Unwrapping a Mummy: The Life, Death, and Embalming of Horemkenesi (review)

This slender paperback volume reports the examination of the mummy of Horemkenesi, an eleventh-century B.C. Egyptian priest in the area of ancient Thebes (now modern Luxor, some 400 miles south of Cairo). The mummy was found in 1904; it arrived shortly thereafter at the Bristol (England) Museum and was noted at that time to be in rather poor condition. Seventy-five years of the English climate did not improve this situation, and in 1980 the decision was made to perform a full examination of the rapidly deteriorating mummy. Mummies (Egyptian and otherwise) are rarely as well identified as was Horemkenesi. Not only were the coffin and wrappings inscribed with his name and official titles, but ancient graffiti were also found in the area where he worked—all of this information placing his career during the reign of Ramesses XI, the last pharaoh of the Twentieth Dynasty and encompassing the time of transition to the Twenty-first Dynasty.

Background chapters provide information on Horemkenesi’s Egypt, at the end of the prosperous New Kingdom. Climatic changes, attacks by foreigners, food shortages, famines, and inflation resulted in civil war and the division of Egypt into two principalities. Throughout this turbulent period, Horemkenesi served as a priest of the temples of Medinet Habu, on the West Bank, and Karnak, on the East Bank. His primary role, however, was on the West Bank, as scribe and chief workman of the royal necropolis. As chief workman, or foreman, he would have controlled a workgang of about a hundred stonemasons, plasterers, draftsmen, and sculptors who lived in the village of Deir el-Medinah and climbed over a nearby mountain, el Qurna, into the Valley of the Kings for two-week work shifts. This mixture of sacred and secular professions was common in ancient Egypt. His job description probably included searching for old tombs, as the graffiti mentioning him are widely scattered throughout the necropolis. A following chapter provides extensive information on Twenty-first-Dynasty mummification and funerary practices, and reconstructs Horemkenesi’s funeral. He was placed within a far older Middle Kingdom tomb, the broken remains of the original inhabitant simply being swept into a corner and the tomb sealed for three thousand years.

The remainder of the book is taken up with the unwrapping of Horemkenesi, which revealed him to have been a robust man of about sixty. Paleopathologic investigations are often exercises in serendipity, limited and frustrated by events that occurred in the distant past. Although no organs were found in the mummy, coffin, or tomb, the body did reveal heavily worn teeth and dental abscesses, a healed nasal fracture, and immunologic evidence of schistosomiasis and malaria. It is suggested that he died in a remote area (perhaps on a tomb search); by the time his body was discovered, decomposition would have precluded mummification of the viscera, which were probably discarded by the ancient embalmers. The final exercise of the investigators was a reconstruction of Horemkenesi’s face, further humanizing the subject. The book concludes with a fairly extensive bibliography, although there are no citations in the text.

One of the challenges of paleopathology is the derivation of the maximum amount of information from the often minimal remains, and this study does present an exceptional example. Paleopathology usually tell us about an individual’s morbidity and mortality; this study tells us about Horemkenesi’s life. I recommend this book as an easy read and a good introduction to the world of ancient Egypt.