It has just been the second annual #ClassicsTober, a Classical Civilisation (and yes the subject needs a better name and wider scope) themed media prompt challenge where each day you post something you know, you’ve seen, you’ve drawn, you’ve read from the ancient Mediterranean world that fits it, that my friend Dr Cora Beth Fraser and I made up last-minute last year and decided to do again this October. ‘Sarcophagus’ was the prompt for Day 31, and I realised I’d inadvertently picked a prompt that fit rather well with the 100th anniversary of Howard Carter disturbing Tutankamun’s tomb, this same week (yesterday, November 4th). There was a very good programme on it on the previous Sunday night with Dr Janina Ramirez, and there’s a British Museum exhibition on hieroglyphs on until February, and so I was watching one, thinking about the other, and deciding what to do with the prompt, and thinking:
I have a mixed reaction to all this. It seems odd to be celebrating opening a tomb, into which one is placed for supposed eternal rest. Perhaps, as it’s been millennia, it’s ok because it’s no longer recent history and any known descendants are long-since lost in time (I think?) And perhaps, if the beliefs of the specific dead are that the body is just a shell and the soul is now in the afterlife, oblivious, then a long-abandoned body is fair game? But most of the ancient burial traditions I know of (and I am no expert, but have been teaching GCSE Classics for fifteen years and enjoy reading about Ancient Med cultures) treat the rest of the body as being important to the fate of the soul – at least at first – so far as that the body must be given rites and proper burial in order to be worthy to pass into the underworld, often with as many grave goods as possible. Does removing them from their tomb drag them out of the afterlife? Is it the equivalent of your credit card being cut up and your tab revoked while you’re kicked out of the VIP section of a club?
Sarcophagus means ‘flesh-eating stone’. Is that abandonment of the body to natural process? Does that count in allowing us to open up the box and look at what’s inside when it’s done?
When I was a child, we visited the British Museum all the time – we were poor, and it was free, as well as educational. I liked the Egyptian galleries best, and frequently could be found hanging out next to the unassuming burial of ‘Ginger’, a mummified person that I liked because they appeared to have red hair, like me. (I didn’t know this was possibly due to the mummification process and thought of Ginger as a fellow bullied ginge. I was probably only six.)
Now I look back on that experience as profoundly weird. My toddler daughter currently has a ‘best friend’ who is a small, inanimate toy monkey she can hug and constantly talks to. At just a few years older, my childhood ‘best friend’ was a deceased person whose final resting place was on display in a class case in a room in a beautiful building in the middle of the city, with whom I would sit and enjoy silent contemplation every so often while giant adults bustled about around us. I had no idea he was actually known as Gebelein man, was around 19 when he died, is about 5000 years old, and was mummified naturally by the dry sand conditions in which he was buried, along with his possessions. Or that he had tattoos (https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/article/ancient-egyptian-mummy-tattoos-spd) or that he’d suffered a violent death (https://www.britishmuseum.org › vi…Virtual autopsy: discover how the ancient Egyptian Gebelein Man died). And, I didn’t realise that the reason he was in a museum is that he is one of the best-preserved examples of natural mummification from the predynastic era. I feel I should know all these things now, to make up for entirely taking his accessible presence for granted during his one and only afterlife.
I think I have a fairly lackadaisical approach to death – it happens, it hurts those left behind, we can’t stop it (and we probably shouldn’t go finding a cure for it, harsh as that sounds) – but that is probably more from, sadly, going to a lot of funerals growing up, which were mostly open-casket and, in the Irish tradition, only a day or two after the death (so if you hadn’t had a chance to come to terms with your loss it was right there on display). None of these bodies I ever associated as being like the bodies in the museum – Ginger, or the Bog Man, or the still-wrapped mummies in the galleries. My funeral bodies were far too recent, and archaeologically uninteresting, and they were family, and not at all ‘other’ like the ones in display cases, the presence of which seemed completely normal, because adults had put them there, and they ran the museums as well as everything else, so they were probably right. Now we’re the adults and… I don’t know.
(From the C16th, whoever was excavating mummies and selling them on to Europe to be turned into paint and Quack medical tinctures also seems to have had a pretty lackadaisical approach to death. The sales of ‘Mummy Brown’ only ended in the 1960s)
I’m writing this out now because I’m confused. I now teach Classical Civilisation and Ancient History, and going to museums as a child very likely has a lot to do with that. My subject is arguably half-supported by the existence of archaeologically-interesting dead people and their burials. I’m about to teach a unit on Mycenaean grave sites, the contents of which are in the Archaeological Museum at Athens (though I don’t know if the owners of the tombs are also there). But now I have to try to answer questions from my students that I never asked when I was a child, and that kids never seemed to ask when I started teaching 16 years ago, such as ‘why do we put dead people in museums?’ It’s an excellent question, and a lengthy debate.
There is definitely the stench of racism around some of the original reasons for thinking it fine and dandy to put others’ ancestors on display. The Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, famous for its trepanned skulls and shrunken heads, has been returning ancestral remains that had been originally used to display ‘other’ cultures as racist stereotypes (https://www.prm.ox.ac.uk/human-remains-pitt-rivers-museum) I vividly remember seeing them for the first time: about seventeen years ago, when I was working at Blackwells and popped over to the nearby museum in my lunchbreak because I’d read in one of Pullman’s His Dark Materials books that the trepanned skulls were there and I wanted to see if it was true. It was, and I remember feeling distinctly horrified for the first time that I could come and look at human remains whenever I wished. And I didn’t know who they were. Sure, the information about trepanning was fascinating (and I think possibly links to Zeus asking Hephaestus to cut open his head when he has his Athene-sized headache) and the shrunken heads were an interesting artefact that explained that scene in Beetlejuice, and having them in a museum certainly made that information accessible… but it smacked of Victorian ‘Freak Show’: old-fashioned and exploitative. I’m glad they’ve gone.
Similarly, the first time I visited Pompeii was as a teacher with my classes, and immediately we came across the Garden of the Fugitives. If you’ve never been, the plaster cast figures are lying, sleeping, some apparently waking, by a garden wall as they possibly take a break from escaping the eruption. One is looking back as if to see what that noise is coming from the mountain now – maybe that final pyroclastic surge that froze them there in thermal shock so that their bodies would be covered in ash and their postures preserved so that later their bones could be coated with plaster and their figures reborn, as if reliving that last moment again and again. The place is both their death scene and their final resting place – they never got a proper burial. And from this reverie I was shaken by some of the students asking if they could eat their lunch yet. How were we even allowed to be here? Let alone, later, on discovering the poor chap in the cast that lets you see his teeth and skull, on display among piles of amphora in the old forum granary while we were actually spinning around and eating our lunch.
Admittedly, there is a tiny frisson of excitement for me when I see, in a museum a stack of bones, or a preserved person in a Pompeiian cast. But it’s more shock and empathy, and I feel I can’t pass by without dipping my head and thanking them for this sacrifice, like a body that has been left to science, although unwittingly and possibly unwillingly if they knew where their mortal remains had ended up. Now that we have the technology, would a photo, a scan, or a 3D model – as I believe are being made from with some of the Pompeiian casts – work just as well to make the point, if it’s absolutely necessary. Does it matter if the body were looking at in the museum is not ‘real’?
On that note, ‘Ginger’ now has a whizzy new touchscreen opposite his glass box, on which you can see the 3D CT scan that was made of him in 2012. Anyone can go up to the screen and manipulate the model so that they can see every part of him, like his face which for so long has been gazing at the sand of his tomb. I could go and look him in the face if I wished. This is, of course, an amazing resource for studying the mummification of an individual and the customs of the predynastic Egyptians (and it turns out his hair was actually ginger after all), but I’m still torn: to me now he’s an old friend, and it feels like this is the last possible act of indignity that he could suffer: his entire body, albeit virtually, at your fingertips.
Trying to understand further for myself, I read a similar article from 2017 by Julia Deathridge on the UCL blog, in which I learned that in 2005 ‘the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) released a “Guidance for the Care of Human Remains in Museums”outlining a code of practice for the handling and displaying of human remains”. I was a bit surprised that this had taken so long. Bodies over 100 years old appear to be largely exempt, but hopefully I’m just reading the legalese incorrectly.
I’m still confused. Archaeologists do a fantastic job of making our human past less confusing and help to create an empathy for it that allows us to see our species as beautiful and flawed. Sometimes we even choose to learn from the mistakes that are uncovered. Anthropologists and medical professionals have used ancient (and modern, and even willing) human remains to make amazing leaps in medicine and technology. Human endeavour is such that it demands human sacrifice. But, is it an understanding that after death, the body is moot?
I remain confused, but here is what I drew for #ClassicsTober. It’s more Hammer Horror than archaeology, and the chicken is just because occasionally I like to draw chickens as ancient characters , but the text (using a probably terrible hieroglyph generator) is meant to say ‘why am I awake?’
Laura Jenkinson-Brown 