Some amiable addenda to FT159:45; I was tempted to assume the name of 20th-century American classicist Preserved Smith.

Plato (Phaedo, para80c) was most impressed by the longevity of Egyptian mummies - had he actually seen one? A fragment of Sophocles' lost play Phineus is less reverent: "He looks as dead as an Egyptian mummy."

Embalming inspired the Egyptian cardiological notion that human hearts grow and shrink in identical annual proportions, reaching a quarter-ounce apogee at 50, thus people cannot live beyond 100 (Pliny, Natural History, bkl l ch70 para184).

Apart from sundry native texts (e.g. Demotic Papyrus no10077, '70 BC), the standard accounts are Herodotus (Histories, bk2 chs85-7) and Diodorus Siculus (Universal History, bkl ch9l). Herodotus lists three methods, the two basic ones being encapsulated in the FT piece. According to his editor WG Waddell (1939), the second one would not actually work. When I quoted them in lectures, fainting students were not uncommon at the bit about hooking out the brain through the nostrils.

One morbid Herodotean detail: beautiful women's cadavers were except a while before handing them over to the embalmers, lest the latter have necrophile sex with them - Esprit de Corpse?

"Alexander the Great's body was preserved in honey" (FT). Not n the major sources. Quintus Curtius (History of Alexander, bk10 ch10 paras 9-13) says he was embalmed with perfumes "in traditional Egyptian manner;" cf. the anonymous Alexander Romance, bk2 ch34. Curtius, also Plutarch (Alexander, ch77 para5) and such writers as Aelian (Historical Miscellany, bkl2 ch64) and Lucian (Dialogues of the Dead, no3 para 392), stress that his body lay a long time in damp surroundings without losing its freshness and colour.

Augustus saw the body in Alexandria (Suetonius, Augustus, ch18 paral). When and whence it vanished is a mystery, one acknowledged by Shakespeare, Hamlet, Acts scl vv224-5: "Why may not imagination trace the noble dust of Alexander till he find it stopping a bunghole?"

Honey was used. In his Life of Agesilaus (ch8 para7), Nepos says that the Spartan king in its absence was waxed. Pliny (bk7 chi para35 ) states the honey-preserved corpse of a hippocentaur was sent to Rome in Claudius' time (AD41-54). Phlegon (Wonders, ch63) assures sceptics a century later that it was still in the royal storerooms. He also claims there was the preserved body of a baby to which a male homosexual had given birth in Egypt.

Having kicked his pregnant wife Poppaea to death, Nero had her body "not cremated Roman-fashion but stuffed with spices and embalmed like a foreign potentate" (Tacitus, Annals, bk16 ch6).

Egyptian mummification continued to the Arab Conquest, albeit expense and changing religious attitudes had caused a decline, signified in a poem (Supplementum Epigraphicum Graecum, vol8 no621) from Hermopolis ridiculing the practice.

`Mummy' entered English in the 17th century, from Arabic Mumiya' = 'Bitumen', ironically since this was not regularly used. John Evelyn's Diary (7 Aug 1645) reports he was given "an hand and foote of rare mummy, the whole body in perfect condition when brought out of Egypt." Samuel Johnson attests to the 18th century mania for mummy bits as medical remedies (and inevitable lively trade in fakes) with his page-long entry for the word, using Hill's Materia Medica.

D Walleschinsky/A Wallace/I Wallace, Book of Lists I (Bantam, 1977, pp448-53) itemise 21 famous mummies from Tut to Mao, mentioning that after the first failure Lenin was re-embalmed in 1926 "using new fluid based on that of the ancient Egyptians."

Stalin provides a fortean touch. While being readied for mummification, a cinder was found in his lung ("Data of falls of cinders have been especially damned" - Fort, Books, p73); when removed from the mausoleum in 1961, "he looked as if he was alive" (E Radzinsky, Stalin, Anchor Books, NY, 1997, pp578-81).

Peter Green (Classical Bearings, Thames & Hudson, London, 1989, p_32n_3) remarks à propos parallels between ancient and modem embalming: "Fortunately, the Egyptian habit of pickling the viscera of the deceased in four canopic jars does not seem to have caught on with American morticians."