History of Mummy Studies

Abstract

The recorded history of mummy studies begins with Herodotus’s insightful observations of Egyptian mummification procedures, including socioeconomic distinctions between elaborate and less intricate forms. Such differences were confirmed by Diodorus, writing a few centuries later, and then again by the savant P. C. Rouyer, who traveled with Napoleon to Egypt at the turn of the nineteenth century. The Bonaparte incursion, an enormously unsuccessful military effort, ignited an eighteenth-century simmering interest in Egypt into a remarkable Egyptomania that coursed across museums and lecture halls, eventually leading to professional Egyptology with cultural and biological interest in the mummies as people. A world away, in the coastal South-Central Andes, sixteenth-century Spanish explorers encountered Inca mummies within a landscape that included the living and the ancestors. By the end of that century, the “extirpation of idolatries” led to the destruction of the Royal Incas, including their mummies, whose preparation methods remain a source of disputation. As mummies crossed the seas to grace private and public collections, study initially focused upon them and their accompaniments as cultural materials, as scientists described preparation procedures, along with associated artifacts. Scientific study of the cadavers themselves, while earlier moments occurred, began with the development of imaging procedures in the very late nineteenth century. This chapter will follow the histories of discovery and interpretation of mummies, focusing upon the contrastive Egyptian and Andean chronologies and ending in the early twentieth century, where the chapters in this volume begin their contemporary treatments.