Working Stiffs

By MICHAEL D. LEMONICK

The Kharga Oasis, some 125 miles southwest of Luxor, Egypt, is hardly the first place you'd think to look for mummies. No pyramids loom there; no mausoleums mark it as a portal through which Egyptian nobles entered the afterlife. Think of it as the Peoria of Pharaonic times, a backwater where ordinary peasants and farmers lived and died--and left pretty ordinary remains.

Yet the ordinary can sometimes prove remarkable. That's what French researchers discovered when they were called in to examine a stash of mummies unearthed by the Egyptians in a necropolis at Ain Labakha, a village within the oasis inhabited by 500 to 1,000 people around the time of Christ. Because working-class graves are of little interest to treasure hunters, the mummies were virtually undisturbed, giving the scientists an unparalleled look at how regular folks of the time lived and died.

Their lives, by the evidence of their remains, were brutish and short. X rays of some 60 complete bodies show that many of the adults had arthritis and bone deformities (not surprising, considering that they performed hard labor), the parasitic disease schistosomiasis (most likely picked up while standing in irrigation ditches), stunted growth (suggesting malnutrition or illness) and tuberculosis. Adults died at 38, on average; few reached 50; and the presence of many children and young mothers implies a high rate of infant mortality and death in childbirth.

Unlike King Tut and other high-profile mummies, however, they'll never suffer the indignity of being put on display. The French team has already returned the bodies to their resting places. And given the remote location, it seems unlikely they will ever be removed again.

--Reported by Andrea Dorfman/New York

With reporting by Andrea Dorfman/New York