on islands throughout the region.
The tsunami decimated the population, and the subsequent rain of volcanic ash probably finished off the Minoan civilization. Nobody knows for sure whether the sinking of Santorini had anything to do with launching a lasting legend of a capsized civilization, but news of such a catastrophic event surely spread around the Mediterranean and in time could have become legend.
Reading the Body Language of the Dead
Some people who lived hundreds or thousands of years ago left more than just their images in sculpture and paintings on stone. Preserved bodies are in-the-flesh evidence of long-ago reality. The mere fact that a human body from thousands of years past is still more or less intact and recognizably like this year’s model can help open your mind to the connection between then and now. Something about a mummy helps your imagination bridge all the generations since that puckered flesh was taut, upright, and dancing.
In history books that cover big expanses of time, you have to adjust your perspective so that a century becomes a relatively small unit of history. In this book, you can breeze through a thousand years here and a thousand years there. Thinking of the Byzantine Empire as one civilization, a single station on the history train, is easy to do. Yet the empire grew and receded, changed governments, and restructured policies over centuries — more than five times longer than the United States has been a nation.
When you back up far enough to take that concept in, you may lose sight of individual lives, which flicker past quickly. I find that contemplating mummies is a helpful, if gruesome, tool for hooking into the perspective of a single life span, a single person, so long ago. Strangely, you may be able to identify with a mummy easily, if you don’t find the idea too macabre.
Mummies have turned up all over the world. Some were preserved naturally by something in the environment where the body came to rest. Others, as in the celebrated tombs of ancient Egypt, were artfully prepared for their voyage into death.
Frozen in the Alps
In the summer of 1991, German tourists hiking in the Ötzal Alps on the border between Austria and Italy spotted a human body lodged in high-altitude ice. A few days later, a rescue team cut free the corpse of a bearded man dressed in leather. Perhaps he had been a back-to-nature hippie whose 1960s wanderings went tragically awry? No. Other curious details made that scenario unlikely — including the man’s flint-bladed knife, flint-tipped arrows, and copper-bladed ax.
Researchers at the University of Innsbruck in Austria first estimated the freeze-dried body to be 4,000 years old. Further examination moved the date of death back by 1,300 years, meaning that Ötzi (as scientists nicknamed him) was journeying over the mountains around 3300 BC when he died and was covered by falling snow.
Ötzi, who resides in Italy’s Museo Archologico dell’Alto Adige in Bolzano, is a natural mummy in that his body was preserved by nature. Scientists find out all kinds of things about the ways people lived and died from mummies, especially those that were preserved whole. Ötzi was between age 40 and 50 when he died, and he suffered from several chronic illnesses; his medicine pouch contained herbal prescriptions for what ailed him. He also had a sloe, the fruit of the blackthorn tree, presumably to eat. Probing the mummy’s stomach, researchers found that he’d eaten the meat of chamois (a European mountain goat) and deer, as well as grain (possibly in the form of bread) shortly before he died.
Ötzi’s mummified body and the things found with it prompted scholars to rethink some assumptions about the roots of European civilization. His copper ax showed that the transition from stone technology to metal happened earlier than archaeologists had previously believed. The rest of his gear — a bow, a quiver of arrows, a waterproof cape woven of grass, even his well-made shoes — show that Ötzi was well equipped for his trek across the mountains. The stress patterns in his leg bones suggest that he made such journeys routinely. At first, scientists theorized that he might have been a shepherd, but further research showed that he had been shot with an arrow and involved in a physical struggle with other men. A blow to the head and blood loss from the arrow wound probably killed him. This man could have been a soldier, perhaps part of a raiding party.
Salted away in Asia
In the dry climate of Chinese Turkestan (between Russia and Mongolia), bodies buried in the salty soil near the towns of Cherchen and Loulan as long as 4,000 years ago turned into mummies rather than rotting away.
Some of the Turkestan mummies have well-preserved blond hair and appear to be of Caucasian ancestry, which challenges latter-day assumptions about the range of ancient ethnic groups. Based on their well-made, colorful clothing, they may have been related to the Celts, whose culture would later flourish all over Europe and whose descendants include the Irish, Scots, and Welsh. The fabrics show weaving techniques similar to those still practiced in rural Ireland. DNA analysis has suggested genetic links ranging from western European to east Asian, which may mean that their home, the Taklimakan Desert basin, was an ancient crossroads between cultures.
Bogged down in northern Europe
The watery peat bogs of northern Europe also made mummies. Tannins in the peat (partially decayed plant matter) and the cold water preserved bodies in such startlingly good condition that Danish villagers have sometimes mistaken a 2,500-year-old body for that of someone they knew only decades before.
Though discolored by the tannins, the mummies look much as they did when the people died. Some people may have fallen into the bogs, but many were killed and dumped there, perhaps as ritual sacrifices or as victims of another kind of execution. Some mummies of young women wear blindfolds, and other mummies appear to have been drowned alive. There are mummies with ropes around their necks, and some with slit throats.
Most of these peat-bog mummies have intact skin, hair, fingernails, and even facial expressions. And their jewelry and clothing sometimes look unsettlingly like something that could hang in your 21st-century closet.
Dried and well preserved in the Andes
The 500-year-old bodies of Inca children in the Argentine Andes, discovered atop Mount Llullaillaco in the 1990s by archaeologist Johan Reinhard and a team from the National Geographic Society, are among the best-preserved mummies ever found. Apparently killed as a religious ritual sacrifice, the boy and two girls — aged between 8 and 15 — were so perfectly frozen that the scientist said they looked as though they had just drawn their last breaths.
The Argentine discoveries are more than fascinating and informative; they’re also terribly sad. The idea of killing an 8-year-old makes me recoil in horror. What could possibly possess a culture to worship gods that must have the blood of innocents? Yet that’s another reason why the three preserved bodies are so compelling: They draw you into the past as you struggle to comprehend how these people, who were so startlingly similar to modern people in some ways, could have understood the world so differently.
If you got a job preparing wealthy and royal Egyptians for the afterlife, how would you go about it? Here’s the how-to:
1 To remove the brain, stick a long, narrow bronze probe up one nostril, breaking through the sinus bone into the cranial cavity. Wiggle the tool vigorously, breaking down the tissue until it’s the consistency of raw egg. Turn the corpse over to drain the liquefied brain through the nostril. Return the body
