Mummies, Disease, and Ancient Cultures (review)

Aidan Cockburn, Eve Cockburn, and Theodore A. Reyman, eds. Mummies, Disease, and Ancient Cultures. 2d ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. xxii + 402 pp. Ill. $80.00.

This sober collection of essays on mummies by thirty-nine contributors from a variety of disciplines and countries deals not only with ancient Egypt, but with the Americas, the Orient, the Mediterranean littoral, Melanesia, and the Arctic regions. The general focus is on objective evidence of demographics, culture, diet, and disease patterns. The only weak chapter discusses bog bodies from northwestern Europe and Denmark, a subject about which some of us would like to know more. Only one illustrated bone lesion struck me as questionable: figures 10.10-11 may indeed be from South Americans with calvarial meningiomas, but fibrous dysplasia or unilateral cranial hyperostosis seem more likely. The authors wisely stress the difficulty of accurate diagnoses on paleopathologic material, and honestly face the adverse impact of "repatriation" on physical anthropology in the United States, Israel, and Australia--Native Americans have in fact closed the door on mummy studies in the United States.

Mummification can either be deliberate or occur naturally when bodies freeze or dry out. Mummies are basically freeze-dried, but sometimes, like Smithfield hams, they are salted, dried, and smoked. Elaborate preparation, as in ancient Egypt, was the exception, although the extent of deliberate mummification was generally related to social class, and the rich fared better in death than the poor. Human sacrifice seems to have preceded deliberate mummification in many cultures, from Peru to Denmark. It may also be that mummification reflected the persisting human hope that death is not final, and that something better follows.

Mummies provide evidence that our ancestors lived neither long nor well: more than half of South American mummies died before fifteen, and a six-year-old Aleutian girl starved to death with stones and animal fur in her stomach--a poignant reminder of how good the really old days really were. Lice and parasitic entozoa crossed cultures, millennia, and social divisions. Queen Maria of Aragon died in 1568 with a festering syphilitic gumma and hepatitis. Cocaine was already a recreational drug by 1000 B.C., and arteriosclerotic coronary artery disease is by no means exclusively a modern disease. Two of three sailors from the disastrous Franklin expedition searching for the Northwest Passage (all 129 members died, mostly of lead poisoning from soldered food cans) had tuberculous spondylitis, and viable Clostridia species were recovered from two of the three bodies--three of six strains from 1848 were already resistant to modern antibiotics. History is about continuity amid change.

Part 4, "Mummies and Technology," is a wonderfully concise summary of the ways in which modern investigative techniques are being applied to mummies and to other paleopathologic material. Mummies can now be examined in great detail without destroying them; endoscopy and CAT scans have been especially productive, permitting detailed anatomic examination without harm. Ancient DNA can be extracted and, to a large extent, identified; but DNA degrades quickly after death, and because aDNA yields typically at most a few hundred base pairs, its validation is difficult. We can anticipate that science will provide more information as laboratory resources expand.

This attractively printed, carefully proofread, and well-illustrated book is, alas, flimsily bound; also, every map deserves a scale of distances. The essays do not exceed the evidence upon which their conclusions are based. While much curious lore appears--for example, how to shrink a human head, and how some Japanese priests attempted to mummify themselves--this is impressively solid science and scholarship. The bibliographies are complete and shun the current slothful notion that all useful publications are in English and came out during the past fifteen years. This volume is very highly recommended indeed!

William D. Sharpe
UMDNJ--New Jersey Medical School

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