UK taxi driver becomes first mummy for 3,000 years
By Staff Reporter
AFP Global Edition
Oct 18, 2011 10:55 EDT
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.
Alongside archaeologist Dr Jo Fletcher, Dr Buckley has studied mummified bodies, analysing tissue samples and finally putting his findings into practice by putting them to the test on Billis’s body at Sheffield’s Medico-Legal Centre.
“It’s turned current understanding, including my own, completely on its head,” said Dr Buckley.
Billis had been diagnosed with terminal lung cancer when he heard 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 told the documentary team.
“People have been leaving their bodies to science for years and if people don’t volunteer for anything nothing gets found out.”
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