Is It Ethical to Exhume Mummies and Display Them in Museums?

In October 2020, a team of Egyptian archaeologists working at the site of Saqqara, which is located about thirty kilometers south of the modern city of Cairo, excavated a total of at least fifty-nine sarcophagi containing the mummified corpses of Egyptian priests and officials from the Twenty-Sixth Dynasty (lasted 664 – 525 BCE). The Egyptian government sought to publicize this discovery as part of a massive ongoing effort to encourage tourism, since Egypt’s tourism sector has still not fully recovered from the hit it took after the 25 January Revolution in 2011. Consequently, the Egyptian archaeologists made a big display of opening one of the sarcophagi in the presence of reporters. A video of the opening of this sarcophagus was widely shared on social media, where it spawned considerable controversy. Many people were criticizing the archaeologists for exhuming the sarcophagi, insisting that exhuming human remains is immoral and unethical.

I originally began writing this post as a response to this controversy shortly after it broke out, but, as I was writing, I found myself doubting my position. In my aporia, I gave up on the article and set it aside. Now, a year and a half later, I have come back to it. Alas, I will admit that, even now, after I have had a lot more time to think about it, I still don’t have a fully worked out sense of how I feel about all aspects of this issue. I am convinced that it is both moral and ethical for archaeologists to excavate human remains. Nonetheless, I do think that these complaints raise some very important questions about how ancient Egyptian human remains are usually treated.

What people were saying about the on-camera sarcophagus opening

Much of the outrage over the archaeologists excavating the sarcophagi seems to have been rooted in the assumption that the mummies being excavated belonged to people of color and that the archaeologists doing the excavating were white. One commentator on Twitter wrote:

“We’re trained very early on to think that mummies and tombs need unearthing, but its kind of sad that even in death POC can’t escape the prying and opportunistic advances of white people. Idk if Im talking out my ass but something about this feels evil. When I die, keep white people away from me.”

Another commentator added:

“It’s even worse than that. They believed that your afterlife only lasted as long as your body does. That’s why they went to all the trouble of mummification in the first place. So this is more than just disrespectful, it’s the equivalent of ripping someone out of heaven.”

These criticisms were reported on by various news outlets. An article about the controversy from the daily tabloid journal New York Post dismisses these criticisms, writing:

“However, the angry online masses seemed clueless that the archaeological team behind the discovery was actually of Egyptian heritage. They launched their dig amid the 11 pyramids of Saqqara in 2018.”

This is true. There were foreign journalists, diplomats, and various other guests present at the opening of the sarcophagus, but the actual team of researchers who conducted the procedure was made up entirely of Egyptians. Contrary to what the article from the New York Post claims here, though, there were at least some critics on Twitter who were aware of this fact. Naturally, this spawned a large number of heated debates over whether modern Egyptians belong to the same skin-colored-defined race as ancient Egyptians.

For what it’s worth, as I argue in this post I wrote back in April 2020, skin color was only marginally relevant to how the ancient Egyptians conceived of their own ethnicity and, in general, the range of skin tones that exist in Egypt today are probably similar to the range of skin tones that existed in Egypt in antiquity. Nonetheless, I think that the people who were hotly debating the ethnicity of the modern Egyptian excavators compared to the ethnicity of the ancient Egyptians whose bodies they were excavating were neglecting the more topical and pressing questions that this situation poses.

The modern field of Egyptology, or Egyptian archaeology, has its roots in nineteenth and twentieth-century western European colonialism. Modern Egyptian archaeologists are still following many of the methods that earlier European archaeologists of the colonial era established. In other words, the archaeologists may or may not be considered white themselves, but they are practicing a form of archaeology that has been substantially shaped by white colonizers’ assumptions. Thus, the real question is: Is this really the best or most suitable way of doing archaeology? Is it really ethical to exhume the earthly remains of ancient people? If it is ethical, then how should those remains ethically be treated?

I am, of course, neither an Egyptologist nor an archaeologist nor a philosopher of ethics, but rather an aspiring ancient historian whose main area of interest is ancient Greek religion, gender, and ethnicity. I have, however, been thinking about this problem for years now and I thought I would share a few of my personal thoughts on the matter.

ABOVE: Photograph of Khaled al-Anany (left), the Egyptian Minister of Tourism and Antiquities, and Mostafa Waziri (right), the Secretary-General of the Egyptian Supreme Council of Antiquities, examining the mummy in front of a crowd of journalists, diplomats, and various other guests

Why I think it can be ethical for archaeologists to exhume ancient corpses and examine them

In general, I think that the remains of ancient people should be treated with no lesser or greater respect than the remains of the recently deceased. When we consider how we should treat the remains of ancient people, we should therefore look at how people treat the remains of people who have died relatively recently for guidance.

It is relatively common for licensed and qualified experts to subject the remains of recently deceased people to medical examination or autopsy to determine the cause of death. The remains of people who have died in relatively recent history are sometimes also exhumed with the permission of living relatives of the deceased person if it is believed that doing so can reveal important information.

For instance, on 17 June 1991, a team of researchers exhumed the corpse of the U.S. president Zachary Taylor, who died in office on 9 July 1850, because they believed that examining his remains could reveal new information about how he died and resolve longstanding speculation about whether Southern politicians had secretly had him poisoned. His remains were subsequently reinterred.

People who died in ancient times generally do not have known living relatives whom archaeologists can contact to ask permission to exhume their relative’s corpse, but there are laws pertaining to such exhumations that archaeologists must abide by. Would-be archaeologists are generally not allowed to excavate a site unless they have professional credentials and the explicit, legal permission of at least the local government.

There is no doubt that the archaeological excavation of ancient tombs can reveal vital information about ancient people and cultures. Indeed, Egyptian tombs in particular are the source of a vast wealth of information. This is due to a combination of the fact that wealthy Egyptians were frequently buried with extensive grave goods and funerary texts and the fact that the Egyptian climate is so hot and dry that, in many cases, things that were left in these tombs have survived to the present day in remarkably good condition.

If no one ever excavated ancient Egyptian tombs, we would know far, far less about ancient Egyptian culture than we do today. For instance, the ancient Egyptian funerary texts that are known collectively as “Books of the Dead” are known almost exclusively from excavations of burial sites, but they provide important information about ancient Egyptian religion and beliefs about the afterlife. Objects found in tombs can also reveal an enormous amount of valuable information about how ancient Egyptian people lived.

ABOVE: Illustration from the Papyrus of Hunefer, dated to around 1275 BCE, showing the weighing of the heart ceremony

It is true that the ancient Egyptians believed that it was very important for a person’s body to remain intact after their death. When modern Egyptologists excavate tombs, though, they are very careful to keep the human remains they find intact. After the remains are found, they are carefully preserved and stored. Archaeologists do this not just because it is what the ancient Egyptians themselves would want, but also because mummies can give us more information if they are in better condition.

It’s also worth remembering that the ancient Egyptians didn’t just believe that their bodies needed to be kept intact; they also believed that it was extremely important for their names to be remembered and spoken aloud by living people. By excavating tombs, archaeologists can recover the names of individual Egyptians who were long ago forgotten.

For instance, as I discuss in this article I published in November 2019, a hundred years ago, virtually no one outside the field of academic Egyptology had ever heard of Tutankhamun. After the British archaeologist Howard Carter discovered the nearly completely intact tomb of Tutankhamun in November 1922, however, Tutankhamun quickly became world famous. His name, which had been forgotten, was remembered once again.

This is especially the case when it comes to ordinary Egyptians who never ruled as pharaohs and who never held any fancy titles at court. Indeed, the vast majority of the individual Egyptians whose names are known today are known only from tomb writings and inscriptions. If no one ever excavated their tombs, their names would forever remain forgotten.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of the gold funerary mask of Tutankhamun, which was discovered inside his nearly intact tomb when it was excavated by Howard Carter in the 1920s

For all these reasons, I think it is perfectly moral and ethical for professional archaeologists to excavate the physical remains of deceased people from ancient times, as long as they conduct such excavations in a respectful manner and with all the appropriate legal permission from the jurisdiction in which the excavation is taking place.

Indeed, I think it is even arguable that archaeologists have a moral imperative to excavate tombs. Professional archaeologists are extremely meticulous about documenting everything they find, where they find it, and under what circumstances. Even the tiniest information about what layer of dirt an object is found in can be extremely important.

Unfortunately, natural forces such as erosion, floods, and earthquakes continually threaten the destruction of ancient tombs. Climate change is already starting to exacerbate this problem; as CO2 levels continue to grow in the atmosphere, the global climate continues to grow steadily warmer, causing environments around the world to change and sea levels to rise, which can be destructive for ancient tombs and remains in general.

Even more pressingly, illegal tomb robbery and looting are extremely rampant, especially in Egypt. Looters never document any information about how or where they find things and they often destroy anything they find that they don’t think will sell on the illegal antiquities market. (I wrote about this problem much more extensively in this post I made in April 2020.)

By excavating tombs, archaeologists can save vital information about ancient people and civilizations that natural forces or looters would otherwise destroy.

ABOVE: Photograph from this article from MentalFloss showing authorities holding various confiscated looted artifacts in custody

Something I do think is ethically questionable

There are, however, aspects of how Egyptian mummies in particular are handled that I think are ethically questionable. In particular, I’m not entirely comfortable with the way museums all around the world display Egyptian mummies.

The history of museums displaying mummies goes back to the nineteenth century, to the height of western colonialism. I discuss the history of how westerners during this era became obsessed with ancient Egypt and Egyptian mummies in particular in much greater depth in this post I wrote in October 2021 about the history of various monsters that have become associated with Halloween, including reanimated mummies, but I will summarize some of the broad strokes of it here.

From 1798 until 1801, the French military leader Napoleon Bonaparte led an invasion of Egypt. He brought many of the most renowned western scientists, architects, painters, and scholars with him on his campaign, which attracted enormous public attention. During the campaign, Napoleon’s soldiers found the Rosetta Stone, a decree stele of Ptolemaios V Epiphanes originally carved in 196 BCE that bears the same inscription in the Egyptian language using the hieroglyphic and Demotic script as well as in Koine Greek.

The Rosetta Stone proved a tremendous boon to scholars who were already trying to decipher hieroglyphic writing. In the early 1820s, the French scholar Jean-François Champollion, relying without acknowledgement on the work of the earlier English scholar Thomas Young, successfully deciphered hieroglyphic writing and demonstrated his decipherment of it in his monograph Précis du système hiéroglyphique des anciens Égyptiens, published in 1824.

These events and others set off the first wave of a widespread western obsession with all things ancient Egyptian, which is known as “Egyptomania.” Wealthy westerners and western museums became obsessed with Egyptian artifacts and, in response to this demand, both westerners and native Egyptians raided and plundered tombs all across Egypt for their artifacts. A vast and lucrative market in looted Egyptian treasures burgeoned and flourished.

Westerners became especially fascinated with Egyptian mummies, which they thought of as bizarre, exotic curiosities. Mummies looted from Egyptian tombs became sold everywhere, from the streets of Cairo to high-class auctions in the cities of western Europe. Wealthy western Europeans would frequently host and attend mummy unwrapping sessions, in which the host would unwrap the linen bandages of an Egyptian mummy to expose the body itself for the entertainment of everyone present. Traveling showmen and museums all across Europe and North America would display mummies for audiences and visitors to gawk and marvel at.

ABOVE: Photograph taken by the French photographer Félix Bonfils in 1875 showing an Egyptian man selling ancient mummies

Meanwhile, western authors wrote stories about Egyptian mummies coming back to life. The very first story of this kind was the science fiction novel The Mummy!: Or a Tale of the Twenty-Second Century, written by the seventeen-year-old English author Jane C. Loudon and originally published anonymously in three volumes in 1827. Other influential early works include the horror short story “The Mummy’s Foot” by the French writer Théophile Gautier (published in 1840) and the satirical short story “Some Words with a Mummy” by the American writer Edgar Allen Poe (published in April 1845).

It was, however, the British author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (lived 1859 – 1930)—the same author who is best known today for his creation of the character Sherlock Holmes—who single-handedly invented the recognizable modern genre of the mummy horror story with his short story “Lot No. 249,” which was first published in 1892.

In previous stories about living people reviving Egyptian mummies, such as those of Loudon and Poe, the mummy was always friendly and intelligent and revived through an electric shock like Frankenstein’s monster in Mary Shelley’s influential 1818 novel Frankenstein: or The Modern Prometheus. “Lot No. 249” is the first story to feature a mummy revived through Egyptian spells rather than electricity and the first to feature a malevolent mummy who acts like a zombie.

ABOVE: Illustration by William Thomas Smedley showing Abercrombie Smith running away from the mummy, as described in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s short story “Lot No. 249”

Reactions that are shaped by history

To some people, the fact that the display of mummies originates from this colonial history, in which mummies were dehumanized and seen as exotic curiosities, may seem irrelevant. After all, museum practices pertaining to the display of mummies have changed significantly since the nineteenth century. Nonetheless, the way members of the general public view mummies is still deeply influenced by this history.

When people today look at mummies in museums, they inevitably have many different reactions. Some people see a mummy and think “This is a person who was once alive like me, who had thoughts and feelings, who probably had family and friends, and who died long ago.” Far too many people, though, look at mummies and think things like “Oh my gosh, it’s a mummy! Isn’t that so gross/awesome/weird?” or “Ha ha! I hope these things don’t come to life and eat me!”

These reactions are neither natural nor inevitable; people respond to mummies in these ways because, whether they realize it or not, the colonial history I have described above has taught them to respond in these ways. This same history has taught us the idea that mummies belong on display in the first place.

I think it can be revealing to look at the discrepancy between how people treat the excavated remains of premodern Europeans and how they treat the excavated remains of ancient Egyptians. Take, for instance, Richard III, who was the king of England for just barely over two years; he ruled from 26 June 1483 until his death in battle on 22 August 1485. His remains went missing during the English Reformation. After his skeleton was unearthed in a parking lot in Leicester, England in September 2012, his remains were extensively examined and subjected to various tests.

Then, on 26 March 2015, Richard III was given a proper reburial in Leicester Cathedral. The Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby was present and so were multiple members of the British royal family. The famous actor Benedict Cumberbatch read a poem that had been specially written for the occasion by the poet laureate Carol Ann Duffy. It was a momentous, highly reverential occasion.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of the tomb monument of King Richard III in Leicester Cathedral

Now let’s talk about a different famous king who lived many centuries ago: Pharaoh Rameses II of Egypt (ruled 1279 – 1213 BCE). He ruled for sixty-six years, making him the longest-reigning pharaoh of the Egyptian New Kingdom. Under his reign, the New Kingdom reached the unsurpassed pinnacle of its power and prosperity. In the late nineteenth century, when Egypt was under British colonial rule, Rameses II’s mummified corpse was discovered in the tomb known as TT320, or the “Royal Cache,” in the Theban Necropolis. The tomb was initially found by tomb robbers and, when authorities heard about it, they had all the mummies and artifacts in the tomb hastily moved to Cairo.

Over the course of the past century and a half, Ramesses II’s mummified corpse has been under almost continuous permanent display as an artifact in a glass display case in various museums in and around Cairo for the whole world to see. It was on display for over a century in the Museum of Egyptian Antiquities until, in June 2019, it was transferred to the National Museum of Egyptian Civilization (NMEC).

Could you imagine how people would have reacted if Richard III’s bones had been put on permanent display in a museum instead of being reburied? There would have been public outcry! Yet the only crucial difference between Richard III and Rameses II is that Richard III was English, while Rameses II was Egyptian. There is an established schema that the bodies of English monarchs are supposed to be entombed in cathedrals, while the bodies of Egyptian monarchs are supposed to be put on public display in museums in glass cases. To me at least, this doesn’t seem entirely right.

You can argue that this doesn’t affect anyone and there are no victims here, since Ramesses II and other Egyptian people whose mummies are displayed in museums are all long dead and any living relatives of them who could potentially be offended by their bodies’ treatment cannot be identified, but that’s not really the point. What bothers me is that the stark discrepancy in treatment between the bodies of premodern European people and the bodies of premodern Egyptian people seems to send a subtle message that Egyptian people’s remains are less deserving of respect than European people’s remains, which reproduces a colonialist hierarchy.

ABOVE: Photograph of Ramesses II’s mummy on display in a glass display case in the Museum of Egyptian Antiquities in Cairo

Difference between displaying Egyptian mummies and embalmed modern leaders like Vladimir Lenin

Now, I am well aware of the fact that the mummified bodies of some twentieth-century communist leaders are kept on public display in mausoleums. For instance:

• The embalmed body of the Russian communist revolutionary Vladimir Lenin (lived 1870 – 1924) is on public display inside his mausoleum in Red Square in Moscow.

• The embalmed body of the Vietnamese communist revolutionary Ho Chi Minh (lived 1890 – 1969) is on public display inside the Ho Chi Minh Mausoleum in Hanoi.

• The embalmed body of the Chinese communist revolutionary Mao Zedong (lived 1893 – 1976) is on public display inside the Mao Zedong Mausoleum in Beijing.

• The embalmed bodies of the North Korean communist leaders Kim Il-sung (lived 1912 – 1994) and Kim Jong-il (lived c. 1941 – 2011) are on public display inside the Kumsusan Palace of the Sun in Pyongyang.

There are significant differences, though, between how the bodies of these communist leaders are displayed and how Egyptian mummies are displayed. All the bodies of twentieth-century communist leaders that I have mentioned are displayed as objects of cultic veneration in gigantic mausoleums that have been built specifically for them, where they are kept under constant guard and supervision. These bodies are also all less than a century old and are constantly being treated by professional embalmers to make them look as human and lifelike as possible. Consequently, they tend to be in very good appearance.

This is a rather different situation from how Egyptian mummies are usually displayed. Egyptian mummies are displayed in ordinary museums alongside ancient artifacts, where they are treated more as artifacts themselves than as the remains of actual people who used to be alive. People don’t normally visit Egyptian mummies in order to venerate them or pay respect to them; instead, they go to gawk at them and take photographs.

I’m not saying that Ramesses II’s mummy should be kept in a huge mausoleum and given constant care and attention to make it look like a living person. On the contrary, I think that the way the mummified bodies of people like Lenin and Mao are kept on perpetual public display is extremely weird, unnecessarily expensive, and frankly macabrely disturbing. (It’s also worth noting that both Lenin and his wife actually specifically wanted his body to be buried and Mao specifically wanted his body to be cremated. Neither of these men ever asked to have their bodies perpetually preserved and, in fact, their bodies are being preserved in a blatant contravention of their own wishes.)

My point here is that displaying ancient mummies in museums as artifacts isn’t quite the same thing as displaying the mummies of communist leaders in mausoleums as objects of veneration. The context in which a mummy is displayed matters.

ABOVE: Photograph of the mummified body of Vladimir Lenin on display in Lenin’s Mausoleum in Red Square in Moscow

Difference between displaying Egyptian mummies and donated embalmed bodies

I am also aware that some museums display embalmed human cadavers that have been donated to science. For instance, the Museum of Science and Industry (MSI) in Chicago has a famous exhibit called “YOU! The Experience” which includes two dissected human cadavers preserved in half-inch-thick slices to illustrate the complexity of human anatomy and a series of embalmed human embryos and fetuses showing the stages of human embryonic and fetal development.

I think that Egyptian mummies are different from displays like these. The cadavers in “YOU! The Experience” were knowingly donated to science and are being used to teach people about anatomy and development. Egyptian mummies, on the other hand, come from people who lived and died long before “donating your body to science” was even a thing, who never consented to having their bodies put in museums, and who would probably be horrified to find their bodies being displayed in such a manner.

Now, it isn’t of any particular relevance to the ancient Egyptians how their bodies are displayed, since, after all, they’ve all been dead for thousands of years. It is, however, of relevance to living people; whether we choose to display Egyptian mummies in museums or not and, if so, how we choose to do it sends a message about what our culture thinks about the ancient Egyptians and, by extension, modern Egyptians as well.

ABOVE: Photograph of one of the embalmed bodies on display in the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago as part of “YOU! The Experience”

Can ancient mummies be displayed respectfully?

Now, just because many ancient mummies—including not just Egyptian mummies, but also other kinds, such as European bog bodies—are currently displayed in a manner that is arguably not respectful does not necessarily mean that ancient mummies inherently cannot be displayed in a respectful manner. I actually find myself going back on forth on the question of whether it is possible to display ancient mummies respectfully. It’s a gnarly issue that I find difficult to sort through.

On the one hand, I think that it would be possible, at least in some hypothetical ideal world, to have a genuinely respectful system for displaying mummies. Mummies would be excavated, thoroughly examined, and photographed. All the information gathered from the bodies would be thoroughly documented.

Then, those mummies that are likely to be of significant interest to the public—including the mummies of Egyptian pharaohs and other prominent or famous Egyptians—would be preserved in as-sterile-as-possible, climate-controlled cases in a specially designated crypt, separate from the main museum, where people could go to view them respectfully.

Visitors would be reminded before going in that they are viewing the remains of real human beings who lived and died long ago and that they should accordingly comport themselves in a reverent manner. There would be rules against talking and photography.

On the other hand, because of how ancient mummies have been exhibited and portrayed for so long, part of me thinks that, even if museums followed an idea along the lines of what I have outlined in the preceding paragraph, it would be difficult or impossible for most people to see them as anything other than exotic curiosities for them to gawk at.

Egyptian mummies on display outside of Egypt

This issue, of course, grows even more complicated. Ramesses II is actually extremely fortunate compared to a lot of other ancient Egyptians, because his body is at least still in Egypt. Many other mummified corpses of ancient Egyptian people have been stolen by western colonialist rulers and treasure-seekers and taken to lands far away from Egypt. Mainly as a result of this, there are Egyptian mummies displayed in museums all over the world.

I remember how, when I was little, my parents regularly took me and my younger sister to visit the Children’s Museum of Indianapolis. Whenever we were there, my parents and my sister would go in to see the mummy that was on display there, which was inside a coffin belonging to Wenuhotep, the daughter of an Egyptian priest, and was, at the time, incorrectly believed to have been the mummy of Wenuhotep herself. (The exhibit even had a reconstruction of what they imagined Wenuhotep might have looked like.)

I was a very fearful child, so, at the time, I was terrified of the mummy and I always refused to go into the exhibit where it was held because I was afraid of what I might see. My parents only managed to convince me to go in and see it once. Even at that young age, I distinctly remember thinking how strange it was that the museum was displaying an actual human corpse.

The mummy in Wenuhotep’s coffin was returned to the Art Institute of Chicago in 2006 when I was six or seven years old. According to the Children’s Museum website, in 2008, researchers from the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago conducted studies which revealed that the mummy in the coffin was actually that of a biological male at least three hundred years younger than the coffin they were interred in—meaning the mummy was not Wenuhotep at all, but rather someone else who had been put in Wenuhotep’s coffin centuries after her death. (The Egyptians were apparently a bit cheap and it was common for people to disinter other people’s bodies so they could reuse their coffins.)

I can only imagine the horror with which the poor person to whom the mummy belongs would react if they had somehow been informed that, 2,200 years after their death, their body would be stolen from Egypt by treasure-seekers and brought to a land on the opposite side of the globe, where it would end up being put on display in a glass case for the amused viewing of small children.

I have a firm opinion that all Egyptian mummies that are currently held outside of Egypt should be returned to Egypt. It’s clear that the people these mummies belong to wanted their remains to be kept in Egypt, their homeland, and, if we are serious about respecting the ancient Egyptians and their culture, we should respect those wishes, even though the ancients are all long dead.

ABOVE: Old black-and-white photograph of the sarcophagus and coffin of Wenuhotep that were displayed in the Children’s Museum of Indianapolis from 1959 to 2006

ABOVE: Photograph from the Art Institute of Chicago of the mummy that was for many years misidentified as belonging to Wenuhotep, the daughter of an Egyptian priest, but is now known to actually be that of someone else who lived centuries after her

Weird, dehumanizing mummy experiments

Finally, I would like to note that, although I am not categorically opposed to mummies being examined, X-rayed, and subjected to non-invasive testing, I do think that some experiments that have been done on mummies are weird, unnecessary, and frankly dehumanizing. For instance, as I discuss in this post I wrote in January 2020, a group of British researchers used a CT scanner to make a digital model of the badly-damaged vocal tract of the mummy of a 3,000-year-old Egyptian priest named Nesyamun, which is kept on permanent public display in the Leeds City Museum in Leeds, England.

The researchers printed this model using a 3D printer. They then played a sound through the 3D model of Nesyamun’s vocal tract using a loudspeaker. They recorded the resulting sound and published it, claiming that this sound represents what it would sound like if Nesyamun’s mummy were to speak the vowel sound “eh.”

This resulted in a bizarre media sensation in which news outlets proclaimed that the researchers had reconstructed Nesyamun’s “voice,” despite how obviously silly this claim was, given that what they actually did was record a single vowel sound played through a 3D model of the badly-damaged vocal tract of his 3,000-year-old mummy.

I think that, before researchers conduct any kind of experiment involving a mummy they should ask: “Does this experiment tell us anything significant about the person the mummy belongs to? Does it tell us anything significant about the ancient Egyptians in general? Or is this just someone’s weird vanity project?”

ABOVE: Photograph from the Leeds Museum Gallery of Nesyamun’s mummy about to be put into the CT scanner