'He looked like Ramses the Great': How experimental archaeologists used ancient techniques to mummify a modern-day person

In most areas of archaeology, excavators painstakingly dig layer after layer to uncover not only buried artifacts but also burnt seeds, broken bones, and microscopic particles of ancient pollen. This delicate process is followed by months of intensive laboratory work to study the newly discovered remains. But there is a type of archaeologist who takes a different approach to understanding the past. Experimental archaeologists use techniques built from archaeological information and modern knowledge to recreate how people did things in the past.

In his new book, “Dinner with King Tut: How rogue archaeologists are recreating the sights, sounds, smells and tastes of lost civilizations(Little, Brown & Company, 2025), Science Writer Sam Keane Explores the experimental side of archaeology. Through a series of ancient and modern vignettes, Keane discovers how stone age townspeople How we kept our homes cool 9,000 years ago Romans Use a needle and thread to style hair, and how swamp body They were formed in Iron Age Europe.

Related: Read Our interview with Sam Keane On ‘Dinner with King Tut’

Cultures throughout history have mummified their dead, and a handful still do so today, but Egyptian mummies remain the most iconic. Unfortunately, the Egyptians wrote virtually nothing about their embalming process. This leaves experimental archeology as one of the few methods available to understand mummification, and many practitioners have actually recreated mummies in modern times. In most cases, they work with animals, but some intrepid spirits have mummified humans, most famously when Bob Brier and Ron Wade did so in 1994.

Wade wanted to grow up to be a mortician like his father. After a stint as a physician in the Vietnam War, he became an anatomist and eventually head of Maryland’s state anatomy board. Brier also trained in anatomy, but is an Egyptologist by training and passion. He has collected so many books on Egypt in his life that he has rented a second apartment to house them. Barrier and Wade selected their mummies from a group of people in Baltimore who had donated their bodies to science. Ultimately, they stopped at a seventy-six-year-old Caucasian man, who died of a heart attack. His identity remains a secret, but somewhat foolishly, Wade nicknamed him EM Bam.

For authenticity, Brier and Wade used replicas of Pharaonic-era tools and materials, including linen wraps, a strangely wide wooden embalming table, and copper and obsidian blades—though they quickly discarded the copper blades, which could not cut meat well. Before beginning work on his mummy, he practiced an important step on other cadavers: removing the brain. Instead of using whole cadavers for this, he obtained some severed heads left over from a medical school plastic surgery class. (“They were looking a little weird,” recalls Brier. “They’d had facelifts and all that.”)

From some scant references, Brier knew that Egyptian embalmers removed the brain by inserting a hooked stick through the nostrils, but the details were vague. Brier and Wade were the first to try to take out the brain with such a stick, but the tissue turned out to be too soft and would not come out. Eventually he squirted water into the corpse’s nose, then used a stick to turn the brain into solution. After that, it was poured straight out. “Like a milkshake,” says Brier. “A strawberry milkshake to be exact.”

Different organs met with different fates in Egypt. Being unclear about the purpose of the brain, embalmers usually threw it away. In contrast, the heart was left in place [in place]; It was considered the center of all thinking, emotion and intelligence. The abdominal organs were carefully removed and preserved. Following this protocol, Brier and Wade created a three and a half inch [9 centimeters] An incision was made in the abdomen of his corpse and the spleen, liver, gall bladder, lungs and twenty-two feet were removed. [6.7 meters] Intestinal. Given their size, removing the liver and lungs requires some creative geometry and determined squeezing. The most difficult part was separating the lungs from the heart while working blindly inside such a small hole.

After removing the organs, the couple cleaned the stomach with palm wine and myrrh, then filled the skull with frankincense. This was an important ritual step to prepare the body for life after death, and it also helped kill germs and mask bad odors. Ancient embalmers also used other sacred substances, often imported at great cost from Europe and Asia – pistachio resin, beeswax, castor oil. Ramses the Great’s mummy stuffed black pepper from India into his nose.

Next, Brier and Wade dehydrated the body using natron, a mineral of equal parts salt and baking soda that forms naturally in Egyptian wadis, or dry drains. Like a sponge, natron absorbs moisture from meat, making it too dry for bacteria, insects, beetles, and other putrefaction agents; The remaining tissue is basically jerky. (Deeply committed to authenticity, Brier dug up the natron himself in Egypt, and recalls that sneaking hundreds of pounds of unknown white powder through customs at JFK Airport was one of the more ticklish aspects of the project. Luckily, he was traveling with a film crew, and could hide the powder in suitcases among his equipment.)

In their laboratory, Brier and Wade placed the mummy’s spleen, lungs, liver, and intestines in bowls and covered them with natron. They also packed 29 linen bags of powder into the empty torso, putting the body at more than 211 pounds. [96 kilograms]and shed 583 extra pounds [264 kg] On this. They kept the body in Wade’s old office in heat up to 104 degrees Fahrenheit [Fahrenheit, or 40 degrees Celsius] and dehumidifiers that run around the clock to simulate Egyptian air.

Over the next five weeks, the natron on top became flaky and brown due to absorbing bodily juices, forcing Brier and Wade to break it up with iron rods. (Today Brier remembers the smell as pungent but not unpleasant, although news reports at the time state that he and Wade wore surgical masks against the smell.) Despite this, the sight of the body below thrilled Brier. As it dries, the mummies’ skin hardens and shrinks, especially on the face and scalp. The lips retract to reveal the teeth and the skin with less melanin becomes brownish-yellow. Brier had always wondered whether these changes resulted from the immediate mummification process, or from several thousands of years of weathering in Egypt’s dry climate. One look at his mother gave Brier the answer: Even after five weeks, “he looked exactly like Ramses the Great,” he recalls, with leathery skin, a beaked nose and sticking-up hair. The process of embalming, not time, created the iconic mummies we know today.

In addition to changing the body’s appearance, the dehydration process made the limbs as stiff as tree branches, and reduced its weight to 188 pounds. [85 kg] only till 79 [36 kg]. (thirty one pounds [14 kg] This represented the removal of organs from it.) Organs drying in bowls also dried, helping to explain another mystery of Egyptian mummification: As other archaeologists have noted, embalmers usually placed organs in so-called canopic jars, funerary vessels with thin necks – so thin that it seemed impossible to fit large organs inside. But the natron shrank them so much that they went straight through.

After removal from the natron, Brier and Wade gave Mr. Baum a full-body massage with lotus, cedar and palm oil, another step that was ritually important as well as having practical benefits – restoring flexibility in the joints, making the mummy easier to handle. This completed, they wrapped the body in strips of linen. (Embalmers in ancient times began with the hands and feet, wrapping each digit separately, then moved on to the arms, legs, and torso. The penis was also wrapped individually—or, if embarrassingly shrunken, a cod-piece of stiff linen was tied to it.) At this point, they let the mummy dry for three more months in a dry office, reducing its weight to 51 pounds. [23 kg]. Later, he added several more layers of wrapping. Between the layers, they inserted pieces of papyrus with magic amulets and spells written on them, a common practice in ancient times.

Sam Keane is a New York Times-bestselling author of seven books. He spent years collecting mercury from broken thermometers as a child, and now lives in Washington, DC. His stories have appeared in National Geographic, The Best American Science and Nature Writing, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and Slate, among other venues, and his work has been featured on NPR’s “RadioLab,” “Science Friday,” and “All Things Considered.”