If you were to ever stumble across a dead body, most likely your response will not be “Oh, hey, that’s awesome!” (Well, maybe for some people it might be, but you might want to back away from them. Slowly.) However, if the body’s embalmed, desiccated, and stuck inside a glass case, then there’ll probably be a line out the door to get a glimpse of it. We tend to be very somber and respectful of the dead, wanting to ensure a peaceful resting place, but when we see something like King Tut our first reaction is “Dude, we’ve got to show this off!”
So, to start, why mummies? I can’t quite say when I first became interested. As I kid, I learned about them in school like everyone else and I thought they were creepy but also pretty freaking cool (I also liked learning about disasters such as the Donner Party, Pompeii, and the Titanic, plus I read the complete works of Edgar Allan Poe at age 11, so take that as you will). I started reading books about them on my own sometime in my teens and ever since then they’ve become a bit of a hobby. An unusual hobby, of course, not one that can really be discussed at the dinner table (“Hey, look at this picture, his tongue is protruding! That’s because gases built up during the decay process and—why did you stop eating? Is there something wrong with the chicken?”). I almost went into archaeology in order to get a chance at finding a mummy, even though I knew how incredibly unlikely that was and that it’s not something you can specialize in unless you’re really lucky. Eventually I realized that maybe wanting to dig up corpses wasn’t the greatest reason to start a career. But I kept reading about mummies and now I have all this random knowledge that’s not particularly useful to my everyday life. So, of course, the only solution was to start a blog and share this useless knowledge with people wasting time on the Internet.
Mummies are a bit of an odd topic, really. People are both fascinated and disgusted by them. They feature as horrifying monsters in movies, but then people gaze in quiet awe at them in museums. Kids read about them in school with glee but then at home they hide beneath the covers for fear of Yde Girl lurking in the closet. Mummies are dead people, plain and simple, with sunken faces, shriveled limbs, and parts falling off due to decay, and yet we can’t seem to help looking at them. Why do we like them? For one, they put a face on the ancient peoples who came before us, long forgotten and silenced through the passage of time. But it’s not just their connection to the past that seems to interest people. We know we’re going to die one day—fade away and be forgotten. However, mummies have survived past that inevitability in a way, gaining a kind of immortality of the body if not the soul. Perhaps people study them because mummies have come closest to overcoming that one certainty of life. Or perhaps we just enjoy staring at morbid things, like how everyone slows down to look at a traffic accident, and then come up with a philosophical reasoning for it later. Frankly, I prefer the philosophical explanation but, considering the fact that I always flip through a book on mummies to glance at the pictures first before reading anything, maybe there is something else behind that, something more primal that I can’t quite describe. Either way, I can’t help but look.
