Mycenaean mummy

Mycenaean mummy: Kristina Killgrove links to an article on Schliemann's Mycenaean mummy. The mummy hasn't actually been unknown, and I had seen a picture of it (presumably Schliemann's engraving?) in Louise Schofield's the Mycenaeans (2007) where it was said to be under study.

But, the new article does include a very good reproduction of the painting that looks a little Giger-esque to me. Perhaps there's room here for some National Geographic-style documentary; after all, mummies seem to be quite popular, and this ought to be a very interesting one, assuming 19th century attempts at preservation stood the test of time, and there's something to show.



From the paper:

Plate 203
is not a photograph but an oil-painting (Fig. 6). This is the painting made of
the supposed ‘mummy’ burial in Shaft Grave I (now V) which formed the basis for
the published engraving (Schliemann 1878, 297 no. 454). It is on stiff card,
measuring some 585 mm in length and 382 mm in width, and shows the corpse about
three-quarters life size in sombre shades of brown against a lighter yellowish brown
background. The engraving omits the lower part of it in which the region of the
pelvis and the tops of the femurs are visible. The painting had been folded in
half to fit it into the Album, but I had it removed and framed behind glass for
its better conservation.
 Schliemann
gives a long and highly dramatized account of the uncovering of this burial. ‘The
round face, with all its flesh, had been wonderfully preserved under its
ponderous golden mask; there was no vestige of hair, but both eyes were
perfectly visible, also the mouth, which, owing to the enormous weight that had
pressed upon it, was wide open, and showed thirty-two beautiful teeth. From
these, all the physicians who came to see the body were led to believe that the
man must have died at the early age of thirty-five. The nose was entirely
gone’. 16 In his initial enthusiasm Schliemann even claimed that ‘the corpse very
much resembles the image which my imagination formed long ago of wide-ruling
Agamemnon’. 17
 ‘The news
that the tolerably well preserved body of a man of the mythic heroic age had
been found, covered with golden ornaments, spread like wildfire through the
Argolid, and people came by thousands from Argos, Nauplia, and the villages to
see the wonder. But, nobody being able to give advice how to preserve the
body,’ Schliemann telegraphed to Nauplion for an artist ‘to get at least an
oil-painting made, for I was afraid that the body would crumble to pieces. Thus
I am able to give a faithful likeness of the body, as it looked after all the
golden ornaments had been removed’. 18
 Schliemann
does not give the name of the artist; but he describes how ‘to my great joy’
the body ‘held out for two days, when a druggist from Argos, Spiridon Nicolaou
by name, rendered it hard and solid by pouring on it alcohol, in which he had
dissolved gumsandarac’. 19 It was then lifted with some difficulty and
transported to Athens, where I can remember seeing
it on the bottom shelf of a glass case in the Mycenaean room of the National Museum
on my first visit to Greece
shortly before the Second World War. Schliemann duly acknowledges that ‘all the
trouble and expense of drugging the body so as to render it hard and solid, and
raising it from the sepulchre’ and transporting it, were incurred by the
Archaeological Society at Athens.20 

I'm no biochemist, but alcohol and gumsandarac doesn't sound good with respect to any potential DNA preservation.



Schliemann’s Mycenae Albums




Sinclair Hood



Link



Related:

• The face of Agamemnon
• mtDNA from Grave Circle B in Mycenae

DIGITAL JUICE