The GOLDEN MUMMY of Isaious

This gilded mummy is one of the most beautiful and mesmerizing ever found from ancient Egypt. Its upper portion is covered with an elaborate mask portraying a woman with a fancy coiffure of corkscrew curls, a smile on her face. She wears a necklace of precious stones and holds a wreath, rings on her fingers, earrings in her ears, bracelets representing snakes on her arms, sandals on her feet. Discovered in Hawara, located in the Fayoum region of Lower Egypt, this artifact is commonly known as the Golden Mummy of Iseus. It dates to the first century CE, a time when the Ptolemies and then Rome ruled the country. The idealized appearance of her mask indicates that she was a lady of elite status. Atop her cartonage mask are Greek letters identifying her as Iseus, daughter of Demetrius. When I saw this remarkable mummy, I wanted to know more about it. So I contacted Dr. Campbell Price, a curator at the Manchester Museum, to see what more he could tell me. I will share our conversation with you now. And after that, I will tell you a few more interesting tidbits about the mummy you may not know. So I have with me here Dr. Campbell Price, who is an Egyptologist, and he earned his PhD at the University of Liverpool. He is chair of the Egypt Exploration Society and is curator of the Antiquities of Egypt and Sudan at the Manchester Museum, where the mummy resides. So I thought, who better to talk about this golden mummy than him? So thank you for joining us today, Dr. Price. My pleasure, David, my pleasure. Glad to have you here. So can you tell us, first of all, where and how was this mummy discovered? Well, so this is one of several golden mummies, mummies covered in gilded cartonage. We'll probably come back to the technique of making one shortly. But it's one of several that came from the site of Hawara in Egypt. And it came through the excavations led by a British Egyptologist archaeologist called William Matthew Flinders Petrie. Petrie had excavated three seasons at Hawara. I should add that it wasn't him doing most of the digging. It was Egyptian men, women and children who rarely get credit for doing all the hard work and making the discoveries. But Petrie directs those excavations and often takes the credit. What years were these? He began work there. It's a very interesting story, actually, how he came upon the site of Hawara. So he began work in 1888, so relatively early in his considerably lengthy career. So he worked in 1888 to 1889. He went back from 1889 to 1890. And then he returned a third time around 1910. And so the mummy of the lady we're going to discuss comes from his third season in 1910. Okay. All right. And was this a deliberate effort to find something in a particular spot or was it found by accident? Oh, good question. I think most things were found by accident. And it's interesting to look at Petrie's diaries from his excavations at Hawara, because they give a sense of his growing frustration at the finds he was making. Initially, he went to the site of Hawara because it was dominated by the mud brick core of a Middle Kingdom pyramid belonging to a chap called Amenemhat III, King Amenemhat III, who ruled around about the mid 1800s BCE. So almost two millennia before the Greco-Roman period burials that we're going to discuss. So I think Petrie went expecting to find evidence for who owned the pyramid and evidence of contemporary Middle Kingdom activity from the reign of Amenemhat III. What he instead discovered was this vast, and I'm talking vast, cemetery of people who'd lived in the Greco-Roman period, by which I mean Egypt under Greek kings, the Ptolemies, from around about 300 and something BCE through to the Roman period, so say around 300 CE. And in that time, that kind of five, 600 year period, the site of Hawara was a major cemetery. Those and such as those elite people who could afford mummification wanted to be buried in the shadow or in the vicinity of the pyramid of the ancient King Amenemhat III, not just because he was a great king, but because he was considered to be a living god. Well, he had been living and he was pretty dead by that point, but he was still considered to be a god, someone who it would be good to be associated with in the afterlife. So if you could, and we have letters to this effect, people say, after I die, I want to be buried near the pyramid or indeed the associated temple, which came to be known in Greek and Roman times as the Labyrinth, this place, this kind of mythical place that was very large and very complex in its construction. I was going to ask you this a little bit later, but we're kind of talking. We're going there. So about the site of Hawara, this is a necropolis, right? It's not a city that people live in? No, for the most part, based on the evidence we have, it's mainly a necropolis. Yeah, it's a burial site. Yeah. I see. And was there a city nearby? There has been evidence of habitation found nearby, but the interesting thing about the cemetery is it seems like it was the most sacred, perhaps, or the most kind of effective place to site your tomb with a view. So we know there are people from all around the Fayyum Lake region, this very fertile part of Egypt. So they might come from some distance just to be buried there? So people were choosing, at least in the Greco-Roman period, they were choosing to, after death, they hoped, to be brought to the site of Hawara from some distance away. So it was really the number one place to be seen dead in that part of Egypt. Yes. All right. Now, as far as the specific golden mummy of Isaias, you told us the general time period, but my viewers are always interested in how we know when things happened and when things come from. So how is the date of the mummy and of the other burials? They're determined. How do we know how old they are? Well, it's rather less precise than you might imagine. And I think Flinders Petrie was among the first to kind of debate these issues because he saw things as happening in very developmental sequences, something, then something, then something, when in fact, the reality of the situation might be, as usual in human society, rather more complicated than we might at first think. So basically, it's about judging things based on style. So we see, generally speaking, maybe a more pharaonic look of what Egyptologists call the late period, the last few centuries BCE, developing change into a more Greek or Roman look. But that's not to deny that people in the Greco-Roman period, people of perhaps Greek origin or Roman origin, were deliberately choosing to be buried in purely Egyptian style funerary goods. Because it was fashionable? Yes, exactly. I always say to students when I'm talking about this in Manchester, if you were, I don't know, a guy walking around London in the 1950s, wearing a pair of Levi jeans, that doesn't mean you're an American, it just means you want to look fashionable in an American brand of clothing. So by the same token, I don't think you can look at any of these mummies and say, they are Greek, they are Roman, they are Egyptian, exclusively. I think it was a very multicultural society. And it goes the other way, it could be when Americans would wear beetle boots, you know, or something like that. For example, for example. So, I mean, archaeologists tend to forget these very simple realities of the complexity of life. And Petri, in particular, wanted to categorise, he wanted to typologise, he wanted to pigeonhole people. And that has a rather sinister undertone, we're waking up to that and have been for the last couple of decades in Egyptology. He was a very active eugenicist. He was measuring skulls, he was racially typologising people. And so for him, a mummy with a painted portrait, one of these very beautiful, very striking, encaustic, thin painted wooden panels that just looked like people from Pompeii, for him, they had to be Greek or Roman. When in fact, they may have been Egyptian. I was just about to pull a Petri and ask you whether this woman was Greek or Egyptian. But I'm assuming now I'm going to get a very nuanced answer. Yes, you are. What do we know? What do we know about her? Well, not a great deal, it has to be said. And I think, in museums, at least, we are trying to, and we are getting better at admitting to the public how little we know. When you watch a documentary TV show, there are definitive answers. These are who these people are, this is the food they ate, this is the medical conditions they had, this is their favourite colour, I don't know. We can't be so precise. And so with the golden mummies, with most of the mummies found by Petri's workers at Hawara, well, for a start, very few of them had any decoration at all. So maybe Petri estimated maybe two or three percent had nice, fancy decoration that you'd want to put on display in a museum. The other mummies, the thousands of mummies he admits to heaving over by the dozen every day, we know nothing of them. There was no attempt to preserve them. Heaving over what? Mummies, mummified bodies. He talks about just churning over the ground. Oh, I see. As you're digging, just kind of discarding it or pushing it aside. Okay. Basically, yeah. So for a start, the ones that are decorated are the elite people. And I suspect mummification in general was only really accessible to people of some means. I don't think farmers and fields necessarily were getting mummified as standard. It was a very expensive process. But these decorated mummies very rarely carry a name. And so this lady, Isaias, is unusual because her name is written in Greek on the top of the cartonnage mummy carapace that surrounds her body. So we have at least a name for her. She's Isaias, the daughter of Demetrios. So we have her father's name. Is it true that we originally got the name wrong? I don't know where the misreading originated from, but our classical colleagues at the University of Manchester looked at the Greek, although it's not terribly well preserved, they identified that she was not called Demetria, daughter of Isaias. She was Isaias, daughter of Demetrios, and Demetrios is the father. The patronymic naming pattern was quite standard, apparently, if you read Greek. So we have her name. She has a very standard appearance. Probably the mummy mask was made in a mold. It's maybe been changed slightly. But isn't that meant to really mimic her face? No. There are archive photos from 1910-11, when the mummy was discovered, which show the face was badly damaged. It was bashed in. So it's been reconstructed? It's been reconstructed in Manchester Museum, and I have archive photos showing a predecessor of mine and a museum technician in the 1930s, perhaps, reconstructing the face. So again, I always say to visitors, what you see in a museum, you know, museums don't transmit facts. They actively create facts. So the fact of her face, although it was probably restored with reference to other better preserved examples, is still a modern creation. So even if it were beautifully preserved, and we do have other examples of mummy masks from Hawara that are beautifully preserved, no image, in my opinion, not even a Fayoun portrait, but certainly not a pharaonic mummy mask or statue or representation of the face. None of those are mimetic likenesses in the sense of modern Western portraiture. The people didn't look like that. I see. Well, the question comes to my head then, if this mask wasn't that well preserved, why is this mummy more famous than other ones? I think that has to do with the restoration, the fact that her face was restored, the fact that this mummy, rather unusually for this type, retains the decorated shroud on the outer covering. And she also has a name, so you can put a name to her. So that combination of things, I think, make her quite well known among people who like Greco-Roman period funerary stuff. And the really appealing feature of this, if you can call it that, this lady's mummified body is that she has her name in Greek, she has this classical Roman appearance, and the shroud is completely pharaonic in its decoration. So the lady, Isaias, is shown on the shroud adoring various gods, being protected by various gods, being mummified on a bed, a lion-headed bed by the jackal-headed god Anubis. So all these very standard scenes in Egyptian funerary ritual. She's also shown being washed, or kind of, I hate to use the word baptised, but cleaned, cleansed, purified, in a scene that you would absolutely get on a temple wall. So I suspect the people decorating the temple walls in Roman Egypt maybe had a sideline in decorating mummy shrouds like this. So all of this, you know, Greek, Roman, and Egyptian combined to make her a very multicultural mummified lady. That doesn't really say anything, though, about her heritage, though, right? It could just be a cultural thing instead of about her ancestry. Exactly. It tells us next to nothing about, yeah, her. And I expect there's, yeah, there's been no genetic analysis of her mummy or anything like that, probably. And even if there had been, I would be deeply suspicious of anything in the results that were produced, to be honest with you. Okay. That's a whole other topic I could talk with you about. Let's try and, yeah, just focus on this mummy, yeah. So her name is, that doesn't sound like a familiar Greek name to me, but I could be wrong. Is it a transcription of an Egyptian name? That's an excellent question, and I would have to defer to classical scholars who know more about it than me. And having discussed it a little bit, I believe the reference is to the Egyptian goddess Isis. So, again, how much do you read it into a name? The mummy is found in Egypt, but, and it's got Egyptian iconography on it, and it's a mummy, it's a mummified body. Possibly there's a reference to Isis, but the name is written in Greek, and the name certainly sounds classical. And then there is Roman iconography there. So, short of finding a papyrus with her personal history on it, which is highly unlikely, we cannot know, was she an Egyptian lady who was given a kind of classical name? Was she a Roman who was going with a soldier, an ex-Roman soldier, pensioned off, as used to be the case, from the army, given some land in Egypt to farm in his retirement? Or is she a Greek who's maybe been hanging around, the Greek family has been hanging around since the Ptolemies, and they've chosen to be buried in this style? And I think, having looked at the mummies in preparation for an exhibition and writing a book about them, they tell us much more about ourselves and our own assumptions and prejudices and, yeah, conventions than they do about the ancient people. We have this great conceit that you can CT scan a mummy or analyse the inscriptions on it and come up with a personal biography. You know, 200 years ago, before 1822, a lot of mummies in museums in Europe and the US had inscriptions on, and it was assumed at the time these were, you know, detailed biographies of the people. But in fact, they were actually just highly formulaic inscriptions that, at best... Oh, that everybody puts on their dead, right? Yeah, yeah, you know, it was, you know, the life and loves of this particular woman, this very romantic story. No, here, actually, Petrie, again, was very dismissive. He didn't like the idea of cultural mixing. He wrote an incredibly racist tract called The Revolutions of Civilisation about that. But he didn't like the idea of this mixture of styles. And he said of mummies like Isaiah's, he said, oh, the hieroglyphs are garbled. The people at this time didn't understand hieroglyphs. But there are legible hieroglyphs used as captions to the gods. So the gods Anubis is captioned. Goddess Isis, Nephthys have their names in hieroglyphs. The sun god is captioned. So people did understand hieroglyphs. There was a much more deliberate, considered way of burying the dead than perhaps Petrie imagined. I see. Well, I can probably ask you this question. Was she rich? Yes, definitely. That's a great question. I wish more people asked that kind of question. She must have been rich because, well, the mummy is covered in gold, which doesn't come cheap. Mummification itself is deeply materials and labour intensive. So there's the treatment of the body. And again, this is something I'm quite interested in. And other colleagues have done more work on this than me. But we are used to, in museums and in popular culture and what we tell school children, to saying mummification is about preservation. Let you into a little secret. It's probably not about preserving the body. I was always told that, you know. It's standard, right? Yeah. Why are you mummifying someone's soul? The spirit in the afterlife will be detrimentally affected if your body wastes away physically, your corpse, that somehow your soul will be affected or something. That's what I always thought. But no, you're telling me that's not true. Well, surprisingly, if that was such a central tenet, such a concept of importance to the ancient Egyptians, it's nowhere explicitly articulated, that belief. So much more likely, the treatment of the body is a ritual of transformation to turn the corpse, the human corpse, into something permanent and impervious to change, like a statue, like a divine statue. So we know from various texts, from pharaonic times and later, that there was a belief that the gods, the gods and the goddesses had flesh made of gold. So the application of gold is a way of imparting, affecting the divinity of the deceased. So the iconography here is, it's of protection, it's of transformation. And so, again, we don't know what the majority of people believe because they don't appear in the material records, or the written record, at least, certainly the written record. So in answer to your question, is she rich? Yes, she's been given this expensive process of transformation. She has a gilded, it's not even really a mask. It's like, I don't know, yeah, a carapace made of a mixture of plaster and linen, or sometimes papyrus, kind of waste paper papyrus, which is built up in layers and then painted or gilded in this case. And she has this kind of detail on her feet, where her feet emerge from the wrappings, again, gilded, showing she's got the flesh of the gods, the flesh of gold. And then on the underside of the foot case, that she's standing on a kind of pedestal, another marker that she's literally on a pedestal, she's divine. On the underside of that pedestal is a representation of foreign enemies. And of course, Petrie leapt on this, imagined some kind of racial interpretation. In fact, we know from texts where there's a caption actually given in hieroglyphs to this scene, that it says, of the deceased, your enemies are under your feet. So it's the concept of the dead person overcoming or vanquishing their enemies in life, their enemies in death, or even the concept of death itself. I see, yes, much more symbolic. It's much more symbolic. So altogether, to afford the mummification, the yards and yards and yards of linen, the mask and the foot case and the painting on the shroud and the gilding, all of that didn't come cheap. So I would say definitely she was high society. When they were mummifying the dead in this period, were they doing it differently than they had done it in earlier times? Was there a development of mummification where there were changes, like where you can identify a mummy, the time period it comes from, based on how it was mummified? I think, yeah, it's possible. I mean, people think of ancient Egypt and they think of this big monolithic recipe book, especially with mummification. Oh, there was a recipe for mummification. And we have to do all these experiments and analyses to try and find out the secret code, the special recipe. To an extent, that's true. To an extent, as most Egyptology is, it's nonsense. So like Herodotus has a full description. This is how they did it. Oh, yeah. Herodotus and other people, you know, Diodorus, have a lot to answer for because they recorded things as if what they saw at that moment in time applied to all 3,000 years of pharaonic history and after. So in answer to the question, you know, if you're a mummy specialist, sure, you can look at a mummy and say, this is Old Kingdom, Middle Kingdom, New Kingdom, Late Period, Roman, based on styles and changes in region as well. So it's not just changes over time. Egypt's a big place, different cities, different regions have different ways of doing things. But here, often people talk about these Roman mummies as being somehow lesser than the pharaonic period, as if, you know, people were deliberately doing a sloppy job, which doesn't seem likely to me. There's an increased use of resin, this kind of black, unguent substance associated with transformation, divinification, the becoming some other state. That's applied pretty liberally with the same objective, I think, as in earlier times to turn their corpse into a permanent god-like being. Preservation of the flesh, I don't think ever really was the main target. So I think the mummification, to the people doing it, would have been as good as anything, as at any other period. Was mummification being done more commonly in the Greco-Roman period than earlier? Because it seems like we find more mummies from later times. And that's a very good point. And it's something I wrestled with myself, trying to understand the kind of funerary culture of this period. I guess you've got to imagine that there was a bigger population in the Greco-Roman period. And so, proportionately, the elite could have grown, and so more mummies would have been produced. I'm less convinced there was a kind of democratisation of mummification. Perhaps there was to an extent. But remember, yeah, the Greco-Roman period is the last period. So understandably... Of course, we would have more. As we do with temples. We have far more Greco-Roman period temples than we do earlier ones, because the other ones were demolished and destroyed and damaged and incorporated into the later ones. But these cemeteries are huge, sure. But remember, the Greco-Roman period itself stretches from the early Ptolemies, early 300s BCE, all the way through into, yeah, the 300s CE. So actually, that period is like 500 or 600 years. So no wonder then, if there was even a small number of the elite kept dying, kept being mummified, no wonder there's quite a lot of them. What have we learned about Egypt of this period from an examination of the mummy and mummies like it? To be honest with you, not a great deal, I don't think. Again, we want to pick this up that CT scanning and x-raying tells you a lot. I mean, you can say to an extent some things about health and life expectancy, but these are very shaky things, in my own opinion, simply because mummification as a transformation ritual really changes the chemistry and the composition and the preserved form of the body. And I've been in CT scanning suites and hospitals with people debating between a medical and an Egyptological point of view, what is a health condition that's preserved in the mummy's bones or in what's left of the flesh? And what is an artifact of mummification itself? What is something that has been caused by the process of mummification? And the jury's still out. I think maybe in the future you might be able to say more accurately. And many people who specialise in mummy studies will absolutely say you can say lots of things for sure, but I kind of adopt a healthy scepticism about the amount and nature of definitive statements you can make based on mummies. I've recently seen an Egyptologist arguing that the displaying of mummies in museums is disrespectful to the dead. As a museum curator, what are your thoughts on that? Manchester Museum has chosen to display mummies. We continue to choose to display mummies. We may not always. I think you can only view the past, I guess, through the lens of the present. And for some people, the idea of putting human remains on display, whether wrapped or unwrapped, cocooned or shielded or coffined or not, is absolute anathema. And people have beliefs on both sides. I think we have to recognise that mummified bodies exist in the here and now. And there is a tendency, perhaps in some quarters, to view the dead sentimentally through the expectations of today. There's no evidence necessarily that people in the past viewed the dead in quite the same way. And as I've already said, mummification is about turning the human body, the beloved grandmother, into an object, into a divine object. So you have to get to grips with these concepts of person, object, thing, divinity, human being. These are concepts that we have today that are somewhat more complex or differently figured in the past. So to me, I wonder whether the display of a statue of a divinity in bronze covered in gold would be as offensive to an ancient Egyptian living in Hawara in 100 CE as the display of the mummy of Isaias. So it's a complicated issue and there are strong beliefs on both sides. And I should also say for the Roman period mummies at least, Greco-Roman period mummies, there is some evidence of them having been displayed in some context in a kind of cultic setting prior to burial. You don't have that evidence for the pharaonic periods. Mummification happens, the funeral happens, the burial takes place. But Petrie himself speculated about mummies hanging around the house for generations and then eventually being gathered up and buried. There is a context for display, there seems to be in Roman Egypt. So that allowed interaction between the living and their ancestors. And we are possibly not as comfortable with that level of interaction today in the West. As I understand it, the mummy is currently on tour and is coming back to Manchester soon, is that right? Yes, the tour of golden mummies of Egypt opened in Buffalo. I'm from Buffalo. Are you? Oh great, great place. Really great place. I visited just before the pandemic struck in February 2020. Yeah, great time. So we opened the show there at the Buffalo Museum of Science and it went on to North Carolina. Pandemic made things complicated and then it toured three venues in China. So it's just coming to the end of its run in China and it comes back to Manchester, the show, 107 objects, beautiful accompanying catalog. I can show you golden mummies of Egypt available online and it will reopen to the public in Manchester in the middle of February 2023. For those of you who are near Manchester at that time, go check out the exhibit. Well, I want to thank you very much Dr Price for talking with us about the golden mummy of Isaias and we love learning about it. I appreciate you taking the time out to speak with us. My pleasure, David. Thank you for the invitation. Take a look at the detail of the shroud on the mummy. At the top, we have a depiction of a Wessex collar worn around the neck by elites or deities. Below that is the sky goddess Nut, her wings spread out. The gods Anubis and Thoth are by her side. She's kneeling on the hieroglyphic symbol for gold. Below that is another depiction of Anubis, tending to the mummy, which rests on a bier. What's interesting is that canopic jars are displayed. But as far as we know, these were not used in the Roman period. But these are traditional Egyptian motifs we see on this shroud. Below that is a libation scene featuring Horus and Thoth. Each of the scenes has captions and hieroglyphs. There is much to look at and ponder over on this mummy. Next time you're at the Manchester Museum, check it out. If you like this video, please hit the thumbs up button and check out more in this channel's artifacts series. Until we meet again. You might like my little e-booklet, Why Ancient History Matters. It's designed to persuade people that the subject is important, even in the modern world. You might also wish to use it to help spread the word. So feel free to share it with someone you know. It's free for anyone who wants it. I've left a link in the description box below the video for you to grab a copy. Catch you later.