THE MUMMY CONGRESS: Science, Obsession and the Everlasting Dead - Softcover

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Heather Pringle is a journalist and author who has written on archaeology and ancient cultures in numerous magazines including Discover, National Geographic Traveler, New Scientist, Science and Geo. In January 2002, she won the American Association for the Advancement of Science award for Magazine Journalism. She is the author of three books, including ‘The Mummy Congress’. She lives in Vancouver, Canada.

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When acclaimed science journalist Heather Pringle was dispatched to a remote part of northern Chile to cover a little-known scientific conference, she found herself in the midst of the most passionate gathering of her working life – dozens of mummy experts crammed into a rambling seaside hotel, battling over the implications of their latest discoveries. Infected with their mania, Pringle spent the next year circling the globe, stopping in to visit leading scientists so she could see at first-hand the breathtaking delicacy and unexpected importance of their work.

In The Mummy Congress, she recounts the intriguing findings from her travels, bringing to life the hitherto unknown worlds of the long-dead, and revealing what mummies have to tell us about ourselves. Pringle’s journeys lead her to the lifelike remains of medieval saints entombed in Italy’s grand cathedrals, eerily preserved bog bodies in the Netherlands bearing signs of violent and untimely slaughter, and frozen Inca princesses glimpsed for the first time atop icy mountains. She learns of the extraordinary skills of ancient Egyptian embalmers capable of preserving bodies, in the words of one mummy expert, ‘until the end of time’; of the horrifying sacrifices made by ancient South Americans to pacify their gods; and of the weird mummified parasites preserved in the guts of millennia-old bodies that still wreak havoc across the world today.

Ranging from the famous excavation of Tutankhamen to tales of ascetic Japanese monks trying to mummify themselves, and from the Russians’ terrified attempts to embalm the body of Stalin to the fleeting craze for public mummy unwrappings in the nineteenth-century New Orleans, Pringle demonstrates that our own obsessions with the preserved dead have a long and bizarre history. Packed with extraordinary stories and narrated with great humour and verve, The Mummy Congress is a compelling and entertaining journey into the world of the everlasting dead.