(submitted 4 years ago * by NotTerriblyHelpful)
tldr: Muhlestein, one of the Church's two big Book of Abraham apologists, provided misleading and exaggerated findings at a scholarly conference and got BYU's excavation license yanked by Egyptian authorities. He claimed he found a million mummies in the desert. The fiasco made international news.
Kerry Muhlestein has been taking a lot of heat on the Mormon internet recently for making poorly sourced and exaggerated claims in support of the Book of Abraham, but the furor that has erupted over the last couple of weeks is nothing compared to when he made international headlines back in 2014.
In 2011, Muhlestein became the team leader of a big BYU dig in Egypt called Fag el-Gamous where the school excavated a small pyramid and a bunch of corpses from the 1st century to 7th century A.D.
https://lifesciences.BYU.edu/from-the-sands-of-egypt BYU had been working at this site to one degree or another for about 25 years. Most of Muhlestein's non-Mormon Egyptian scholarship is related to this dig (see his cv here:
http://BYU.academia.edu/KerryMuhlestein/CurriculumVitae ).
In 2014, Muhlestein attended the Study of Egyptian Antiquities Scholars Colloquium conference in Toronto. There, he excitedly announced to the scholars in attendance that Fag el-Gamous may hold more than a million mummies! The description of this huge find was important enough that it made mainstream international news in mid-December of 2014.
"In a square that is 5 by 5 meters across and usually just over 2 meters deep, we will typically find about 40 burials," Muhlestein explained in an email to Newsweek. "The cemetery is very large and so far seems to maintain that kind of burial density throughout. Thus the math suggests that there are over a million mummies in the cemetery, though we cannot be certain of this without further exploration and a thorough academic review process." He added that the findings are only preliminary.
https://www.newsweek.com/tale-million-m ... els-293615
"We are fairly certain we have over a million burials within this cemetery. It's large, and it's dense," Project Director Kerry Muhlestein, an associate professor in the Department of Ancient Scripture at Brigham Young University, said in a paper he presented at the Society for the Study of Egyptian Antiquities Scholars Colloquium, which was held last month in Toronto.
https://www.livescience.com/49147-egypt ... mmies.html
The headline at the Daily Mail trumpeted "Cemetery with one MILLION mummies unearthed in Egypt."
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech ... found.html. News of the announcement hit NBC, CBS, NPR, pretty much everywhere.
This was a stunning announcement and made for great headlines. Imagine, a million mummies in the Egyptian desert! Unfortunately for Muhlestein and BYU, the excitement generated by this big find, and the mainstream attention, was shortlived - and quickly turned to embarrassment. There was a problem with the announcement: it was inaccurate. Dr. Youssef Khalifa, head of the Ancient Egypt department of Egypt's Ministry of Antiquities issued harsh criticism of Muhlestein's announcement and revoked BYU's excavation permit, ending BYU's 28 years of work at Fag el-Gamous.
Dr. Youssef Khalifa, head of Ancient Egypt department, said to Luxor Times on phone “What was published in the newspaper is not true. There are no million mummies, a mummy definition to begin with means a complete mummified body and there is only one mummy found at the site of Fag El Gamous in 1980 which is at the Egyptian museum since then.” Dr. Youssef added “In the past few seasons of the mission’s work at the site, only poor skeletons were found and some thousands of bone’s remains. The mission violated the rules and regulations of the agreement with the Ministry of Antiquities concerning making press statements and that’s why the committee of the ancient Egypt department took the decision to stop their permission to work at the site after 28 years of working at the site and the last season finished last March.”
http://luxortimes.com/2014/12/mummy-cur ... u-mission/
"There’s no way that cemetery has a million mummies, there are maximum a few thousand,” said Yousef Khalifa, chairman of the Egyptian antiquities sector.
"Even if the cemetery is huge, it would take the bodies to be buried over each other and upon each other to fit in the space,” said Khalifa. “Only one mummy was found in that cemetery in 1980, and the rest are just remains of old dead bodies."
https://dailynewsegypt.com/2014/12/18/c ... ummy-tomb/
The drama between BYU and Egypt also hit the news. Newsweek reported "Tale of a Million Mummies Unravels"
https://www.newsweek.com/tale-million-m ... els-293615. Gizmodo reported "Archaeologists Have Dig Licenses Revoked After 'Million Mummies' Claim."
https://io9.gizmodo.com/archaeologists- ... 1674466896 Archeology News Network reported "BYU Dig License Revoked Over 'Million Mummy' Claim."
https://archaeologynewsnetwork.blogspot ... llion.html My favorite was "Mummy Curse Strikes Again: MSA Stops BYU Mission."
http://luxortimes.com/2014/12/mummy-cur ... u-mission/
BYU losing its dig license was obviously a big deal. Muhlestein quickly backpedaled from his announcement. “I believe there have been some misunderstandings. I would like to work this out with the Ministry, for whom I have the greatest respect.”
http://luxortimes.com/2014/12/mummy-cur ... u-mission/. BYU quickly moved to repair the damage that had been done to its relationship with Egyptian authorities. By mid-January, 2015, BYU and the Ministry had mended fences. “I am fully pleased with the spirit of cooperation and communication we have had with the Egyptian Ministry of State for Antiquities over the years and during the last few weeks,” Muhlestein said. “It has allowed miscommunications to be rectified.”
https://universe.BYU.edu/2015/01/26/BYU ... ypt-again/. The Daily Universe reported that Muhlestein would be returning to work at Fag el-Gamous, but it is unclear whether that ever happened.
So, what can we learn about Muhlestein as a scholar from this event? I am not an Egyptologist,but it appears that Muhlestein got in trouble with Egyptian authorities for two reasons. First, he characterized the human remains he was excavating as "mummies" when they weren't. Mummies have a very specific definition in Egyptology. Old human remains found in the desert in Egypt are not necessarily mummies unless they have been mummified. The Egyptian minister noted that the remains BYU had excavated were simply old human remains. Only one mummy had been removed from the site, and that was decades before Muhlestein was there.
Second, Muhlestein predicted that the site contained a million corpses based on a very small data set. At the time, BYU had excavated about 1,700 corpses. Based on that number, Muhlestein predicted a million burials. The Egyptian minister found this prediction laughable.
It is informative to compare Muhlestein's scholarship in this regard to that of Dr. C. Wilfred Griggs, Muhlestein's immediate predecessor as head of the BYU Fag el-Gamous excavation. In 2010, near the end of his time at the BYU excavation, Dr. Griggs published a paper called "Artifacts, Icons, and Pomegranates: Brigham Young University Egypt Excavation Project" in the Journal of the American Research Center in Egypt. Journal of the American Research Center in Egypt, 46, 215-231. Retrieved August 29, 2020, from
http://www.jstor.org/stable/41431581 In his paper, Dr. Griggs never refers to the human remains that were excavated at Fag el-Gamouns as mummies. He takes great care to identify the human remains as "burials." This makes sense because the corpses that were recovered are not mummies and should not be identified as such.
<snipped>
In any event, it is surprising that Muhlestein would repeatedly publicly assert that there were likely a million sets of remains in Fag el-Gamouns based on only 1,700 excavations. It is not surprising that the Egyptian minister found his estimate to be ludicrous based on the available data.
Unfortunately, I have not found any sources where Muhlestein addresses this fiasco. I suspect he would contend that the entire event was a miscommunication that was started by livescience.com, which appears to be the first outlet that reported the news of the "million mummy" announcement, and that he never called the human remains "mummies" in the technical sense. And to be fair to Muhlestein, it appears that he tried to clarify that he did not necessarily mean "mummies" in the sense of a corpse that had been carefully mummified and prepared for burial.
"I don't think you would term what happens to these burials as true mummification," Muhlestein said. "If we want to use the term loosely, then they were mummified."
https://www.livescience.com/49147-egypt ... mmies.html
Unfortunately, and unsurprisingly, it appears that Muhlestein never published the paper that he presented in at the 2014 Egyptian Antiquities Scholars Colloquium conference that started this whole mess. Thus, we cannot say for certain whether he ever referred to the human remains he excavated as mummies. However, it seems unlikely that livescience.com would run a story about a "million mummy" discovery unless Muhlestein referred to the remains as mummies. Additionally, the livescience.com story demonstrates that Muhlestein was definitely using the term "mummy," even if he was using the term "loosely" and not in the scientific sense. Finally, Muhlestein has referred to the remains at Fag el-Gamouns as mummies in several other settings. The the BYU Religious Education Review magazine, Muhlestein referenced " a tomb of mummified cats, some jewelry in the shape of the cross, some spectacularly wrapped mummies, and a beautiful golden mummy" that had been excavated.
https://religion.BYU.edu/event/egyptian ... on-exhibit. He references the mummies of Fag el-Gamouns several times in his 2015 paper "Rethinking burial dates at a Graeco-Roman Cemetary: Fag el-Gamous, Fayoum, Egypt.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/a ... 9X15000188 In 2011 he published an article called "Pyramids and Mummies: the BYU Egypt Excavation Project" in the Newsletter for the Society for the Study of Egyptian Antiquities.
The point here is that that Muhlestein's tendency to present exaggerated and unfounded scholarly conclusions is not limited to the field of Mormon studies. His failure to properly identify mummies got himself and BYU kicked out of Egypt for a while.
He practices in an arcane field, and it is difficult for most Latter-day Saints to determine whether his opinions regarding Egyptology are valid. It is hard for us to know whether he is correct when he claims that Egyptians practiced human sacrifice as opposed to state-sanctioned killings or executions. It is hard for us to know whether a random Egyptian papyrus really says "Abraham on the couch" or if its just a love spell with mumbo jumbo words. None of us know Egyptian and he expects us all to accept his opinions on faith. However, we can know that 1) all of the best Egyptologists disagree with his opinions and 2) he's been kicked out of Egypt for overstating and exaggerating his scientific findings. Frankly, he hasn't earned our faith.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Mormon/comment ... n_license/
