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.
Continue reading “Is It Ethical to Exhume Mummies and Display Them in Museums?”