Fascinated with death? Visit Egyptian exhibit at San Diego Museum of Man

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By Donald H. Harrison

SAN DIEGO—With such popular television series as “Law and Order,” “NCIS “(Naval Criminal Investigative Service) and “CSI “(Crime Scene Investigation) and their spinoffs all featuring regular trips to the autopsy table, American viewers are becoming increasingly less queasy watching surgical procedures on the dead.

For such viewers, the Museum of Man’s graphic explanations of the mummification practices of the ancient Egyptians–and for comparison purposes the head-shrinking methods of the Shuar Indians of Ecuador—no longer have any shock value, but they may afford a certain clinical interest.

“The word ‘mummy’ comes from ‘mumiya,’ an Arabic word for bitumen, a tar-like substance not actually used in the embalming process,” informs a sign near the entrance of the museum’s Egyptian collection, culled in large measure from collections willed to the museum by Ellen Browning Scripps of the Scripps newspaper family and Dr. Geoffrey A. Smith.

“Mummification consisted of a complicated series of processes and rituals that lasted 70 days. First, the body was washed and the internal organs were removed since they decayed more quickly. The brain was extracted by means of a metal hook inserted through the nostrils and apparently discarded.

“An incision was made in the abdomen through which the lungs, stomach, liver and intestines were removed …. The body was then covered with natron, a natural salt that absorbed all remaining moisture from the tissues. After drying, the skin was covered with resins and the body cavity packed to return it, as much as possible to its former appearance. Finally the body was wrapped in yards of linen for protection. During the wrapping process, priests placed amulets between the layers of linen and recited magical spells for the protection of the mummy. The most important amulet was the large scarab to protect the heart which was not removed during the embalming process. Internal organs, each of which was protected by its own god, were put into special jars and place with the mummy in the tomb.”

Ricky Owens-Smith, a docent with a sense of humor, added that such processes were reserved for people of wealth. “Poor people like me would have been thrown out into the sand,” he said, “and as a result of the dry weather, some of them would have been mummified naturally.”

He could show how bodies could become naturally mummified by taking a short stroll over to the so-called “Lemon Grove Girl,” a 15-year-old who got the moniker because her mummified remains were found with that of an infant in San Diego’s neighboring city of Lemon Grove.

Owens-Smith explained that “two kids went to Mexico, stole this mummy, brought it to the States, put it in a garage and left it for years and years. The house was sold and the new people who bought it cleaned out the garage and found her. They thought it was somebody who was murdered so they called the police. They investigated it…. She is naturally preserved.”

The teenagers who transported the girl’s body and that of a baby illegally across the international border told of finding them in a cave in Chihuahua in 1966. The bodies remained in the garage for 14 years, and were estimated to have been mummified for as long as 500 years. Although the mummies had been stolen by the boys, the Mexican government gave the Museum of Man permission to exhibit them.

Nearby is an image of another mummified body, this one from Denmark. His body was thrown into a peat bog. As there was a rope around his neck, it is assumed he was executed some 1,800 years ago.

The exhibit showing shrunken heads from Ecuador explained that “by taking an enemy head as a trophy, the Shuar warrior believed he assumed the victim’s power and exacted blood revenge for his ancestors.” However the Shuar believed the victim’s soul would remain in the head, and possibly pose a threat to the victor, unless the head were shrunken, and the victim’s soul thereby destroyed.

There were several steps in shrinking a head: “First the back of the head was cut and the skull discarded. Next the skin was turned inside out and cleaned of soft tissue, then the head was simmered in a large pot of water, skin was turned inside out and fastened shut, as were the eyes and the lips. The head was then filled with hot pebbles and sand, and smoked over a fire, which completed the shrinking and the drying. Finally the face was blackened with charcoal. Shuar warriors often wore their victims’ heads on a cord around their necks as symbols of honor.”

In an area adjacent to the Egyptian display is a Children’s Discovery Center, where youngsters and adults can “don clothes from ancient Egypt, pretend they are part of a market and weigh the ‘heart’ of a princess to decide her fate – to decide if she is going to the underworld or be honored as a princess,” commented Elizabeth Berg, the museum’s marketing director. “You can also practice putting together a pyramid out of blocks and you can pretend that you are riding on a ship,” she said.

This helps carry out a portion of the mission of the cultural and physical anthropology museum which is to “collect, preserve, interpret and communicate evidence of human development, creativity and artistic expression to advance understanding and respect for all cultures,” she said.

The ‘heart’ of the princess is made from a plastic material, and can be placed on a scale to see if it is heavier or lighter than a feather made of metal. As children perform this pretend ritual, an adult can watch with interest from a ‘pharaoh’s chair.’”

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While mummies hold many visitors in thrall, the Egyptian exhibit at the Museum of Man also can serve as a primer for anyone wanting to brush up on Ancient Egypt before taking a trip to see the Pyramids.

Here, docent Owens-Smith is in his element, providing interesting factoids about Egypt that will help anyone become oriented for such a journey.

He starts by explaining that although scholars refer to different time periods in Egyptian history—such as that of the Middle Kingdom – “no pharaoh ever said ‘I am the third pharaoh of the Middle Kingdom;’ it’s a modern invention to help in the study of 5,000 years of Egyptian history.”

Further, he said, people should not be confused by the fact that Lower Egypt is in the north and Upper Egypt is in the south, even though a map might suggest the reverse. Just remember that the Nile flows from the mountains in the southern part of the country to the delta in the northern part of the country and onward to the Mediterranean.

The Nile was something of a spiritual dividing line for Egypt. “All the temples are on the western side of the Nile because the western side represented death. The sun came up in the morning in the East, where it was born, so to speak, and it ‘died’ every day in the west,” Owens-Smith said.

Rulers like Hatshepsut and Nefertiti frequently are called ‘queens,’ but in actuality they were pharaohs, Owens-Smith said. ‘Queens’ were the wives of the rulers, and those two women were themselves the rulers. (Some scholars say Nefertiti briefly succeeded her husband, the Pharaoh Akhenaten.) Nefertiti had one bad eye, so in portraits she typically faced to the left, so the bad eye was not in view, Owens-Smith reported.

The docent said that the temple of the Pharaoh Ramses had been in a different location, but had to be disassembled bit by bit and moved to higher ground in order not to be covered by Lake Nasser, which was created with the building of the High Dam at Aswan.

Pyramids evolved in their design. The Step Pyramid at Syqqara was of an early design, and then ways were developed to make the sides of pyramids smoother, as exemplified by the Pyramids at Giza.

No modern explorers found treasures in the pyramids, the docent said. “They were all robbed in antiquity. People knew that the pharaoh was buried there, all of his goods, all of his treasures. I don’t think they even found a string of beans in a pyramid.”

The Rosetta Stone, named for the town in which it was discovered by the French in 1799, contained inscriptions in hieroglyphics, in Demotic (an Egyptian script) and in ancient Greek. The town of Rosetta is known as Rashid in Arabic. As people could read ancient Greek, they assumed the inscriptions in the other languages meant the same and puzzled out a system for understanding the hieroglyphics written inside Egyptian tombs and other sites.

Hieroglyphics, said Owens-Smith, “could be written top to bottom, bottom to top, left to right, or right to left – clearly not at the same time. They have a little human figure here that tells you which way to read it. So if she is looking to the right, we can read this left to right. Here is one looking to the left, so this tells us how to read it.”

“Ra,” Owens-Smith continued, “is a god and every god had a sacred animal. Ra’s sacred animal was the hawk (or the falcon) so when he died , within his tomb they put all his treasures and gold, and chariots, and you bury his sacred animal as well.” The guide pointed to a small standing coffin with a door painted on it, but into which the hawk actually was loaded from the top. “The incredible thing about this is that the original paint is still there.”

The collection at the Museum of Man also includes ushabtis, which are figures depicting workers and their foremen. A sign explains: “For Egyptians a place of eternal existence after death was called the Field of Reeds where they might be required to perform agricultural work. To relieve themselves of these tasks, the Egyptians began to place magical worker figures in their tombs, beginning in the Middle Kingdom, circa 2100 B.C. These mummiform figures called ushabtis (answerers) were made in a wide variety of materials and sizes to suit every economic level. Large sets might include as many as 365 pieces—as well as one foreman identified by his apron for every 10 workers. Usually carrying hoes in their hands and baskets on their backs, these figures typically were inscribed with the name of the deceased and the lines from the sixth chapter of the Egyptian Book of the Dead.”

Several coffins carved with human figures are included in the exhibition. One sarcophagus, carved from a fig tree, depicts a light-skinned, bearded male, indicating the occupant was from the delta region – where light skinned Egyptians lived, and important, as that is what a beard signified. There is also on this coffin “a scarab beetle pulling the moon behind it,” representing “eternal rebirth and passage of time.”

Owens-Smith said the scarab was highly appreciated by Egyptians, perhaps because of a misconception. Unlike other insects, it seemed to emerge fully grown. Egyptians got the idea that the scarab was born that way, but in actuality the insect remains hidden under the sands until mature.

Images of scarabs might be painted on Egyptian funerary objects, possibly with red ochre, yellow ochre, green malachite or cobalt blue. Owens-Smith explained that these naturally occurring materials would be ground up, mixed with water or oil, and used to paint the coffins. In some cases, men and women would use the paints for makeup, “the men to keep the sun out of their eyes, the way football players put stuff beneath their eyes to keep out the sun’s glare.”

A familiar design was the Eye of Ra, previously known as the Eye of Horus, “just showing you that someone is always watching over you, protecting you, keeping an eye on you.” A similar design is on the back of the U.S. one-dollar bill, Owens-Smith pointed out.

One of the exhibits is a sarcophagus for a child, one of only seven known to be on display anywhere in the world.

“Unless they were from a wealthy family, children did not receive this type of elaborate coffin, but instead were bundled in linen wrapping,”and with palm frond maps, “placed in a deep depression in the sand, placed in a communal tomb or floated down the Nile River in a carved box,” said a sign.

In the early days of studying mummies, scientists such as Margaret Murray, a pioneer Egyptologist, would unwrap and dissect them. Now, however, the mummies can be x-rayed, CAT-scanned or given an MRI, deepening knowledge of life—and death—in eastern Egypt.