Science writer Jennifer Pringle worries over that question repeatedly in “The Mummy Congress,” her survey of scientists obsessed with mummies. But her answers are always more high-minded than they are convincing (“We are enchanted by the immortality that they represent”), and in no time she’s back to the good stuff, regaling us with mummy stories. (And this is a summer made for mummy fans. First up was “The Mummy Returns.” In August comes another book, Howard Reid’s excellent anthropological study, “In Search of the Immortals.” And there’s a fiction anthology, “Into the Mummy’s Tomb,” with stories by everyone from Poe to Tennessee Williams.) What’s oddest about this obsession is how much of what we think we know about mummies is wrong, right down to the name.
As Pringle points out, the word mumiya is Arabic for a certain kind of bituminous asphalt found in Persia, where medieval physicians used it to heal everything from cuts to tuberculosis. But when European translators came across the word, they confused it with another kind of bitumen used by Egyptians for embalming. Thereafter mumiya became synonymous with the embalmed, hence “mummies.” And somewhere in this tangle, mummies got a reputation for curative powers, so ground-up “mummy” became a medicine. But that was far from the strangest thing to happen to these hapless corpses. Hands down, the weird award would have to go to mummy paint, a brown glaze made from crushed mummies that was wildly popular in Europe for centuries.
Mummies turn up all over the world–some preserved deliberately, some accidentally, in bogs or caves or on frozen mountaintops. The one constant is that wherever people have encountered mummies, they have been captivated. Even the French lost their cool in the 19th century, when it seemed like every tourist coming home from Egypt toted a mummy. The novelist Gustave Flaubert, a model of restraint, contented himself with a mummified foot, which he kept on his desk for the rest of his life. Then and now, the living look at mummies and think, well, however strange they seem, they cheated death at least a little.
