Mummified: The stories behind Egyptian mummies in museums

The unsettling stories of how Egyptian mummies came to be held in British and French museums.

We all know what a mummy is – or do we? In Mummified, Angela Stienne explores the little-known stories behind the ancient Egyptian remains displayed in British and French museums.

Taking the reader on a journey between Egypt, Paris and London, Stienne exposes a murky world of grave-robbing, theft and callously treated human remains. Mummies have been unrolled in public, dissected for race studies and even eaten for their supposed health-giving properties. But does the fact they are thousands of years old mean they can be treated as objects, or do we owe them the same respect we would any other human body?

Investigating matters of life and death and the ethics of collection and display, Mummified offers a fresh perspective on these ancient bodies, which have fascinated Europeans for centuries.