Salima Ikram is an Egyptologist and author. She is Distinguished Professor of Egyptology at the American University in Cairo, and has worked as an archaeologist on projects in Turkey, Sudan, Greece, and the USA, as well as throughout Egypt. Dr Ikram founded the Animal Mummy project at the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, and has also directed the North Kharga Darb Ain Amur Survey and the Valley of the Kings KV10/KV63 Mission, and co-directed the Predynastic Gallery project and the North Kharga Oasis Survey. She has published widely on Egyptology, including the books Divine Creatures, The Mummy in Ancient Egypt, The Tomb in Ancient Egypt, Death and Burial in Ancient Egypt, and, recently, A History of World Egyptology, co-edited with Andrew Bednarski and Aidan Dodson.
Ancient body-wrappings, masks and gold, mystery and discovery, museum displays, horror movies – the word ‘mummy’ conjures up many things. Where does the word come from?
The word ‘mummy’ comes from the Arabic word mum or mumia, which basically means wax or a black bituminous substance originating from the ‘mummy mountain’ in Persia. Because a lot of mummies were covered with a dark substance that the Arabs who first encountered them thought to be mum, the word ‘mummy’ was used to describe them. In fact, most of the mummies that we have analysed are made of resins, oils, and beeswax that has darkened to give them this black colour.
Can you tell us about the relationship between Egyptian religion and mummification?
As the Egyptians believed that you lived forever, they felt that the aspects of your soul needed to have a body to animate, which is why mummification was born, so that the soul could live in a proper body. Of course, images, both two- and three-dimensional, were also available for the soul to animate. The soul had a variety of components: the ka, one’s doppelgänger; the ba, a human-headed bird that was the part of your soul that could fly here and there, and is also the closest we get to a ghost; and the akh, which is the divine spark that can go off and be eternally joined with the stars.
