A Mummy by Any Other NameA century after the discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb, curators bent on ‘decolonizing’ history have become needlessly skittish about the M-word.
Steven Tucker
16 Feb 2023
In November 2022, the British media marked an important centenary: the passage of 100 years since the discovery of the antechamber of Tutankhamun’s tomb by the English archaeologist Howard Carter and his patron, the Fifth Earl of Carnarvon, in Egypt’s Valley of the Kings. February 16th, 2023 likewise marks the centenary of the duo’s uncovering of the pharaoh’s main burial chamber. The occasion has led some of Carter and Carnarvon’s decidedly less adventurous modern-day museum-based counterparts to set down rules regarding how the topic should be discussed.
In the run-up to this week’s milestone, newspapers informed readers that the word “mummy” has been added to the lengthy list of words that academics want to see banned. Notwithstanding these attention-grabbing headlines, however, the M-word is not entirely verboten—at least not yet. But museums across the British Isles are indeed beginning to remove the word “mummy” from exhibit display labels, in favour of awkward phrases such as “mummified person.”
Strictly speaking, a “mummy” is any dead human or animal whose tissues and organs are preserved with chemicals, desiccation, extreme cold, or oxygen deprivation. But in the way the word is colloquially used, it is often linked with Ancient Egypt, whose embalmers employed a variety of methods to preserve the dead. According to a spokeswoman for National Museums Scotland, within whose institutions the M-word rebranding has been implemented as a matter of official policy, “the word ‘mummy’ is not incorrect, but it is dehumanizing, whereas using the term ‘mummified person’ encourages our visitors to think of the [living, pre-mummified] individual.”
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Source:
https://quillette.com/2023/02/16/a-mummy-by-any-other-name/
