Riggs highlights this while also, quite appropriately I think, stressing that her discipline of Egyptology is not all mummies all the time. At the end of the day, this is the story of British archaeologists digging up the dead bodies of an ancient culture because they wanted to and had the power to make it happen.
In the case of Tutankhamun, the subject is millennia dead-but I don’t really see that making much of a difference. The truth is that for the vast majority of the history of science, the scientists, the people involved, have often resorted to callous, careless, cruel experiments and methodology to get answers. We like to hold up science as a neutral process, but that is true only in the most abstract sense of the scientific method. These are the science history books I truly appreciate: the ones that grapple with the darkness at the root of Western science’s often harmful history. That was my main concern going in-that the book would be a little shallow and not engage with the colonial elephant in the room-and Riggs allayed it immediately. Much to my satisfaction, Riggs explicitly calls out the colonialist and imperialist forces that shaped everything about Tutankhamun’s treatment, from his discovery up to the present day. Riggs weaves her own personal backstory throughout the book as she examines the discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb, the subsequent analyses of his tomb and body, and the way the objects of his tomb became an important part of Egypt’s export of its culture on tour for political and economic benefits. “Let’s dive into this,” I thought, “and see what more I can learn.”
So when I saw Public Affairs offering eARCs, yeah, it touched something deep within my psyche. Though it had no such enduring impact on me, I remember the requisite ancient Egypt unit in elementary school, the making of a papier-mâché mummy entombed in a shoebox sarcophagus painted like Tutankhamun’s famous funerary mask. Christina Riggs does not exaggerate when she talks about the “Tut-mania” that swept the world over and over throughout the twentieth century, literally inspiring so many people like her to become Egyptologists. Treasured: How Tutankhamun Shaped a Century promised something very tantalizing: a look into a cultural phenomenon that took the world by storm a hundred years ago. To say that I windmill-slammed the request button on NetGalley for this book is an understatement.
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