Time to Wonder Podcast

Episode 7 Are those mummies real?

• Sue Harper, Lesley Buxton, Ava Louie

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In this episode we are missing Ava who was playing basketball (the activity she loves more than anything.) Lesley and Sue talk to Gayle Gibson, an Egyptologist who works with the Royal Ontario Museum teaching children about ancient Egypt. Gayle talks about how she became an Egyptologist. She tells us how and why the ancient Egyptians mummified their dead. Although Gayle wouldn't say who her favourite mummy is, she tells a fascinating story about Nahkt, a young 16 year old weaver who was wrapped in his old clothes but then placed in a very nice coffin and buried where kings were buried even though his family was quite poor. She tells us what we can learn from studying mummies. Of course we ask about the mummified cats in the museum and Gayle explains that cats were not the only animals the Egyptians mummified. 

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Transcript Gayle Gibson Are those mummies real?

 Intro

Today's big question is, are those mummies real? 

Our guest today is Gayle Gibson. She's an Egyptologist who works with the Royal Ontario Museum teaching young people about ancient Egypt. Gayle became interested in ancient Egypt when she was in Grade 2. Welcome to Time to Wonder Podcast Gayle. Could you tell us about how you fell in love with Egypt so young? 

Thank you, Sue. Well, it was very mysterious. My grade two class went to the library and it was a children's library. And we went upstairs through all kinds of wonderful children's books and for some reason nothing appealed to me. And the librarian very kindly came over and said, “Well, let's go down to the grown up library. And I was kind of scared 'cause I really didn't read that well to go to the grown up library. But I went down with her and somehow a book almost jumped off the shelf at me. And it was called Manners and Customs of Ancient Egyptians by a man named John Gardner Wilkinson was over 100 years old then, and it was full of beautiful pictures. Little people doing interesting things, playing and eating and cooking and all kinds of stuff. And I just said, “Oh yeah, that looks good.” And I took it home and I could hardly read a word of it. I read the titles and I just loved the pictures. And I read it and read it and read it and it probably helped me learn how to read 'cause I wanted so much to know about it. And then after that, I think I was still in Grade 2 and my Brownie troop went to the Royal Ontario Museum. In those days you marched through the museum holding hands in a big, long line. I didn't stop to look at anything. But I saw the mummies. I was kind of scared. But later on, I used to go every Sunday after church for years to visit the museum and go up to the Egyptians. But I was always kind of scared of the mummies. And then one day I noticed there's a little a card like a recipe card attached to one of the glass cases with the coffin in it. So, I went over to see what it said, and it said that a man named Antjau was the mummy and that his mother, her name was Tjes-neith-peret. His father's name was Ankh-hor and his grandfather was a man named Antanakht. Now there was his whole family. I thought this is just an ordinary person like me. And because I had just come from church, I said a prayer for him. And in fact, what the ancient Egyptians wanted us to do was to pray for them and say their names out loud. And he and I have been friends ever since. 

Great story. 

He's been very good to me. The ancient Egyptians have put me into this wonderful life of meeting modern and ancient Egyptians and spending a lot of time in museums and with children talking about these things. 

Fabulous. 

We heard how you fell in love with ancient Egypt as a child. How did you become an Egyptologist as an adult? 

That was a little tricky because when I was in high school, I said I want to go to university and study Egyptology, and my guidance counselor said, “Oh no, you'll never make any money doing that. No, no, you can't do that.” So I became a teacher, I became an English teacher. That's how I met Sue. But as the years went by, I would think, “I really want to read about that stuff. And whenever anybody gave me birthday present money, I would go to a bookstore and buy a book on Ancient Egypt. So finally, I went back to university and took a whole bunch of courses and took a degree in Egyptology. And by a miracle, I was at the museum one day with my own son. And somebody said, “Oh, you should apply for the job. I should watch on your work as a teacher here, you teaching both ancient history, another oh. It was really a miracle. It was just somebody sort of handed me that job. I think it was Antjau upstairs.  

So today the big question of course is are those mummies real? So we want to talk about mummies. So what is a mummy? 

A mummy is really just a body of a person or an animal that is all dried out. And that's pretty common in many cultures in the world. Many West Coast peoples used to smoke the bodies of the dead to preserve them. Especially in Clayoquot Sound. There are lot of mummies in Calyoquot Sound. ancestors who are still there But in Egypt, because it's so hot and dry, if you just bury someone in the sand, the body will dry out. It's that hot and it doesn't rain very much. But sometimes if you bury that body too deep, then the body will rot. So they had to figure out a way to keep the body as dry as if they just put it in the sand, but as protected as it would be in a tomb. So that artificial mummification. And to do that, you take out all the wet squishy bits inside and dry out the body just the way I mean, it sounds gruesome, but just the way you would dry fish to preserve them. You would salt that fish. And they used a kind of salt called natron. And it takes away any nasty smells and it preserves the body. And then you wrap the body up and you try to make it look as much alive as you can. And sometimes they would paint the features back on the face and they would model it so it looked it was pretty much like you. They didn't want to be forgotten. They wanted us to say their names and to remember. 

So. You talked about them not wanting them to basically rot under that sand, but the specific thing like wrapping the body, why did they want to I guess preserve the bodies so well.

Part of the wrapping, you know, if you think about a Christmas present or birthday present. I can just hand you a present. But if it's wrapped up in nice paper or with a bow, it’s much more special. So if you wrap the body, you wrap something, you're making it much more special. You're taking very good care of it. And just as at Christmas time, sometimes wrapping is almost more exciting than the real present inside. You're trying to keep that body special. It's saying, "I know you're dead, but I still think you are a special person to me." And so you wrap up your friend to make them special again and it may help preserve the body, but it's the drying out that really does the preserving. 

So that is just like gift wrapping, the wrapping. 

Very much like gift wrapping and as I said, sometimes they. Try to preserve your features, make you look a little bit more the way you did when you were alive. But it's a way of saying this is a special person. One of their words for a body is sah, which means the revered one, someone you respect and admire. So it's a very special word. Sounds like "that's an old dead body". No,  this is a revered one." This is somebody special. 

Have you ever touched a mummy? Were you afraid?

 No, no, I'm after I got to be friends with my friend, Antjau, I have visited many, many mummies and have been able to help them out, some of them. Sometimes mummies aren't very well taken care of and then you are taking away from Canada. And because I became known from television as someone who loved mummies and took care of them, people would write to me and say we have a mummy. Can you help us out? So I ran a sort of mummy adoption agency for a while. And helped mummies get to universities where they could be taken care of and you know, really studied and loved and protected. So I have had a lot of intimate relationships with mummies. 

OK, so so who is your favorite mummy at the Royal Ontario Museum? 

Oh, I couldn't say. That would be very rude. I couldn't make a favorite. 

Do you have one that kind of stood out because it has a very special story? 

Well, there is one whose name is Nahkt and Nahkt means strong. So in this little baby was born, his mother said. "He's a strong baby." But he wasn't. He probably died when he was around 16. And he was very unhealthy. He had everything wrong with him that could have wrong with him. He had sand in his lungs and soot in his lungs, probably from sitting too near the campfire at night. Probably his mom said "Come and sit near the fire, you know, get warm." And the soot actually hurt his lungs. And he had all kinds of worms. Oh everything you can name, just a horrible life, a hard life. And yet this was a boy who he was weaver. He was a profession. He didn't, you didn't go to school very long in those days. And he was a professional weaver. He wove cloth for a temple. It was professional. But he didn't live long, and when he died, his family, they didn't have enough money to give him a lot of wrapping. He was wrapped up in his own old clothes mostly, and maybe old clothes from other members of the family, which they might have thought was friendly, you know, to be wrapped up in things that you had worn in life, and things you loved. And then they somehow they got him a really, really nice coffee. A splendid coffin and it's a big mystery really how he got such a nice coffin. But I guess his family really wanted to take very good care of him. And then they buried him in a really holy place, where kings had been buried. And so his family really loved this little boy. You think, what was he like? What was that boy like that people took so much trouble to make sure that he would be remembered and that his body would be preserved and that he would enter the afterlife as an honored person. That's Nahkt. 

Great story. 

Was everyone mummified after they died? 

No,  if you were poor your family would wrap you up in probably your own old clothes and sometimes in straw mats. They were very good at weaving straw mats and put you into the sand in a place where a lot of people are buried. But you know, that's not as nice as having a fancy coffin then being put in a fancy tomb. But it all depended on how much money you had, of course. And if you're a king, like King Tut, you get a golden coffin. But for ordinary people, we would be lucky -  a lot of people had very plain coffins, you know and not to get it from old wood that was around, But you did the best you could for the people you loved.

 It's interesting. 

OK, so did the ancient Egyptians take the brains out of people before they were mummified? 

That's always such a horrible, gruesome story. Sometimes they did not always. My friend Nahkt, that boy, he wasn't mummified at all. They just wrapped him up and put him in the coffin. So. nothing was removed and later on his brain was studied. I actually held his brain in my hand. It felt like a bar of soap. Yeah, it's kind of gruesome, but sometimes they did take the brain out. Sometimes they drilled a little hole in the back of the head, scooped it out. Sometimes they broke through a little bone after called the ethmoid bone. And then they slushed up the brain and let it pour out the nose. So you can do it gruesome ways or you can just leave it there. And very often they just left it 'cause it was a lot of work. And it is kind of gross. So very often the brain is still there

Want there any special reason they wanted to take the brain out? Or was it just part of the process? 

The brain is one of the worst squishy things in the body and it will rot and I guess it will smell bad. So what you do is you take out everything that is going to rot and smell bad. And I guess that's why the brain came out too. But the brain didn't always come out. They believed you thought with your heart. They knew that the brain controlled things like, you know, if you got a blow to the head, you might end up with a paralyzed arm. They knew stuff like that. But we also, even though we know you think with your head, we say, what does your heart say? What does your heart tell you? Oh, she's a hard hearted woman. He's a kind hearted man. And on Valentine's Day, we give each other chocolate hearts. Nobody gives anybody a chocolate brain to say I'm thinking about you. I mean, you could, you could try it. You've got Purdys chocolates there in Vancouver. But I don't know if Purdy's would be open to selling chocolate brains. 

What can we learn from mummies? 

We can learn an awful lot. For example, because my old friend Nahkt had not been mummified and all his organs were inside - they'd all just dried out naturally  - we found out that he had malaria. And that was the earliest case of malaria that had been found up to that point. I don't know if they've found an earlier one since. He died about 3200 years ago. So malaria was already pretty common 3200 years ago. He had this disease called schistosomiasis  and you get that from just wading in water that has these tiny snails that don't look like anything but the larva of this snail is a tiny little worm. As fine as a piece of thread. And if you have a cut on your foot, it will go into the cut and will get inside your body and cause all kinds of trouble so that even when you pee your pee looks like blood, it will be red. So we know that he had that. That's still quite common in Africa. And if you are a child in Egypt, in many parts of Egypt, on one day of the month, every kid in the class gets a pill. And that pill is to kill the schistosomiasis. And so it's still a problem. But they didn't have that pill in his day. Nowadays you can take care of it. So  he had problems like that that are very interesting. And he could teach us things. And that, you know, he had quite a hard life. He had a hard life, but was much loved.

OK, Leslie has a cat question. We hear there's a mummified cat in the Royal Ontario Museum. Did the ancient Egyptians make all their pets into mummies? 

Not all. We have several mummified cats in the Royal Ontario Museum. Some are quite fancy some aren't. My cat is sleeping or he'd over here visiting with us. These Egyptians loved cats because they're beautiful. And because they're very good mothers. They loved that cats were such good mothers. They thought that was very poor and about them and that the Tomcats were very ferocious. And if you've ever seen Tomcats fight, they're tough guys and they will take down a bird is much bigger than they are. They're tough creatures. Cats, you know, people think of as little fluffy things that, you know, live in the house. They can be pretty tough guys. So they really loved cats. And there was a goddess of cats. Her name is Bastet. She was also the goddess of beauty, but also of music and motherhood. So I guess because mothers sang to the babies. So she was goddess of lots of nice things. And if you really wanted a favour from the goddess Bastet, you could have a cat mummified and take it to the temple and say, "look, Bastet.. I've taken very good care of this cat and it's going straight into the afterlife. It's going to be in the afterlife with you. Could you do me a favour?" And the cat could sort of be your messenger and the cat would take your message. "Could you please help me sing? I'm an awful singer". It would take the message to Bastet. They mummified millions of cats and in the end, I wonder how serious it all was. It may have been just something you did. You know, sometimes you go to a certain place and you say, oh, everybody when they come here, buys this. You know, those things like Beaver tails and "OK, I'm I'm here, I'm gonna buy one. OK, that's fine." You know, and I think it may be got like that in places. But all of those cats were messengers to the gods and they would take your message to the gods. They also mummified dogs. Almost any animal you can think of they mummified. 

So that was going to be one of our other questions. Did they mummify other animals? 

Not as many. The ones they mumified most were a bird called the Ibis, which is quite nice. But they raised them. They had these big artificial lakes, great big artificial lakes. And they would raise the birds and sometimes they mummified them while they were still in the egg. And then others they let grow up, and they snapped their necks. And wrap them up and send them off to the next life. So, I'm not sure if I was an Ibis I would have been very impressed with and if I'd actually take the message. But they mummified thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands of Ibises. And very often, especially like 100 years ago, any time an Egyptologist went to dig a new site, first they would have to deal with 1000s of Ibises in pots. And they'd spend the whole year just clearing out the Ibises before they could actually you know, look at the temple or the tomb or whatever it was. Temples, they were buried in temples. So it's kind of a strange custom, not something we do, but a lot of things we do the Egyptians would have thought were very weird too. 

Have you been to a pyramid? And what did it feel like? 

Pyramids are so cool. I just love being in pyramids and when I'm in Egypt with kids, the kids and I love going. We go crawling into everything. But pyramids are very, very cool. Some of them are very difficult to get into. You have to do a lot of climbing up and climbing down. But the Egyptian government has been very good, and they've now got pretty good air circulation in the pyramids. So they're much better now than when I first went to Egypt. When you finally got to the burial chamber you'd  be covered in sweat and hardly able to breathe. But nowadays you can sort of walk in and still be pretty cool, pretty respectable. But it is very cool. I love being in pyramids. Some of them are quite magical, some of them aren't. There's one at a place called Dahshur, it's hard to get into, but the burial vault is really impressive. It's red granite and very, very high and very, very interesting. The first time I went there, I sang a Latin song for the king, a Latin requiem for the king. And now whenever I'm there, my friend said "You have to sing." I really don't sing very well, but I've, I've practiced that song so I can do a respectable job. So that particular king Sneferu, he knows I'm the one who sings for him. It's a very magical place. 

 And is it a beautiful sound when you sing? 

Yes. There's a lovely echo. So someone who could really sing  - and I think you can really sing, can't you, Sue.  It would be much better to go with you and let you sing for the king. 

Look, Gayle, in all of this, is there anything that you think that kids would like to know or should know about mummies that we haven't talked about today? 

I guess the important thing is not to be afraid. And if you can find out the name of the dead person say his name and say a prayer for him.  And their prayer was kind of funny. Their prayer was, "may you be given bread and beer." So really. sort of "Have a nice lunch." That was their prayer. So you could say that prayer or you could say any prayer you'd like. But what they want is not to be forgotten. And if you don't know the name of person, you can just say,  "Here's a prayer for you old friend." and say a prayer for them. And here's what they said about that. They said, "Say a prayer for me. What is it to you? It's breath of the mouth. Breath of the mouth costs you nothing and it's good for you to pray. If you pray for me, I'll  show you what it is to have a friend in the afterlife." So if you say that prayer for the mummy, he will be your friend and I really think Antjau has been my friend for 70 years. 

Pretty cool pretty cool. Thank thank you so much Gayle what a pleasure to talk to you again and to chat with you and it's  just great. 

Well, thank you so much. It was really great

Thank you very much.