What killed Dr Granville's mummy?

New Scientist

This mummy had no abdominal incision. But if the embalmers had used the anal purge, it hadn't worked: most of the organs were intact and in place. Granville concluded that the embalmers had used a method Herodotus had missed. One clue to the technique was the softness of the skin and muscles and the pliable joints. Another was the presence throughout of a waxy substance, which Granville believed was a mix of beeswax and bitumen. He deduced that the body "must have been plunged into a vessel containing a liquefied mixture of wax and bitumen and kept there for some hours or days, over a gentle fire." He tried the treatment on stillborn babies. It seemed to work.

The body must have been kept in a bath of warm liquid wax

When Granville presented his results to the Royal Society, they caused a stir. And after he published his findings in Philosophical Transactions, he went on to enlighten the scientifically curious with a lecture at the Royal Institution. There, before some of London's great and good, he exhibited his specimens and performed experiments by the light of candles made from the wax scraped from his mummy.

Thirty years later, Granville sold the now battered coffin lid and a chest of specimens to the British Museum. Another 130 years on, Taylor rediscovered the chest. All that remained of the mummy were some bits of leg bone and soft tissue, the lungs and heart, and some of the waxy material Granville had extracted from the body. Since 1990, a team of investigators has re-examined the remains using modern scientific methods. Their findings will be published next year. So how much had Granville got right?

One thing he couldn't know was the identity of his mummy, because Egyptologists hadn't yet deciphered the language of the ancient Egyptians.

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