Mummies and Death in Egypt

Mummies offer abundant data about vanished civilizations. Those found at the necropolis of Dush, for instance, used from the end of the Ptolemaic period to the end of the Roman period, reveal various illnesses suffered by the ancient Egyptians. A seven-year-old girl wears a wig to cover hair that had fallen out and grown back in a disordered manner characteristic of prolonged typhoid fever, and a five-year-old boy is fixed in a posture of agony, probably from appendicitis complicated by peritonitis. Gold conferred a divine quality on the deceased, and in the Hellenistic period, the eyelids, lips and nails of certain mummies were gilded. X-rays of Ramses II reveal that the pharaoh died an old man, suffered from osteoarthritis of the hips, and had bad teeth, while a CAT scan proves that King Tutankhamen, who died as a teenager, wasn't assassinated. This French import by Strasbourg religion professor Dunand and physician Lichtenberg spans a wide range of museums and excavations, and the scholarship is generally accessible and interesting, but the work's textbook-like quality may turn off lay enthusiasts, and the b&w illustrations, fuzzily reproduced on matte paper, don't do justice to the material. (Dec.)