Taxi driver mummified for TV documentary

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

In a Channel 4 documentary — Mummifying Alan: Egypt’s Last Secret — to be screened on Monday, October 24, 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.”

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,” he said.

Billis — who dubbed himself “Tuten-Alan” — added: “Experimenting is all about trying different processes to make things work. If it doesn’t work it’s not the end of the world, is it? Don’t make any difference to me, I’m not going to feel it. It’s still bloody interesting.”

His wife took his decision in her stride and said: “He just said, ‘I’ve just phoned someone up about being mummified’. I said ‘you’ve what?’ ‘Yes, I’ve phoned up someone about being mummified’.

“And I thought here we go again. What’s going to go on now? It’s just the sort of thing you would expect him to do.”

Dr Buckley has used specialist scientific equipment such as a gas chromatograph mass spectrometer to identify materials which were used by priests, including beeswax, oils and resins.

He went on to conduct a series of experiments using pigs’ legs as a substitute for human flesh, rigging up makeshift desert conditions in his shed.

Billis’s internal organs — including his lungs and intestines — were removed through an incision in his side, and the sterilised cavity was padded with linen, although the brain was left in place. Then the body’s moisture content was removed using a caustic salt from the region, called natron which was described by Greek historian Herodotus in 450BC — 800 years after the 18th dynasty.

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 layer of oils.

The body was then wrapped in linen — like the classic image of a mummy — protecting it from light and insects, and his wife made a visit, leaving favourite photographs and drawings by his grandchildren.