Diary of a dead man
This blog post introduces readers to the well-traveled remains of an Egyptian mummy now residing in Houston, Texas. If old Ankh-Hap still had his original hands and an endless supply of papyrus, he might have made entries like these in a diary of his afterlife.
29 July 1987
Dear Diary,
I traded coffins today. I left behind the comfortable wooden box that had cradled my remains for the past twenty-three centuries. I feel a bit lost without it. Ancient mourners had listed upon its lid the essentials of my being, including my name (Ankh-Hap, son of Ma’at Djehuty) and my eternal needs (bread, beer, wine, milk, meat, oil, and incense). In brilliant colors, it pictured the gods who have guarded my afterlife and the rituals of my resurrection. It recorded all that I was and would ever be: a transitory man and then a mummy.
My new coffin is larger but less personal, the product of another time and place that worships Science instead of Osiris. Its priests have sealed me inside a casket they call a CT-Scanner. This modern metalloid coffin promises me no food or drink; it does not even know my name. Yet, I sense it searching my deepest self, probing for secrets my wooden one has refused to share. What lies hidden beneath my linen wrappings? The whole world is about to know.
I am a physical wreck. The priests see in the shiny coffin that I have wasp nests in my skull. There are seven wooden slats rammed through my body from head to ankles. I have partial limbs and fake ones too. Most of me is missing between my head and my hips, an inexplicable void filled by just a few ribs and vertebrae. No one yet knows how, when, or why this happened. Was I the victim of a crocodile attack or perhaps a chariot crash? Did tomb raiders despoil my body in search of loot and then leave me to be pieced together and reburied? Could my condition be the result of a modern crime? Am I even Ankh-Hap at all, or just a Franken-mummy who was stuffed into a stolen coffin? Is one casket calling the other a liar? This has been an unsettling day.
29 July 2024
Dear Diary,
Many Wep Renpets have passed since my week-long sojourn inside that second coffin. It was an experience that changed my afterlife. Resting again in the one of wood, I peep out at throngs of modern admirers—or should I call them mourners? They do not seem sure how to respond to my updated obituary. I was a man of some means but not of high status; neither of my coffins support old rumors that I was a tax collector or a prince of royal blood. I was about forty when I died, with signs of osteoarthritis and episodes of stress-related anemia. I most certainly did not go to my grave with wasps in my head or with sticks where my bones should have been.
When carbon-dated, the wooden braces inside me proved to be modern, showing that my body was ravaged and then repaired during the mummy craze of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. That’s when an American entrepreneur dredged me from the infamous mummy-pits of Egypt. His company openly trafficked in mummies and mummy parts, selling assorted arms, legs, heads, and whole bodies at bargain prices to all and sundry. That’s how my wooden coffin and I (yes, I am its rightful inhabitant) came to Texas, where I spent some time in a traveling show, a university lecture hall, and an abandoned campus bathroom. Sadly, people forgot I was there, allowing those worrisome wasps to colonize my cranium. Fortunately, I was rescued and now repose in a marvelous temple called the Houston Museum of Natural Science. Its priests and patrons keep me and my coffin safe within a shrine that now links the religions of Science and Osiris.
All of these details and more appear in a new book about my life and afterlife, titled A Mystery from the Mummy-Pits: The Amazing Journey of Ankh-Hap (Oxford University Press, 2024). In its pages, author Frank L. Holt makes the most of what my two coffins reveal about me. I just love being buried in a good book.
Featured image by Dmitrii Zhodzishskii via Unsplash.