Kea Johnston Egyptologist

Wrapping a "Mummy"

May 1, 2021 » Experimental Archeology

Last fall, I was writing a section of my dissertaion about the actual craft of making coffins. I ended up reading a lot of papers on conservation of Egyptian coffins, and I had conversations via email with a lot of people who are really knowledgeable about how coffins were decorated (whose work I'll mention further in later entries). However, if you are going to make a small coffin or cartonnage, you had best have a "mummy" to go in it! So off I went to the discount store to find a cheap Barbie-knockoff to wrap.

The Plastic Skeleton now named Neferqesut

I finally decided on a small but articulated skeleton from a Halloween display. After all, many of the occupants of the coffins that I study--the ones from post-new-kingdom Akhmim--really aren't very well mummified. We can pretend that our skeleton, while clearly a member of the elite, had limited resources, and chose to put them all into wrapping and a nice coffin rather than mummification.

I decided to use a 1906 account of the unwarpping of a mummy of a 21st dynasty priestess as a guide for how to wrap my skeleton, whose name is (as of 5 minutes ago) Neferqesut. The author of the account, Egyptologist Grafton Elliot Smith, was involved in the unwrapping of many of the occupants of a tomb now called Bab el-Gasus (Smith, 1906). This tomb was carved from the rock hundreds of years before being used as a communal burial place for priests of the god Amun at Thebes (modern Luxor).

These priests lived in the 21st dynasty, (roughly 1075 to 950 BCE) a time of political fragmentation and economic collapse in Egypt. To view this time (the Third Intermediate Period) as a "dark ages" would be incorrect, however. Like many transitional eras, it was a time of great artistic and religious/philosophical innovation. Because they no longer had the resources and infrastructure to protect the painted tombs that their ancestors enjoyed, the elite of the 21st dynasty put their resources into brilliantly painted coffins and sophisticated embalming techniques designed to make the deceased as lifelike as possible (Cooney, 20011).

I wanted to get an idea of what aspects of wrapping a body held the embalmers' attention and why. These details do not really come accross in the written accounts of unwrappings, which tend to be a bit of a tedious, boring (and also depressing) read. However, I appreciated the detail of Smith's account when it came to reconstructing his steps. Smith gave the measurements of every piece of cloth that he unwound from the mummy of Ta-wosret-im-per-nesu.

If you want to watch my step-by-step wrapping process, I've made a video of it available here. I even gave him some "amulets" and a little papyrus, and I talk a little more about the original subject of Smith's paper, Ta-wosret-im-per-nesu.

To wrap the body, the Egyptians used linen. This linen came from a variety of sources--sometimes, it came from clothing which was probably worn by the deceased and saved by themselves or their relatives. Somteimes, if the person was important, they were wrapped with cloth that belonged to the temple and might have been used to clothe the statue of the god. Neferqesut, however, will have to settle with a small amount of leftover muslin and an old bedsheet.

The wrapping proceeded from the head to the foot. The limbs were first wrapped individually and then, the hands were fixed over the groin-area with a special bandage wound around the arms and tied at the wrists. This created a hollow, which needed to be padded to maintain the ideal shape of the mummy.

Osiris Shrouds were placed on some 21st dynasty mummies.

The degree of effort which went into creating this shape was something that I didn't really appreciate until I reproduced it. This ideal, divinized mummy is called a Sah. It represents a deceased being who has become divine because all of the correct rites have been performed for them, including wrapping and mummification. It could be that creating a perfect mummy included getting the shape of the wrapped body as close to the ideal as possible.

What was also surprising, but probably shoulnd't have been, is just how much textile it took to wrap a skeleton which was a little over a foot tall. I used some really rough calculations based on the ratio of the size of my skeleton to the size that Smith gave for Ta-wosret-im-per-nesu's body to calculate a scale factor of 1/4. I then divided all of Smith's heights and widths of bandages by 4, and ripped/cut the resulting sizes out of my fabric. I still managed to use up about two queen bedsheets' worth of fabric for a foot-high plastic skeleton. If you think that every piece of linen clothing was hand spun and hand woven, then you can get an idea of just how extravagant and costly wrapping a mummy was for the Egyptians.

You'll also note that in the video I had some fun "accessorizing" Neferqesut. I gave him an Osiris shroud--an outer wrapping on which a figure of Osiris was drawn, usually in red or black ink. These were made in the 21st dynasty for many of these burials of clergy of Amun. He also got a rolled up papyrus between his legs. This papyrus was not a Book of the Dead Papyrus, but a papyrus with figural scenes which were intended to help the deceased to be reborn or navigate the afterlife. An example of such a papyrus is the "Litany of Re" papyrus pf Princess Nany, pictured here and listed in the picture credits, now in the Metropolitan Museum

An Idealized Mummiform Deity

In short, I suppose I didn't get anything out of this that I could not have gotten from a close, thoughful reading of an account of an unwrapping. However, reproducing the wrapping process was fun, and it forced me to focus on aspects of the process that I wouldn't have thought about otherwise, such as the importance of the shape of the final product, and the sheer amount of fabric that went into wrapping the body.

Bibliography & Further Reading:

  • Cooney, Kathlyn M., ‘Changing Burial Practices at the End of the New Kingdom: Defensive Adaptations in Tomb Commissions, Coffin Commissions, Coffin Decoration, and Mummification’, Journal of the American Research Center in Egypt, 47 (2011), 3–44
  • Dawson, David P., Susan Giles, Michael W. Ponsford, and Janet Ambers, eds., Horemkenesi: May He Live Forever! ; The Bristol Mummy Project (Bristol: Bristol City Council, 2002)
  • Ikram, Salima, and Aidan Dodson, The Mummy in Ancient Egypt: Equipping the Dead for Eternity (London: Thames and Hudson, 1998)
  • Smith, G. Elliot, ‘An Account of the Mummy of a Priestess of Amun Supposed to Be Ta-Usert-Em-Suten-Pa’ , Annales Du Service Des Antiquités de l’Égypte, 7 (1906), 155–82
  • Taylor, John H., Death and the Afterlife in Ancient Egypt (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001)

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