In Search of the Immortals: Mummies, Death and the Afterlife

by Howard Reid

Everyone knows that the ancient Egyptians were great mummifiers, and their sarcophagi and bandage-wrapped corpses are familiar images to us all. Yet across the vast sweep of history, we find many other great cultures in which the bodies of the dead were preserved as a matter of course.

In coastal Peru were the Chinchorros, whose mummifying culture flowered several millennia before Egypt's, and in the Andes were the Chachapoyas, the 'Cloud People,' a lost civilization which has only recently begun to be understood. In China's Taklamakan desert, the oddly-Caucasian looking people who established the Silk Route, which made possible the first trade between East and West, have left behind stunningly lifelike mummies. The ritually sacrificed bodies preserved in the peat bogs of northern Europe give us an extraordinary insight into life in the Dark Ages. And in the Canary Islands, perhaps most surprisingly of all, lived the Guanches, whose sophisticated mummification techniques - and whose cultural links with the Egyptians - Howard Reid explores here for the first time.

Taking his extraordinary first-hand experiences of discovering and filming mummies all over the world as his starting point, Howard Reid brings these ancient cultures vividly to life. And in so doing, In Search of the Immortals comes to represent his personal quest to find an answer to that most epic and timeless of human the meaning of death.

Genres: Nonfiction, History, Death, Anthropology, Archaeology

320 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1999

Reviews

[Lizzie · Rating 1 out of 5]

You'd think someone who has travelled the globe studying death and burial would know better than to state 'rotting corpses can cause and transmit disease' when in the majority of cases that simply isn't true. Unusual to see someone in 1999 still believing in miasma theory...

[Mel Campbell · Rating 3 out of 5]

I found this book on a shelf in a holiday house (which is one of my favourite ways to discover new books) and was drawn to it as, when I was a kid reading National Geographic, the mummy articles were always the ones that freaked me out the most, and yet the ones I returned to most often. I still remember the cover with the Inuit baby in his furry parka, so well preserved you could still see his eyelashes.

There is something utterly abject and repulsive about mummies and yet at the same time they are transcendent. I can't honestly find them beautiful but I can appreciate them as uncanny, awe-inspiring objects.

I'm not sure what I was hoping to get from this book, but it turned out to be heavy on the cosmology of various mummy-making cultures: expounding (and in almost all cases, speculating) on what these peoples hoped to achieve by preserving the bodies of their dead. It's also a travelogue as Reid explores sites where mummies were excavated, and reflects on his past experiences and travels.

For me, the weakest parts of the book were the attempts to draw links between mummy-making practices in different parts of the world to imply that these people learned mummification from one another. I didn't enjoy his Indiana Jonesy travelogue writing – it reminded me unfortunately of the risible credulity of Graham Hancock, whom, ironically, Reid disses in these pages for the silliness of his ancient astronaut theories. Reid uses the structure of the 'near-death experience' as a kind of rubric for understanding all forms of mummification, but I didn't find it convincing.

Also, I was annoyed to see Ötzi, the Iceman, relegated to an 'afterword' rather than discussed within the text, because unfortunately for Reid's argument about deliberately preserved mummies, Ötzi is an accidentally preserved mummy. I was also surprised not to see the Inuit mummies that so fascinated me, nor the Christian mummies in the catacombs in Palermo, and the Buddhist mummies which are really self-mummification through diet and voluntary immuration, or even English philosopher Jeremy Bentham, who famously requested that he be mummified after his death.

However, some of the mummy cultures in this book were unfamiliar to me, especially the Chinchorro mummies of South America and the Pazyryk of Eurasia, and I enjoyed Reid's historical and anthropological descriptions. It's a shame that the book seems so dated now, as this is such a dynamic area of study: new mummy caches are discovered and new archaeogenetic techniques are being used to analyse them.

[Elentarri · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a nicely written, and somewhat personal, book (with colour photographs) about the author's quest to discover the meaning of death by taking a look at the cultures that preserved the bodies of their dead. Reid starts off in the Old World with the mummies of the Taklamakan desert, Siberia,the bog people of northern Europe, the mummies of Ancient Egypt and the Canary Islands. He then moves on to the mummy cultures of South America - the Chinchorros, the 'Cloud People' and what remains of the Inca mummies. The author provides a description of the preserved bodies, how the mummies were created, some information about the cultures that produced them and a fair amount of speculation (where information is completely absent) about the religious views of these peoples and why they preserved their dead in this fashion. This book is an overview of the various mummy cultures - not an extensive text on the subject. I found this book to provide an fascinating glimpse into ancient civilizations and their view of the afterlife.

OTHER BOOKS

The Tarim Mummies: Ancient China and the Mystery of the Earliest Peoples from the West by J.P Mallory
Mummy Congress: Science, Obsession, and the Everlasting Dead by Heather Pringle [more scientific look at mummies]
Ice Maiden: Inca Mummies, Mountain Gods, and Sacred Sites in the Andes by Johan Reinhard
Bog Bodies Uncovered: Solving Europe's Ancient Mystery by Miranda Aldhouse-Green
Iceman by Brenda Fowler [aka how not to do archaeology]
The Amazons: Lives and Legends of Warrior Women Across the Ancient World by Adrienne Mayor

[Fred Conrad · Rating 4 out of 5]

interesting, good, but took a long little while to work through. i also happened, sadly, to read the uncorrected proof copy with grainy b&w images. it left me wondering where the author was getting all the cash for the travel and immersion trips he was taking, seemingly all his life.

[Kandice Newren · Rating 3 out of 5]

It's a pretty good book, and I learned a lot about different cultures, but for some reason I had a hard time really getting into the book, which is why it took me about 4 months to read.

[Kimberly Huddleston · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really enjoyed this one.