In Search of the Immortals
Mummies, Death and the Afterlife
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
Everyone knows that the ancient Egyptians were great mummifiers, and their sarcophagi and bandage-wrapped corpses are familiar images to us all. Yet across the vast sweep of history, we find many other great cultures in which the bodies of the dead were preserved as a matter of course.
In coastal Peru were the Chinchorros, whose mummifying culture flowered several millennia before Egypt's, and in the Andes were the Chachapoyas, the 'Cloud People,' a lost civilization which has only recently begun to be understood. In China's Taklamakan desert, the oddly-Caucasian looking people who established the Silk Route, which made possible the first trade between East and West, have left behind stunningly lifelike mummies. The ritually sacrificed bodies preserved in the peat bogs of northern Europe give us an extraordinary insight into life in the Dark Ages. And in the Canary Islands, perhaps most surprisingly of all, lived the Guanches, whose sophisticated mummification techniques - and whose cultural links with the Egyptians - Howard Reid explores here for the first time.
Taking his extraordinary first-hand experiences of discovering and filming mummies all over the world as his starting point, Howard Reid brings these ancient cultures vividly to life. And in so doing, In Search of the Immortals comes to represent his personal quest to find an answer to that most epic and timeless of human problems: the meaning of death.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This vivid, sympathetic account of the world's mummy-making cultures contributes much to the mummy trade, which does such a brisk business these days in books and on programs like National Geographic Explorer and the Discovery Channel that it might seem that there is nothing left to say. Another recent contribution to the genre, Heather Pringle's outstanding The Mummy Congress(Forecasts, May 21), will likely garner more attention this summer, but for its freshness and sensitivity, Reid's should do very well also. Reid, a documentary filmmaker and anthropologist living in England, sets out for exotic regions and vivifies ancient mummy-making cultures, artfully blending living and dead voices. He cites ancient scribes like Herodotus, Tacitus and the Babylonian author of the Gilgamesh epic, alongside accounts of and by the living descendents of mummy makers. Primarily, he seeks to understand "the paths that may have intended to tread beyond life" by examining "the bodies themselves, their attire and tomb accoutrements." Reid visits with the Maku in the Amazon to unravel the mystery of the Chinchorros of Peru, whose mummifying culture predates Egypt's. At a winter camp in southwest Siberia, he learns about the burial rites of the Kazakh nomads' warlord ancestors. He investigates the bog bodies of northern Europe; the peoples who established the Silk Route in China, whose mummies show evidence of an ancient European influence in the East; and the Guanches of the Canary Islands, who shared unexpected cultural links with the Egyptians. This intellectual adventure story focuses as much on life as on death; indeed, the way a culture regards death, the author implies, says much about how it regards life.
