In 1926: living at the edge of time - Monoskop

MUMMIES 153
vades the street life of Kottbus, its administrative center. Soon, however,
he notices more archaic cultural forms and a strange linguistic accent,
both of which are characteristic of a Slavic tribe known as the Wends.
At the point where the impossibly present past engages in an improbable
encounter with cultural otherness, the author comes upon some mummies-deep
in the crypt of a local church. Although these mummies are
only two hundred years old and have nothing to do with Slavic culture,
they inspire in the beholder the same awe that Carter feels in the tomb
of Tutankhamen. Compressing historical distance and straddling the
border of death, they bring the past to life:
Tutankhamen in the Spree Forest! The church has a crypt, with a dozen
unsealed wooden coffins. Opening them, one finds authentic and surprisingly
well-preserved mummies. They are not as old as the Egyptian
mummies, but, skillfully embalmed, they have survived the air and
humidity of two hundred years. There is an officer from the time of
Friedrich Wilhelm I, with a dried-out skull resembling that of the late
Ramses II in the Cairo Museum. The silks that surround him and the
leather of his high riding-boots are remarkably well preserved. After
two hundred years, his three-cornered hat is still tucked under his
withered arm. Next to him lies a young woman with her newborn; and
then some more male mummies. It is no different from the Sakkara.
Interpretation and its inherent desire for depth lead to such encounters.
[see Authenticity vs. Artificiality] Tutankhamen's body lies in the
innermost chamber of a tomb, in the innermost of four coffins. The
process of discovering and unwrapping it requires enormous historical
knowledge and technical expertise, and culminates in an experience that
is overwhelming-and somehow definitive. But while this is an experience
of authenticity, because it enables concrete relics of the past to enter
the physical immediacy of the present, it is also an experience doomed
to remain unfulfilled. Like Tutankhamen's body, from which the embalmers
have extracted the brain and the inner organs, his face neither
"contains" nor "yields" the essence of his life. Howard Carter gives a
good historical explanation for the way in which ancient Egyptian artifacts
resist interpretation and reconstruction: "Much must remain dark
and obscure in the life of the ancient Egyptians ... because the main
idea behind the cults by which they are revealed to us, was to make clear