Tales from the crypt

Originally printed in the Globe and Mail
Tales from the crypt
While mummies are still among the most popular museum artifacts in the West, many of them are returning to their ancient homes
VAL ROSS
From Thursday’s Globe and Mail
There’s no smell like it — the cloying, nasty, burning-tooth stink created by cutting into the bones of an Egyptian mummy. A few weeks ago, a small group of Royal Ontario Museum and University of Toronto scholars inhaled the smell in the form of weird, brown-black, bitumen-saturated dust when they gathered to extract a sample of shin bone from a mummy lying in the apartment of antiquities dealer Billy Jamieson. After drilling, the scholars carefully prised away an olive-sized bit and dropped it into a plastic bag so it could be taken to the university for carbon dating.
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