While ancient Egypt may be most associated in many people’s minds with the mummification of the dead, in fact it is far from being the only culture to have practiced it, as a new exhibition at the Musée de l’Homme in Paris, the city’s main anthropology museum, reveals.
Called simply “Mummies” and running in the museum’s top-floor temporary exhibition spaces until May next year, the exhibition presents mummification as a practice that has developed independently in different cultures worldwide and that continues in some of them up until the present day.
A variety of methods can be used for mummification depending on local climatic conditions and the materials available. The ancient Egyptians used techniques that included desiccation – the drying of the flesh using natron (sodium carbonate or soda ash) – as well as the removal of the internal organs and the wrapping of the body in bandages. Preservation was helped by the dry air in desert tombs.
In other cultures, desiccation has also been used but so have other techniques including freezing or drying out by smoke. The ancient Thule people in Greenland mummified their dead through freezing, for example, as indicated by finds at the Qilakitsoq gravesites on the country’s northern coast, while the ancient Guanche people of the Canary Islands, the indigenous people before the Spanish conquest, seem to have mummified them at least in part through heat.
However, though the techniques may differ, the aim in each case is the same – to preserve the body for religious or other reasons. While in ancient Egypt it was thought important to do this in order to ensure the survival of the soul, and mummified bodies were not placed on display, in other cultures they might be displayed from time to time or in some cases even permanently as a way of retaining a physical connection with the dead.
As the exhibition points out, the habit of embalming the bodies of dead political leaders and placing them on public display, practiced in various countries around the world, could also be considered a form of mummification. The preservation of the body of the Russian revolutionary leader Vladimir Lenin, still on display in his mausoleum in Moscow, could be considered mummification since the aim is to conserve his body.
In Lenin’s case, the original motivation was ideological rather than religious, since it was felt that the survival of his body would help to guarantee the survival of his ideas. Communism seems to have been particularly vulnerable to this way of thinking, since the bodies of the former Chinese Communist Party leader Mao Zedong and of former Vietnamese Communist Party leader Ho Chi Minh can also be viewed in Beijing and Hanoi today.
Mummification, the exhibition says, tends to flourish in cultures where the environment is conducive to it, with extreme dryness, like in Egypt’s deserts, or extreme cold, like in Greenland, naturally tending to preserve human remains. It is then simply a matter of working with nature to reinforce this process, by desiccating and treating the body with mineral salts, for example, as in the ancient Egyptian case, or by freezing or smoking it, as in the case of the Thule and Guanche.
Mummification tends to have a short shelf-life, however, and of all the cultures that practiced it presented in the exhibition the ancient Egyptian one wins hands down for the sheer length of time during which mummification survived – perhaps something like three thousand years – as well as for the sophistication of the techniques involved.
The other cultures considered might also have had elaborate religious justifications for mummification and a body of literature explaining what the deceased person whose body had been so carefully mummified might be thought to get up to in the afterlife. However, if this was so, we know little about it, since little survives aside from the mummies themselves. Even in cases where mummification seems to have been firmly fixed in the culture concerned, it rarely continued for periods of more than a few hundred years.
All this is in stark contrast to the ancient Egyptian situation, where we not only possess accounts of the techniques and of the tools involved, but also a literature explaining beliefs about life in the next world. The ancient Greek historian Herodotus, who claimed to have visited Egypt in the 5th century BCE, left behind a famous outsider’s account of ancient Egyptian mummification.
While the ancient Egyptians seem to have been thoroughgoing Cartesians, sure that the mind and body were distinct and that the spiritual part of the human being could survive the body’s death, they still seem to have thought that it was somehow tethered to it. Had that not been the case, they would not have provided the elaborate grave goods with which they filled at least elite tombs to supply the body’s needs even after death.
Mummy returns: The exhibition begins with artefacts testifying to the ongoing fascination with particularly ancient Egyptian mummies, still seen as mysterious and possibly also threatening in US films like The Mummy and The Mummy Returns.
However, these mummies are only some of those considered in the first section of the exhibition, which also contains 19th-century samples of the medicinal substance from which mummies got their name. According to the dictionary, mummy, or mummia, was originally “a medicinal preparation of the substance of mummies… an unctuous liquid or gum used medicinally” and “a medicinal bituminous drug obtained from Arabia and the East.”
It seems that this substance was confused with the bituminous materials used in ancient Egyptian mummification and that this eventually gave rise to an early modern European trade in ground-up Egyptian mummies.
Mummification, the exhibition notes, properly refers to any technique aimed at the preservation of human remains, and because these techniques draw on pre-existing natural processes there are quite possibly as many accidental mummies as intended ones. Extreme cold and pickling processes associated with high levels of tannic acid both tend to preserve the body, which is why some of the most famous unintended mummies have been found in high mountain ranges or buried in peat bogs.
The exhibition gives the example of Ötzi, the natural mummy of a man who lived between 3350 and 3105 BCE whose remains were found in the European Alps in 1991 where they had been preserved by freezing. It also refers to the so-called “bog bodies” found in various parts of Europe including Denmark and Ireland, where Iron Age bodies have been discovered preserved by the high levels of acid, cold temperatures, and the low levels of oxygen prevailing in the continent’s peat bogs.
Among intentionally produced mummies, the exhibition gives the examples of the Tarim mummies from China dating from between 1800 and the first centuries BCE and produced using techniques of desiccation, and the Chinchorro and Chancay mummies from arid coastal regions and the Andes Mountains in what are now Chile and Peru. The Chinchorro culture, flourishing from around 7,000 to 1,500 BCE, produced the oldest mummies yet discovered, while the Chancay, flourishing in the same area rather later between 1000 and 1470 CE and coexisting with the Inca Empire, has left behind it not only mummified human remains but also ceramics and textiles.
Of the two cultures, the Chinchorro is perhaps particularly important owing to its antiquity and to its claim to have produced the earliest human mummies. Like most of the other cultures considered in the exhibition, the Chinchorro seem to have mummified individuals without regard for their age or social status, although higher-ranking individuals seem to have received special treatment, as was the case with the ancient Egyptians.
The Chinchorro cemeteries in which the mummies were discovered have been registered on the UN cultural agency UNESCO’s World Heritage List since 2021, with the citation commenting that the Chinchorro “perfected complex mortuary practices whereby they systematically dismembered and reassembled bodies of deceased men, women and children from the entire social spectrum... These mummies possess material, sculptural, and aesthetic qualities that are presumed to reflect the fundamental role of the dead in Chinchorro society.”
While both cultures used techniques of desiccation and the removal of soft tissues, the Chinchorro placed their mummies in caves, whereas the Chancay wrapped theirs in textiles, often in a crouching position, and buried them in the sand.
The Musée de l’Homme, the Paris “Museum of Mankind,” was established in 1937 to replace the earlier Ethnographic Museum on the same site that once contained France’s most important collections of ethnographic material from different cultures worldwide. While the museum today focuses on physical anthropology, with the ethnographic collections having mostly been transferred to the Musée du Quai Branly on the opposite side of the Seine, this was not originally the case – and many visitors may perhaps still associate it with the early 20th-century European artists who discovered “primitive art” in it and used this to renovate their work.
Today, the museum is a lot more focused on the provenance, display, and proper interpretation of its collections, and so while the first part of the mummies exhibition reviews some of the cultures that have historically practiced mummification and contains examples from them, the second goes into much more detail about the history and changing display of the museum’s collection of human remains as well as their scientific and cultural interpretation.
Like most other European museums, it has drawn up a code of practice for the display of human remains, noting that while some museums no longer do this, the mummies on display in the exhibition are presented with properly scientific intentions in mind. While there are some 70 complete mummies from different cultures in the museum’s collections, often collected under very different circumstances from those that would be tolerated today, these are used for research purposes to find out more about the cultures and historical periods from which they come and are otherwise kept in storage.
Mummies, the material accompanying the exhibition says, are like “time capsules” because of their ability to provide information about ancient societies and what their people ate, what diseases afflicted them, what they thought about religion and other cultural practices, and even about their origins and patterns of migration.
One of the most remarkable of the dozen or so mummies from different cultures included in the exhibition, all of them drawn from the museum’s collections, is the Chachapoya mummy dating from between the 12th and 16th centuries CE and coming from what is now Peru. The Chachapoya, flourishing in the Andes Mountains before their conquest by the Inca Empire in the 15th century CE, mummified their dead and stored them in mausoleums located on high mountainsides.
One of these mummies, entering the museum in the late 19th century, has a remarkable facial expression and apparently inspired the Norwegian painter Edvard Munch in his famous picture The Scream.
All visitors to the Musée de l’Homme exhibition will leave knowing far more about mummies than when they entered and will be unlikely to make the mistake of thinking of ancient Egyptian funerary practices as unique. On the other hand, they will likely still be impressed by the sophistication of these when compared with others elsewhere in the world, and the exhibition nowhere mentions one of ancient Egypt’s other most characteristic practices, which was the mummification of animals.
Some idea of the significance of this for the country’s religious practices can be had by considering numbers. There are thought to be millions of cat mummies at the ancient Egyptian site of Bubastis and millions of mummified dogs and jackals at Saqqara along with some two million mummified ibises.
Momies, Musée de l’Homme, Paris, until 25 May 2026.
* A version of this article appears in print in the 18 December, 2025 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly
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