What are the reasons you should dig up mummies?

To start with, digging up bodies automatically gets you into murky territory. Unless they've willed their bodies to science, most people expect their bodies to be left alone. And we know the mummies especially expected that. read more

If you go to an Egyptian tomb, it's sufficiently exotic to be exciting, if you're digging someone up from underneath a carpark, in Leicester, it's basically a rescue, if you go to a charming village graveyard with a spade, you're a horrible human being; all the more so if there's sinister chanting in the background, and candles liberally strewn around the place. read more

To start with, digging up bodies automatically gets you into murky territory. Unless they've willed their bodies to science, most people expect their bodies to be left alone. And we know the mummies especially expected that. read more

John M. Adams, director emeritus of the Orange County Public Library, is author of The Millionaire and the Mummies: Theodore Davis’s Gilded Age in the Valley of Kings, the first biography of the robber baron archaeologist, published by the St. Martin’s Press. read more