We're here with JP Brown, who is the conservator of Pacific Anthropology in the
Regenstein Lab here at the Field Museum. But today we're not talking about
Pacific Anthropology... - No, today we're talking about Egypt.
- And, kind of, ancient Egypt.
- Yeah, pretty ancient Egypt.
What we're looking at here is the mummy of Pen Ptah,
a male from the twenty-fifth dynasty about 2700 years ago,
something like that.
- That seems pretty ancient to me. - That is fairly ancient.
- What are we doing with an Egyptian artifact today?
- What we're trying to do is understand more about how Egyptian culture works.
The really interesting thing about studying burials is that you don't bury yourself.
- Right! - Right? - Oh, yeah. - It's exactly what society thinks is what happens.
'Cause you get no say at all in the end.
It's really fascinating to see how this incredibly long and intense tradition
of mummification actually changes over the years. Everybody knows the thing about canopic jars.
You take the organs out and put them in.
But starting at about this period, the canopic jar starts to fade out.
It's not really so much of a thing anymore. Instead, the organs are wrapped up and put
back inside the mummy. - Oh! So, does this individual have the organ jars with it?
Or did it? Or are the organs wrapped up and inside the body?
- We suspect that they're wrapped up and inside the body, but we haven't done
x-radiography on this specimen yet, so we don't know.
What we'd expect to find is a number of packets inside the body.
- Kind of just like a chicken when you get it at the grocery store and it's got the gizzard
bits in it, sort of? - Well, yes, except that you're not planning to take them out and...
- Make a stew? - Make gravy of them. - (laughs) Gross.
- What we know about mummification is that it's a fairly elite activity.
So it's the top 5% or something like that.
And to preserve the body, they took the brain out,
they opened it up, typically with an incision of the left-hand side of the abdomen,
and then removed most of the internal organs.
Part of the removal of the brain involved punching through the nose.
There's the story that they took the brains out with hooks, but you've handled brains.
- Yeah, brains are not intestines. - Right, it's not like silly putty where you could...
- Right. - ... squeeze it out through a hole. It seems to me likely that they used something
like turpentine to try to digest it a bit. - And then it just goops out.
- And then pour it out, essentially. - Like a disgusting mucus.
- Having done all that, the body having been
packed in natron for something like 40 days, then the mummy
would be assembled and wrapped.
- So it would be in a tomb for some period of time and then...
- Then it would just stay there forever. - Forever! Until... - ... is the plan.
- ... was the plan, until who came along and upset this?
- So you've got tomb robbers, you've got people reusing tombs,
maybe a tomb's fallen into disuse and people are like, oh! Free tomb.
Then you've got archaeologists coming in and excavating. - Yeah. Kind of coming in and
wanting to make observations. And so that's how it ended up at the Field Museum.
- We acquired it from the Supreme Council of Antiquities in Egypt. - Okay.
- And what we don't have, alas, is the story before that. - What was the purpose of taking
this sarcophagus and tomb and coffin out of storage and into the lab today?
- So, we're preparing this mummy for a touring exhibit that we've got called,
"Mummies: Images of the Afterlife." What we're gonna be talking about here is the ways
that people messed mummies about before we had modern imaging technologies
like x-ray and CT. - Oh, so what not to do with mummies. - Right. Before the 1920s, this was
pretty much the only way of getting in there and finding anything out.
You mean the only way being actually doing invasive, investigative work.
- Right. So you can see that the outer wrappings have been totally removed to
reveal the inner wrappings, and then my guess is they kind of burrowed around in
there to try to see what we could see. Also, you can see that, basically, the head's fallen off.
- (laughs) Yeah, I kind of noticed it was missing its... had lost its head.
- The problem with unwrapping is that the final layer of bandage is usually adhered on
with resin, and when you try and unwrap that, usually what happens is it gives at the neck
and the head comes off. - So when do you think that those first invasive attempts to
figure out what was going on-- When did that happen?
- I think what was happening when they were collecting the mummies in the late
19th century, was they were really looking for museum-ready exhibits.
- Have you come across any surprises in opening it up today?
- There's this painting on the bottom of the outer coffin: Goddess of the sky, Nut
- And that was pretty traditional, right, that they would paint
this figure, because she's supposed to sweep you off into the next world.
- Right, and she's quite often embracing people from behind, so...
- Well, that doesn't sound so bad. - Yeah, give you a bit of a hug when you die.
- Yeah. Well, you know. - And we did find some beetles inside the coffin, so we're gonna have to...
- Beetles. - Yeah, we're gonna have to identify those. - Are these museum beetles or are these
Egyptian beetles? - We don't know yet. - Oh!
So, we're back unexpectedly in JP's lab, because there's been new developments
in the mummy conservation project. - So, when we were working on the mummy
itself, what we found was that, unlike the majority of late Egyptian human mummies,
the brain hasn't been removed. - There's no brain scooped. - Right. The brain was unscooped.
This is what we found. - Ew! - So, this is dried Egyptian brains. - Can I hold this?
- Yeah, sure. - Oh gosh. I'm holdin'-- I'm holdin' old brains!
These are the oldest brains I've ever held! - But what we also found mixed in with the
brains... lemme take that. - Yeah, yeah, I'm nervous holding those a little bit.
- ... was these blowfly casings. So, there was something in there eating the brain.
- Eating the brain. And you think this was at or around the time that the mummy
was mummified, or before then? - Before. So, we think this guy actually
decomposed a bit before they'd gotten into the mummification system.
- Isn't that kind of counter to how we thought the dead were treated?
- Well, I think it probably depends a bit how far away you are from mummification facilities
when you die. But not just flies eating your brain, then dermestids eating the flies.
These are flesh-eating beetles.
- These are the same flesh-eating beetles that Anna uses in her lab upstairs.
- They're actually a different species but the same family. - Same family.
So those are 2500-year-old dermestid beetles. - Yeah, something like that.
Maybe even a little older. One's trying to think about what circumstances this could
happen in. Maybe you died when you were off on your own somewhere and people didn't
find you for a bit. It's kind of interesting, we'd like to know what the story is, but I guess
we never will. - Well, you never know! Maybe the more work that you're doing on this guy,
the more secrets he will reveal as time goes on. - Yeah, could be.
- Or maybe someone will just hand you a hieroglyphic... - A scroll!
- Yeah, and it'll reveal the secret. Maybe it's the real King Tut, I don't know, I'm just...
This is all... conjecture. - It's a bit later than that. - Yeah, yeah, well.
Are these all of the brains, or... - That's all we got, so... - Yeah.
- That doesn't look like all the brain that you would have left if you dried a brain.
- Yeah. - But, of course, the insects ate some, so...
- So, the dermestids ate some brain, and the blowflies, were they--
- The blowflies, my guess, ate the brain. - Okay.
- And then the dermestids ate the blowflies. - Wow! It's a bug-eat-bug world inside of the
cranium of a mummy! - Yep! (inaudible) - That's really exciting. Cool!