Mummies—named after the bitumen tar, mum, used to coat the linen winding strips around them—have long held an almost magical fascination. The "civilized" world was titillated by Egypt's ...

(The word "mummy" is from an Arabic word for bitumen ... to have been preserved by God to reinforce faith. Or perhaps the catacombs were made as a great vanitas, a memento mori, an illustration ...

Mummies are practically synonymous with Ancient Egypt. The term conjures up images of an undead creature wrapped in bandages rising from its sarcophagus deep within a pyramid. But mummies aren’t ...

A mummy, to put it bluntly, is an old dead body. But unlike a skeleton or a fossil, a mummy still retains some of the soft tissue it had when it was alive—most often skin, but sometimes organs ...

A cross inlaid in the floor of a library marks the spot where Indiana Jones has to dig to access the ancient catacombs of Venice in the film Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. The catacombs ...

Like the Capuchin Catacombs in Sicily, the Museum of Mummies in the small, Umbrian town of Ferentillo houses a collection of ...