Egypt

Where is the dignity in the display of this corpse?

Independent (Philip Hensher)

It is interesting to note that in all the 100s of repetitive articles and posts alerting us to the fact that the body of Tutankhamun went on display this month (revealing his face to onlookers for the first time), so very few of them have addressed the issue of whether or not this is an appropriate way to treat the body of a dead person. In this article Philip Hensher takes a quick critical look at his own first impression in terms of modern and ancient approaches to the dead, but concludes that there is something truly disprespectful about the treatment of the mummified king:

To me, this looks like a sad and an unattractive object. The body of the 19-year-old boy is blackened into charcoal, his teeth peeping through the mouth. I find it difficult to reconcile any kind of notion of the dignity of death with the idea of putting a dead body, however old, in a glass case for people to pay to stare at. The trappings of Tutankhamun's tomb - the sublime funerary mask and the extraordinary beds and caskets - are one thing. They are the trappings of a civilisation, and don't represent a human being, but rather the nobility of his status. But Tutankhamun's corpse is another matter. That, really, is just a human being.

On the whole, we used only to put dead bodies on display in such a manner to express our contempt for the dead. One thinks of the display of the corpses of Mussolini and Clara Petacci at the end of the Second World War in Milan. Very occasionally, a corpse might be displayed in churches to demonstrate its extraordinary sanctity. Recently, things have started to change, and being remarkable neither for great wickedness or great virtue will no longer preserve you against being put on display. I found it very difficult to come to terms with Gunther von Hagen's travelling show of laminated corpses in undignified positions, believing that the dead ought to be treated better than that.

There is something distasteful about the failure to treat the dead with proper respect, to bury or cremate them with due ceremony. For me, and for many people, the respect due to the dead does not diminish with the decades or the centuries.

See the above page for the full story.

Philip Hensher is also featured on the Times Online's Egypt Travel Special pages, with an article entitled My Secret Cairo.

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Egypt