Speaker 1: Astonishing Legends Network Disclaimer. This episode includes the usual amount
Speaker 1: of adult language and graphic discussions you've come to expect
Speaker 1: around here, but in the event it becomes an unusual amount,
Speaker 1: expect another call from me.
Speaker 2: Hey, everybody, welcome back to Scaret all the time. I'm
Speaker 2: Chris Klari and I'm Edvacola, And this week we are
Speaker 2: digging into the past to unor something ancient, sacred, and
Speaker 2: very very fucked up. With the new Mummy movie hitting
Speaker 2: theaters tomorrow, we thought we'd break out the bandages and
Speaker 2: crawl from the tomb to talk about the wild history
Speaker 2: and persistent mystery of all things wrapped and bandagaged and mummified. Okay,
Speaker 2: before you tune out because you think you know everything
Speaker 2: about mummies from watching Boris Karloff stumble around a backlot
Speaker 2: or Brendan Fraser punching sand, trust me you don't, because
Speaker 2: it turns out curses are far from the weirdest, scariest
Speaker 2: things about mummies. From the gory details of how they
Speaker 2: were created to the unspeak things we've done to their
Speaker 2: remains over the centuries, the story of the desiccated dead
Speaker 2: is a bizarre and twisted tail on par with any
Speaker 2: horror movie. So join us as we crack open the
Speaker 2: sarcophagus this week. Don't breathe in the dust, and please,
Speaker 2: for the love of God, do not take any souvenirs.
Speaker 2: This podcast is cursed enough as it is. Saman, what
Speaker 2: are we screwed?
Speaker 3: When are we?
Speaker 2: All? The time? Now? Which is time? Full time scan?
Speaker 2: All right? So, longtime listeners of this show might be thinking,
Speaker 2: haven't you guys already talked about mummies? And you would
Speaker 2: be correct. I guess you actually haven't. You wouldn't have
Speaker 2: to have been listening that long to have heard us
Speaker 2: talking about mummies us curses episode, And we also touched
Speaker 2: a little bit on mummification in the Buried Alive episode
Speaker 2: two parter two part are Buried Alive? Yeah? Two part
Speaker 2: two parts? I remember which part. If you haven't checked
Speaker 2: those out, go do that. I think they'll nicely implement
Speaker 2: this episode. But today is Mummy's the main event, because
Speaker 2: unless you are some sort of a professional mummy doctor, studier, scientist, eddie,
Speaker 2: you looking for a mummy?
Speaker 3: You're looking for Sorry, I just had to move something
Speaker 3: my mummy collection. I stolen artifacts display case.
Speaker 2: Unless you are a professional mummy head mummy studier. I'm
Speaker 2: gonna bet that almost everything that you think you know
Speaker 2: about them is either wrong, incomplete, or nowhere near as
Speaker 2: disturbing as the actual truth about them. But before we
Speaker 2: dive into all of that, Ed, I gotta know what
Speaker 2: is your relationship with mummies? Were you scared of them ever?
Speaker 2: Were you ever a mummy for Halloween?
Speaker 3: That's interesting because I'm not I've never been a mummy,
Speaker 3: but it's an easy costume. Yeah, I've never been a
Speaker 3: mummy for Halloween. My relationship is I'm a person of
Speaker 3: a certain age. So there was never a Mummy movie
Speaker 3: that wasn't just the most fun. Yeah, so like we're
Speaker 3: Brendan Fraser mummy people, I would imagine yep. And I
Speaker 3: don't consider that movie scary in the slightest. I don't
Speaker 3: find the Mummy to be a genuine threat. I think
Speaker 3: he's doing something that might end the world. I don't know,
Speaker 3: But that movie, it's like it's in the way that
Speaker 3: I don't find a lot of any Ed Jones scary,
Speaker 3: even knowing like the Second Ones got a lot of
Speaker 3: scary stuff. Yeah, it's just like I'm having so much fun.
Speaker 3: Yeah watching it, I associate the word mummy with having
Speaker 3: a good time.
Speaker 2: Actually, okay, all right, well this episode's gonna be a
Speaker 2: good time, I would say. In the Brendan Fraser Mummy movies,
Speaker 2: there's one scene where a guy gets eaten by scarebs
Speaker 2: that I found kind of scary when I was younger.
Speaker 3: I feel that exact same way about the boobox and hook. Yes,
Speaker 3: so yes, get these bugs off of us.
Speaker 2: Yeah, there's Look, mummies are a tough sell as scary
Speaker 2: horror villains. I think they shamble, they moan, they do
Speaker 2: a lot of strangling. They're basically a zombie that's one
Speaker 2: zombie and doesn't eat brains.
Speaker 3: That's why I think the Mummy dit a good job
Speaker 3: of being like, well, it was just kind of like
Speaker 3: a hot guy, like like not Billy's in.
Speaker 2: Well, we'll see what this Mummy movie is like that
Speaker 2: comes out tomorrow.
Speaker 3: Saw the trailer had to wait too much Mummy in it.
Speaker 2: Lee Cronin's The Mummy. It seems like they're trying to
Speaker 2: make they're trying to go for a scary thing, but
Speaker 2: it does seem like there's not actually like a shambling mummy.
Speaker 2: It's this more possessed dead kid angle.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I think a suicide squad a little mummy ask
Speaker 3: shit in it too, where they just got a babe.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so I think you gotta throw.
Speaker 3: Like a hansom or hot you gotta throw a hot
Speaker 3: person in there and get rid of those wraps immediately.
Speaker 2: Well right, but then what that does I think and
Speaker 2: what you see in most of the attempts Universal has
Speaker 2: made to relaunch The Mummy as a franchise is both
Speaker 2: the but the addition of the hot person and the
Speaker 2: fact that they always feel like they have to give
Speaker 2: the Mummy some kind of powers to make up for
Speaker 2: the fact that it's dead turns it more into you.
Speaker 3: Why isn't there just a voodoo movie.
Speaker 2: It's just more of a fantasy horror adventure at that point.
Speaker 2: No matter how you square it neck, yeah, you're not
Speaker 2: really getting that kind of groaning, shambling kind of mummy
Speaker 2: that I think is is one of the first things
Speaker 2: that comes to mind when people think of mummies.
Speaker 3: Well, I mean it's in their defense of making it
Speaker 3: that way. Yeah, don't they have like their brains taken
Speaker 3: out through their nose. They're not working with brains.
Speaker 2: The first they'd be like, oh, we will, we will
Speaker 2: get to exactly. We will get into detail about what
Speaker 2: comes out of mummies and how Yeah.
Speaker 3: And they're going to little jars and stuff. We'll get
Speaker 3: into that, I'm sure. And I feel like that's the
Speaker 3: stuff they tossed to the side in the movies.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Like, well, because we think about it, this guy's he's
Speaker 3: thinking with sand to quote, what was that movie? Was
Speaker 3: that movie with Bruce Campbell where he's in like a
Speaker 3: retirement home is like elvis o bubbajo tap.
Speaker 2: Yeah, there's that kind of a mummy vampire thing coming out.
Speaker 3: But to quote that movie, I'm thinking with sand here, Yeah,
Speaker 3: you got a brain or whatever?
Speaker 2: I yeah, my favorite I'll say, I don't know if
Speaker 2: you have a favorite classic mummy design. I mean my
Speaker 2: first encounter with the classic mummy design were those orange
Speaker 2: Crestwood horror books. They were hardcover, bright orange, and they
Speaker 2: were like, uh, they were nineteen thirties horror movies repackaged
Speaker 2: as sort of books for second or third grade readers
Speaker 2: with black and white photos from the movies and the
Speaker 2: stories were simplified. Now was the first place I came
Speaker 2: across the classic Karloff Mummy, and it was slow move
Speaker 2: in wrapped in stuff wrapped in stuff. I think.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I guess I can't pinpoint mummies. I mean so
Speaker 3: much of you know, Monster Squad and stuff where they're
Speaker 3: like making fun of the universal monsters would be some
Speaker 3: of my earliest.
Speaker 2: Yes, but I was just gonna say the Monster Squad Mummy. Actually,
Speaker 2: all of the Monster Squad monsters I think are incredible
Speaker 2: modern ish version of those creatures. Not in the sense
Speaker 2: that they are necessarily the most frightening, but stan Winston
Speaker 2: designed all of them, and they are They managed to
Speaker 2: capture everything we love about the universal version of those
Speaker 2: monsters but give them sort of a fresh coat of paint.
Speaker 2: And the Mummy in particular, even though it's not particularly
Speaker 2: threatening in the movie, I love the visual design of
Speaker 2: the Mummy in that movie. It's angular, it's dirtier, It's like,
Speaker 2: there's just something cool about the Mummy in that movie,
Speaker 2: about all the monsters in that.
Speaker 3: I guess the Mummy to me just in the context
Speaker 3: of universal monsters. Yeah, even at the time they were made,
Speaker 3: which wasn't amazingly a time where they were like these
Speaker 3: are scary movies. Uh, even at the time they were
Speaker 3: made doing press or whatever, I feel like there probably
Speaker 3: was like and the Mummy. You know what, It's like,
Speaker 3: we got fucking Belle Luguzu's vamb We've got a were wolf,
Speaker 3: and there's a mummy. You also have this Mummy.
Speaker 2: There's man maybe the better Rapped Guy movie.
Speaker 3: But we have the Mummy as well.
Speaker 2: I think we mentioned this in the Curses episode that
Speaker 2: you know, the Mummy movie itself wasn't made that long
Speaker 2: after a sort of egypt Mania of like the Curses
Speaker 2: of Opening the Tomb and so like a lot of
Speaker 2: that I think was kind of coasting on almost like
Speaker 2: recent news. You know, it was like semi recent.
Speaker 3: And it's a great concept of like pillaging in the
Speaker 3: sense that like a bunch of British dudes and stupid
Speaker 3: hats show up and they're like, oh, this is tight,
Speaker 3: I'm gonna take this.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and it would just be.
Speaker 3: I mean, the fucking Museum of Natural History and like
Speaker 3: every major city has some shit from Egypt in it. Yeah,
Speaker 3: And so there's a good thing if something is cursed.
Speaker 3: It's a great idea, especially at the time they were
Speaker 3: making those movies where it was like not long after, like.
Speaker 2: The New York Museum is introducing mummies.
Speaker 3: Yes, this mummy thing, so they would be like, Oh,
Speaker 3: wouldn't it be cool if something followed you home?
Speaker 2: Actually, now that I think about it, though, I guess
Speaker 2: maybe we would not necessarily have the idea of the
Speaker 2: modern Romero zombie without the karl Off mummy, because the
Speaker 2: modern Romero zombies like zombies have existed in culture, but
Speaker 2: they were always more of like a Haitian voodoo like
Speaker 2: the real zombie was that sort of the serpent in
Speaker 2: the Rainbow styles of it.
Speaker 3: That's why I said earlier, like what if you without
Speaker 3: the rappings? These things are just voodoo stories or necromancers.
Speaker 2: Right, But I sort of wonder. I mean, it's too
Speaker 2: late to ask him now because he is a member
Speaker 2: of the undead, but I wonder if Georgia Merrow was
Speaker 2: influenced at all by the shambling mummy figure and just
Speaker 2: sort of turned it up to eleven to create Mobably.
Speaker 3: I've seen that original movie. They couldn't afford the rappings, No,
Speaker 3: it probably was originally a mummy movie. And he was like,
Speaker 3: we don't got enough toilet paper, Yeah, like the crewhose
Speaker 3: isn't already using. Let's just make them a guy in
Speaker 3: a suit.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And I also think I would also say the
Speaker 2: reason mummies probably fall to the bottom of most people's
Speaker 2: monster fears is that my theory and this is different
Speaker 2: for everybody, but generally I feel like the most effective
Speaker 2: horror is more gent, like if you can imagine something
Speaker 2: scary happening to you, if it feels like it's something
Speaker 2: that could happen when you go outside, that's the most
Speaker 2: effective horror. And the only way that you're really coming
Speaker 2: across a mummy is a pretty specific like you either
Speaker 2: have to be a grave robber or a running a
Speaker 2: museum or something to really encounter a mummy on a
Speaker 2: regular basis.
Speaker 3: I love India Jones is always like this belongs in
Speaker 3: a museum. Yeah, in the museums, Like, will you stop
Speaker 3: giving us these? It's been a nightmare for Yeah, just
Speaker 3: leave them where they are.
Speaker 2: Indeed, so I'm not particularly concerned about waking up to
Speaker 2: find a mummy standing at the foot of my bed,
Speaker 2: but the lore and the science and the myth around
Speaker 2: them is so gross and gory and dusty and in
Speaker 2: touch with the world of the dead that this might
Speaker 2: actually end up being one of my favorite episodes.
Speaker 3: Well, the thing I'm most looking forward to in this episode,
Speaker 3: and if it exists, I'm pumped, and if it doesn't,
Speaker 3: less pumped.
Speaker 2: I'm fired.
Speaker 3: They're fired. Is I really want there to be an
Speaker 3: insane number of booby traps where they're buried?
Speaker 2: Oh oh boy, you might be disappointed. Yeah, you might
Speaker 2: be unemployed. There's really the creation of the chambers that
Speaker 2: a lot of mummies were buried in. Let's just say
Speaker 2: that there's a disappointing amount of traps. Booby Traps were
Speaker 2: not something that ancient peoples were particularly invested in making
Speaker 2: last very long. If there ever were booby traps, Okay,
Speaker 2: nature set some booby traps by I don't get into
Speaker 2: it in the episode, but there is some research around
Speaker 2: and I think this is what we talk about in Curses.
Speaker 2: If you haven't and you want a deeper dive on this,
Speaker 2: go listen to Curses. But the idea that perhaps there
Speaker 2: was some kind of like bacteria or viruses or whatever
Speaker 2: that had been kind of sealed up in some of
Speaker 2: these pots and chambers, and that when people broke open
Speaker 2: those doors to go in there, they may have been
Speaker 2: exposed to like mold or whatever that made them sick.
Speaker 2: But I don't think any of that was set there
Speaker 2: on purpose. It was just sort of nature doing its thing.
Speaker 3: Yeah, your air being like you're telling me there's no
Speaker 3: way out, air being no way out. Yeah, well we're
Speaker 3: toxic now.
Speaker 2: So to start, let's still nail down exactly what a
Speaker 2: mummy is, because the same images that caught my attention
Speaker 2: as a kid are so baked into the cultural idea
Speaker 2: of a mummy that you'd be forgiven for thinking that
Speaker 2: mummies are a exclusively Egyptian and b only count as
Speaker 2: when wrapped in thin strips of fabric. But that is
Speaker 2: just one example of the form. We turned to Wikipedia,
Speaker 2: which tells us a mummy is a dead human or
Speaker 2: animal whose soft issues and organs have been preserved by
Speaker 2: either intentional or accidental exposure to chemicals, extreme cold, very
Speaker 2: low humidity, or lack of air, so that the recovered
Speaker 2: body does not decay further if kept in cool and
Speaker 2: dry conditions.
Speaker 3: So mummy is not a noun then, because because if
Speaker 3: it's if it's unintentional as well, someone's been mummified.
Speaker 2: Well you can you essentially, you can find a mummy.
Speaker 2: There's there's many many animal mummies throughout the world, particularly
Speaker 2: that one that with the Cheetos one from our from
Speaker 2: our live show. Yeah, it just like fell into a
Speaker 2: cave and then like became desiccated and dried out, and
Speaker 2: we found it eight thousand years later. And yeah, and
Speaker 2: then just the devradd It live. You want to hear
Speaker 2: that mummies of humans and animals have been found on
Speaker 2: every continent, both as a result of natural preservation and
Speaker 2: as cultural artifacts. We'll get into this a little bit
Speaker 2: more later, but over one million animal mummies have been
Speaker 2: found in Egypt, many of which are cats. Evidence of
Speaker 2: deliberate mummification in human cultures is documented to have existed
Speaker 2: across Southeast Asia, China, New Guinea, and Australia, where discoveries
Speaker 2: made just last year in twenty twenty five tell us
Speaker 2: that various cultures have been practicing mummification since approximately ten
Speaker 2: thousand BC. These new finds are prompting research into cultures
Speaker 2: documented to twenty thousand years ago for evidence of use
Speaker 2: of the same mummification methods. So this means that the
Speaker 2: oldest deliberately mummified humans are somewhere around eight thousand years
Speaker 2: older than Egyptian mummies and six to seven thousand years
Speaker 2: older than.
Speaker 3: The wheel Oh wow. So they had to carry all
Speaker 3: of these mummies to get around just two guys.
Speaker 2: It's funny each mummy. We'll get into that in a minute,
Speaker 2: but I just think it really puts our perspective to
Speaker 2: turn human beings into jerky, or it really puts our
Speaker 2: desire to turn human beings into jerky, into perspective that
Speaker 2: we were doing this thousands of years before we figured
Speaker 2: out how to move them, and.
Speaker 3: If climate change as it's way, we might be doing
Speaker 3: it for sustenance soon.
Speaker 2: Yeah. So I know we sometimes go in historical order
Speaker 2: on this show, but I think for this episode, the
Speaker 2: best place to start our journey through the Dead is
Speaker 2: with a closer look at the Egyptian mummy, because it's
Speaker 2: what most people think of first, and we know a
Speaker 2: lot about them.
Speaker 3: And we're getting to that thing now where everything's being
Speaker 3: memed as, like you know, we're now as far away
Speaker 3: from whatever as the Egyptians were from whatever. Yeah, and
Speaker 3: I never remember, obviously the fill in the blanks on that,
Speaker 3: but I see the Pyramids come up a lot.
Speaker 2: Well. It's the big one for me is we live
Speaker 2: closer to the era of Tyrannosaurus racks than Tyrannosaurus wracks
Speaker 2: lived to I believe stegosaurus. How the fuck is that
Speaker 2: helping anybody? Oh it's not, but it's just wild, Like
Speaker 2: that's how much time.
Speaker 3: But I can't figure that out. I don't understand the reference.
Speaker 3: I'm saying, like I can look and see the pyramids
Speaker 3: and I get that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and I know that humans made them.
Speaker 3: Yeah, Okay, there goes half our audience or aliens whatever.
Speaker 2: Yeah, whoever you want to have made them.
Speaker 3: We have no evidence, but it is yeah that I
Speaker 3: can I can track, but I can't.
Speaker 2: I don't as far as I'm concerned.
Speaker 3: Ttegosaurus and t rexes are hanging out together, right, but
Speaker 3: they weren't.
Speaker 2: There was like a it's like sixty five million years
Speaker 2: between us and t rex, and I think like a
Speaker 2: hundred million years between t rex and stegosaurus.
Speaker 3: So they're never together.
Speaker 2: No, only in the movies. Only in the movies. Like
Speaker 2: they say that a lot about mummies today too. Yeah,
Speaker 2: the Jurassic the earliest parts of the Jurassic Period and
Speaker 2: the latest parts of the Cretaceous Period. I don't remember
Speaker 2: that the actual time scale, but it's it's immense amounts
Speaker 2: of time. And then if you going back to the
Speaker 2: Triassic period forget about it. That's like, do you.
Speaker 3: Think people who know this type of stuff when they
Speaker 3: saw Jurassic Park were like.
Speaker 2: You crazy for this one? Yeah, that's fucking together. I
Speaker 2: never thought, well, Jurassic Park wouldn't work for a lot
Speaker 2: of reasons. But yes, part of the reason it wouldn't
Speaker 2: work is because you're not only put dinosaurs and humans together.
Speaker 2: You're putting dinosaurs together that had never experienced Oh.
Speaker 3: That's like, you know, I can't even imagine. I'm trying
Speaker 3: to think of like a zoo where it's like a
Speaker 3: zoos must be nuts for animals, Yeah, but like a
Speaker 3: draft hanging out with something, it's like what the fuck
Speaker 3: are you?
Speaker 2: Yeah?
Speaker 3: Yeah, t Rex would be like what are you? Ye
Speaker 3: too a stecosaurus?
Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly, So we don't we don't have to worry
Speaker 2: about it. I mean, you could also argue that dinosaurs
Speaker 2: in a Jurassic Park wouldn't really be dinosaurs. They would
Speaker 2: be some sort of modern uh Frankenstein hybridization of the
Speaker 2: closest thing we could get.
Speaker 3: So what you're saying is is that t Rex would
Speaker 3: be like, what even are you? And then Stecosaurus would
Speaker 3: say what are we.
Speaker 2: Yeah, t Rex would say, what even am I? Yeah? Yeah? Anyway.
Speaker 2: One of the most important things to understand about mummies
Speaker 2: is that the Egyptians weren't mummifying the dead for fun
Speaker 2: or to preserve information about their culture. Even funerary right.
Speaker 2: Rituals changed over time, but mummification in the Egyptian culture
Speaker 2: was considered an essential component if you were to have
Speaker 2: a successful afterlife.
Speaker 3: Accordingly, for like rich people like pharaohs in ger where
Speaker 3: regular asks people getting for everybody. Okay, so according to match,
Speaker 3: some of these mummifications look real shitty. They do, like
Speaker 3: what are the Turkish hair transplants of.
Speaker 2: Yesterday? In real time? According to the Spurlock Museum at
Speaker 2: the University of Illinois, quote, two very important things were
Speaker 2: necessary for a person to go to one's ah or
Speaker 2: become a blessed one who could spend a pleasant eternal life.
Speaker 2: One component to that was passing a final judgment. The
Speaker 2: other component was having a well preserved body that that
Speaker 2: person's soul could recognize and return to after something called
Speaker 2: the opening of the mouth ceremony. Okay, better name would
Speaker 2: be better. I mean, it's pretty straightforward. What happens during
Speaker 2: that ceremony. I believe the mouth is opened and the
Speaker 2: soul returns body.
Speaker 3: Interesting that that the mouth is, but like everything else, is.
Speaker 2: With the nose, although some stuff is through all kinds
Speaker 2: of different holes. Well hold, hang, hold that thought, Hold
Speaker 2: hold that thought. The two most important divisions of the
Speaker 2: soul were the Ka and the baka. The Ka was
Speaker 2: the person's double, and it stayed with the deceased in
Speaker 2: the tomb. The Ba was portrayed as a human headed
Speaker 2: bird that could leave the tomb during the day but
Speaker 2: needed to return to their body at night, sort of
Speaker 2: like Jeffrey Epstein when he was put in prison for
Speaker 2: his first crime. During the day, you could think of
Speaker 2: a Ba as sort of a Jeffrey Epstein with wings.
Speaker 2: Without the mummified human, the Ba and the Ka could
Speaker 2: not survive. So the body, the mummified body, was like
Speaker 2: the anchor for both parts of your soul is the
Speaker 2: body the ba doing that there were two parts of
Speaker 2: your spirits, so the Ka stayed with the body in
Speaker 2: the box out.
Speaker 3: And spirit base gotcha, gotcha, gotcha, gotcha?
Speaker 1: Uh.
Speaker 2: So to assure your continued existence in the afterlife, the
Speaker 2: Egyptians worked hard to find the perfect method of preserving
Speaker 2: the body. Interestingly, the Global Egyptian Museum tells us that
Speaker 2: our knowledge of the mummification process does not come from
Speaker 2: the ancient Egyptians themselves, and the City Museum elaborates that quote.
Speaker 2: Ancient Egyptian sources on the treatment of the human body
Speaker 2: after death are scarce, with only a few inscriptions and
Speaker 2: funerary images. The few texts that have survived, such as
Speaker 2: the Ritual of Embalming, focus on the rituals, and the
Speaker 2: more practical and gruesome aspects of mummification are largely ignored.
Speaker 3: No, I've never thought about this in my entire life
Speaker 3: until right this second. Yep, higher glyphs. Yeah, it is
Speaker 3: a language that's a picture base. Yes, where are the
Speaker 3: better drawings? Like literally, image is worth a thousand words,
Speaker 3: But they're like what if it's just one word? Yeah,
Speaker 3: So why do we not have a wood etching of
Speaker 3: these events from a gyps versus? Like, well, I told
Speaker 3: them about it. You can see from the bird had
Speaker 3: bird had bird ed guy doing the Egyptian dance.
Speaker 2: Yeah, there's lots of guys doing the Egyptian dance.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so you have to like kind of glean from
Speaker 3: that what you will.
Speaker 2: There's a lot of speculation about this. Some people think
Speaker 2: that the rituals were considered so sacred that they were
Speaker 2: never passed down anywhere. They were just or they were
Speaker 2: I'm sorry that they were never written down anywhere. They
Speaker 2: were only passed down through an oral tradition. Some people
Speaker 2: think that perhaps you know they were written, if there
Speaker 2: were ever written instructions for any of this, that perhaps
Speaker 2: it was written on papyrus that didn't survive very long
Speaker 2: and was never painted onto a wall or something never
Speaker 2: higher glyft into a tomb, because once you're in the tomb,
Speaker 2: you wouldn't necessarily need the rules for how to make
Speaker 2: a mummy on the wall. Yeah. I mean, look, I
Speaker 2: hung for the longest time. The ratio is for how
Speaker 2: to make a good cup of coffee over my coffee machine,
Speaker 2: So like maybe you would do that for a moment. Yeah,
Speaker 2: I haven't my refrigerator right now.
Speaker 3: That's like the breakdown of like two tea spoons is one, yeah,
Speaker 3: or whatever, you know what I mean.
Speaker 2: But they had it, as we'll get into in a
Speaker 2: moment here, they had a lot of guys who were
Speaker 2: very good at all the different aspects of this, so
Speaker 2: they didn't. This is the kind of thing where generations
Speaker 2: of people existed to do one part of the ritual,
Speaker 2: you know, so you didn't necessarily need to write any
Speaker 2: of this down.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and it's a good job to add. Everyone's getting
Speaker 3: it done. Great job, great job to add. Like, and
Speaker 3: no one can kill you because no one else knows
Speaker 3: how to do it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, well, great job for some people.
Speaker 3: But oh, I'm sure there were something some sons and
Speaker 3: daughters who were like, I feel like I want to dance.
Speaker 3: I don't want to cut brains out anymore, or even
Speaker 3: to begin with.
Speaker 2: But in any case, this is where the ancient Greeks
Speaker 2: come in, as they usually do around this point in
Speaker 2: the show.
Speaker 3: Is that was that a stone included Egyptian hieroglyphs, didn't it?
Speaker 2: Well, no, no, no, I take it back, I don't.
Speaker 2: I don't know if there was that Ai zone included
Speaker 2: Egyptian hieroglyphs. But the Greeks are coming in on this
Speaker 2: at this part of the show because we actually know
Speaker 2: more about the ummification process in Egypt due to the
Speaker 2: writing of the Greeks then the writing of the Egyptians.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's why I brought up the Resetta Stone, because
Speaker 3: that was shit where they were out here just transcribing
Speaker 3: stuff in three languages the same sign, right, and so
Speaker 3: it sometimes it takes another culture to come up and
Speaker 3: be like, hey, this way to Denny's on the sign
Speaker 3: is written for everyone who lives there, and you're not
Speaker 3: going to get that if it's all just hieroglyphs, if
Speaker 3: it's all just Latin. So yeah, I guess Greeks are
Speaker 3: pretty cool because they wrote things down.
Speaker 2: Well, not only did they and preserved it. Yes, they
Speaker 2: did write it down and preserve it. The problem that
Speaker 2: we will face here in a moment is that.
Speaker 3: The financial collapse they faced a few years ago.
Speaker 2: Do they have money anymore?
Speaker 3: I don't know. The Greeks, like the countryquent bankrupt.
Speaker 2: I think they have money, but they don't have jobs.
Speaker 3: I think is okay, we're hurdling towards that. We just
Speaker 3: start writing everything down and triplicate too.
Speaker 2: No, the issue is that the writing we have isn't
Speaker 2: contemporary with mummification processes, so like we don't have the
Speaker 2: first hand witnesses to a lot of it, but we
Speaker 2: have what was what was recorded as having been passed down.
Speaker 2: So thanks to the writing of Herodotus, Deodorus Siculus, and
Speaker 2: fragments of Plutarch's writing. We do know convention this weekend.
Speaker 3: We're hoping people are wearing Diyota title this serve.
Speaker 2: Like I just said, Ed's making a stinky comic fan joke.
Speaker 2: We'll see you at Wonder con folks.
Speaker 3: Yeah, this will come after that.
Speaker 2: But that's true. But thanks to the writing of those three,
Speaker 2: we do know a lot of the process and we
Speaker 2: have also been able to confirm a lot of what
Speaker 2: they wrote by mummifying things with the processes that they
Speaker 2: wrote about in the present.
Speaker 3: So if only the Greeks were there for those fucking
Speaker 3: Homunculi stuff, had better Homunculi records.
Speaker 2: We could have we might actually have Humunculi in the
Speaker 2: studio with us.
Speaker 3: Oh hell yeah, at the homunculirius level of patrion. You
Speaker 3: can get your own one cent too. It will dial
Speaker 3: on the way.
Speaker 2: It will be made from equal parts my shit and
Speaker 2: Ed's come. It's going to be an incredible little man.
Speaker 3: Yeah, but we're going to write for the service that
Speaker 3: it's a book. I guess the Greeks would have to
Speaker 3: go home and try it a few times, just because
Speaker 3: there could be. You know, I've seen enough movies about
Speaker 3: journalists where it's like, don't tell them, or even my
Speaker 3: mom giving out recipes, she doesn't want it to be
Speaker 3: if it's like a family recipe, she might leave like
Speaker 3: one really important thing out right so that people can't
Speaker 3: replicate as good of granola.
Speaker 2: And but it hang on a second, and journalists leave
Speaker 2: important things out.
Speaker 3: Why No, I meant people who were like talking to
Speaker 3: a journalist as my source might leave out something that
Speaker 3: would reveal icy and so I guess I would have
Speaker 3: to go back and test. It could be like I
Speaker 3: don't know fucking whomever told me in Egypt, this is
Speaker 3: how you do it. But he could have had over
Speaker 3: his shoulder, like we never revealed to the men from
Speaker 3: over the horizon, the like white guy that came, We're
Speaker 3: not going to tell him exactly how this ancient procedure
Speaker 3: goes ICEE. I like leave out the part about how
Speaker 3: they get powers.
Speaker 2: Well they I think they did leave out the part
Speaker 2: about how they get powers, because nothing that was written
Speaker 2: down has anything to do with infusing a mummy with
Speaker 2: magical powers. But we do know that the earliest detailed
Speaker 2: account of Egyptian mummification comes from Herodotus writing around four
Speaker 2: to fifty BC. And I don't want to get too
Speaker 2: sidetracked by Herodotus, but he is a super interesting figure
Speaker 2: based on how much he traveled and the quality of
Speaker 2: his writing. They think, and by they, I mean archaeologists
Speaker 2: and people who study the classics and stuff think that
Speaker 2: he seems to have been very wealthy and educated. But
Speaker 2: no one has any idea where his money came from.
Speaker 2: Which if you had a ton of money in four
Speaker 2: fifty BC, and I mean people know, but if but
Speaker 2: you didn't get it anywhere or good. But also I
Speaker 2: think about this.
Speaker 3: Even Indiana Jones is probably gonna come up a lot
Speaker 3: in this episode, But I think about this, and even
Speaker 3: Indiana Jones where it's like the thirties, Yeah, and it
Speaker 3: was like he took a zeppelin there, Like these red
Speaker 3: lines on the screen across the map are not taking
Speaker 3: into account that was weeks yeah, Like so the fact
Speaker 3: that this guy's doing it even before that, he's on
Speaker 3: some weird trade ship like in three point thirty BC. Yeah,
Speaker 3: to get to a place that like someone assured him
Speaker 3: was there, like he's ever been to fucking well no,
Speaker 3: because even Julius Caesar, and it would be years later
Speaker 3: that they would ever go to hang out with Cleopatra.
Speaker 3: I'm saying, so this guy is really taking a chance
Speaker 3: that there is in Egypt, that there are things of
Speaker 3: interest there. And then also being rich, you're just carrying
Speaker 3: a bunch of gold or silver, hay.
Speaker 2: Or in the currency he didn't have checks then yeah, exactly.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so it's like, fuck, man, you had to show
Speaker 3: up with, Like, I hope this is enough gold to
Speaker 3: not kill, but also not so much that I'm instantly killed.
Speaker 2: True, you know, it's a it's a very fine line
Speaker 2: amount of gold that you need to have all times.
Speaker 3: Which also makes me think Togas must have just spen
Speaker 3: for the Senate, Like this guy had to have a backpack,
Speaker 3: maybe some clothes toed shoes, like he's gonna be tracking
Speaker 3: in the sun. Well, God, we're gonna let us know
Speaker 3: if you want us to do a full episode on
Speaker 3: Ed Learns about the very specific things that have nothing
Speaker 3: to do with the show that have interested me.
Speaker 2: Herodotus's most famous piece of writing is a book called
Speaker 2: The Histories, and it garnered him two memorable nicknames and
Speaker 2: two Peabody Awards. The father of history and the father
Speaker 2: of lies. The book opens with a hell of a line.
Speaker 2: Herodotus of Halikarnassis here displays his inquiry so that human
Speaker 2: achievements may not become forgotten in time, and great and
Speaker 2: marvelous deeds, some displayed by Greeks, some by barbarians, may
Speaker 2: not be without their glory, according to modern scholars. Quote
Speaker 2: what cements Herodotus as the father of history, where his
Speaker 2: attempts to explain the course of human events through causal consequences.
Speaker 2: This blew my mind because I'd never thought about this before.
Speaker 2: But he basically was on the tip of like this
Speaker 2: set of decisions by people led to a certain action,
Speaker 2: which brought on another reaction, and so on. Before that,
Speaker 2: the idea of the past and history was literally just who, what, when? Why? Where?
Speaker 2: Speaking to the warless or anyone, Yeah, who's writing right now?
Speaker 2: You usually will suffice. You don't have to.
Speaker 3: Well, not the way so far, we don't have Usually
Speaker 3: we don't get those from writing anymore.
Speaker 2: Not not the why, the who, the what, and the when?
Speaker 3: I guess he introduced.
Speaker 2: He introduced the why, sure, okay, why did the Persians
Speaker 2: hate the Greeks so much? Why did mighty Egypt, the
Speaker 2: crown jewel of antiquity fall to the Persians. Why did
Speaker 2: one powerful and leader after another fall victim to pride,
Speaker 2: revenge or greed. So they say that Herodotus invented history
Speaker 2: as we know it because he was the first to
Speaker 2: see these myriad stories from the past as small parts
Speaker 2: of a bigger story, the story of the known human world. Now,
Speaker 2: the problem is that the best historical data he could
Speaker 2: get his hands on were called logoi, the stories told
Speaker 2: by people who either witnessed an event firsthand or had
Speaker 2: received knowledge passed down through strong oral traditions. And the
Speaker 2: logoi weren't always the most reliable. Oh no, Herodotus wrote
Speaker 2: of winged serpents in Arabia, giant gold digging ants, and
Speaker 2: made claims about battles where almost everyone involved died. So
Speaker 2: there's a big question about who was left to describe
Speaker 2: what happened in the battle?
Speaker 3: Okay to him, but I will say to his point,
Speaker 3: to the first guy to bring the why into the equation,
Speaker 3: how often do inean.
Speaker 2: Jones or anything else?
Speaker 3: Where you see it was like, oh, this hieroglyph says
Speaker 3: like this is based on the Sanskrit word for whatever,
Speaker 3: because they believed that the earth was made by God
Speaker 3: had two piles of sand and then he did this.
Speaker 3: So the why, the cause and effect were mythology. Yeah, mythos,
Speaker 3: including by the way, very famously from the Greeks.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah, So he might have been the first guy who
Speaker 3: was like, maybe it wasn't a cinaur, let me go see.
Speaker 3: And then he unfortunately for him, and he had to
Speaker 3: write it down because he's good at his job. He
Speaker 3: was like a lot of places think it's a cinaur.
Speaker 2: Like a lot of places they have different words for it.
Speaker 3: Yeah, but a lot of the same shit we've got
Speaker 3: because no one was around to be like, oh, this
Speaker 3: guy wanted power.
Speaker 2: Right right, So he did dig up a lot of truths,
Speaker 2: but he was a storyteller at heart, and you know,
Speaker 2: he could only check some of this information, sort of
Speaker 2: like this podcast. He could only do so much fact checking,
Speaker 2: and he went, hey, you know what, this sounds pretty good.
Speaker 2: We're gonna go with this. We do more than most.
Speaker 2: So we have to keep all that in mind. Because
Speaker 2: his account of Egyptian burial traditions starts plainly enough with
Speaker 2: descriptions of grief. He tells us that after a loved
Speaker 2: one passed, women of the household covered themselves in mud
Speaker 2: and walked through town beating their bare breasts. Okay, but
Speaker 2: then comes the part about necrophilia. According to Herodonus, if
Speaker 2: the deceased was a beautiful or distinguished woman, the family
Speaker 2: deliberately held the body in the home for three to
Speaker 2: four days to avoid before sending it to the embalmers,
Speaker 2: because they wanted to make sure the body was gross
Speaker 2: and stinky and rotten enough that if there were lecherous
Speaker 2: embalm are.
Speaker 3: Involved in the process, which is all of them.
Speaker 2: Which was probably in many of them, he would not
Speaker 2: try to ship where he eats.
Speaker 3: So to speare, right now, you're not allowed to make
Speaker 3: rules in this year United States about like there's like
Speaker 3: a you can't just say I'm I'm not gonna hire
Speaker 3: Chris because he's a fucking disgusting Italian.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I can't do that here correct these days?
Speaker 3: Right, I think we should be able to make a
Speaker 3: rule that, like, you can't work in a morgue if
Speaker 3: you're a guy.
Speaker 2: Like you know what I mean.
Speaker 3: I'm not saying anything's gonna happen, but I would say
Speaker 3: that Aramaalabalus or whatever here's gonna be like And on.
Speaker 2: My thirtieth interview, Herodotus and a chronicler of modern history,
Speaker 2: Quentin Tarantino, both show us what happens to a body
Speaker 2: left out more.
Speaker 3: I think if it was put up to a vote
Speaker 3: to society, I think people would be like, yes, is
Speaker 3: it against the freedoms of the people in this It is?
Speaker 3: But you know what, we're all on board. Yeah, just
Speaker 3: ladies work here so and also women fucking Jesus that
Speaker 3: horrible lives and probably still definitely still. But I'm saying,
Speaker 3: like every one of the stories we do that go
Speaker 3: back earlier than like like it was like boo, that's rough.
Speaker 2: The only way to keep the women from being assaulted
Speaker 2: was to hide them. Yeah, So, to be fair, no
Speaker 2: one else has ever made this claim about the bodies
Speaker 2: being kept at home to write.
Speaker 3: The only real one, dude, well will tell you what's up.
Speaker 2: Herodotus is the only one that gonzo journalists. He is,
Speaker 2: so it has to be taken with a grain of salt.
Speaker 3: Uh.
Speaker 2: It may be one of the lies that he fathered.
Speaker 2: But we luckily also have the writings of Deodoris Siculus,
Speaker 2: who is generally considered a bit more reliable, although still
Speaker 2: relying on a lot of the same skills that Herodotus us.
Speaker 3: He just wanted to be able to put it on TikTok.
Speaker 3: He's over here writing segs alived, were our boy?
Speaker 2: Hiraki?
Speaker 3: Yeah, I'm never gonna have these names. He's he's just
Speaker 3: like he doesn't give a fuck.
Speaker 2: U Yeah, well, deodor As Siculus tells us that the corpse,
Speaker 2: once they at it, would be sent to what the
Speaker 2: Egyptians called the Pernepher, which translates to house of beauty,
Speaker 2: which I think is really just a fancy and sort
Speaker 2: of optimistic name for the embalmers, just like a modern
Speaker 2: day burial or the scaret all the time Patreon. The
Speaker 2: family would be presented with three options from most expensive
Speaker 2: to least expensive, and we'll get to the differences in
Speaker 2: a moment, But after the family chose their tear, the
Speaker 2: chief embalmer would get to work. This guy was known
Speaker 2: as the Harry Seshta, or Master of Secrets, and he
Speaker 2: wore a jackal mask to represent a Nubis, the god
Speaker 2: of the dead.
Speaker 3: Do you think one of the secrets he carries is
Speaker 3: what he does for a living at parties?
Speaker 2: Being like, I'm just sort of because the Harry Sheshta
Speaker 2: oversaw a team of specialists, all of whom, despite being
Speaker 2: priests with sacred anatomical knowledge, were also considered ritually unclean
Speaker 2: and how had to live in a segregated necropolis away
Speaker 2: from the living.
Speaker 3: Yeah that's that's one too many dinner party was ruined
Speaker 3: by these people.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's said. They're like, look, you guys, you live
Speaker 2: over here.
Speaker 3: You can't talk about where anyone else put each other.
Speaker 3: But I do find it interesting the anatomical secrets, because
Speaker 3: you know, even in fictional fantasy, you'd have like Game
Speaker 3: of Thrones, you'd have these like measters or whatever, where
Speaker 3: it's like I'm gonna have a baby, go find a master,
Speaker 3: Like no one else was taught that. Yeah, only like
Speaker 3: religious or very wealthy people had any knowledge of. Yeah,
Speaker 3: I mean even some of our some of our heroes
Speaker 3: from from these episodes were like ladies had eighteeth or
Speaker 3: more teeth or whatever. It was like people straight up
Speaker 3: like if you weren't in that very specific club, you're
Speaker 3: just guessing.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And so these guys knew a lot, but knew
Speaker 2: a little too much to be let out in public
Speaker 2: so anyway, if you were, if your family chose the
Speaker 2: most expensive mummification method, as many of the mummies that
Speaker 2: we have, what we still have, yeah, the ones that
Speaker 2: were made with care. The first step was to remove
Speaker 2: the brain. Now, many of you who have seen anything
Speaker 2: mummy related or ed, as you suggested earlier, this had
Speaker 2: to This was done through the nose. A long hooked
Speaker 2: iron instrument was inserted to your nostrils. But that was
Speaker 2: not to pull the brain out. That was to break
Speaker 2: the fmoid bone, which is the thin plate of bone
Speaker 2: between your nose and your brain. That when people are like, oh,
Speaker 2: if you give them a palm strike, yeah, break the
Speaker 2: fmoid bone. Oh, no one ever said the second part. Well,
Speaker 2: I heard it goes into their brain. That's the if
Speaker 2: you palm strike someone's nose. The idea is you shadow
Speaker 2: ship into their brain. But then cocaine can get around
Speaker 2: it without issue. I get well, not without issue, if
Speaker 2: any how much cocaine you do. But you had to
Speaker 2: break the bone first, and then this hook was used
Speaker 2: to liquefy the brain matter. But then the brain matter
Speaker 2: was not pulled out on a hook.
Speaker 3: How is it liquefied? Did they make it hot?
Speaker 2: Oh buddy, you just stirred it up. You stir it up,
Speaker 2: and then you drained the brain out through the nose
Speaker 2: by gravity. And I hate this. We know that this
Speaker 2: works because in nineteen ninety four celebrated the release of
Speaker 2: never Mind. Yeah, this celebrated egyptologist and philosophy professor Bob
Speaker 2: Bryer or mister Mummy. According to the article I found, Wow,
Speaker 2: was so stumped by certain aspects of ancient mummification that
Speaker 2: he and a research partner named Robert Wade decided to
Speaker 2: create a mummy themselves, using only ancient techniques and materials.
Speaker 2: This should have been and hopefully not a member of
Speaker 2: their family. Yeah.
Speaker 3: Man, this is again, this is something where it's like
Speaker 3: by two people who decided to remain anonymous, Like why
Speaker 3: would you throw your name on this disgusting.
Speaker 2: Opposite of anonymous? I guess famous for this. Yeah, but
Speaker 2: I guess it has to get done because, like you said,
Speaker 2: it took a lot of trial and error, and after
Speaker 2: a lot of trial and error with I assume maybe
Speaker 2: bodies that were donated to science.
Speaker 3: No, it has to like and you know what, thank
Speaker 3: God for these two guys to do it, not to
Speaker 3: prisoners of war, Like, this is just like everyone's on board. Yeah,
Speaker 3: it's good if everyone's on board.
Speaker 2: Yeah. They confirmed after much trial and error that the
Speaker 2: brain was not pulled out in chunks as you would
Speaker 2: think in these movies. It was liquefied into brain stew
Speaker 2: and then poured out of the head through the nose
Speaker 2: and then it's.
Speaker 3: So attached to the head but the body at this point, yes.
Speaker 2: Okay, and then all that brain matter was just thrown
Speaker 2: away because to the Egyptians, they considered the brain useless.
Speaker 2: To them, it was the origin of mucus. That's what
Speaker 2: they thought the brain was for that it created the
Speaker 2: mucus in your body.
Speaker 3: The heart, it's just a bunch of little mucinex guys
Speaker 3: coming out of your nose. Hey, he's all shitty and
Speaker 3: like as like an accent.
Speaker 2: They believe that the heart was where intelligence lived.
Speaker 3: Honestly, it does for me too.
Speaker 2: This is a sweet thought. Yeah.
Speaker 3: Four chambers. They loved chambers. The heart has chambers.
Speaker 2: The heart has chambers. What episode was it where we
Speaker 2: learned that there was somebody else that thought the heart
Speaker 2: was where the heart was for warming your blood or something.
Speaker 3: I don't remember anymore. I'm sure it was one of
Speaker 3: our heroes, but it's uh.
Speaker 2: Yeah. People have had all kinds of weird thoughts about
Speaker 2: the brain, the heart, the stomach, the lungs. They had
Speaker 2: no idea until like twenty years ago that we're.
Speaker 3: All just like everything else. We're just a brain in
Speaker 3: a mechs suit. Yes, the reality of the situation, but yeah,
Speaker 3: I think we I don't think it's gonna work for
Speaker 3: a button of the month, but I do think we
Speaker 3: should build some sort of like ever evolving Mount rushmore
Speaker 3: of like nonsense heroes from the show. Yeah. Yeah, ladies
Speaker 3: have different amount of teeth. Yeah, like people who show
Speaker 3: up a bunch like Eronymous or Hew. No, he's a
Speaker 3: ronymus Bosh as an artist. Yeah, but I'm saying, like
Speaker 3: that can be fun. Yeah, it would be ext to
Speaker 3: remember the things we once did. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I
Speaker 3: like this.
Speaker 2: I like this. Once the brain was juiced and dumped
Speaker 2: into the street, a scribe marked the left side God,
Speaker 2: a scribe marked the left side of the corpse is abdomen.
Speaker 2: Then a man again with very fine tuned, completely useless
Speaker 2: in every other aspect of life knowledge. This man called
Speaker 2: the Periski. I'm gonna fuck this up parastecise. A man
Speaker 2: called the parastecise or the slitter, stepped forward with an
Speaker 2: obsidian blade and made the incision down the abdomen city
Speaker 2: a cool rock. And then, according to Deodorus Siculus, the
Speaker 2: slitter immediately had to turn and run while his colleagues
Speaker 2: pelted him with stones and cursed him, because cutting a
Speaker 2: body was desecration, even when necessary. So the slitter was
Speaker 2: like a sin eater. He was like a ritual.
Speaker 3: Literally going to compare it to a seat.
Speaker 2: He did the dirty work and took the spiritual hit
Speaker 2: and was pelted with stones, So physical hits, it's like,
Speaker 2: so no one else had too. On a ship job.
Speaker 3: It's a ship job. This is a didn't Egypt also
Speaker 3: invent beer? They had I think they invented beer.
Speaker 2: They may have they had case, they had ales or
Speaker 2: something in which.
Speaker 3: I think is specifically for guys with this job. And
Speaker 3: it's like, I gotta go to the bar. How was
Speaker 3: your day? How do you think I'm a fucking slitter.
Speaker 3: I'm just gitting another round.
Speaker 2: Please. After the slitter fled and got drunk at the bar,
Speaker 2: and Embalmer reached into the incision that he made and
Speaker 2: pulled out everything except the kidneys and the heart. Let
Speaker 2: me do this, let me, let me dig into the corpse.
Speaker 2: This is fine.
Speaker 3: Yeah, what we do is fine. What he did was heinous.
Speaker 2: The removed organs were washed in palm wine, packed with spices,
Speaker 2: and placed into four jars, each jar guarded by one
Speaker 2: of the four sons of Horace. There was Imsetti, who
Speaker 2: had a human head and got the liver, Appi, the
Speaker 2: baboon headed one who got the lungs, Duamutef the jackal,
Speaker 2: who got the stomach, and Cabis sanoof the falcon, who
Speaker 2: got the intestines the jar. Yeah, yeah, right, there's like
Speaker 2: three small jars and one gigantic giant wine barrel size.
Speaker 2: The body was then packed inside and out with roughly
Speaker 2: five hundred eighty pounds of natron and naturally occurring salt,
Speaker 2: and left for forty days to dry out. Five hundred
Speaker 2: and eighty pounds. Yeah, almost six hundred pounds.
Speaker 3: I mean, how is that not shoving, you know, twenty
Speaker 3: pounds of shit in a five pound bag or whatever
Speaker 3: like that.
Speaker 2: Well, I'm I think the it was packed inside and out,
Speaker 2: so inside.
Speaker 3: It was incredibly dense and heavy. Maybe it's like a
Speaker 3: little bit of spent uranium goes a long way. Yeah,
Speaker 3: my brain, it's like, how do they fit that much
Speaker 3: in one? But maybe they're heavy.
Speaker 2: Well I think a bunch of it was put in
Speaker 2: and then they were probably packed around the body with
Speaker 2: the rest of it. Oh, so they probably put like
Speaker 2: forty pounds or whatever inside the body.
Speaker 3: You I thought this was fully turkey stuffing.
Speaker 2: No, no, okay. After the body was left for forty
Speaker 2: days to dry out, the cavity was stuffed with linen, sawdust,
Speaker 2: and sometimes onions, which that tells you how bad the
Speaker 2: body still smell that They're like, let's in here. Yeah.
Speaker 2: The skin was coated with ox fat and cedar oil
Speaker 2: and then cinnamon mrh and Frankincenseyes, I want.
Speaker 3: To eat these fucking things, but everything you described so
Speaker 3: far from like the spices in the heart or whatever.
Speaker 2: And then like all I would.
Speaker 3: I use like half these ingredients in cookies, Yeah, cookies.
Speaker 2: After the body was packed with cinnamon muhr and frankincense,
Speaker 2: each finger and each toe was individually wrapped in linen
Speaker 2: before the entire body was cocooned, and hundreds of yards
Speaker 2: of linen strips the most elaborate mummies used approximately four
Speaker 2: thousand square feet of linen. To RaSE the linen body plentiful.
Speaker 3: Whatever linen's made from.
Speaker 2: They made a lot of linens in Egypt. I guess
Speaker 2: looms or do they have looms that they don't know?
Speaker 2: I wish it could tell you, but I don't know.
Speaker 2: Protective amulets were then placed between well, I guess not then,
Speaker 2: but as the body was being wrapped in linens, protective
Speaker 2: amulets were placed between.
Speaker 3: The layers, so they were making great nachos.
Speaker 2: Basically, there was a widge at eye to protect against evil,
Speaker 2: a heart scareb to keep things light for judgment in
Speaker 2: the afterlife, and a headrest amulet to prevent decapitation in
Speaker 2: the next world. So to your point, you would think
Speaker 2: the smell would be horrendous, but a groundbreaking twenty twenty
Speaker 2: five study in the Journal of American Chemical Society analyzed
Speaker 2: nine mummies in Cairo and found that the dominant aromas
Speaker 2: of a mummy were woody, spicy, and sweet thanks to
Speaker 2: pine cedar and juniper resins mixed with myrr and frankinsense. Yeah,
Speaker 2: I'm sure.
Speaker 3: A guy pretty early on in this process was like,
Speaker 3: there's got to be a better way. Yeah, you know what,
Speaker 3: now they need uh popo ri to get to the
Speaker 3: other side, you know what I mean, just adding shit
Speaker 3: to not make it the most heinous job.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's already hot in the desert. I still don't
Speaker 2: know about the onions, but hey, you know what, everything
Speaker 2: else sounds pretty good. So conservators have described the scent
Speaker 2: of a mummy as surprisingly pleasant. And it turns out
Speaker 2: the Egyptians actually equated a good smell with spiritual purity,
Speaker 2: so they were into, let's make this shit smell good
Speaker 2: because otherwise your soul's dirty.
Speaker 3: Also, like the Yankee candle factory there has like mummy smells.
Speaker 2: I was gonna say that might candle, that might be
Speaker 2: a good merch item for us.
Speaker 3: I don't I do make my own candles. I haven't
Speaker 3: in a while. I don't know if I'll be doing
Speaker 3: that soon because I've never got good at not having
Speaker 3: the wick just be like black smoke all the time.
Speaker 2: Right. So, like I said, all of this was the
Speaker 2: deluxe package. Yeah, I'm the twenty five dollars Patreon yea
Speaker 2: if you will. The mid range tire skipped the incision
Speaker 2: and the organ removal, so that guy was like, thank
Speaker 2: god if you got the mid range instead, cedar oil
Speaker 2: was injected through the anus, which was then plugged shut,
Speaker 2: and the body was left in salt, So you just
Speaker 2: got the old squirt cork, squirt cork in the salt.
Speaker 2: Seventy days later, the plugs removed, the oil comes out,
Speaker 2: all the dissolved organs squirt out with it, and really,
Speaker 2: quote from herodotus on that quote, nothing remains but the
Speaker 2: skin and bones. So that's the mid tier. You just
Speaker 2: kind of get that and they dump it.
Speaker 3: They don't put them in jars. I don't think, so
Speaker 3: got you, Okay, no physical rewards.
Speaker 2: The budget tier consisted of an enema with an unnamed liquid,
Speaker 2: which I'm thinking, maybe you think of.
Speaker 3: The previous liquid. They just took the other guy out
Speaker 3: of the other guy.
Speaker 2: Or this is where the brain juice went, is maybe
Speaker 2: what my thought.
Speaker 3: Fuck, dude, you're getting a brain juice plans.
Speaker 2: So you're getting a up the butt. Seventy days in
Speaker 2: Natron body returned, no wrapping, no jars, no ceremony, the
Speaker 2: salt salt Jimmy Natron Jimmy Natron boy enema, no wrapping,
Speaker 2: no jars, just sort of a here's your brother, you know,
Speaker 2: like justin I.
Speaker 3: Guess I didn't ask that the bodies go back to
Speaker 3: the family, I believe, so, so it's like a it's
Speaker 3: a pretty inconvenient.
Speaker 2: Well then you then you it's up to you where
Speaker 2: you put it, I guess.
Speaker 3: So then you have to hire an architect to get
Speaker 3: a fucking pyramid made.
Speaker 2: Yeah, if you're a giant family, you're just a regular family.
Speaker 2: I don't to be honest. On the mantle like ashes.
Speaker 3: Yeah, well they always say the home of the Mummy
Speaker 3: and it is haunted.
Speaker 2: No, the what's the history of the parlor used to
Speaker 2: be where the body was placed out? Oh yeah in
Speaker 2: the Victorian era, So maybe the Egyptians had their version
Speaker 2: of the parlor. I mean, at this point, this your
Speaker 2: your how big of these houses? Your loved one is
Speaker 2: basically a stuff fox. Yeah, so you can just put
Speaker 2: it wherever you sleep with it, just platonically. Not sure.
Speaker 3: The only thing it's like, what's that saying, It's like
Speaker 3: the only like whatever is death and taxes.
Speaker 2: The only thing is certain in life, Yeah, death in taxes.
Speaker 3: But I feel like we could make an Egyptian sitcom
Speaker 3: called Death and taxidermy, and the only thing is certain
Speaker 3: in life is death and taxidermy. And then it's like
Speaker 3: hard cut too. It's like, man, that's a lot of
Speaker 3: mummies in your.
Speaker 2: House, so that's how you make a human mummy. But
Speaker 2: humans weren't the only ones getting mummed up. The Egyptians
Speaker 2: mummified animals too, as I mentioned.
Speaker 3: Like a million million cats.
Speaker 2: They did this on an absolutely industrial scale. According according
Speaker 2: to history dot com, the.
Speaker 3: Chips of Hoy commercial when we were kids, like putting
Speaker 3: on the writs or whatever it is like playing yeah,
Speaker 3: but it's.
Speaker 2: Just the no, no, no, it wasn't. It wasn't putting on
Speaker 2: the rits. I don't Knowmber, the you you just did
Speaker 2: the like putting on the rits is bomb bomb boond No,
Speaker 2: it's not what.
Speaker 3: You just that's fucking freaksdatra or something that's New York,
Speaker 3: New York.
Speaker 2: That you're but you're thinking of.
Speaker 3: Uh the chips Hoy commercial.
Speaker 2: Uh when we were kid No no not not not no.
Speaker 3: No no no no no no.
Speaker 4: No.
Speaker 2: Hope is royalty free? Is that one from the commercial?
Speaker 3: It hads like a fun Glenn Miller orchestra ass yeah song,
Speaker 3: But either way, it's that.
Speaker 2: But with cats, it's all I'm getting it. Yes, and
Speaker 2: they weren't tap dancing though, they were just.
Speaker 3: Nobody tap dances in that either. I think they're just
Speaker 3: making cookies.
Speaker 2: I don't think I'm remembering a commercial. This may just
Speaker 2: be a dream.
Speaker 3: I think had dream you had because I think I'll
Speaker 3: find it, I'll put it in the show.
Speaker 2: Note anyway, Some mummified animals were intended as food offerings
Speaker 2: to humans in the afterlife, so they'd send you off.
Speaker 3: In the afterlife. Got you should have waited for that part.
Speaker 2: Many others were created to serve as sacred offerings to
Speaker 2: the gods, who in ancient Egypt often took animal form,
Speaker 2: including cats, cows, falcons, frogs, baboons, and vultures, among many others.
Speaker 2: Animals mummified for this purpose as a sacred offering were
Speaker 2: available for purchase or barter at sacred sites. So kind
Speaker 2: of like picking up flowers on the way to the grave,
Speaker 2: you'd swing by, you'd pick up the mummified baboon. Su
Speaker 2: go lean it on your loved ones, mummy.
Speaker 3: Show them you care with a mummified bear or something
Speaker 3: like that. There was ads and shit chizzled into the
Speaker 3: side of no zigger out.
Speaker 2: To different nationalities. Yeah, chizzling piers.
Speaker 3: By the way, I've ever seen the pictures of like
Speaker 3: the Pyramids of Giza from the other angle, and it's
Speaker 3: all just like KFC's and fucking yeah, that's a wild image.
Speaker 2: Hey man, human race, we did great. Ye. The people
Speaker 2: who bought these mummified animals would give them to a
Speaker 2: priest who would then bury collections of the animals as
Speaker 2: gifts for the gods.
Speaker 3: We grew up with that, right, Like, wasn't uh, like
Speaker 3: rabbits feet popular when we were kids, Like having a rabbit, Yeah,
Speaker 3: lucky rabbits.
Speaker 2: See, yeah, that's pretty different. I think this was sort
Speaker 2: of rabbit foot it is, and I guess it was lucky,
Speaker 2: so I'm not sure rabbit foot though. This practice was
Speaker 2: actually considered mor akin to lighting a votive candle at church.
Speaker 2: You go, you light a candle, and this is sort
Speaker 2: of you would go, you bring a.
Speaker 3: Wonder it's yeah, because it's like that seems pretty disposable
Speaker 3: versus having a rabbit.
Speaker 2: This was so widespread in Egypt that animal mummification became
Speaker 2: big business. Archaeologists have found thirty catacombs in Egypt.
Speaker 3: With each one they got their name catacombs. Uh.
Speaker 2: I doubt it, but sure, quick, that's quick, that's what
Speaker 2: I do. Uh. Each one of these was dedicated to
Speaker 2: a single animal and packed floor to ceiling with mummies,
Speaker 2: for a total that some reason estimate to be nearly
Speaker 2: seventy million animal mummies produced over roughly twelve hundred years.
Speaker 2: That's a booming industry. And here's the part where we
Speaker 2: learned that humans have always really been the same, because
Speaker 2: it turns out a lot of these mummies were a
Speaker 2: scam a bat. In the largest study of that kind,
Speaker 2: researchers at the Manchester Museum in the University of Manchester
Speaker 2: have used X rays and CT scams to examine more
Speaker 2: than eight hundred ancient Egyptian animal mummies, many of which
Speaker 2: are now housed or stolen by British museums. While a
Speaker 2: third of those mummies contain the well preserved remains of
Speaker 2: complete animals, researchers found only partial remains in another third,
Speaker 2: and in the last third they found that the mummies
Speaker 2: were empty of all bones or any animal remains, and
Speaker 2: the linens were stuffed with items such as mud sticks,
Speaker 2: eggshells and feathers.
Speaker 3: Wow, they couldn't use an onion on at those two
Speaker 3: precious The.
Speaker 2: Field Museum in Chicago confirmed their most beautifully detailed cat
Speaker 2: mummy was completely empty inside.
Speaker 3: I this is a job I'd actually fucking love to
Speaker 3: have if I was like on the X ray team
Speaker 3: at a museum. Every day is the most fun because
Speaker 3: you're like making bets.
Speaker 2: You're like, is it gonna be a fake? Is it
Speaker 2: gonna be real? Are we gonna find thirty gold coins?
Speaker 2: And yeah? Otherwise it a biggie bank, but it's a
Speaker 2: literal pig. Yeah. Like that to me would be just
Speaker 2: the coolest job. I'd also suggest to the Field Museum
Speaker 2: of Chicago that a great thief may have swapped their
Speaker 2: real cat mummy with a fake one.
Speaker 3: Oh my god, I didn't think about that.
Speaker 2: They might want to look into it seventy million times. Yeah.
Speaker 2: Some scientists and archaeologists argue that the ancient customers knew
Speaker 2: that these mummies didn't contain remains and the sticks and feathers.
Speaker 2: This sounds like an old timey sales pitch. The sticks
Speaker 2: and feathers were all considered just as important because they
Speaker 2: had been in close contact with the animals.
Speaker 3: Wow, that's after the first guy realized that it's bullshit. Yeah,
Speaker 3: but also I'd love to see a family member being like.
Speaker 2: There's bullshit lougging, there's.
Speaker 3: Sticks, And it was like, Dave, I can't help notice
Speaker 3: the mummified thing on the right was three hundred dollars
Speaker 3: and the one you bought was a dollar.
Speaker 2: Yeah, what did you think was in it? Yeah? Like
Speaker 2: it was clearly displayed.
Speaker 3: There's a price difference here.
Speaker 2: You grabbed the display version and its nose is falling
Speaker 2: off and you could see that there is hey in there.
Speaker 3: Dude, It's like you got a great deal in this
Speaker 3: votive candle. You cheat, piece of shit.
Speaker 2: But mummies have been around much much longer than the
Speaker 2: Egyptian mummies that most of us think of.
Speaker 3: Been around almost as long as scams pretty much.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Until the tail end of last year, the oldest
Speaker 2: mummies we'd ever found were in the Ata Kama Desert
Speaker 2: in modern day Chile and Peru, and we're going to
Speaker 2: get to those in a minute. But in September twenty
Speaker 2: twenty five, it was announced that we'd made an even
Speaker 2: more ancient discovery. According to Smithsonian magazine, New News this
Speaker 2: brand new news. This literally no joke. This literally turned
Speaker 2: what we thought we knew about mummification like upside down.
Speaker 2: At the very end of last year. Wow. According to
Speaker 2: Smithsonia magazine quote, researchers examined fifty four graves in southern China,
Speaker 2: the Philippines, Laos, Malaysia, Thailand, and Indonesia. They noticed that
Speaker 2: many of the bodies that they found in these graves
Speaker 2: were tucked into tight crouching positions and that the remains.
Speaker 3: Clutching tiger, hid and mummy. The remains I don't even
Speaker 3: know if that's okay to say.
Speaker 2: I think it's fine. I think it's fine. I'd watch
Speaker 2: that movie. The remains looked burnt. The four thousand to
Speaker 2: twelve thousand year old graves didn't contain any evidence that
Speaker 2: there was ever been a fire within the grave, which
Speaker 2: indicated the corpses were exposed to heat before being buried.
Speaker 2: The scientists used non destructive techniques like X ray diffraction
Speaker 2: and infrared spectroscopy to examine the bones, and these tests
Speaker 2: revealed that the skeleton's discoloration, because they're like jet black,
Speaker 2: some of them was caused not by direct combustion as
Speaker 2: you would see in like a failed cremation of setting
Speaker 2: the body on fire, try to cremate it, but exposure
Speaker 2: to a low oxygen environment, and so the reason so it's.
Speaker 3: Like drying meats or drying like foods.
Speaker 2: The researchers concluded exactly that many of the bodies were
Speaker 2: smoke dried. They were arranged in these crouched postures before
Speaker 2: being propped over or positioned near a fire to slowly
Speaker 2: dehydrate them, and this process deliberately preserve the remains, which
Speaker 2: means they were mummified. Fuck man. The reasons that people
Speaker 2: may have done this are almost as interesting as the process.
Speaker 2: And this is where we get back to something else
Speaker 2: you said earlier about how how do you carry these
Speaker 2: guys around? Before the wheel They.
Speaker 3: Think crouched them up. You put them on sticks like
Speaker 3: in the cartoons. They is sooci as you you were
Speaker 3: about to eat and put in a cold ring.
Speaker 2: It is speculated that the people who created these mummies
Speaker 2: may have been a nomadic tribe of hunter gatherers who
Speaker 2: wished to travel with their dead, so they mummified them
Speaker 2: so that they could be easily packed in the in
Speaker 2: the carrions and shoveled off to the next location.
Speaker 3: Also, just the idea that what we have is like
Speaker 3: six guys here, but we don't have our shovels, so
Speaker 3: we can throw them on a stick. Let's carry him out.
Speaker 3: In one hundred years, we'll figure out how to bury them.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Not every archaeologist agrees that that's what happened, though,
Speaker 2: one such skeptic, Michael Green, told Smithsonian mag to quote,
Speaker 2: some of the bones the researchers study had been heated
Speaker 2: to more than nine hundred degrees fahrenheit, indicating something going
Speaker 2: on the outside that is not going to something going
Speaker 2: on on the outside of the body that is not
Speaker 2: going to result in a smoking of the body, but
Speaker 2: a burning of the body.
Speaker 3: I mean, listen, Mike, fucking skeptic buzzkill, Mike, Yeah, you've
Speaker 3: never gotten a phone call in the middle of making something.
Speaker 3: Now your risotto stuck to the bottom of the van.
Speaker 3: I'm sure every once in a while a fucking panther
Speaker 3: came to attack the camp and they had to leave
Speaker 3: the body. The body there a little too long.
Speaker 2: His point basically is that whatever was done to these
Speaker 2: bodies definitely involve fire, but it's possible that the mummification
Speaker 2: was not the intended purpose, but it was some sort
Speaker 2: of side effect. And it's tough to know who's right
Speaker 2: because these are.
Speaker 3: So old and people were eating people.
Speaker 2: Yes, there was deff. There could have been some of that,
Speaker 2: although it's unlikely because these corpses are like black charred.
Speaker 2: We'll put it. I think I put a picture on
Speaker 2: the shiver now. But something that, something that lends this
Speaker 2: theory credence is that this style of mummification is still
Speaker 2: practiced today by the Anga tribe in Poupun, New Guinea.
Speaker 2: I found an article in National Geographic that reported on
Speaker 2: what they called, quote the pungent smell of slow smoked
Speaker 2: human flesh at the last known modern mummification, that of
Speaker 2: village elder Gemptasu in twenty fifteen.
Speaker 3: I think it was one of those things where they
Speaker 3: found an uncontacted tribe from the smell and then they're like,
Speaker 3: we need in the best part is the guy who
Speaker 3: proposed going was like, something's so fucking good. Yeah, like
Speaker 3: over there, we need to see what's going on. And
Speaker 3: to this day they're like, oh.
Speaker 2: Something smells delicious. Uh, we were burning bodies. Weirdly enough,
Speaker 2: Anthony Bourdain discovered these guys on a no reservation trip
Speaker 2: because like this smell is delicious. No they he described
Speaker 2: the process. National Geographic describes the process of mummifying Gemtasu
Speaker 2: like this quote. The mummification method follows a strict structure.
Speaker 2: The body is suspended over a fire and as it bloats,
Speaker 2: it is poked with wooden sticks to drain its fluids,
Speaker 2: and later a stick is used to gently widen the
Speaker 2: anus to allow the organs to fall out.
Speaker 3: The tree is an amazing thing. Trees are fucking.
Speaker 2: Rat from start to finish. The mummifiers must remain with
Speaker 2: the body at all times, and no part of the dead,
Speaker 2: including his fluids, his intestines, and the body is allowed
Speaker 2: to touch the ground because that is a taboo invitation
Speaker 2: for bad luck. So what are they using to catch.
Speaker 3: All the juices?
Speaker 2: Unclear? Wasn't described. I'd assume some sort of bowl or
Speaker 2: a pot, or maybe the mouth made from tree. The
Speaker 2: mouth of an unlucky warrior in training may own No,
Speaker 2: that guy's not going to survive that. The finished mummies
Speaker 2: are then placed up on cliff ledges to sit hundreds
Speaker 2: of feet above their villages. Chief Moi, Mangao Mumma fight
Speaker 2: in the nineteen fifties overlooks one village from over three
Speaker 2: hundred meters up with twenty two of his boys at
Speaker 2: his side. That's sick. Unfortunately, the result of this process
Speaker 2: creates one of the most horrifying mummies I have ever
Speaker 2: seen in my life.
Speaker 3: And also a misunderstanding for anyone who shows up and
Speaker 3: like they're counting the people and putting them there to
Speaker 3: scare us away. Was like, no, that's just what we do.
Speaker 2: We'll pop this up on screen. But ed, this is
Speaker 2: what a smoke dried mummy in the modern day looks like, dude,
Speaker 2: that's sick.
Speaker 3: Like he's like a He's like in a hip hop pose.
Speaker 2: This could be an album. He's got the rap squad,
Speaker 2: yeah does. But he looks terrifying. He looks like the
Speaker 2: cover of Cannibal Holocaust. Yeah. Or I was gonna say, oh,
Speaker 2: zombie zombie movies.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, that's how you know our words in a
Speaker 3: video store.
Speaker 2: You know the cover.
Speaker 3: I know the cover.
Speaker 2: It might be like Zombie three. Maybe I know exact one.
Speaker 3: Of the cover that I at first I which is
Speaker 3: exactly what I was thinking of, And I thought Cannibal
Speaker 3: Holocausts for I'm sure the cover doesn't have that. The
Speaker 3: only time I've seen that fucking horrible movie that all
Speaker 3: copies should be burned is because you showed it to
Speaker 3: me on Joy Street.
Speaker 2: Yep. I've shown that to a few people who have said,
Speaker 2: why are we watching this?
Speaker 3: I'm glad people got in trouble for that movie.
Speaker 2: So this is one of the scariest mummies I have
Speaker 2: ever seen, and that one showed me.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that genuinely love that guy.
Speaker 2: Well see if you love these guys, because the second
Speaker 2: scariest mummy I've ever seen is also the second oldest
Speaker 2: mummy in the world, the Chinchorro mummies of the Atakama Desert.
Speaker 2: So ed, maybe we'll bring these up on screen while
Speaker 2: we discuss what's happening. You can maybe put them in
Speaker 2: a little box on the side or something. I'll show
Speaker 2: you here in person, just so you can get a
Speaker 2: look at.
Speaker 3: Love it less, we're less and for people to know.
Speaker 3: It's kind of like if and this is not probably
Speaker 3: the actual thing that happened. This mummy looks like if
Speaker 3: someone cut your face off mumma fied it separately, and
Speaker 3: then placed it back on your head as you deflated.
Speaker 2: Below this is another one.
Speaker 3: And you know what, I think that's exactly what happened
Speaker 3: is that's not a fuck face.
Speaker 2: Nope, it's not a face. So it looks like a face.
Speaker 3: It looks like the weird like heads in the wall,
Speaker 3: Pink Floyd's the Wall. Yeah, it gets put on top
Speaker 3: of you. That's way worse. I don't want that as
Speaker 3: an album cover. I don't want that as a friend.
Speaker 3: But the other guys I hang out with today.
Speaker 2: I will say, though, the story of what's actually happened
Speaker 2: here is like sweet to the point of its touching story,
Speaker 2: despite how terrifying these mummies look. Yeah bad, Hang though.
Speaker 2: The Cinchoro people were mummifying their dead in the deserts
Speaker 2: of what is now Chile and Peru, roughly two thousand
Speaker 2: years before Egypt's first mummy, so around fifty to fifty BC. Okay,
Speaker 2: I think we touched on this tribe in episode.
Speaker 3: Oh my god, that's so many years before B.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, wait, no, that is B. It's so much B.
Speaker 2: It's it's before C. Yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's crazy. I guess the most I've ever heard
Speaker 3: B before C that doesn't have a dinosaur.
Speaker 2: I think we touched on this tribe somewhere in another episode.
Speaker 2: But these were marine hunter gatherers who developed an extraordinary
Speaker 2: process frommmification. The bodies were completely defleshed, scalped, disassembled, and
Speaker 2: then reassembled with sticks and clay, coated in black manganese
Speaker 2: paste and fitted with clay masks featuring modeled eyes and mouths.
Speaker 2: It's believed that the goal was to make the dead
Speaker 2: look alive. Now they failed some some archaeologists have described
Speaker 2: these as sophisticated, which I would agree with, but also
Speaker 2: visually appealing, which I would not agree with. Maybe to
Speaker 2: a serial killer.
Speaker 3: Yeah, if you know what you don't You don't know
Speaker 3: what you're going to be into until you see it,
Speaker 3: I guess. Unfortunately, Yeah, but that my body rejected this one.
Speaker 2: There were actually four types of these mummies, black, red, bandaged,
Speaker 2: and mud coated, so sort of like Egyptian mummies. We
Speaker 2: ended up with a bandage. There was tears potentially. The
Speaker 2: black mummies were the ones that I just described, Yeah,
Speaker 2: the black paste, and they tend to be the oldest
Speaker 2: examples of these mummies. The red mummies are a little newer,
Speaker 2: and they were prepared slightly differently. According to an article
Speaker 2: I found, quote, the body would first be disemboweled, the
Speaker 2: organs removed through careful incisions. Then the body cavities were
Speaker 2: filled with different elements such as soil and feathers. The
Speaker 2: stitched up body would then be painted with red ochre
Speaker 2: while the face was painted with black manganese. Unlike black mummies,
Speaker 2: red mummies have long black wigs with no masks covering
Speaker 2: their face. This is they. That's the other example we saw.
Speaker 2: The first one that you commented on would be a
Speaker 2: red mummy. I believe the black wig.
Speaker 3: Sure, this is these are a people. We don't have
Speaker 3: horror films without these people existing. This is the craziest.
Speaker 3: And I was right that there was like ripping off
Speaker 3: faces and doing it separately because you reassembled them. Yeah,
Speaker 3: but this is a lot of trial and error. It
Speaker 3: feels like and I'm sure huge arguments, but like Manganese
Speaker 3: guys being like manganese. The only way bro, And it
Speaker 3: was like, no, red is a vibe, we should do red.
Speaker 3: And then they probably fought to the death.
Speaker 2: I loved red ocre before anybody else ever heard of
Speaker 2: red ochre.
Speaker 3: Well, we're still to a manganese faces, And it was like,
Speaker 3: oh blackface, Thatt'll age well, and they fight.
Speaker 2: The black and red mummification styles are the most elaborate
Speaker 2: of the Cinchurro mummies. The other two types, the bandage
Speaker 2: and the mud coated, were a little bit less elaborate.
Speaker 2: The beard to find manganese and red oak. At that point.
Speaker 2: The bandage mummies were a variant of the red mummy,
Speaker 2: with the skin being replaced with bandages, so instead of
Speaker 2: stitching the skin back on, they just said, fuck it,
Speaker 2: let's wrap it up. Sure. The mud coated mummies were
Speaker 2: naturally dried bodies that were covered in a thick layer
Speaker 2: of mud and were the newest Cinchurro mummies that we found,
Speaker 2: which kind of sounds like they just got lazy. They
Speaker 2: started being artists about this and then they're like, you
Speaker 2: know what, I.
Speaker 3: Think it's the same thing we see now. There's there's
Speaker 3: a skill gap. Yeah, Like I think some people are
Speaker 3: like I'm not going into this, dad, I'm gonna go
Speaker 3: right TV yeah or whatever. And then hard cut too,
Speaker 3: it's like we have no jobs and we don't know
Speaker 3: how to fix our toilets.
Speaker 2: It got in.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so these guys everyone got white collar jobs in
Speaker 3: this group, and nobody knew anymore. How to do it well.
Speaker 2: But here's what's sweet about it. Unlike Egypt's hierarchical system
Speaker 2: where only the rich and the wealthy got the full
Speaker 2: nice treatment, Centurro mummification was radically egalitarian. Men, women, children,
Speaker 2: and even miscarried fetuses all received the exact same style
Speaker 2: of care, well, whatever style was popular at the time. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 2: because by the end they're just.
Speaker 3: Getting thrown Yeah, like this is not.
Speaker 2: In fact, the earliest and most elaborate mummies that we
Speaker 2: found were infants and children, which anthropologists makes Bernardo Ariatza
Speaker 2: suggests was a grief response. High arsenic levels in the
Speaker 2: Camerones River where they lived along caused a lot of
Speaker 2: miscarriages and stillburths, and mummification was how parents held on
Speaker 2: to their lost children. That's nicest.
Speaker 3: The rebirth doll of yeah, of the ancient times, almost more.
Speaker 2: Horrifying looking than when they put that big black on
Speaker 2: that baby. It's not gonna go great.
Speaker 3: But I do think that's very sweet, and that there
Speaker 3: is an element of like give them the full treatment
Speaker 3: because they're without sin.
Speaker 2: They're just little kids.
Speaker 3: Like give Boris a fucking the shittiest wig, Yeah, because
Speaker 3: he was kind of Dick when he was a lie,
Speaker 3: you know what I mean, Let's not waste his time
Speaker 3: on boris. But like, these kids did nothing wrong.
Speaker 2: No, they had to, they had to dress them up.
Speaker 2: So it certainly seems like no matter what culture you
Speaker 2: were part of, mummification was a sacred somber ritual that
Speaker 2: held great emotional and religious meaning. So of course, when
Speaker 2: the Europeans got their hands on mummies, they immediately desecrated
Speaker 2: them for health and pleasure. For roughly five hundred years,
Speaker 2: from the twelfth through the eighteenth century, Europeans consumed ground
Speaker 2: up Egyptian mummies as medicine.
Speaker 3: And this, I'm sorry, what this all start sounds like
Speaker 3: the gonna kill you whenever.
Speaker 2: Don't put that in your body. Yeah, this all started
Speaker 2: with the mistranslation. So get this. The Arabic word mumia
Speaker 2: originally was the word for bitumen, which is a greasy,
Speaker 2: black petroleum like product, which, according to a substack I
Speaker 2: found written about this whole debacle, the bitumen or mummia's oil.
Speaker 2: It did have legitimate uses like waterproofing ships and treating wounds.
Speaker 2: But when European translate, yeah, when European translators encountered the word.
Speaker 2: They confused it with the similar looking resin that coated
Speaker 2: Egyptian mummies. So one Italian translator, Gerard of Cremona, the
Speaker 2: wrongest man of all time, declared that mummia was created
Speaker 2: when quote, the liquid of the dead mixed with the
Speaker 2: aloes is transformed. Another scholar insisted that it formed when
Speaker 2: spices used in mummification mixed with bodily fluids.
Speaker 3: Body these two fucking homunculous ass So there's two giant
Speaker 3: leaps of logic happening here.
Speaker 2: Yeah. The first is that the stuff that was the
Speaker 2: stuff on mummy looked like bitumen, which was used to
Speaker 2: do actual things, which, by the way, neither of these
Speaker 2: were for health benefits. Correct, So like they jumped from
Speaker 2: they said, this looks like this other thing that didn't
Speaker 2: really have any health benefits.
Speaker 3: Yeah, but it was used. I've been giving my kids
Speaker 3: insulation instead of gotten and it's fine.
Speaker 2: They're doing great, they're doing great. The two leaps were
Speaker 2: this stuff on mummies looks like this other stuff that's useful.
Speaker 2: Then there was a leap of well, this other stuff
Speaker 2: that's useful might have health properties, which then turned into, oh,
Speaker 2: the stuff on mummies cures things, which then just jumped
Speaker 2: straight to crushed up mummies cure thing. It's amazing and
Speaker 2: I don't know.
Speaker 3: If it's like a European exclusive thing. It doesn't sound
Speaker 3: like it based on the fake cats.
Speaker 2: But it seems like we can't go.
Speaker 3: Three episodes without a snake oil salesman. No, like just
Speaker 3: everything is, everything is like you want to be young forever, You.
Speaker 2: Want to beautiful snort mummy powder? Yeah, eat mummy powder.
Speaker 2: Do this within a few generations. Oh, mummies look young forever.
Speaker 2: I mean, I'm sure that was the logic to a
Speaker 2: certain point. It was like, look there, Yeah, if we
Speaker 2: do it while we're alive, we'll be double young within
Speaker 2: a few generations. Every well stocked European apothecary was selling
Speaker 2: powdered Mummy. The sixteen eighteen London from.
Speaker 3: You know, only like one eighteenth of those were powdered Mummy.
Speaker 3: The rest were just like Cobblestone Street.
Speaker 2: Oh dust thousand percent. Yeah. The sixteen eighteen London Pharmacopeia,
Speaker 2: the official catalog of approved medicines in England, listed Mummy
Speaker 2: alongside essential remedies and described the taste as quote somewhat
Speaker 2: acrid and bitterish because you're eating a ground up dead person.
Speaker 2: Side effects may include death immediately it was prescribed. Ground
Speaker 2: up mummy was prescribed for headaches, epilepsy, plague, bruising, paralysis, nosebleeds,
Speaker 2: and child birth. King Francis the First of France carried
Speaker 2: a personal pouch of powdered mummy mixed with rhubarb everywhere
Speaker 2: he went.
Speaker 3: Something tells me there was a King Francis the second
Speaker 3: real quick after.
Speaker 2: Charles the second of England, rubbed mummy on his skin
Speaker 2: to quote, absorb the greatness of pharaohs, and even had
Speaker 2: a signature cocktail called the King's Drops, which was powdered
Speaker 2: human skull dissolved in alcohol.
Speaker 3: There's a It's a power you can't buy.
Speaker 2: Robert Boyle widely considered the father of modern chemistry because he.
Speaker 3: Was the first one who came up with the idea
Speaker 3: to boil this first to get rid of all the
Speaker 3: fucked up impurities.
Speaker 2: He called mummy.
Speaker 3: I survived one day longer.
Speaker 2: He called mummy quote, one of the most useful medicines.
Speaker 3: Yeah, but that sounds like a four to five doctors agree,
Speaker 3: like he was paid.
Speaker 2: Yeah, say that this is how this tells you how
Speaker 2: bad medicine was into sixteen hundreds, that they were like
Speaker 2: powdered mummy is one of the best options we've got,
Speaker 2: and you know it wasn't doing jack shit for anybody.
Speaker 3: Two things. One, the overwhelming disrespect of Europeans to the
Speaker 3: culture of the place they took it from.
Speaker 2: Just crazy, but I'm.
Speaker 3: Sure it was originally called like savage skincare or something,
Speaker 3: or like Barbarian beauty. But the second thing it tells
Speaker 3: me is the most shocking episode we've done is maybe
Speaker 3: waking up during surgery where we find out kind of
Speaker 3: how recent, genuinely good medicine and techniques are. And I
Speaker 3: find that's the first thing I thought of when you
Speaker 3: told me that they pelted a man who made an incision,
Speaker 3: Like just to tell you what hurdles we have to
Speaker 3: get to modern surgery that we have to overcome. And
Speaker 3: so yeah, between what I will refer to from here
Speaker 3: on out as get out of here science. So between
Speaker 3: get out of here science.
Speaker 2: Is that like an I fucking love science, but it's
Speaker 2: the bad version.
Speaker 3: It's you beat it, you scram science. So we'll deal
Speaker 3: with you. We're putting this down the kicking science down
Speaker 3: the road. So between get out of here science and
Speaker 3: the seemingly universal sirens call of scammery, yep, Like, it's
Speaker 3: amazing that we're living at a time period that we
Speaker 3: got to see at least a few years of like
Speaker 3: genuine benefits in both society and health.
Speaker 2: Yeah, most other places than here at the moment.
Speaker 3: But I'm saying, like, what a weird little pocket we
Speaker 3: got to experience.
Speaker 2: Well, that is a great segue into the next part
Speaker 2: of this story of mummy medicine, because much like those
Speaker 2: mummified animal corps as we talked about earlier, scammers quickly
Speaker 2: took over the medicinal mummy trade.
Speaker 3: Quote.
Speaker 2: Entrepreneurs got creative. Some merchants discovered it was easier to
Speaker 2: manufacture fresh mummies than dig up old ones.
Speaker 3: But you mean, really make mummies out of people?
Speaker 2: Well, they purchased corpses of executed criminals, plague victims and
Speaker 2: enslaved people, dried them out, coded them and resident and
Speaker 2: passed them off as ancient Egyptian royalty.
Speaker 3: Feel like purchase was in air quotes.
Speaker 2: In fifteen sixty four, our French physician Guy de la
Speaker 2: Fontaigne witnessed the process firsthand in Alexandria, watching merchants prepare
Speaker 2: fresh corpses for export. One dealer confessed they could produce
Speaker 2: forty ancient mummies in a single batch.
Speaker 3: Ah. Also we saw them preparing bodies for export. It
Speaker 3: was like, no, this was going to the cemetery, Like
Speaker 3: what this wasn't shipping abroad?
Speaker 2: Oh no, Now they're going all over the world. But
Speaker 2: even crazier, I think, is the practice of medicinal mummies
Speaker 2: lasted until at least nineteen oh eight, because we have
Speaker 2: a commercial listing for medicinal mummy in the Murk catalog
Speaker 2: of nineteen oh eight. So Merk Pharmaceuticals Murk is what
Speaker 2: the Mirk still exists. They're still a pharmaceutical company in America.
Speaker 2: In America, well, they're probably owned.
Speaker 3: By like yeah, but I'm saying they were an American
Speaker 3: company though at.
Speaker 2: The time I believe Merk was American. Okay, they were
Speaker 2: a big pharmacy. They're an early pharmaceutical company. And in
Speaker 2: their nineteen oh eight catalog they were still selling medicinal
Speaker 2: mummy under the heading quote genuine Egyptian as long as
Speaker 2: the supply lasts seventeen marks fifty per kilogram. What the
Speaker 2: fuck's a mark? Oh maybe a Dutch mark, so maybe
Speaker 2: a Dutch rump.
Speaker 3: And yeah, there's no way we were because America is
Speaker 3: eight days old.
Speaker 2: Sure, it's not like they didn't have doctors in Germany
Speaker 2: or or not bring up German doctors for any reason
Speaker 2: on this, or Danish doctors or whatever. Like there was science,
Speaker 2: there was knowledge in nineteen oh eight. Oh oh, nineteen
Speaker 2: oh eight for sure, that's when this went automobiles. This
Speaker 2: was nineteen oh eight. They were still selling genuine, genuine,
Speaker 2: giant Giant air quotes around genuine. Yeah, great way to
Speaker 2: dispose of a body. Though, if you were murdering people
Speaker 2: back then, grind them up in a mummy pace, and I.
Speaker 3: Will say there was probably a lot more money to
Speaker 3: be made having corpses on hand than not having corpses.
Speaker 2: I'd also love to know once you once you were
Speaker 2: purchasing powdered mummy, do you require or would you want
Speaker 2: to require some sort of proof of lineage that ties
Speaker 2: it to a mummy, because if you're just buying powdered mummy,
Speaker 2: I think.
Speaker 3: It would require it. But I think even lobbying at
Speaker 3: the time was like we don't have to.
Speaker 2: Actually, it would be cute though. If the pharmacists wrapped
Speaker 2: the bottle in a little bit of the mummy bandage.
Speaker 3: They probably did it and it wasn't real, all these
Speaker 3: little gimmicks.
Speaker 2: Anyway, I could see this shit in the.
Speaker 3: Manosphere right now, like Andrew Tap being like, you need
Speaker 3: to take mummy supplements that.
Speaker 2: We are a week away.
Speaker 3: Yeah, they jaw strong and take these mummy supplements.
Speaker 2: By the Victorian era, mummies had been ground up and
Speaker 2: used in everything from medicine to fertilizer to even paint.
Speaker 2: But the Victorian's relationships isn't.
Speaker 3: This like how Crisco was made. It was like industrial
Speaker 3: runoff and now it's like the best way to make
Speaker 3: up eye.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I'm half joking. I think a lot of that
Speaker 2: is true. The Victorian relationship with mummies went way beyond
Speaker 2: paint and medicine. They also hosted mummy unwrapping parties. We
Speaker 2: talked about this in Cursions. We mentioned this in Cursing.
Speaker 2: Is going a lot deeper into it, hate to hear it.
Speaker 2: According to the website Burial and Beyond quote, it's generally.
Speaker 3: The bed in that they feel they fucked up.
Speaker 2: It's generally believed that the first unwrapping public event was
Speaker 2: conducted by archaeologist, a term we're using very loosely here
Speaker 2: Giovanni Bolzoni, who in eighteen twenty one unwrapped a cadaver
Speaker 2: in Piccadilly Circus to a reported audience of thousands. Now,
Speaker 2: Giovanni was known as the Great Belzonia. He was a
Speaker 2: prominent Italian explorer with a taste for showmanship.
Speaker 3: And he was a prominent Italian magician. Like nobody has that.
Speaker 2: Aided, this guy was like the rock of.
Speaker 3: His also aided magicians have aids.
Speaker 2: This guy's a magician. Let even his sentence. This guy
Speaker 2: was the rock of his time. He was an explorer,
Speaker 2: the taste for showmanship, and aided by his former career
Speaker 2: as a circus strongman. So he started at entertainment and
Speaker 2: became an archaeologist. He kicked off the era of mummy
Speaker 2: desecration with his own discoveries in Egypt, most notably his
Speaker 2: unearthing of the mummy at Simephis, and another source tells
Speaker 2: us that while he did in fact make many dramatic discoveries,
Speaker 2: Belzoni was also infamous for using a battering ram to
Speaker 2: open tombs and for carving his name in the temple
Speaker 2: of Abu simbel We. Here's the thing, like, this guy
Speaker 2: was like a he he was not American, but you'd
Speaker 2: be forgiven for thinking that he was.
Speaker 3: Yeah, jeez, Louise though, because there is an element of Nope,
Speaker 3: there's no element of anything. This guy's just kind of shitty.
Speaker 2: In any case, his event was marketed towards medical professionals,
Speaker 2: but Belzoni came out wrapped in bandages, which he knew
Speaker 2: exactly what he was doing. Yeah, it's like how in
Speaker 2: the early days of exploitation films, they would, you know,
Speaker 2: you see a sex movie, but it would be like
Speaker 2: the Dangers of Childbirth or whatever. In the first twenty
Speaker 2: minutes would be basically pornography and then but it was
Speaker 2: educational so it was safe. Yeah. I think that's what
Speaker 2: this guy was doing here.
Speaker 3: It's crazy to come out in ben you know, that's
Speaker 3: the circus in him. He couldn't get rid of his
Speaker 3: assistant for this show is again like magicians, Yeah, like
Speaker 3: a magician.
Speaker 2: But his assistant here was a prominent doctor named Thomas Pettigrew.
Speaker 3: Who apologized at every event for.
Speaker 2: In this Oh no. He was famous for vac having
Speaker 2: vaccinated Queen Victoria, I guess in the early days of vaccinations,
Speaker 2: and was friends with Charles Dickens, who he was a
Speaker 2: real man about town. And he also quickly stole Belzoni's
Speaker 2: whole act and became London's premier mummy showman.
Speaker 3: I feel like that also happens to magicians.
Speaker 2: This earned him the name of Mummy Pedigrew. His January
Speaker 2: eighteen thirty four unwrapping at the Royal College of Surgeons
Speaker 2: sold out, with people turned away at the door, and
Speaker 2: other mummy unwrapping events attracting up to three thousand spectators.
Speaker 2: I mean it is a cool event. Once the trend
Speaker 2: caught on, because it is a cool event, the rich
Speaker 2: jumped right on board, and according to Haunted Palace blog quote,
Speaker 2: many wealthy individuals were said to have obtained their own
Speaker 2: mummies and invited their friends over to soirees to dine,
Speaker 2: drink and dissect. As these upper class parties often involved
Speaker 2: copious amounts of alcohol, they could end up quite raucous.
Speaker 3: Who's that guy who had the ummy fucking Martine early
Speaker 3: or whatever. He'd be doing well now someone who had
Speaker 3: his own like cocktail, you.
Speaker 2: Said the King Charles had a skull drops. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 2: I'm sure that made a callback. At these parties, often artifacts, rappings,
Speaker 2: and even body parts would get tossed around amongst the
Speaker 2: curious guests. Such parties were almost always purely for the
Speaker 2: entertainment of the upper class, and little regard was paid
Speaker 2: either to respect for the dead or preserving archaeological artifacts.
Speaker 2: Which makes me think mummy curses are bullshit, because if
Speaker 2: anyone was gonna get cursed, it would be these people
Speaker 2: who are tearing mummies limb from limb at a drunken
Speaker 2: party in some castle.
Speaker 3: Not one person has been indicted, and all the new
Speaker 3: stuff coming out in the news these days. You make
Speaker 3: a certain amount of money. It sounds like you can
Speaker 3: do with anybody part at any age you want. I
Speaker 3: don't know if mummy curses are real. We do introduce
Speaker 3: many characters who deserve to be cursed so far, Yes,
Speaker 3: I think is what the point you're making.
Speaker 2: But it never seemed to have come bit anybody in
Speaker 2: the air.
Speaker 3: It doesn't seem like anybody's getting in trouble for anything here.
Speaker 2: Although Victorian era, even if you were rich, the chances
Speaker 2: that you were going to eventually meet some sort of
Speaker 2: a protracted and painful death or pretty good. So you know,
Speaker 2: whether you were being hung in the town square by
Speaker 2: angry peasants or being carved inside out, or just getting
Speaker 2: some horrible disease, sure you were probably even even the wealthy,
Speaker 2: there was a level.
Speaker 3: Of like, let's throw the bodies around now before dysentery.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, whatever. So this also continued until nineteen oh eight.
Speaker 2: And what happened in nineteen oh eight, I don't know.
Speaker 2: We hadn't started World War One yet, but that was
Speaker 2: nineteen oh I was there wasn't the Great Mummy Curse cleansing.
Speaker 2: Maybe maybe the Mummy curse was world War One. It
Speaker 2: just took a while to shit build up across Europe,
Speaker 2: all the all the angry mummies. You know, we got
Speaker 2: to check and see what was What was Ferdinand up
Speaker 2: to right before he got plugged? Was he dancing with
Speaker 2: the leg of an ancient prince?
Speaker 3: He might very well have been. He had the money.
Speaker 3: They come from a family, I think so.
Speaker 2: Yeah. The The last public unwrapping was performed in nineteen
Speaker 2: oh eight by Let's Hear It for the first woman
Speaker 2: appointed as a lecturer of archaeology in the UK. Margaret Murray.
Speaker 2: Welcome Peggy.
Speaker 3: She was the.
Speaker 2: Last known public unwrapper and maybe she put an end
Speaker 2: to it. Maybe she said we've had enough.
Speaker 3: Or people were like, women are doing it.
Speaker 2: That not as cool anymore.
Speaker 4: Anyway, I want to end this episode with the story
Speaker 4: of a modern mummy, a story that is equal parts
Speaker 4: funny and sad and fills me a little bit of
Speaker 4: mummy on we there's something eerie and beautiful about that.
Speaker 3: It's not that mummy that they made the voicebox work
Speaker 3: the dumbest thing in the world.
Speaker 2: No, okay, this is the story of Elmer McCurdy, the
Speaker 2: wandering Mummy. In life, Elmer McCurdy was a scoundrel.
Speaker 3: Yeah, Chloe's chasing bugs bunny.
Speaker 2: According to history dot Com, he was quote born in
Speaker 2: eighteen eighty in Washington, Maine, so confusion from a young
Speaker 2: age right there and raised by his aunt and uncle.
Speaker 3: He had twenty eight years where he could have seen
Speaker 3: a mummy unwrapping.
Speaker 2: And that's true. Yeah, but he never did because he
Speaker 2: was poor, and he learned by the time he was
Speaker 2: a teenager, he learned that his aunt and uncle weren't
Speaker 2: his actual parents. Oh no, so he thought that his
Speaker 2: aunt and uncle were his real parents until he was
Speaker 2: a teenager.
Speaker 3: Which he realized he was been inducted.
Speaker 2: History dot com notes possibly contributed to a life of discontent.
Speaker 2: For a time, McCurdy lived with his grandfather, apprenticed as
Speaker 2: a plumber, and did manage to reconnect with his mother life.
Speaker 2: But in eighteen ninety eight he lost his job in
Speaker 2: an economic crash, and in nineteen hundred his mother and
Speaker 2: grandfather both passed away, so McCurdy headed west, drifting through
Speaker 2: Kansas and Missouri.
Speaker 3: I thought this story was going to be like they
Speaker 3: passed away, and he found himself of the inheritance of
Speaker 3: two fresh bodies and.
Speaker 2: Went mummy mode. Yeah, dude, No, he became a drifter
Speaker 2: and in nineteen oh seven he joined the US Army,
Speaker 2: learning explosive skills crucial to his later crimes. Dude, he
Speaker 2: not tipped my hand about where this is going. But yeah,
Speaker 2: but he really could have fucked up.
Speaker 3: He could have joined the Army in the mummification department
Speaker 3: and would only have one year before those skills became unnecessary.
Speaker 2: True. He was honorably discharged in nineteen ten and quickly
Speaker 2: returned to a life of dishonor only weeks. Only weeks
Speaker 2: after leaving, the military, authorities rested McCurdy and another soldier
Speaker 2: for possession of burglary paraphernalia, including nitro glycerine burglary.
Speaker 3: That's like making TNT paraphnalia.
Speaker 2: McCurdy at his compatriot convinced the jury they were just
Speaker 2: building a foot powered machine gun. No additional details on that.
Speaker 2: McCurdy then traveled to Oklahoma, where he joined a gang
Speaker 2: of small time outlaws known as Yeggs. Yegs which sounds
Speaker 2: like a real slur, but it's just sort of a
Speaker 2: term for these lay about gangsters sort of okay. The
Speaker 2: Pinkerton Detective Agency published a pamphlet in nineteen oh four
Speaker 2: about a group known as Yeggs. Says Michael Williams, site
Speaker 2: director of the Oklahoma Territorial Museum in Carnegie Library, they
Speaker 2: were an element that grew out of the hobo community. Sure,
Speaker 2: where most hobos traveled to find work, Yeggs traveled to
Speaker 2: commit crimes. There was like a Hobo think there was
Speaker 2: some crossover between the hobo community and the yeg community.
Speaker 3: And if I've seen any Hobo language, it's pretty close
Speaker 3: to hieroglyphics.
Speaker 2: Yes, so we've come full circle. On October fourth, nineteen eleven,
Speaker 2: McCurdy and his yeggs robbed the wrong train. They made
Speaker 2: off with only forty six dollars and a jug of
Speaker 2: whiskey instead of the four hundred thousand dollars day four
Speaker 2: hundred thousand dollars they thought they were going to rob
Speaker 2: off this train.
Speaker 3: How many bindls did they bring to carry?
Speaker 2: Maybe that's how they got caught. They left the bendles
Speaker 2: on the train.
Speaker 3: But listening at home, who aren't comedy writers, bendles is
Speaker 3: the stick with the handkerchief attached to it that.
Speaker 2: You carry things in Robbing a train was not taken lightly,
Speaker 2: and a reward was issued from a Curdy two thousand
Speaker 2: dollars dead or alive, and in the early hours of
Speaker 2: October seventh, nineteen eleven. Just a few days later, law
Speaker 2: enforcement surrounded a barn near Bartlesville, Oklahoma, where McCurdy had
Speaker 2: taken shelter. He refused to surrender and opened fire on
Speaker 2: the officers. Not a great time in American history to
Speaker 2: be opening fire on it's ninety kind of law.
Speaker 3: If it's never a good time in American history to
Speaker 3: do that. But this is a yeggs last stand dude.
Speaker 2: Quote, he took a shot at me, first Officer Bob
Speaker 2: Fenton told the Blackwell Weekly Sun.
Speaker 3: Not quoted as him turning to all the other cops
Speaker 3: going right, right, guys.
Speaker 2: Then he took a shot at Officer Stringer Fenton, who's
Speaker 2: probably nodding yeah, yeah, yeah. And after that he took
Speaker 2: three shots at Officer Richard Wallace before we opened up.
Speaker 2: The on fight lasted more than an hour. Guns are
Speaker 2: not accurate, but when the shooting stopped would have been
Speaker 2: a lot faster if he had a foot powered MAI gun.
Speaker 2: What the fuck happened to that? Yeah?
Speaker 3: I couldn't get it together.
Speaker 2: I hope they at least filed a patent that could
Speaker 2: have been a real like he could have gone legit.
Speaker 3: He could have gone shilling no money for turn into
Speaker 3: no investors.
Speaker 2: They had no investors. I've never seen this, I don't think,
Speaker 2: but I imagine him basically like sitting in a bike seat,
Speaker 2: you know, with his legs up and like like that
Speaker 2: must have been what they were building. I don't know
Speaker 2: if those ever existed or if that's just in my imagination.
Speaker 3: I don't know. I mean, you just did some sort
Speaker 3: of like egg beatter boat things with your feet. So
Speaker 3: I don't know.
Speaker 2: Yeah, but you know, like shirt like pull like like
Speaker 2: a gatling gun that you power with your feet. Yes,
Speaker 2: that's a great idea and at all what I thought
Speaker 2: it was.
Speaker 3: I thought it was some sort of like a pedal,
Speaker 3: like a sitting like. I didn't even think it was
Speaker 3: powered like with your leg I thought it was like
Speaker 3: how they opened a trap and Ghostbusters. He just expresses
Speaker 3: it once, but yeah, you were thinking about the mechanic.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Anyway, when the shooting stopped, these guys
Speaker 2: found mccurty dead in the hayloft. And it's here in
Speaker 2: this remote hayloft in the middle of nowhere of Oklahoma,
Speaker 2: that the light leaves Elma mccurty's eyes and his story
Speaker 2: really begins. His body was taken to the Johnson Funeral
Speaker 2: Home in pa Huska, Oklahoma, where it was embalmed and
Speaker 2: preserved with a heavy dose of arsenic.
Speaker 3: Do you think it's hard to embalm a body if
Speaker 3: it's filled with bullet holes?
Speaker 2: Like you have to patch all that so shit doesn't
Speaker 2: just pour out. I think actually they did patch. Yes,
Speaker 2: I think they patched these bullet holes. Okay, with his mom,
Speaker 2: dad and his actual father long gone, and his aunt
Speaker 2: and uncle, I guess none too enthusiastic about picking up
Speaker 2: their body of this damn yegg Yeah. Elmer's corpse, mummified
Speaker 2: with chemicals, sat in the mortuary unclaimed for six months.
Speaker 3: So this is an accidental mummification.
Speaker 2: Well, he was mummified to be buried. His body was
Speaker 2: preserved because they didn't know what else to do with it.
Speaker 2: And I guess they weren't just gonna throw it out
Speaker 2: and no one came to claim.
Speaker 3: Times of Change could have sold it to a rich,
Speaker 3: rich party.
Speaker 2: Locals took notice of Elmer's body sitting in the mortuary,
Speaker 2: and he became an attraction worth paying for. Wait, why
Speaker 2: did locals see it at all? I think, is it
Speaker 2: in the window? I think they put him out front. Yeah,
Speaker 2: I think at some point they put him out front.
Speaker 2: And then we know quote the undertaker tressed McCurdy and
Speaker 2: street clothes, gave him a rifle and charged visitors five
Speaker 2: cents to see the embalmed bandit collecting the coins through
Speaker 2: the parted lips of the lifeless alba.
Speaker 3: That is somehow more disrespectful than using the door busting
Speaker 3: thing on. No, it's not actually I'm grave, No, but
Speaker 3: it's closed. But remember that detail the coin slot. In
Speaker 3: nineteen sixteen, two men posing it Jimmy fin Dick showed
Speaker 3: yeah to use the coin slot.
Speaker 2: In nineteen sixteen, two men posing as mccurty's brothers convinced
Speaker 2: the funeral home to release the body to them. They
Speaker 2: were not mccurty's brothers. They were actually James and Charles Patterson,
Speaker 2: carnival promoters, who proceeded to add McCurdy to the Patterson
Speaker 2: Traveling Slide show as quote the outlaw who would never
Speaker 2: be captured alive, and he became a grim centerpiece in
Speaker 2: a lineup of human curiosities.
Speaker 3: Do we need to outlaws circuses?
Speaker 2: Like?
Speaker 3: It's like, I am sorry, but there are too many
Speaker 3: main characters in these come from that background.
Speaker 2: It gets crazier. McCurdy's body then changed hands repeatedly. For
Speaker 2: more than half a century. The McCurdy mummy bounced from
Speaker 2: crime exhibits to drug awareness campaigns, to haunted houses and
Speaker 2: low budget films. In nineteen twenty two, the body had
Speaker 2: passed to Louis Sunny, a former cop turned showman who
Speaker 2: ran a traveling museum of crime featuring wax outlaws.
Speaker 3: Mccurty, this real man.
Speaker 2: Yeah, McCurdy was the only exhibit that was real, and
Speaker 2: Sonny tored him up and down the West coast for decades.
Speaker 2: In nineteen twenty eight, mccurty traveled with the side show
Speaker 2: for the Trans American FOS Race, a cross country race
Speaker 2: that I guess he brought all these bodies with him.
Speaker 2: When it passed through Oklahoma, Sonny's son, Sonny's son o Louise,
Speaker 2: Sonny's son Edward, refused to display the body for fear
Speaker 2: someone might recognize it because again, this is where it's from. Yeah,
Speaker 2: and this is only twenty twenty five years after he
Speaker 2: was killed. Not even this is nineteen twenty eight, and
Speaker 2: he was killed in nineteen eleven.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and the last time you were in Oklahoma, you
Speaker 3: were like where his brothers were gonna give him a
Speaker 3: proper burial. Well that not harness his ghost soul.
Speaker 2: That was like three owners back. But Edward was smart
Speaker 2: and was like, we can't just put this guy out
Speaker 2: on the side of the road. Someone might know him.
Speaker 2: So Bob Fenton, the deputy who had helped kill McCurdy,
Speaker 2: seventeen years earlier requested a private viewing. He looked at
Speaker 2: the body, said nothing, and walked away. Weird, weird. Maybe
Speaker 2: he had some unfinished business. I don't know, but he
Speaker 2: somehow knew the body was in town and wanted some
Speaker 2: alone time with.
Speaker 3: I don't why, but this story, in particular is the
Speaker 3: first time I felt that the soul is trapped in
Speaker 3: this mummy and that his unfinished business might be like
Speaker 3: a business deal.
Speaker 2: At this point. In nineteen thirty three, exploitation filmmaker Dwayne
Speaker 2: Esper borrowed the corpse and stood it in theater lobbies
Speaker 2: during screenings of his drug scare film Narcotic with an
Speaker 2: exclamation point, rebranding McCurdy as a dead dope fiend who'd
Speaker 2: killed himself or gotten himself killed during a drug store robbery. Wow,
Speaker 2: we used to be a film industry man. He used
Speaker 2: to be able to really make some money. After Louis
Speaker 2: Sunny died in nineteen forty nine, his other son Dan
Speaker 2: shoved the body into an a warehouse in la for
Speaker 2: fifteen years.
Speaker 3: Stop at what year was this?
Speaker 2: Nineteen forty nine to nineteen sixty four, Elma mccurty's body
Speaker 2: sat Raiders of the Lost Ark style.
Speaker 3: I mean we won the war. People were getting free houses.
Speaker 3: Maybe we don't need the gimmick anymore.
Speaker 2: In nineteen sixty four, the body was lent to another
Speaker 2: exploitation producer, Datacket. Back at War, David F. Friedman and
Speaker 2: Curtius's McCurdy makes what is described as a blink and
Speaker 2: you'll miss it appearance in the nineteen sixty seven film
Speaker 2: She Freak, filmed at the Kern County Fair in Bakersfield, California. Wow.
Speaker 2: In nineteen sixty eight, Dan sold mccurty and a bunch
Speaker 2: of wax figures for ten thousand dollars to Spooney sing,
Speaker 2: founder of the Hollywood Wax Museum. OH. Spooney deemed McCurdy
Speaker 2: too gruesome to display, so two Canadian operators it's only
Speaker 2: been lightly.
Speaker 3: Used for forty years or whatever.
Speaker 2: Two Canadian operators then took the body of mccurty to
Speaker 2: display it, as shown near Mount Rushmore, where a windstorm
Speaker 2: blew off the tips of his ears, fingers, and toes. Oh.
Speaker 2: By nineteen seventy one, the damaged corpse ended up at
Speaker 2: the Pike Amusement Zone in Long Beach, mounted to a
Speaker 2: coffin with a mechanical rig that made him twitch as
Speaker 2: the cars passed by in the dark. Wait r Long Beach,
Speaker 2: Our Long Beach. When one operator drilled a mounting hole
Speaker 2: in McCurdy's foot quote, some yellow, gooey stuff came out
Speaker 2: on the drill.
Speaker 3: I feel bad for this.
Speaker 2: He didn't this guy didn't know that this was a
Speaker 2: real corpse. He was just told put this, you know, yeah,
Speaker 2: you thought it was body. Yeah. Yeah. Finally, around nineteen
Speaker 2: seventy two, the operators of the amusement zone defaulted on
Speaker 2: their lease. Sounds like circus people. Yeah. McCurdy was confiscated,
Speaker 2: spent a year in an electricians closet, got painted with
Speaker 2: day glow fluorescent orange paint, and was hung from a
Speaker 2: noose inside the Laugh in the Dark Funhouse, where he
Speaker 2: dangled by his neck for four years.
Speaker 3: I am losing my mind with this story.
Speaker 2: By this point, no living person on earth knew that
Speaker 2: the glowing figure was retten from this noose was real.
Speaker 2: Everyone just assumed it's a Paine. Not only real, it's
Speaker 2: in hell.
Speaker 3: Had the soul of this man who I don't know
Speaker 3: if he was a bad enough criminal honesty.
Speaker 2: December eighth, nineteen seventy six, sixty five years after McCurdy
Speaker 2: is gunned down in Oklahoma, a crew from Universal Studios
Speaker 2: filming the episode Carnival of Spies episode nineteen, season four
Speaker 2: of The Six Million Dollar Man is filming inside the
Speaker 2: laugh in the Dark ride where this body is hanging.
Speaker 2: Crewmember Chris Haynes noticed the neon reddish orange figure swinging
Speaker 2: from a noose in the background of a shot. Didn't
Speaker 2: want to have a repeat of the Wizard of Oz
Speaker 2: background hanging and tried to move it. When he grabbed
Speaker 2: the arm, it snapped off in his hands, revealing human
Speaker 2: bone and desiccated muscle tissue beneath the layers of wax
Speaker 2: and paint.
Speaker 3: Holy shit.
Speaker 2: Homicide detectives werecalled and the body was removed on a stretch,
Speaker 2: this one beneath the white sheet. Here's how they solved
Speaker 2: it because of.
Speaker 3: The bill of sales. It's moved hands.
Speaker 2: Even better, and autopsy revealed his gunshot wounds, so they went, okay,
Speaker 2: this guy got plugged. We know he was killed by guns.
Speaker 2: When they opened his mouth, they found a corroded nineteen
Speaker 2: twenty four penny Oh because he used to put the
Speaker 2: money ticket stubs in his throat one reading Louis Sonny's
Speaker 2: Museum of Crime five two four South Main Street, Los Angeles.
Speaker 2: Holy shit. So they were able to track him back
Speaker 2: to Louis Sonny and they said, who the fuck is
Speaker 2: this guy?
Speaker 3: Go, Coin's probably worth more now than that entire like
Speaker 3: all of his sales combined.
Speaker 2: And here is sort of the kind of sweet, touching
Speaker 2: cherry on top of this whole thing. On April twenty second,
Speaker 2: nineteen seventy years.
Speaker 3: Time purchased him for eleven dollars and he is he's
Speaker 3: in the studio.
Speaker 2: He drops from the ceiling on the news. On April
Speaker 2: twenty second, nineteen seventy seven, a horse drawn hearst brought
Speaker 2: Elma McCurdy to the Boothill section of Summit View Cemetery
Speaker 2: in Guthrie, Oklahoma, where he was buried alongside fellow bandit
Speaker 2: Bill Doolin and his Wild Bunch gang. Three hundred people
Speaker 2: attended the service, and to prevent any further exploitation, two
Speaker 2: feet of concrete was allegedly poured over his casket. But
Speaker 2: the thing that kind of gets me not the most
Speaker 2: patriotic guy in the world, but on Veterans Day and
Speaker 2: Memorial Day, Elmer mccurty gets a flag placed on his grave,
Speaker 2: just like any other veteran.
Speaker 3: Yeah he was a vet. Wow.
Speaker 2: So that is that of the Horror Wars. Yeah, that
Speaker 2: of the Skeleton Army, the Mummy Marines. Wow.
Speaker 3: Wow wow Wow.
Speaker 2: That story is unbelievable, And I apologize to anybody. I
Speaker 2: think we briefly may have mentioned some part of this
Speaker 2: story I could not find in our notes where you're
Speaker 2: probably thinking of the.
Speaker 3: Guy with the sunglasses, the monk with the sunglasses.
Speaker 2: There may be, but there's somewhere I think we may
Speaker 2: have mentioned Elman mccurty, but we certainly did not tell
Speaker 2: his whole story. I didn't remember most of this, but
Speaker 2: the million Dollar Man thing, I was like, wait a second,
Speaker 2: did we do this?
Speaker 3: This story? The thing I love about this story is
Speaker 3: it's unbelievable and interesting and also doesn't make for a
Speaker 3: movie or anything. So it's not even like it's just
Speaker 3: interesting to learn about it.
Speaker 2: It is. But here's the thing. I kind of think
Speaker 2: Terrence Malick or like somebody could do remember what's his
Speaker 2: name made that movie a ghost story. Yeah, but we
Speaker 2: don't need that, I mean that movie.
Speaker 3: But yeah, there you go.
Speaker 2: This is sort of this is sort of the Troma
Speaker 2: version of a ghost story. I shitting, he's like leaking,
Speaker 2: He's hanging to me.
Speaker 3: It's in the same way that I feel like I
Speaker 3: can't watch RoboCop.
Speaker 2: I just feel too bad for RoboCop.
Speaker 3: That is life. Yeah, and it's kind of against his will.
Speaker 3: And also after we're shooting. Yeah, I just feel so
Speaker 3: like inherently bad for this. At least he was buried
Speaker 3: in the Boothill grave. Isn't that what you usually put criminals?
Speaker 2: Well, the Boothill Cemetery, I think is a famous cemetery
Speaker 2: because of the amount of gangsters, Yeah, buried there. I
Speaker 2: forget or I guess, well, no, you might be right.
Speaker 2: He's buried in the Boothill section of some of you.
Speaker 2: So I guess maybe that's the yeah.
Speaker 3: Because I only ever, I only know it from that
Speaker 3: fairly fictitious Billy Joel song about Billy the Kid. Mmm,
Speaker 3: because there's no I don't knows. I think where his
Speaker 3: real name was where he's buried, but they has like
Speaker 3: he mentions, like the Boothill grave that bears his name. Yeah,
Speaker 3: And until this story, I've ever heard the term Boothill before.
Speaker 2: Well, but forever if you're ever driving back through the
Speaker 2: middle of the country, but you can maybe stop and visit.
Speaker 2: Definitely Almer McCurdy, I definitely check him out.
Speaker 3: I've gone through Oklahoma a bunch of times.
Speaker 2: So that brings us to the fear tier. Ed. Where
Speaker 2: would you place mummies on your fear tire.
Speaker 3: Considerably lower than whatever Elmer had done? After like you
Speaker 3: were saying, being Mumma fiederre being attacked by a mummy
Speaker 3: just because we didn't get into many like mummy curse things.
Speaker 2: I placed mummies at a one on my fear too.
Speaker 3: It's a one.
Speaker 2: I'm not afraid of them in the movies. I'm not
Speaker 2: afraid of them in real life. I am terrified of
Speaker 2: what's happened to Elmer got through hapening to.
Speaker 3: Me exactly dude. Although interesting that he had a you know,
Speaker 3: he lived on in many ways, Yeah, just the worst
Speaker 3: possible to live on. Yeah, Yeah, that's a one.
Speaker 2: If his car and Bob we're trapped hanging on by
Speaker 2: a thread, they're hanging on by a thread.
Speaker 3: I would say, yeah, I would say a one. To
Speaker 3: go all the way back to what I said earlier
Speaker 3: in this episode, which is and mummies. Mummies are an afterthought.
Speaker 3: Mummies are a thing. It's also here, yeah, but tough
Speaker 3: go of it. If anything, I'm like an eight on
Speaker 3: not being left alone after I die.
Speaker 2: It's like a high for me now.
Speaker 3: Or it's like either giving some medicine or like turn
Speaker 3: into a fucking day glow a park attraction, or having
Speaker 3: the wealth you throw me around at parties. So like, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 3: like being mummified and the torturous existence thereafter. I'm actually
Speaker 3: very on board with mummy curses. I think it's warrnted. Yeah,
Speaker 3: but yeah, it's a fucking one.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's a one for me too. So that's the
Speaker 2: end of the episode. If you've made it this far,
Speaker 2: you probably love the show, so don't forget to go
Speaker 2: to patreon dot com slash scare it all the time.
Speaker 2: Sign up for one of our three mummification levels. You'll
Speaker 2: see them there on the site. We've got all kinds
Speaker 2: of good bonuses. Unfortunately, neither of us are equipped to
Speaker 2: put pine oil in your butt, but for pretty much
Speaker 2: everything else is available on the on the Patreon, so
Speaker 2: head over there, join us for some live shows, leave
Speaker 2: us a five star review, like, subscribe, follow, Wherever you're
Speaker 2: listening to this, don't miss an episode of Scared all
Speaker 2: the Time and until next time. I'm Chris Calari and
Speaker 2: I'm edva Cola. The show is Scared all the Time
Speaker 2: and we will see us soon. Bye bye, bye bye.
Speaker 3: Scared All the Time is co produced by Chris Calari
Speaker 3: and Edvacola.
Speaker 2: Written by Chris Calari.
Speaker 3: Edited by Edvacola.
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