IN THE NEWS
KING TOOT: TORQUAY CAB DRIVER MUMMIFIED IN FRONT OF TV CAMERAS!!
One ruled over a vast kingdom from his royal palace by the Nile. The other reigned over the roads of Torquay from behind the wheel of his taxi. But despite their vastly different lives, and some 3,000 years between them, King Tutankhamun and Alan Billis have one impor- tant thing in common. The late Mr Billis has become the first man to be mummified in the style of the ancient Egyptian pharoahs for at least 3,000 years. And the process was re- vealed in a Channel 4 documentary last month entitled, “Mummifying Alan: Egypt’s Last Secret”.
Using the techniques that preserved Tutan- khamun’s body after his death in 1323BC,
scientists embalmed the 61-year old follow- ing his death from lung cancer.
Mr Billis had already heard of his diagnosis when he read in the paper about the search for a body donor. “I was reading the paper and there was a piece that said ‘volunteer wanted with a terminal illness to donate their body to be mummified’,” he added. He put himself forward to be turned into a mummy over the space of a few months, using the procedure which a scientist has been working to secret- ly for years.
Dr Stephen Buckley, a chemist and research fellow at York Universi- ty, has spent 19 years trying to uncover the techniques the Egyp-
tians used during the 18th dynasty. Along- side archaeologist Dr Jo Fletcher, Dr Buckley has studied mum- mified bodies, analy- sing tissue samples and finally putting his findings into practice on Mr Billis’s body at Sheffield’s Medico- Legal Centre.
Mr Billis, who loved watching documen- taries, and who dub- bed himself “Tutan- Alan”, said: “Experi- menting is all about try- ing different proces- ses to make things work. If it doesn’t work it’s not the end of the world, is it? [It doesn’t] make any difference to me – I’m not going to feel it.”
As for Mr Billis’s wife, she took the decision in her stride and said: “He
Alan Billis
just said, ‘I’ve phoned someone up about being mummified.’ I said, You’ve what? And I thought, here we go again. It’s just the sort of thing you would expect him to do.”
Mr Billis’s internal organs were removed and the sterilised cavity was padded with linen. Then the body’s mois- ture content was removed using a caus-
tic salt called natron, which was described by Greek historian Herodotus in 450BC. The scientists then immersed the corpse in a salt bath for more than a month to draw out the water; and to protect the skin from the harsh salt it was covered in a special protective layer of oils. The body was then wrapped in linen, like the classic image of a mummy. The process was judged to be com- plete after three months. Dr Buckley said Mr Billis’s body could now last several millennia.
In an interview with the Radio Times, Mrs Billis said: “I didn’t find it upsetting. I think it was because you could see they all took such good care of Alan. When I did
eventually watch the film and saw his mummified face, you could see it was still him.
“The involvement in the television programme kept him occupied, and took his mind off the ill- ness.”
Mrs Billis had been reluctant to visit her hus- band’s body. However, six months after his death, she went to see the body and touched his hand. And she said he would have approved of the results: “Oh, he’d be in his glory.”
Mr Billis’s mummy is expected to stay in Sheffield until the end of 2011. It will then be studied by scientists researching decompo- sition. No doubt Tutan-Alan would con- sider that a fitting end to the adventure.
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0800 142 2815 PAGE 50 PHTM NOVEMBER 2011
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