My Alan told me: I’m going to be a mummy

But Jan Billis was remarkably unfazed by her husband Alan’s sudden announcement about volunteering to become the first person in three millennia to be buried like the Pharaoh Tutankhamun.

“I said, you’ve what? ‘Yes, I’ve phoned someone up about being mummified’, and I thought, here we go again. What’s going to go on now? It’s just the sort of thing you would expect him to do...”

Mr Billis, a former taxi driver from Torquay, died from lung cancer in January this year and made history by being the first person since 1323BC to be mummified in the Egyptian style.

In doing so, he fulfilled the 19-year ambition of Dr Stephen Buckley, a chemist and research fellow at the University of York, to discover one of the last great secrets of Ancient Egypt.

The whole process was captured by the Channel Four cameras and will be aired on Monday in a feature-length science documentary entitled Mummifying Alan: Egypt’s Last Secret.

Dr Buckley, working with archaeologist Dr Jo Fletcher, has devoted years to working out exactly how the ancient Egyptians kept bodies so pristinely. He has converted his own kitchen into an embalmer’s laboratory and experimented in a shed with over 200 pigs’ legs, a close substitute for human tissue, to find the exact process used to preserve the Pharaohs.

Mr Billis – or “Tuten-Alan” as he is now known – decided to donate his body to the experiment after his death, with the full support of his family.

“I was reading the paper and there was a piece that said: ‘volunteer wanted with a terminal illness to donate their body to be mummified,” he says in the documentary.

“People have been leaving their bodies to science for years and if people don’t volunteer for anything nothing gets found out.”

The art of mummification reached its peak during the 18th dynasty “golden age” of Ancient Egypt, but the secrets of Tutankhamun, passed down and closely guarded by embalmers for centuries, were lost over time.

That is until Dr Buckley’s theories were put to the ultimate test by world-renowned forensic pathologist Professor Peter Vanezis at Sheffield’s Medico-Legal Centre.

What happened is straight from the pages of Horrible Histories. To prevent the body decomposing, Mr Billis’s intestines, liver, stomach and lungs were removed through a four-inch incision on the left-side of the body, as would have happened in Ancient Egypt.

The cavity was then sterilised with alcohol and stuffed with small bags of linen to preserve its appearance. The organs were preserved in Canopic jars, as history dictates.

His body was then drained of water and coated in sesame oil and beeswax, before being soaked in a natron bath for over a month.

Natron is a type of salt unique to Egypt and is almost as caustic as bleach. This stage of the process had taken Dr Buckley years to perfect – although that is just a fraction of how long it probably took the Egyptians.

Finally, Mr Billis’s body was dried out in a special chamber which replicated the high temperatures and low humidity of Egypt and wrapped in linen bandages to keep the limbs fully intact. Photographs and drawings from his grandchildren were left with the mummy.

But one science lesson myth was debunked by this experiment – Dr Buckley’s X-ray scans revealed that around half of 18th dynasty mummies kept their brains, rather than having them hooked out through the nose.

It seems everyone was happy with the outcome of this unique experiment.

“I’m the only woman in the country who’s got a mummy for a husband,” said Mrs Billis. “It’s strange because I would never have thought it but every single day I think about him. I wonder what he’s doing now, laying there.”

Dr Buckley added: “I’ve come up with fantastic new insights that tell us a very great deal. What I was able to do was look at things in quite a different way, and in doing so get information that perhaps people had missed.

“It’s turned current understanding, including my own, completely on its head.”

Prof. Vanezis said: “The skin itself has this leathery appearance which indicates that he has become mummified all over. It makes me very confident that his tissues have been mummified correctly and in a very successful manner.”

And Mr Billis, dubbed Torquay’s Tutankhamun, had only one regret: “Shame I’m not gonna be around to see it, isn’t it? I’d like to have seen that because I like documentaries.”

King who found immortality

Alan Billis is the first person to be mummified in the same way as Tutankhamun for more than 3,000 years.

Contrary to popular belief, Tutankhamun, despite being the 11th Pharaoh of the 18th dynasty of Ancient Egypt, was unremarkable and famous only for being the best preserved example of mummification unearthed to date.

He would have inherited the throne aged eight or nine, but died aged just 17 in 1323BC.

According to the most important document of his short reign, the Restoration Stela, his father Akhenaten had left Egypt in chaos and crisis.

The traditional religious cult of Amun had been replaced by the solar deity Aten and the gods had abandoned Egypt.

Tutankhamun restored the old religion and began the restoration of its ruined temples. He even changed his name from Tutankhaten.

He constructed his tomb in the Valley of the Kings and this was discovered, completely intact, by the British archaeologist Howard Carter in 1922.