There was a time we adorned our drawing rooms with them. In the 19th century, we staged private "unrollings" - a kind of assisted striptease. We have hawked their pulverised remains as medicine, made pigment from their ground-up bodies.
We have placed them at the service of nationalism, racism, and the manipulation of evolutionary and cultural history. We have made celebrities of them, creating a kind of a Who's Who of mummydom. We have drug tested them, subjected them to CT scans, inserted fibre optic tubes into their delicate interiors, stolen them, dismembered them, and just plain gawked at them.
For many mummies, long-term survival has turned out to be a fate worse than decay. And decay is no picnic. Enzymes seep out of their cellular nuclei and, like drops of acid, digest everything in their path. Fantastically ghastly things follow. For the ancient Egyptians - who began deactivating enzymes at least 4,500 years ago (though they weren't the first mummifiers) - embalming was a religious act: the preservation of flesh allowed a person's spiritual and life forces to recognise the body, enabling the reunion necessary for rebirth.
The details are too good to omit. Embalmers first pierced the cranial vault and threaded a metal tool through a nostril. Puncturing the bone between the eye sockets, they drew out grey folds of brain. They then made a small incision in the abdomen and, reaching inside the cavity, sliced up tissue and hauled out clumps of intestine and other organs. Finally, the abdominal cavity was stuffed with small linen bags containing natron (sodium carbonate and sodium bicarbonate) and the outer body was painted with a form of resin.
The Mummy Congress is full of such fascinating stuff. Consider paleoparasitology, the science that allows us to deduce, from the frightful state of mummy organs, the presence of particular parasites - parasites still with us.
The fact that mummies may add to medical knowledge is at the centre of the debate over dissection: the question of how, exactly, we should treat these emissaries from the past.
What do we owe them? What, if anything, do they owe us? Should we even display them? Some say no, that a well-preserved mummy is as recognisable as a modern corpse and demands a similar degree of protection and privacy.
Some say even the best-intentioned exhibits are carnival sideshows, chambers of horror. And yet we flock to them. Mummies are like dinosaurs for grown-ups, evoking a similar blend of fascination and fear, but also - being human - speaking to our horror of, and desire for, immortality.
Over the centuries, the earth has obliged us, yielding a number of spectacularly preserved dead. There is Tollund Man, a 2,400-year-old excavated from a Danish bog and now kept in a bullet-proof case under video surveillance.
There are the delicate Weerdinge Men, found arm in arm, looking like they're dancing to something like Tea for Two. There is Cherchen Man, a long-legged, Caucasian-looking mummy unearthed in China, still sporting a smashing pair of striped leggings and likely descended from European nomads (contradicting theories about when China and the West first met).
And then there is Juanita, discovered in the 1990s, the cause c=€9l=€8bre of mummies. Unlike other Inca children, who had freeze-dried, Juanita had frozen and so was phenomenally well-preserved. Scientists and the media descended on her, the Peruvian and American governments negotiated over her display.
National Geographic was subject to accusations of cultural imperialism, and Bill Clinton even thought about dating her: " . . . if I were a single man," he said, "I might ask that mummy out. That's a good-looking mummy."
Clinton, however, wasn't the only one with designs on Juanita: a Peruvian firm proposed extracting eggs from her ovaries and fertilizing them with modern sperm, thereby creating an Inca baby. In the midst of such mummy-induced frenzies fueled by ego, greed and the genuine desire for knowledge, is the moving tale of the Chilean Chinchorro mummies, the world's oldest.
Discovered in the 1980s, these 7,000-year-old mummies - unlike many of their counterparts around the world, who were garroted, asphyxiated or strangled before being left in the bogs - these were lovingly preserved. Many possessed moulded paste masks bearing different expressions.
In the earliest Chinchorro cemeteries, only children were found to have been so elaborately preserved. The young mummies had been laid in the sand, faithfully tended, painted and repainted by their families. The Chinchorro children hadn't been sacrificed; they were simply the victims of a high infant mortality rate, and it is thought that the attempt by parents to cope with such recurrent grief may have driven the Chinchorro to invent mummification.
The Mummy Congress is science writer Heather Pringle's first-person narration of her engagement with the mummies of the world and those who have worked with them. At times overly earnest, at times a little flat, the book is none the less full of absorbing digressions and a genuine concern for the long-dead. If you have a thing for mummies, you could do worse.
Molly McCloskey is a writer and critic