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In a message dated 97-10-20 16:00:33 EDT, John Carmi Parsons writes: > The suggestion may well be correct that what was being peddled as "mummy" > in Europe in more recent centuries was not actually of Egyptian origin. > During the French Revolution, for example, the royal sepulchres at St Denis > were not the only Bourbon burials violated. It was long the custom to give > separate burial to the preserved hearts of the members of the Bourbon family > in > the abbey of Val-de-Grace. The vault in which the hearts were kept was also > > ransacked during the Revolution and the hearts put up for sale; they were > purchased by an artist who used them to prepare his oil paints, to which, > he said, the hearts imparted a "wonderful iridescence." I don't know if > any of this fellow's canvases have survived. > > Which leads me to wonder: Could a good deal of the "mummy" hawked around > Europe have come from grave robbers within Europe itself? > How did they preserve the hearts? An Egyptian mummy looks very much like a prune, and I have slides from the Brit Museum in which one is partially unwrapped. If you live near the kind of Chinese market that sells dried oysters, dried sea cucumbers, dried abalone, etc, . it's fairly clear that the remains of any animal form, when dried, always gets that same prune-like look. The dark brown color is pervasive enough in mummies where it's really impossible to tell the original skin color of the mummifoed person (much to the disappointment of my students). Mummy, the paint, actually was a dark brown color. Rather like umber, which is an extremely inexpensive pigment and might be easy to substitute for umber without people knowing the difference. Note that fruits don't necessarily get so dark--dried apricots, peaches, etc. Though I think something might be added in drying some fruits precisely to ensure that the color doesn 't turn dark brown. The artist (above) who said the hearts gave a wonderful irridescence doesn't sound as if he's talking about a dark brown coloration. So I'm wondering about the process used to preserve the hearts, and what it's effect would have been. . pat sloane %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%