Richard Evershed keeps mummy parts in his drawers. Not bandages or bones but tiny glass vials containing specks of brown powder, the sad residue of an ancient embalmer's art. On the vials are curious labels: Female Adult Ptolemaic: "resinous" lump hanging by thread off right ankle, says one. Horemkenesi: leg and foot, says another. Pedeamun: resin from top of head, reads a third. Retrieved from the remains of once-proud Egyptians, these remnants now resemble dried tea leaves. But it isn't clairvoyance that awaits them; instead, it's 21st-century chemical analysis in Evershed's lab at the University of Bristol in England.
Evershed, a gray-haired man with the slightly bemused air of someone unused to sudden fame, is more than willing to show visitors the mummies in the Bristol museum, five minutes' walk up the road from his paper-stacked office. But clearly his heart lies with chemistry, not coffins. "Some people spend hours looking at them," he says of the dusty, dimly lit collection of sarcophagi in the museum. "I'm more interested in the bodies."
