Mummies: Secrets of the Pharaohs

January 11 to April 20, 2008

The Egyptian civilization has always fascinated our imagination : its gods, myths and symbols intrigue us and attract us.

Egyptian mummies are like time-capsules of a distant past : they are testimony to the Egyptian people’s belief in the after-life and to the rituals they developed around these beliefs.

Unveiling the mummies
The story for the film came from a variety of documentation including the book Egyptian Mummies by Robert Brier about the astonishing story of the Rassoul brothers and their discovery of a cache of royal mummies in 1881. It’s a wonderful historical adventure that has all the ingredients of an Indiana Jones-type suspense movie with great scientific content.

The film recreates the 1881 discovery of some twelve mummies of Ancient Egyptian Kings dating back some 3,000 years.

• The most famous of them all is Rameses II or Rameses the Great who reigned for 67 years (1279-1212 BC). During his reign, Egypt prospered but had to secure its borders against invasions from neighbouring tribes. Rameses is also known as the pharaoh of the Exodus – the king who banished Moses and the Hebrews, for whom the Red Sea parted.
• The other mummies include
• Merenptah, the 13th son of Rameses the Great;
• Seti I, his principal legacy is the extraordinary flowering of the arts during his reign;
• Tuthmosis I, whose military conquests created new limits for Egypt’s borders;
• Tuthmosis II;
• Tuthmosis III, a great conqueror affectionately know as ‘ the Napoleon of ancient Egypt’ – he took over 350 cities in the near east;
• Ramsès III, the last of Egypt’s great pharaohs;
• Pinudjem I, a High-Priest who became pharaoh and whose remains initiatd the great discovery of the Rassoul brothers in 1881.

What can we learn from mummies?
Why did the Egyptians mummify bodies?
Egyptians believed their destinies were the wishes of gods, whose wills their dead ancestors might influence. By revering their ancestors through mummification, they hoped to gain better control of their destiny.

In previous eras, mummies were ground to powder as medicinal cures for wealthy Europeans. Many of them were destroyed by damaging unwrapping techniques employed by scientists in the 19th and 20th century. Today, scientists use non-invasive CAT scans to examine mummies. They reconstruct mummy DNA to gain precious insight into modern human genetics.

• What did people in Egypt eat, some 3000 years ago?
• What diseases affected these people?
• What effect did their environment have on them?

By studying elements of their lives (and deaths), scientists are able to reconstruct conditions under which, for example, a disease like malaria spread. This data can help them build prospective models to prevent the occurrence of new pandemics. By combining all ancient and modern pieces of the puzzle that is the ecology of infectious diseases such as malaria, scientists can collect key data on the human immune system’s response to infection and lead them to the discovery of a vaccine.

The advent of DNA technology has proven to us that, beyond time and space, all humans are united by the common bond of DNA and that the few variations amon us are purely accidental and related only to our environment. We are the children of the same ancestor, we are all Rameses’ relatives.

The film production
The film was seven years in the making : finding the right producers and securing financing were not easy.

• Filming was done in the fall of 2006, in Morocco and Egypt.
• Morocco provided the crew with massive pre-existing sets for the ancient Egyptian and 1800’s recreations. The sets were adapted for the scenario and really helped in transporting the audience back in time.
• Scenes involving actors had to be shot during Ramadan and during the sandstorm season in the dunes. The difficulties faced – and faced down - by the Moroccan crew were an inspiration to all the other members of the production.
• Special care was taken in filming scenes involving actors. Acting in general on the big screen is always touchy, as actors can easily go ‘overboard’ and feel fake.
• Part of the filming was also done in Egypt to capture some of teh key architectural and landscape elements that are critical to the story.
• Seti’s tomb, a well preserved crypt some 25 metres underground, was also used to shoot certain scenes