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A dying man offers up his body for a unique experiment to help solve one of the greatest mysteries of ancient Egypt. The art of mummification. How did the Egyptians preserve these people so well? We still haven't fully understood it simply because the ancient Egyptians themselves regarded this as the ultimate secret art. But one scientist thinks he has finally cracked the code. He's turned current understanding, including my own, completely on its head. Now he's come up with a radical plan to prove his new theory.
Applying the same techniques used 3,000 years ago on the Egyptian pharaohs, he will mummify one extraordinary man. That's what we all strive for is to learn. This is mummification but in a completely new light. Shame I'm not going to be around to see it, eh? I quite like documentaries. Egyptian civilization dominated the ancient world. For the last 9 years, Dr. Jo Fletcher of the University of York in England has been on a quest to discover its most intriguing secret.
The mummification of the pharaohs. It just allows us to look into their faces and see them as the same kind of individuals as you or I. We can really try and tap into what made the ancient Egyptians tick. The human body starts to decompose around 4 minutes after death. So, how did the Egyptians manage to preserve them for more than 3,000 years? In all the hieroglyphs and scripts of ancient Egypt, there is no written formula for mummification. Its techniques must have been passed down by word of mouth alone. because the well-being of Egypt depended on it.
It meant that even after death, the pharaoh could still protect the nation in spirit. The death of any pharaoh was a crisis point for the ancient Egyptians, and it was essential that each deceased pharaoh be transformed into a mummy to create, basically, a permanent home for the soul. The mummified pharaoh's soul could still recognize his body and dwell there forever. If the divine royal soul could last forever, so could Egypt. It was a kind of uh guarantee that each one would last for eternity. With the future of Egypt at stake, mummification was a matter of national security. But to crack the code, Jo Fletcher has an expert ally.
Her partner and academic colleague back home in England. Archaeological chemist Dr. Stephen Buckley is on the verge of a major discovery. Using cutting-edge science, he believes that he is closer than anyone before him to answering the question, "How did the ancient Egyptians so perfectly stop time at the moment of death?" I have come up with fantastic new insights that tell us a very great deal. It has turned current understanding, including my own, completely on its head. As a chemist, Buckley probes deeply.
He can look beneath the mummy's skin. What I was able to do was to look at things in quite a different way, and in doing so, get information that perhaps people had missed. Stephen's insights are driven by painstaking chemical analysis of mummy tissue samples. He has identified intriguing but familiar ingredients. Traces of salt, beeswax, and natural oils and resins. These are the sorts of materials that the ancient Egyptians had access to and used in mummification.
Stephen set out to master the skills of the very best Egyptian embalmers by testing these ancient ingredients on samples of pigs in nearly 200 mummification experiments. Now, he's ready to prove his theory in the most challenging way possible. You really need to do a human being to test it ultimately. I felt as long as the person and the family had their eyes open and wanted to do this, it was the right thing to do. The opportunity has finally arrived.
Now, in a remarkable gift to science, a human donor has given his body to be mummified in the same way as ancient Egypt's very best. Over the next 3 months, a carefully assembled team of experts will attempt to preserve his body using techniques last practiced by the ancient Egyptians more than 3,000 years ago. Professor Peter Vanezis is one of the world's top forensic pathologists. What we're doing here is going to help us understand a lot more and improve our knowledge on the whole process of mummification.
He has performed more than 10,000 autopsies, many on murder victims. If I see something and I've never encountered it before, I do say, "What's that? What's this all about?" And try and investigate it. It's a challenge. Forensic anthropologist Professor Bill Bass is a world expert in human decomposition. All of my adult life, I have been interested in looking at the changes that occur to teach students on what happens after death. Bass is the pioneering scientist behind the Body Farm in Knoxville, Tennessee, where human donors give their bodies for research.
People wonder. People wonder, "Well, what happens? What happens when a body decays?" Professor Bass and his colleague Rebecca Taylor will monitor the project from Tennessee. But the most important person in this story is not a scientist. British cab driver Alan Billis was diagnosed with terminal lung cancer in 2009. I was reading the paper and there was a little piece that volunteer with a terminal illness to donate their body to be mummified. And I thought, well, I fit that category. I'll And I'll How many people have been leaving their bodies to science for years? It's not going to go away, is it? So, you just have to get on with it. After 36 years of marriage, Alan's wife, Jan, is used to surprises.
Oh, he just said off them phoned up someone about being mummified. I said, "You what?" "Yes, I phoned up someone about being mummified." I thought, "Oh, here he goes again." Cuz he's he's just the sort of thing you would expect him to do. So, I don't know. Saves you the money on the funeral, now. Oh, for goodness' sake, Alan. If people don't volunteer for things or offer to do things, nothing gets found out. So, I know why Yeah, they mummified people centuries ago, but they're trying to copy that same way of doing it.
4 months after this interview, in January 2011, Alan finally lost his battle with cancer. He was 61 years old. Now, he begins a new journey. The mummification is about to begin. The clock is ticking. When a person dies, their body starts to decay within minutes. The scientists aim to stop this process in its tracks forever. The ancient Egyptian art of mummification is about to be reborn.
A team of modern scientists is trying to crack the secret techniques of ancient Egyptian mummification. Now, after years of detailed chemical analysis, they are ready to put their theory to the ultimate test on a human volunteer. They will first make a small incision in the abdomen, through which the internal organs will be removed. Where do you think we should actually make this incision? It's on the left side somewhere, isn't it, Stephen? Yeah, it should be sort of around here. And I would say about that size. Ancient Egyptians believed that mummification would preserve the body, allowing it to reunite with the soul after death.
The Egyptian embalmers knew that decay started and spread from the internal organs, so they were removed as soon after death as possible and placed in canopic jars. Egyptologist Dr. Jo Fletcher is part of the mummification team. It was essential that the internal organs were taken out of the body cavity. And so, the intestines, the liver, the stomach, and the lungs all had to be removed through a small incision in the left side of the body. To minimize damage, the Egyptians extracted the organs through a cut around 4 in long.
This type of keyhole surgery is pathologist Peter Vanezis' first challenge. Just make a small cut I'm relying on my anatomical knowledge to tell me where everything is. But here I'm working blind. It's totally different. 28 ft of intestines must be removed through the small gap. Forensic anthropologist Professor Bill Bass and Rebecca Taylor are experts in human decomposition. space as the internal organs They are monitoring the procedure remotely. Your major bacteria is in the digestive tract. When you took out the digestive system, you've taken out your major bacteria creator there. If you don't, then that body is not going to last very long because your bacterial count is building up.
With the intestines, stomach, and liver removed, the team now moves further inside the body. I've got to separate the lungs from the heart. That could be quite difficult to do. I can feel the top of the lungs. They're really stuck down, making life quite difficult for me. Retrieving the lungs is the toughest challenge. Not only are they penned in by the rib cage, but they must be removed without damaging Alan's heart. For the Egyptians, it was vital to preserve the heart inside the body.
It had very special significance. The Egyptians regarded the heart much as we understand the brain to function now. The heart was the seat of wisdom and intelligence and intellect, and so it was essential that the heart remained inside the body. With just the heart remaining, the modern-day mummy makers now pack Alan's body cavity with small bags of linen, just like those found inside Egyptian mummies. Just make sure this just cavity is really full. Is it filling up? It's beginning to, yes. The bags replace the missing organs, restoring Alan's outward appearance.
I think that actually does it. We've got the right We've got the shape there. We've got enough in the abdomen. It's firm. That only leaves one major organ, the brain. It was once thought that all Egyptian mummies had their brains removed through the nostrils with a metal hook. But this X-ray of a 3,000-year-old mummy's head suggests otherwise. It looks very much, looking at these scans, that you can see quite clearly the outline of the brain here. So, it's obviously been left in.
The brain has shrunk to less than half its size and settled at the back of the skull, but it's still clearly visible. Although the consensus is generally the brain was removed, clearly that wasn't the case. Because it can clearly be well preserved without doing that, then uh for me uh his brain needs to be left in place. Right. Okay. That makes sense. I've got nothing in my body I'd like to keep, so whatever bits they want to put in jars and hide them away, they can do. Experiment is all about is trying different processes to make things work. If it doesn't work, it's not the end of the world, is it?
Now the team faces its biggest hurdle. Somehow they must halt tissue decay caused by water, which makes up 70% of the body mass. And they can't use a single modern-day chemical. The creation of a 21st century mummy using the very best ancient Egyptian methods moves into its second phase. The modern embalmers have removed the internal organs. Now the incisions are sealed with beeswax in the ancient Egyptian tradition. But decomposition still threatens the body from within.
The body must be dried out or the fluid in the tissues will destroy it. Chemical analysis of ancient mummies has revealed that a key ingredient in this process was a type of salt called natron. Egyptians have gathered natron from dry lake beds like these for more than 4,000 years. Its use was first described by the ancient Greek historian Herodotus, who visited Egypt around 450 BC. He wrote that the Egyptians preserved their mummies the same way they preserved fish. First they remove the entrails, then they packed them in salt to dry.
The salt draws the moisture from the flesh and up through the skin where it's absorbed by the salt. But Stephen Buckley has discovered evidence that suggests the Egyptians also developed another far superior method. His breakthrough came in 2003 when Buckley and Dr. Jo Fletcher were given access to a mysterious tomb in the Valley of the Kings known as KV35. Inside lay three exceptionally preserved royal mummies including one of the great figures of ancient Egypt Queen Tiye. She would come to transform Buckley and Fletcher's ideas about mummification and turn current understanding on its head.
I think one of the best moments for me [snorts] was the x-rays coming up digitally on the screen. It was very much a lightbulb moment, no question. As a chemist, Buckley saw something mysterious deep beneath her skin. This artifact, this strange sort of flakes in and around the arms. It was telling me this could well be extremely important. Queen Tiye was part of a very special family the 18th Dynasty. Ruling for two and a half centuries, this legendary family included the most iconic names of ancient Egypt.
Nefertiti Akhenaten and the most famous of all Tutankhamun. The 18th Dynasty was when Buckley believes mummification reached its peak. We see throughout the 18th Dynasty actually an improvement until the end of the 18th Dynasty they've clearly perfected it and you have fantastically lifelike mummies. Buckley suspected that the mystery flakes in Queen Tiye were salt crystals and held the key to how the 18th Dynasty was preserved. Because he would discover the same pattern in her relatives.
Queen Tiye's father Yuya had them in his arm. You can see very, very nicely the salt crystals in his tissue. Very nice example of excellent. Her mother, Tuya, had them in her legs. In the 18th Dynasty, pharaoh after pharaoh showed the same telltale signs. They were clearly mummified in a very, very different way. To us it felt, um, was she giving us a clue? Was she giving us a hint of one of the greatest secrets of the ancient Egyptians? But the question arises, if it is salt, how did it get beneath the skin at all?
Piling the salts on wouldn't have produced salt within the tissue because there wouldn't have been an easy way of these salt crystals getting in. Buckley believes there is only one way to get salt deep inside the tissues. Against what seems common sense, he's going to immerse Alan Billis in a natron bath. Of course, the idea of a natron bath as a salt solution sounds mad, really, because, um, you're actually using water to dry out a body. It just sounds so counterintuitive, uh, and so strange. Strange or not, chemical analysis has convinced Dr. Buckley that it's the only way to produce a mummy that meets the 18th Dynasty gold standard.
He plans to fill the bath with a powerful natron solution. He believes the salt solution will diffuse throughout Alan's body, creating an alkaline environment to inhibit bacteria and stop enzymes from destroying the body. But before Stephen Buckley, Egyptologists had dismissed the idea of a natron bath. Dead bodies in salt water normally don't mix. If we find dead bodies in the sea, um we will usually see them pretty decomposed. The thought of actually putting Alan in water just seemed absolutely crazy because to me when you put uh a body into water, they've gone off very quickly.
Do you think that this water solution is going to be effective? Well, you've got to get it for the preservative to work, you've got to get it running through the whole body. All the tissue on the inside. Dr. Buckley is mixing up a solution that precisely matches that of Egyptian natron. At this concentration, it is almost as caustic as bleach. I'm adding the alkali, bicarbonate and carbonate, and they can cause quite severe burns. So, it makes sense to uh be a little bit careful. Getting the proper proportions of natron to water is critical. If you were to have the concentration too low in terms of the salt, what you may end up doing is drive water into the body. You would
probably bloat the body up with water. You may actually help um enhance putrefaction and rapidly break down the body. But if the solution is too strong, it could seriously damage the soft tissues. It would be a chemical burn, maybe? Oh, yeah. You I think you would basically corrode the top layer of the skin. Yeah. But Buckley has a secret safeguard based on his chemical analysis of Egyptian mummies. Before he immerses the body, he'll coat Alan with a mixture of ancient Egyptian ingredients, sesame oil, resin, and beeswax. When the sesame oil dries, the beeswax and resin will form a barrier layer on the skin to stop it from bleaching. From this point on, Alan Billis
will be venturing into the unknown. His body will stay in the solution for 35 days, where his flesh could decompose or begin to stabilize. I mean, how else are you going to know this unless you do something like this? Is this going to work? Well, I don't know. If this does work, it will provide a new insight into the golden era of Egyptian mummification. It's an experiment. Perhaps it won't serve any purpose to save life or anything, but people can still learn from it. That's what we all strive for is to learn. If it fails, then Alan will have given up his body for nothing.
I'm not particularly worried. I was more concerned with Jan's reaction because she's quite a caring person. He's swimming in his tank. Oh, but he's having a lovely time. It's strange because I would never have thought it, but every single day I think about him. I think she's a bit skeptical about him. He is mostly a bloody good sleep. Cuz he always liked to be a fool. He could always make a joke out of anything. But Alan Billis is about to be transformed.
Show them I'm not going to be around to see it, am I? I quite like documentaries. The mummification of Alan Billis has reached a critical phase. The human body donor is now soaking in a bath of natron, an Egyptian salt. But why would the ancient embalmers risk putting a dead body in water? The team believes it may have had a psychological as well as physical inspiration. Its source, the mighty Nile. Since ancient times, the Nile has flooded every year, bringing new life to the dry lands. For the ancient Egyptians, this yearly
inundation was also connected to their story of creation and an eternal cycle of death and rebirth. For Egyptologist Dr. Jo Fletcher, this was a key motivation for immersing the royals of the 18th Dynasty in water. It's rebirth. It's new life. It's resurrection. It's living forever, which is exactly what the ancient Egyptians wanted to achieve. The dead will be reborn into the next world just in the same way we are born into this life. Before these mummies went in the tomb, they went back into the womb.
Day 21, at the lab, there has been a dramatic transformation. Allen's bath has turned red, blood red. It may be a good sign, an indication that the natron has penetrated deep beneath the skin and dissolved the hemoglobin in his tissues. But until the bath is drained, no one knows for sure. Two weeks later, the team is about to find out. They are removing the body. Dr. Buckley has only tried the natron bath before on piglets. A human body is very different. Okay. Cuz this is the critical time when he's at his most fragile, really.
His belly might seem uh a little distended, but it was a little that way before he went in and um but it should reverse itself. The solution has soaked into the linen packed into Allen's body cavity distending his abdomen. The straps have rubbed away some protective beeswax allowing the skin to bleach in places and left pinch marks on the body. I think I've really always had a great deal of respect for the Egyptian embalmers. Doing this project I have yet more respect for them because of the difficulties that you see when you try it for real.
Stephen Buckley hopes he has transformed Alan's body chemistry. The natron bath is highly alkaline. As the solution soaks into the skin he believes it will have both driven out the internal liquids and started to break down the body fat into a new and highly stable form. This should make Alan's body far more resistant to decomposition. At the body farm in Tennessee the results come as a revelation. It's kind of a little bit ingenious I think. The body looks pretty good to me. It does to me too. Yes, I mean something has slowed down the decay process because if you call me to say how long has he been there I'd say maybe 3 days at the most.
He's in good shape. Alan's saturated body will now be moved to a heated chamber to dry out. Dr. Buckley believes this would have been the logical next step for the ancient Egyptian mummy makers. I just programmed the unit to replicate Egypt so that's high temperature low humidity. Over the next 2 weeks Alan's body will be slowly dried. He will then be ready for the last transformative stage in his journey to becoming a real-life royal mummy. The body of human donor Alan Billis is edging steadily closer to becoming a mummy.
It's day 51. He's dry. And he's about to be dressed, wrapped from head to toe in linen. Wrapping was a complex religious ritual. Charmed objects were bound inside to safeguard the dead pharaoh's soul. The wrapping itself was a shield against physical harm. For the Egyptian embalmers, this would be the very last time they would see the face of their pharaoh. I'm quite confident that we're going to achieve what we want to achieve. Once we do wrap his face, it to me it's it's also very emotional because this is very final.
Alan will now be left to dry for a final 6 weeks. Only then can the team decide whether his mummification is a success or a failure. But before the team of scientists get to examine him, this modern-day pharaoh will receive one last farewell. I didn't want to go and see him at first. I thought about him exactly the same if he'd been buried or cremated. I couldn't see, in all honesty, that it's any different. It was only just recently that I suddenly thought to myself, "I think I'm going to go and see him." Alan's widow, Jan, is coming for a special viewing.
I'm more interested to see what he looks like as a mummy. It's the first time Jan has seen her husband since he died. As a final gift, she has decided to bring family photos to place with his mummy. Well, I never did. Hi, good to see you, love. Lying here as normal, fast asleep. Do you think? Underneath him, pet. My. I'm quite surprised that I feel I need to feel his hands. Yeah. And it's his hands more his wrists Yeah. Well, I Can you tell it's him? Yes. Just feeling. Dear fellow. Well, I'm never did. Your lordship. Would he have approved?
Oh, he'd be in his glory. Okay? Yes. So, I can give you permission to leave him and you'll be happy leaving him. You trust me. very happy. I think you've looked after him beautifully. So, yes, you can stay with us. You'll look after you far better than I did, dear. Aw, bless him. Come on. Okay. Don't you cry. It'll be me crying. In Sheffield, the mummification process takes another step forward. The team are about to x-ray Alan's body. X-rays could reveal salt crystals and provide a vital link between Alan and the mummies of the 18th Dynasty. With Alan Billis, he's been mummified in an natron bath. So, if I see the salt crystals in him,
then it points to the Egyptian royal mummies being mummified in exactly the same way. In the bath, Alan's soft tissues were infused with salt solution. But now, after several weeks of drying, the salt should be forming crystals. Stephen targets the x-ray beam on Alan's legs. There is plenty of salt in the tissue. The density here suggests that it's salt and it's starting to come through. Both leg bones show up as dense white. Outside the bone, the rest of the soft tissue is filled with streaks of white salt.
It's patchy, isn't it? It's patchy, but it's quite uniform in the same way as that it's affecting all the tissues. It's not just in one area. The white streaks are present across the entire body, the shoulders and arms, legs, and feet. So, this does show exactly what you get when you use a natron bath. Alan is gradually taking on the features of an 18th Dynasty mummy. I mean, the reality is the time frame involved is relatively short. The longer you leave it, the crystals will grow larger. That's the way it works.
The process is nearly complete. Over the last 90 days, Alan's body has been disemboweled, packed with linen, and sprayed in a protective oil. Let's see what it looks He has spent 5 weeks in a salt bath, wrapped, and then dried for a further 6 weeks. Tomorrow is the final day of scientific analysis, when at last his fully mummified body will be revealed. It's more than 3,000 years since the ancient Egyptians of the 18th Dynasty perfected a preservation technique that produced the best mummies ever.
Now, it's time to see whether their methods have been successfully reproduced on Alan Billis, a 61-year-old cab driver from England. Alan donated his body to be mummified, and today is the day of reckoning. Now, the team of modern-day embalmers is coming together 3 months after the process began. They know that if Alan's body is to survive for 3,000 years, it is essential that decomposition has been halted completely.
CT scans will reveal the condition of Alan's deepest tissues. Pathologist Professor Venessis wants to assess whether ultimately these tissues have been stabilized. We need to have the appearances uh of dark, leathery, hard tissue. I'm actually very excited to see how this is going to pan out. For archaeological chemist Stephen Buckley, it will be the culmination of almost 20 years of research into the methods of Egyptian mummification. What's so important about today is I'm actually going to see Alan's body in the condition that the best Egyptian mummies were at the time they were going into the tomb, which was a crucial time for the soul to recognize the body. I will see
how well he's preserved now, and therefore how he's going to look in the long term. Dr. Jo Fletcher, the Egyptologist on the team, has come to witness the renaissance of an ancient secret art. It's as if we're scrolling back to a very special time in Egypt's history. They were trying to almost deny that death had happened and keep uh these specific, very special individuals here on Earth in as lifelike a way as possible. And if we've achieved that with Alan, that would be a tremendous thing. Even if Dr. Buckley and Dr. Fletcher's theory is right, this is a method that hasn't been tried in more than 3,000 years. If they got a single step wrong, then Allan's body may have started to decay
or worse, putrefy. There's only one way to find out. The soft tissues of Allan's foot provide the first critical clue. Are you pleased with that? Yeah, very. Yeah, in good condition. Yeah, that is amazing. Still some give as well. You've got good uh good delineation of the tissue, the um shape of the foot because you've got quite a lot of tissue here as well. As Steven says, there's still a lot of give in the skin underneath, especially. The natron salts have transformed Allan's skin, muscle, and body fat, halting decomposition and stabilizing his tissues.
This foot looks good. It's properly stable as far as the changes are concerned. It's got a nice color to it. It's not like a decomposed body. It would have been soft and slimy. It was slimy and soft. Precisely. It's It's almost like a cast, isn't Yeah, it is. That Yeah, that's a good description, a cast. Professor Venis needs to check that the changes are uniform. Allan's hand has lost a greater proportion of water and fat, but it has the same signs of stability.
This has lost a lot more tissue, particularly Yeah. from the ends of the fingers. The top of the hand at the back is a bit more like the foot where it's softer, um but still has this leathery texture to it. Do you expect the fingers to move at any point? No. And all those fingernails, they're on there. they? Yeah, they are. We need to see some more, then. With the CT scan, Professor Venis can examine Alan's entire body. He explores the outer layers of soft tissue. The skin itself has this leathery appearance, which indicates that he has become mummified all over. We can see it over the chest, over the arms in particular. It does look as if it's a
pretty uniform mummification, which is good. The body cavities are scanned for signs of decay. We can actually take layers off the body and go down to the cavity. The decomposition process seems to have been arrested. Even the deepest tissues are stable. It makes me very confident that his tissues have been mummified correctly and in a very successful manner. But the final proof is still to come. For a modern-day cab driver to be reborn as an Egyptian pharaoh, he has to look the part. In a break with Egyptian tradition, they decide to unwrap his face, so they can compare him to how other Egyptian mummies look unmasked.
All right, Alan. This is your moment of truth. Let's see how he'll look, Alan. Wow. There you go, Alan. It works. Yeah. The soul would recognize him, no question. Brilliant. Definitely a success. Yeah. Yeah, you can still tell it's Alan. Yeah, definitely. Absolutely. It has been preserved, both the head and the stubble and the eyebrows. Um and so really I mean the result is fantastic. It's very pleasing. It's been so successful. It's extraordinary. We're the very first people to see a mummy produced in this way.
I'm impressed at the what good shape that body is. I think this is a great research project. We're learning more about what they did 3,000 years ago. He's definitely as good as the best of the royal mummies, no question. So I think we can be pretty happy. The preservation process has captured the essence of him. It's captured his character, that the way he always looked in life. It does look as if he's asleep. And I think that's the mark of success. So he is a true mummy. I think he's on the road to looking very much like the best of the 18th Dynasty in 3,000 years time. He's perfectly preserved.
For the moment, Alan's body will remain under scientific observation, where the team will continue to monitor him. We're all into new territory here. We've taken the next step in looking at it scientifically. A hundred years from now, I'll bet you're going to see that there's been tremendous strides made in this procedure. It's all been made possible by the gift of one exceptional man. I'd like to hope I'm going to be missed. I've had quite a good life.
I'm going to be hanging around a bit longer, that's all. That's my legacy, I suppose.
