I am a lucky man. My youngest son called me up on Monday and invited me to visit an exhibit with him. We went to the Maryland Science Center and walked through the results of a recent and ongoing German effort to use modern medical technologies to examine mummies from around the world without damaging them. I did not know how to tag this. My son said it was much like a power point presentation, one of which I have never seen. I felt as if I was walking through an interactive book. And, at the end of the maze of preserved dead, I found a credits board and acknowledgement board that smacked of teamwork literature like that put out by National Geographic and Time Life Books. To me, Mummies of the World remains a book.

I have long been interested in South American mummies, as they are so much less creepy and more representative of the living rather than the hierarchal cosmology associated with the Egyptian mummies. This exhibit has them all, plus mummified animals, European bog mummies, and crypt mummies donated by a German noble family who still reside in the castle beneath which these ancestors of theirs dried out after the Thirty Years War.

I highly recommend visiting the exhibit if it comes to a museum or science center near you. Below are some of my impressions.

The Egyptians were a lot like protestant American capitalists, obsessed with making money on the backs of poorer folks, terrified of some heavy-heart smelling devourer in a penitent afterlife, and obsessed with their social status to the point of packing figurines of their earthly servants with them, so somebody would be around to do all of the work in the afterlife.

Get a job Hatstupet!

The first mummies were Andean, not Egyptian, and by thousands of years. Some of the Andean women still have hair so nice that black American women would pay a month’s salary for a wig made of it, even thousands of years after their death.

The study of early modern European mummies is currently of importance to medical researchers in the fight against tuberculosis, which carried off one out of every four souls in Europe during the middle ages and early modern era.

Arab Muslims and European Christians have been disgusting cannibalizers of more primitive cultures for at least a thousand years, as evidenced by the practice of pulverizing and grinding up Egyptian mummies for medicine. Yep, Arab and European doctors, up until 1924, were still prescribing the ingestion of mummified people for a variety of ills! A 1924 Merck Pharmaceutical catalog was opened to the page where Mumia vera Aegyptica was listed. The entire collection of mummies somehow escaped the destruction of WWII Germany, where they had apparently been shipped to and held, for, perhaps, this very purpose.

The ironic take way notion that so humored me was, that what those rich Egyptians feared the most—next to awakening in the Land of The Dead without a full crew of slaves—was that some beastly alligator god known as ‘The Swallower of The Dead’ would eat them in the afterlife. In the end, it was a bunch of rich bearded slave-owners that did just that to the preserved bodies that they so cherished as launching pad-linchpins into their ancient version of a Wall Street/Hollywood afterlife.

Overall, my impression was that I am thankful to be living in the age of modern dentistry.