Bob Brier

Bob Brier is Senior Research Fellow at the C. W. Post Campus of the University of Long Island. Previously he was chairman of the Department of Philosophy where in time he supplemented the department's dull boring classes on Plato, Socrates, logic, and ethics with neat stuff like Egyptology.

Professor Bob is well known for his books about mummies, including the Encyclopedia of Mummies. This is (what else?) an encyclopedia about mummies, and the articles extend to topics well beyond the burial practices of Ancient Egypt. Others of Bob books cover subjects more varied and range from the general to the specific. His most recent (and specific) work is Secrets of the Great Pyramid, co-authored with French architect Jean-Pierre Houdin, and is about Jean-Pierre's theory that the Egyptians built the massive stone structure using internal spiral ramps. Although not everyone is convinced that this was indeed the modus operandi, it is certainly one possible method, and Jean-Pierre's idea of how they put the capstone in place is actually quite clever. A more general book is Bob's Daily Life of the Ancient Egyptians, co-authored with Hoyt Hobbs.

But without doubt Bob's greatest claim to fame was when he, along with the chief anatomist of Maryland, Ronald Wade, actually mummified a real person (dead, of course). They did so in the strict methode a les egyptiens even getting their ingredients (such as the palm wine) from Egypt itself. Although the basic principles of how the Egyptians "did it" have long been known, it was Bob and Ron who finally discovered you needed 600 pounds of dry natron for the process.

We shall now resume breathing.