Ötzi’s mummified body and the things found with it prompted scholars to rethink some assumptions about the roots of European civilization. His copper ax showed that the transition from stone technology to metal happened earlier than archaeologists had previously believed. The rest of his gear — a bow, a quiver of arrows, a waterproof cape woven of grass, even his well-made shoes — show that Ötzi was well equipped for his trek across the mountains. The stress patterns in his leg bones suggest that he made such journeys routinely. At first, scientists theorized that he might have been a shepherd, but further research showed that he had been shot with an arrow and involved in a physical struggle with other men. A blow to the head and blood loss from the arrow wound probably killed him. This man could have been a soldier, perhaps part of a raiding party.
Salted away in Asia
In the dry climate of Chinese Turkestan (between Russia and Mongolia), bodies buried in the salty soil near the towns of Cherchen and Loulan as long as 4,000 years ago turned into mummies rather than rotting away.
Some of the Turkestan mummies have well-preserved blond hair and appear to be of Caucasian ancestry, which challenges latter-day assumptions about the range of ancient ethnic groups. Based on their well-made, colorful clothing, they may have been related to the Celts, whose culture would later flourish all over Europe and whose descendants include the Irish, Scots, and Welsh. The fabrics show weaving techniques similar to those still practiced in rural Ireland. DNA analysis has suggested genetic links ranging from western European to east Asian, which may mean that their home, the Taklimakan Desert basin, was an ancient crossroads between cultures.
Bogged down in northern Europe
The watery peat bogs of northern Europe also made mummies. Tannins in the peat (partially decayed plant matter) and the cold water preserved bodies in such startlingly good condition that Danish villagers have sometimes mistaken a 2,500-year-old body for that of someone they knew only decades before.
Though discolored by the tannins, the mummies look much as they did when the people died. Some people may have fallen into the bogs, but many were killed and dumped there, perhaps as ritual sacrifices or as victims of another kind of execution. Some mummies of young women wear blindfolds, and other mummies appear to have been drowned alive. There are mummies with ropes around their necks, and some with slit throats.
Most of these peat-bog mummies have intact skin, hair, fingernails, and even facial expressions. And their jewelry and clothing sometimes look unsettlingly like something that could hang in your 21st-century closet.
Dried and well preserved in the Andes
The 500-year-old bodies of Inca children in the Argentine Andes, discovered atop Mount Llullaillaco in the 1990s by archaeologist Johan Reinhard and a team from the National Geographic Society, are among the best-preserved mummies ever found. Apparently killed as a religious ritual sacrifice, the boy and two girls — aged between 8 and 15 — were so perfectly frozen that the scientist said they looked as though they had just drawn their last breaths.
The Argentine discoveries are more than fascinating and informative; they’re also terribly sad. The idea of killing an 8-year-old makes me recoil in horror. What could possibly possess a culture to worship gods that must have the blood of innocents? Yet that’s another reason why the three preserved bodies are so compelling: They draw you into the past as you struggle to comprehend how these people, who were so startlingly similar to modern people in some ways, could have understood the world so differently.
If you got a job preparing wealthy and royal Egyptians for the afterlife, how would you go about it? Here’s the how-to:
1 To remove the brain, stick a long, narrow bronze probe up one nostril, breaking through the sinus bone into the cranial cavity. Wiggle the tool vigorously, breaking down the tissue until it’s the consistency of raw egg. Turn the corpse over to drain the liquefied brain through the nostril. Return the body to a face-up position. Use a funnel to pour boiling-hot tree resin into the cranium to halt decomposition of remaining tissue.
2 Extract the internal organs through a slit in the abdomen wall. (You’ll have to reach in with a sharp knife and feel around for them.) Wait! Leave the heart. Egyptians considered the heart to be the control center for thought and action, so they figured they’d need it in the afterlife. What to do with the other organs? Put them in jars decorated with the heads of gods or a likeness of the departed. The jars go in the tomb with the mummy.
3 Bathe the body in spices and palm wine. Cover it with natron salts, a sodium paste found in drying lakebeds, to retard spoilage and dry the skin.
4 When the body is good and dry, stuff rolled-up linen cloths inside, kind of like stuffing a turkey. Try to restore the person’s shape to something resembling lifelike.
5 Wrap more linen, cut into neat strips, around the outside of the body to create that creepy, bandaged look that will scare the pants off moviegoers a few millennia later.
6 Put the body in a coffin, preferably a double coffin (one inside another). If you’re working on a pharaoh, put the coffin inside a stone sarcophagus inside a hidden tomb.
Preserved pharaohs in Egypt
Perhaps nobody devoted quite so much thought and energy to death and the afterlife as the ancient Egyptians. After burying their dead with great care and ceremony since perhaps 4000 BC (Chapter 4 has more on ancient Egypt), the Egyptians began artfully mummifying their pharaohs sometime before the 24th century BC.
By 2300 BC, the practice had spread beyond royalty. Any Egyptian who could afford it was dried and fortified for the trip into the afterlife. The mummy was buried with possessions and even servants for use in the next world.
Carter first gazed by candlelight into the wonders of that tomb, unseen for more than 3,300 years. That moment has been held up ever since as the ideal archaeological breakthrough — completely unlike most great discoveries, which are scratched out of the ancient dust and painstakingly pieced together.
The discovery made all the papers, and so did Carnarvon’s untimely death. The earl died of an infected mosquito bite a few months after he helped Carter find the tomb. Naturally, some people blamed his death on an ancient curse against anyone who disturbed the boy king’s eternal rest. (Grave robbers had been the scourge of Egyptian royalty.)
The