The first mummy, it is said, was the god Osiris--brother and husband of Isis--who was slain and dismembered by his brother Seth. The pieces of Osiris's body were then distributed throughout Egypt. But Isis retrieved them, pieced them back together, and wrapped them in linen. Thus revived, Osiris resumed his life, but because of his death and rebirth, he reigned as sovereign of the dead, one of the most revered and powerful deities.
And the last mummy, it may someday be said, is a man who died in Baltimore in 1994 of a heart attack. His name is not public knowledge. He left this life in his seventies. By now, his mummifiers imagine, this man has already approached Osiris and been deemed worthy. One of his mummifiers is Ronn Wade, director of the Maryland State Anatomy Board and director of the Anatomical Service Division of the University of Maryland. He is in charge of finding and allotting to medical schools the bodies of those who donate themselves to science. Offices at the University of Maryland have been Wade's domain for 27 years, and he hurries through underground corridors efficiently, passing an unidentified body on a gurney--with only a pale toe peeking out--without a glance. More than five years ago, these quarters opened a small window onto the funerary practices of the ancient Egyptians. "I told the family it was a Ôlong-term' research project," Wade says. "They don't know that Dad's a mummy, but from my point of view, we treated him like a king."
Inside Wade's dim, windowless office stands a large Styrofoam replica of an Egyptian sarcophagus, and, but for a few replicas of human organs, the room looks as if it belonged to an Egyptologist at the British Museum. In 1994, Wade was contacted by the classical scholar Bob Brier, a professor of philosophy and Egyptology at the C.W. Post campus of Long Island University in New York. After years of studying hieroglyphs and investigating tombs, Brier had decided that his research would not be complete until he mummified--properly--a human body. The problem: where to get the body. A colleague put him in touch with Wade, who agreed to help. They became partners in a plot to re-create ancient Egyptian techniques of body preservation. As befits the person who dreamed up this project, Brier is a bit over the top when it comes to ancient Egypt. The license plate on his Jeep Cherokee reads MUMMY 1. In his apartment in the Riverdale section of the Bronx, hand-sized servant-mummy statuettes--figurines that were supposed to accompany ancient Egyptians into the afterlife--line the top shelves of his bookcases.
