another set of reasons. It doesn't matter that the one set of reasons is probably human-directed and the other is natural forces-directed. The distinction between the two may not be nearly so great as first appears. I don't know. I just keep coming back to 'do no harm'.
[then one woman replied, asking what if in disinterring the mummy, there's good to come of it?]
As far as I can tell just from this book, quite a lot of good has come from disinterring the mummies and either making detailed examinations of them or simply preserving them as well as can be in climate-controlled vaults. The simple presence of the Chinchorro mummies led people to inquire more closely into the nature of Chinchorro society, and the same with Incan mummies. Apparently, Incans mummified their dead across the spectrum of society. It was an integral part of their lives. The dead weren't gone, nor did they cease to own things. It's speculated that this was itself the reason why the Incan empire spread so far-- the dead owned everything behind.
Then, of course, Pizarro and the Spanish came along, and with them the spanish inquisition and forcible conversion and that meant a whole lot of burnt mummies. A real shame as they were reputedly among the best preserved in the world.
There's also work being done on understanding the scope of various plagues and parasites in the ancient world, and that still requires tissue and bone samples. It's not possible to supply those without disfiguring the subject. So it's necessary, but at the same time, how does doing the actual cutting and bagging affect the person on the scene? By the time they get to their fiftieth mummy, what do they see on the table?
(There's a woman at the University at Manchester who has started a kind of 'tissue bank' for mummies, which means that when someone dreams up a study they won't have to find a fresh crypt to get their raw samples from.)
[the discussion turned to what is meant by "good", and who gets to choose, and how those two points intersect, and where the acceptable limits are drawn.]
I would, indeed. I would go even farther-- I'm not all that keen on harming things on the road to a better world.
It's not that I worry about their feelings. I'm somewhat more concerned with the feelings of the survivors-- in some cases recently, aboriginal descendants have raised quite a ruckus about museums holding on to the remains of their ancestors. They want the bodies treated respectfully, according to their beliefs, and by extension, to be themselves treated respectfully, as people and not as conquered subjects.
But what really concerns me is that once the mummy (or other ancient relic) has been unwrapped, cut up, ground up, whatever-- that it is beyond the power of anyone on earth to restore that mummy to its original state. I think that, knowing that what one does to this corpse is absolutely irreversible, it is essential to be certain that whatever one does is needful.
With mummies and such, there's one saving grace—they've been there a long time, and will last a while yet (if they're left alone), so there's no hurry on that score. We can sit in the sun, drink iced tea all day long, and ponder and argue the merits of our plans until we're sick of it or convinced, before we open the door of the tomb. The mummies will wait, unlike watersheds or Greenland ice caps or troop movements.
Time to consider all possible ramifications of one's acts is a luxury we don't often see.
