The British Museum is famous for no end of reasons, but one of the things it’s most synonymous with is its collection of Egyptian mummies. Incredibly, over the 250+ years that the museum has been maintaining its collection it has never unwrapped any of the mummies; in 2014 it opened a new exhibition called Ancient Lives, New Discoveries which uses the results of new technology to peer beneath the wrappings of eight of the mummies and show them in a new light. This book is the companion to the exhibition and tells the stories, or at least as much as can be determined, of these eight people and how their mummified remains came to be held at the museum.
