Science and Education Writing

Milwaukee Public Museum, 2018

It is often said that the Inuit—one of several indigenous peoples of the Arctic circle—have a hundred or more words for snow. Is this actually true? Well, sort of.

In fact, among the people of these many nations, there are likely more than 100 words for snow–and ice, and sea ice–as well. Some estimates put it closer to 200 words.

According to the Museum’s anthropologist, this is not a myth. That said, most Sub-Arctic and Arctic cultures don’t have more than a few dozen words altogether. So, while it’s true that there are hundreds of words for snow among these people, in fact, they generally derive from multiple languages and dialects.

This kind of linguistic complexity should come as no surprise. For us Wisconsinites, snow is a part of life for a few months out of the year. Arctic people do more than live with it, they live on it, and snow and ice are practically a way of life, pretty much all the time.

So, this gives us an idea of how important these things are for the Inuit, and the way they communicate with each other about it can be a matter of life and death. They need to know whether ice and snow is fit to travel over, or whether you’re going to sink through it.

The language of both the Inuit and Yupik people has generated many dialects. Early 20th century scholars only recorded a small fragment of these words, and in the intervening century, much has been lost. Originally there would have been many more such terms than there are today.

For many of these dialects, the vocabulary associated with sea ice is even richer. In the Inupiaq dialect of Wales, Alaska, one anthropologist documented approximately 70 terms for ice such as utuqaq, which is ice that lasts year after year, and auniq, which is ice filled with holes, like Swiss cheese. Yet another term refers to the patchwork layer of crystals that forms as the sea begins to freeze over.

The Sami people, who have lived for millennia in the remote northern reaches of Scandinavia and Russia, use at least 180 words related to snow and ice. The Sami are historically a reindeer people, and have as many as one thousand words for them. These refer to such things as the reindeer’s fitness, personality, and the shape of its antlers. The word snarri, for example, is a reindeer whose antlers are short and branched.

All language finds a way to say what its speakers need to say, and it’s the force and precision these words bear that’s most vital, rather than a debate about how many there are. So, we can see language as a rich and compelling tool for learning about the people who speak it.

For example, we Americans have multiple words in English for something that’s vitally central in our culture, something we tend to be known for in other countries around the globe. Any guesses? How about money?

By one calculation, there are close to 100 words for money in the English language. How many words for money do you imagine can be found in the language of indigenous Arctic people? Probably not too many. Traditionally, these people had no word for it.

Milwaukee Public Museum, March 2023

Most of us are likely familiar with the kimono, the traditional Japanese garment. Derived from the words ki, meaning “wear,” and mono meaning “thing,” they are typically hand-sewn into a T shape from four single pieces of fabric and fastened with a sash called an obi. In its simplicity, the kimono leaves no room for one particular feature that no one today could quite do without: pockets. But, as with so many things, this problem became an opportunity.

The solution emerged over four hundred years ago during the Edo period when Japan experienced its first period of extended peace in nearly 500 years. During the Edo era, Japan saw a higher standard of living, accompanied by increased agricultural development, education and literacy, prosperity, and a blossoming of artisanal craftsmanship.

To compensate for the lack of pockets in kimono, women stashed personal items in their sleeves, but men began wearing sagemono. Originally worn by men of the warrior class, sagemono are small cases or pouches suspended from the obi, making it easy to carry small objects such as seals, pipes, coins, writing implements, and materials like medicine and tobacco.

A cord, or himo, attached to the sagemono, was tucked inside the obi and anchored by small, elaborately carved fob-like object that served as counterweight, preventing the himo from slipping through. These objects are called netsuke, and they are extraordinary.

The first netsuke were made of small, dried gourds, slender pieces of wood or bamboo, reflected in the way netsuke is written in Japanese, with two characters meaning “root” and “attached.” Netsuke also commonly have two holes through which the cord is threaded to connect it to the sagemono.

Japanese craftspeople turned netsuke into stunning, diminutive works of art reflecting naturally found objects, plants and animals, heroes and beasts of legend and myth, gods, religious symbols, daily activities, theatrical masks, and historical, literary or everyday figures, and myriad other themes. Some were considered talismans and ascribed with religious or magical powers intended to protect or heal.

Usually carved from such materials as wood, ivory, shell, tagua nut, and horn, among others, netsuke became a fixture of the Edo period. They generally ranged from about the size of a walnut to perhaps a golf ball, and were commonly carved to a smooth finish so as not to snag the silk fabric of the kimono. Over time, their design grew increasingly intricate, whimsical, and masterfully carved, displaying an astonishing range of styles and themes. Small and inconspicuous, netsuke encapsulated the refined aesthetic sense and subdued elegance of the Edo-period. Eventually worn by men of all levels of society, netsuke became particularly fashionable among the Edo period merchant class.

By the mid-eighteenth century, however, new customs of dress had evolved, and netsuke gradually fell out of fashion, though some were still produced for the tourist trade. Today, netsuke are carved for collectors in a broad range of styles, and are highly coveted as collectible fine art objects, and several netsuke organizations hold conferences and gatherings in locations worldwide.

After more than 400 years, Netsuke still continue to intrigue and dazzle us, having evolved from simple, practical objects into captivating and intricate carvings admired and collected worldwide.

It was a Friday evening, and I was working a family event at the Milwaukee Public Museum where I’m the Education Programs Coordinator. Visitors were there to enjoy the museum and spend the night camping out on the exhibit floors. A small boy, maybe about six years old, walked up to me trailing his parents. His face reflected intense concern. He wanted to know if he could ask me a question. “Shoot,” I told him. “Are the mummies scary when they come alive at night?” he asked. “No,” I replied, “they’re not scary at all.”

Now I suspect that most of you would have stopped right there. But I saw an opportunity, and I wasn’t about to let it escape me. I continued to elaborate spectacularly on the subject. “They’re not scary at all,” I repeated, “they’re just loud.” The boy gulped, and his face turned the color of oatmeal. Yesterday’s oatmeal. “You see,” I went on, “they’re really just looking for companionship. They’ve become so deprived of human connection after centuries in the tomb that they’re starved for company, and just looking for a little conversation. So, they’ll carry on moaning and groaning, trying to get your attention. They might follow you around for a while, they might even tap you on the shoulder or wake you up in the middle of the night and try to get you play checkers or something, but no, they’re not scary.” By now, he looked like he’d just shaken hands with Jack the Ripper.

I spend a good deal of my time at the Museum around our two Egyptian mummies and teach a broad range of programming focused on them. Outside of Chicago, the Public Museum is one of the few venues in this region of the country where you can see real mummies, face to face.

And over the years, our visitors—young and old—have found them to be a source of enduring curiosity. And this is not surprising. Since the beginning, mummies have been objects of fascination and considerable misadventure.

Ancient people all over the globe mummified their dead. In fact, the Egyptians were not even the first to do it. That was likely the Chinchorro people of what we now know as Chile and Peru. They were mummifying their dead in the dry air of the coastal desert about three thousand years before the Egyptians even thought about it.

So, why haven’t we heard more about South American mummies? We all have the image in our heads of a kid wrapped in toilet paper stumbling around and trick-or-treating at Halloween. But I’d bet none of us have ever seen a kid dressed for Halloween as a Chinchorro mummy. That’s because of all the ancient cultures that mummified their dead, the Egyptians were the virtuosos, and a well-preserved mummy from ancient Egypt is a masterwork of the form.

Napoleon knew this and sent mummies back to France during his disastrous military campaign in Egypt in the late 18^th century, generating our modern interest in them. By the mid 19^th century, mummies were trending. Very much a thing to have if you wished to project an air of cultural adventurism, many well-to-do Europeans brought mummies back from Egypt or sent for them. It was common to hold “unrollings,” as they were called, where guests were invited to watch as the mummy was unwrapped—or “unrolled”—just out of curiosity, just to see what they looked like under the bandages.

Fortunately, this practice—intriguing as it may have been—has long been discontinued, as it’s particularly destructive to the mummy. Once unwrapped, a mummy may never again be wrapped back up in the same way, and thus a great deal of its archaeological matter is lost.

A source of enduring mystery, mummies have long been thought to bear a powerful life force. Since at least the Middle Ages, apothecaries ground mummies into powder which, added to various concoctions, were cheerfully peddled as miracle cures well into the 19^th century. A kind of snake oil, if you will, it may have made up in morbid curiosity what it utterly lacked in potency. It was, of course, useless.

Somewhere along the way, someone began using powdered mummies as pigment, making a shade of paint called, indeed, “mummy brown.” Upon learning that he was painting with the remains of ancient Egyptians, Pre-Raphaelite painter, Edward Burnes-Jones, felt terrible and insisted on giving his tubes of mummy brown a decent burial in his backyard. One London colorman claimed that he could satisfy the demands of his customers for twenty years from one Egyptian mummy. If you ever want to experience an exuberant application of mummy brown paint, take a look at Martin Drolling’s painting, Interior of a Kitchen. It’s loaded with it.

This November 4^th is the anniversary of the discovery of the tomb of the most famous mummy in history, King Tutankhamun. Discovered by British archaeologist, Howard Carter, in 1922, it was the first tomb of an ancient Egyptian royal found in modern times intact, meaning that all the stuff interred with the pharaoh in 1352 BCE—over eight thousand individual objects—was still in there when Carter and his team opened it. If mummies hadn’t already been popular by then, they would have gotten popular very quickly. Tut’s mummy has enjoyed a rather spirited second life and has generated an entire subculture. He’s been a sensation ever since.

Once, when we were moving one of our mummies to the Museum’s conservation lab, I got nose-to-nose with him just for the experience, just to get nose-to-nose with somebody who lived and died in Egypt over two thousand years ago. The smell was faintly musty like the inside of an old steamer trunk maybe. It was the scent of mummy dust, the smell of eternity.

Actually, I was wrong when I told that kid that mummies are loud. They’re not, They are, let’s be clear, absolutely dead quiet which, of course, makes them captivating, and utterly indelible.

Here’s my poem, “Mummies—Milwaukee Public Museum”

When children ask if it’s frightening
when they come alive, I tell them yes,
of course it is, it’s absolutely terrifying,
and believe me, you don’t want to be around

when it happens, especially at night.
When they ask if the mummies walk
with their arms outstretched like mummies
in the movies, I tell them no, it’s nothing

like that. You see, I explain, the muscles
of their arms have atrophied from thousands
of years of disuse; they just can’t walk
around the way mummies do in movies.

In fact, I explain, their feet have been so
lovingly and carefully bound by strips
of linen, that it’s difficult for them
to walk at all which explains the halting

gait, the fear that at any moment they will stumble
and pitch forward, landing in a heap of rags.
Can they talk? No, they can’t talk, not after
all those years in tombs choked with the dust

of centuries and the weight of eternity
upon them. Can they see, they want to know.
Not anymore, I say, for their eyes
were replaced with onions or stones,

stones as white as the sun. Finally, I explain,
they long only to wander forth as they used to,
so long ago and once again admire their reflections
in the shimmering Nile of the gallery floor.