At the British Museum

Well, I am... I've never felt tremendously happy about the graverobbing that mummies represent, given the uproar when someone desecrates a cemetary these days.  It seems to me just another manifestation of our idea that we own everything, or have a right to.  It's very easy to think of these museum "objects" as property, but the fact remains that once, thousands of years ago this woman woke each morning to a sun not so different from the one shining today.  She was a child, probably had as difficult an adolescence as any teen today, fell in love, had children of her own, maybe even lived to hold grandchildren... would her people, who held such reverence for the dead and the mysticism of the afterlife, have paraded shrivelled corpses for schoolchildren?