The Mummy in Ancient Egypt: Equipping the Dead for Eternity.

• Author: Murnane, William J.
• Position: Review

The Mummy in Ancient Egypt: Equipping the Dead for Eternity. By SALIMA IKRAM and AIDAN DODSON. New York: THAMES & HUDSON LTD., 1998. Pp. 352, illus. $45.

With the explosion of mass-market publishing has come a flood of books that batten, in slapdash fashion, on the public's fascination with the ancient Egyptian way of death. Happily, this is not one of them. The authors, both respected Egyptologists with research backgrounds in "funerary archaeology," have produced a work that is not only accessible to general readers but a rewarding synthesis for scholars. It completely supersedes E. A. Wallis Budge's The Mummy: Chapters on Egyptian Funereal Archaeology (first published in 1893), which is still sold in modern reprint editions even though it is quite out-of-date. More significantly, though, it offers an alternative to A. J. Spencer, Death in Ancient Egypt (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982)--an estimable work that ranges across all the topics covered in this new book, but which focuses mostly on tomb design. By contrast, Ikram and Dodson deal explicitly with this theme, along with Egyptian conceptions of the afterlife, only in their first chapter (pp. 15-60); and after a lengthy second chapter (pp. 61-102) on the vicissitudes of Egyptian burials in antiquity and their rediscovery down to modern times, the focus is on what the tomb was designed most immediately to protect.

In part II, the heart of the book, most chapters open with a survey of principal developments over time, followed by a detailed account of practices and how they changed, from the Pre-dynastic period down to Graeco-Roman and even early Christian times. Chapters three to six are devoted to mummies and the equipment that accompanied them. The treatment of mummification (pp. 103-36) includes accounts of the ancient sources on the embalmer's art as well as the physical evidence, with sidebars on the materials employed in the process and entire sections on the uses of natron and resin, and on animal mummies. Chapter four (pp. 137-52) surveys the amulets that provided magical protection for the deceased, and how they were arranged on the corpse--a procedure that accounts for much of the damage done to mummies by tomb robbers in search of these precious items--as well as hand- and foot-covers, and jewelry. Next come thorough discussions of how mummies were wrapped (pp. 153-65) and of the masks and other ornaments t hat were placed on them (pp. 166- 92). Since such decorations came to...