Early investigations

From the Renaissance, Egyptian mummies have attracted the interest of antiquarian collectors, who brought them from Egypt to enhance the collections of museums, learned societies, and wealthy individuals in Britain, Europe, and later the United States of America. From the sixteenth century onwards, some of these mummies were ‘unrolled’ (unwrapped) at frivolous social events in front of invited audiences. Most of these unwrappings had little scientific value; however, some were performed by serious investigators whose detailed publications still provide valuable evidence.

These researchers include Thomas Pettigrew (1791–1865), a London surgeon who unwrapped a series of mummies in London (Pettigrew 1834); Augustus Bozzi Granville (1783–1872), another London doctor who reported evidence of ovarian disease in an Egyptian mummy (Granville 1825); and members of the Leeds Philosophical and Literary Society, who undertook an interdisciplinary study on a mummy in 1825 (Osburn 1828).

In the early twentieth century, various pioneering projects laid the basis for mummy research. Armand Ruffer, Professor of Bacteriology in Cairo, developed methods of rehydrating ancient tissues (Ruffer 1921), and invented the term palaeopathology for the study of disease in ancient populations.

Grafton Elliot Smith, Professor of Anatomy in Cairo, performed extensive examinations of the mummies of the rulers of the New Kingdom, discovered at Thebes in 1871 and 1898 (Smith 1912). With his co-workers W. R. Dawson and F. W. Jones, Smith also undertook an important study on some 6,000 ancient bodies retrieved during the Archaeological Survey of Nubia, a heritage rescue operation that was established when the first dam was built at Aswan in the early twentieth century (Smith and Wood Jones 1910).