UK taxi driver becomes first mummy for 3,000 years

[Bosonic]

A former British taxi driver has become the first person in the world for 3,000 years to be mummified in the same way as the pharaohs.

Channel Four viewers will see Alan Billis turned into a mummy over the space of a few months as his body is preserved using the techniques which the ancient Egyptians used on Tutankhamun.

Billis had been terminally ill with cancer when he volunteered to undergo the procedure which a scientist has been working to recreate for many years.

The 61-year-old from Torquay in Devon had the backing of his wife Jan, who said: "I'm the only woman in the country who's got a mummy for a husband."

The process is revealed in a new documentary Mummifying Alan: Egypt's Last Secret to be screened next Monday, October 24.

Dr Stephen Buckley, a chemist and research fellow at York University, has spent 19 years trying to uncover the preservation techniques which the Egyptians used during the 18th dynasty.

http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-10-uk-taxi-driver-mummy-years.html

:+ (Creepy clown emoticon seems best emotional summation)

[hifiguy]

1. I think Dr. Bob Brier, the American Egyptologist undertook

a similar project a few years ago: http://www.egyptartsite.com/mummy.html

[Bosonic]

2. Well found

UK taxi driver becomes first mummy for 17 years doesn't have the same gravitas I guess.

[Hugabear]

3. Think John McCain beat them to it

Or perhaps McCain's handlers used a different method...

[Cassandra]

4. They certainly sucked his brains out...

through his nose.

[madinmaryland]

5. Sorry, but Keith Richards has been mummified most of his adult life!!

:P

[Sheepshank]

7. errr that would be 'pickled'. Not quite the same thing n/t

[dtexdem]

6. But won't that make him subject to judgement by Osiris?

And how will that ancient Egyptian god feel about a taxi driver?

[mainer]

8. Bob Brier's a great guy -- and yes, he did mummify someone first.

I know him and he's a brilliant Egyptologist. He also removed the brain in his subject, which was not done on this UK taxi driver. The brain, it turns out, is a lot more complicated to extract than just sucking or pulling it out through the nostril. Interesting that the UK experimenter did not even attempt to take out the brain.

Another inaccuracy in this story -- Egyptians were mummifying bodies in the Greco-Roman era as well, which was much more recent than 3,000 years ago.