Why we all love a good mummy

The biggest news in this book has to be that gruesome playground lore has been wrong all these years.

Ancient Egyptian priests did not, it turns out, fish people's brains out through their nostrils using a hook. They just poked a hollow tube up their client's nose till it "punctured the tiny porous ethmoid bone between the eye sockets". After that, the fermenting grey jelly inside simply poured out.

Here, as throughout the book, Heather Pringle takes care to tell you the icky things you really wanted to know, while eloquently touring the world of present-day mummy studies.

Her jumping-off point is the congress of the title, a three-yearly event attended by fanatical mummy researchers from across the globe; but she quickly leaves it behind in favour of chapters that venture out in all directions. She explores the medical secrets locked up in mummies, from the evidence of ancient drug use to the elusive DNA of parasites.

She probes the different kinds of preservation brought about by dryness, and by cold, and by the acidic ooze of European bogs, which softens bones and tans flesh till it resembles treaclecoloured leather. She investigates the odd case of the Japanese monks who, uniquely, managed to start mummifying themselves when still alive, by drinking bowls of pineresin varnish.

She also chronicles the strange uses that mummies have been put to. Characteristically, our western fascination with them began with a mistake; a mistake that gave us the very name we use for them.

Medieval Arab medical texts recommended using black bitumen as a salve for cuts. They called this mumiya, but Gerard of Cremona, translating from Arabic into Latin, had no idea it referred to the tarry stuff that seeps out of the ground in Persia, and decided it must mean the resinous gloop he had come across in classical accounts of Egyptian embalming. So commenced a lively import trade from Egypt.

For centuries, European apothecaries sold scraps of mummified flesh as a medicine. From there, it just got odder. The tubes of "mummy brown? oil paint that 19th century artists bought did indeed contain ancient bodies ground up into a rather attractive reddish brown paste, good for doing shadows with. And there were also "unwrappings" of mummies promoted as riveting public entertainment. One of Heather Pringle's best finds is the unwrapping at Harvard in 1850 that dissolved into hysterical laughter when the last bandage came off and the promised "Egyptian princess" proved to have "a generous penis".

So expertly and agreeably does she lead us through all this that it seems churlish to complain of what the book doesn't do: which is, that it never breaks out of the smooth feature-writing conventions that govern it, as they do so much of American non-fiction.

Her witnesses are always created on the page for us with that synthetic intimacy that never risks offence by attempting actual characterisation. ("He neither smokes nor drinks, and never did, and is by his own admission a born leader.") She doesn't pursue any idea into its difficult or idiosyncratic details, preferring instead to deploy a scrim of knowledge no thicker than it needs be. Oh well.

But I have to disagree with her central claim, that mummies are so arresting because they give us "the shock and wonder of glimpsing immortality". She seems to be confusing people's motives for looking at mummies with their motives for getting themselves mummified - which linger in the modern world, as she shows in her final chapter's nicely observed report on the mummification services now on offer.