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At last night’s Royal Television Society Awards Channel 4 documentary “Mummifying Alan” won the Science & Natural History award; focusing on the work of academics at The University of York.

Everyone knows that Egyptians used to mummify their dead: we have all seen the results propped up in museums, on documentaries, and indeed chasing terrified people on the silver screen. It’s a standard part of public awareness. What is surprising however is that no one quite knows how mummies are created.

The Ancient Egyptians, showing a flagrant disregard for posterity, left no instruction manual, and while Herodotus had a few notes on the subject, he was not contemporary with the ancient practice, which peaked in sophistication around a millennium before at the time of Tutankhamun. Luckily while we’ve been pottering about living our quaint little lives, the Mummy Research Group at York University have been delving into this interesting problem. Spanning the departments of archaeology and chemistry, this multidisciplinary group contains one Dr Stephen Buckley who wishes to more fully understand the process of mummification as employed by the ancients.

In order for Dr Buckley to test his theories on mummification, naturally a practical exercise was called for: a body would have to be acquired. Fortunately, Dr Buckley and his team found a volunteer, the late Alan Billis.

Mr Billis had been diagnosed with a terminal disease when he gave his consent for the post mortem use of his body to help answer this fascinating question, philosophically pointing out the importance of such donations in advancing human knowledge. It is gratifying to know therefore that Dr Buckley has revolutionised our understanding of the mummification process. Rather than piling the body in natron, natural salt, which rapidly extracts water from the body, water is used in the preservation method itself, avoiding the shrinking associated with the rapid water loss method. For the ancient Egyptians who believed in bodily resurrection, life-like preservation was jolly important, no doubt with a loss of height in the afterlife resulting in acute social embarrassment.

In case you missed it the first time, for fuller details of this unique study click here.