Brier is a professor of philosophy at New York's Long Island University -- a credential that helps distinguish him in the eyes of the law from the less academic types who also enjoy corpse experimentation. In fact, Brier isn't only legal, he's famous: It was he who, after years of research, proclaimed King Tutankhamen's murderer to be Commander Aye, Tut's own advisor. Brier insisted that many had previously suggested Aye's guilt; nevertheless, he received worldwide attention for discovering the young king's assassin.

There is studying ancient Egypt, then there's being ancient Egypt. To Brier, in 1994, it seemed his next logical step as an Egyptologist was getting into character. "There are certain things you can only learn by doing it yourself," he told the Dallas Morning News at the time, and after years of poking at mummies, he decided to make his own. He did, and now, six years later, Brier has discovered that the project was a success.

To mummify a corpse, one needs a corpse. Brier's had no name, and to this day he has no idea who he gutted and wrapped. (He did have basic relevant medical information about his cadaver; a serial killer's body was rejected when evidence of hepatitis C showed up.) Likewise the donor's loved ones don't know that there's now a mummy in the family. In making his mummy, Brier duplicated Egyptian tradition down to the incense; this was the one exception: Where ancient mummifiers worked their craft on the rich and famous, Brier's crew wrapped a no-name.

Brier documents each of the mummification steps in the January/February issue of Archaeology magazine, from the abdominal incision to the wrapping. But long before he touched the body, Brier was in an area called Wadi Natrun, 60 miles from Cairo, collecting 400 pounds of natron. Natron, which Brier calls "basically baking soda and table salt," is the primary desiccant, or drying agent, in an Egyptian mummification.

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He was meticulous: After he had the natron, he picked up frankincense and myrrh in a Cairo spice market, imported palm wine from Nigeria (for flushing the abdominal cavity) and had a silversmith manufacture the bronze and copper knives, using the same percentage of tin that the Egyptians used.

Following the removal of the brain, Brier made a small slit in the gut with an obsidian flake. Once he got his hand inside, he proceeded to remove each organ. The liver, he said, "popped out, much like a newborn."

Next came the drying. With the body emptied of its organs, Brier and his team set the cadaver on an embalming board and covered it with natron. They then left it (in conditions roughly similar to those of a tomb in Egypt's Valley of the Kings -- 105 degrees Fahrenheit, very low humidity) for 35 days. The corpse smelled when they returned, but the natron had successfully dehydrated the body. The team wrapped it in pure white linen and the job was done.

Why so fastidious? (The abdominal incision, for example, presented a great conundrum for Brier: At 3 and a half inches, it wasn't big enough to get the organs out. After much deliberation, he made the cut a half inch longer.) Egyptians went to great lengths to avoid scarring the body, and the reason for this points up a common misconception about their take on death.

"Most people think they [believed in] reincarnation," Brier says. "But they were, in fact, resurrectionists."

Whereas reincarnation has a soul returning to Earth in a new form -- think Hinduism and Buddhism -- resurrection means using the same body in a different world. Consequently, it made sense to carve up the corpse as little as possible. (Egyptians also knew where death happened: in the west, where the sun set. The dead, consequently, were "Westerners." When you died, it was said you were going west.)

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