I learnt today from a talk at the British Museum that you’ve got it all wrong. Mummies were not white, or even off-white; most of the ones you see in museums are just like that because they’ve been exposed to light for some time and the dye has faded.
The outer wrapping was usually a deep pinkish red (there are a couple of examples in gallery 64 for anyone interested), sometimes with strips of contrasting colour patterned across it.
The mummy masks have blue hair because the hair of the gods was thought to be made of lapis lazuli, and and faces were made of gold, or gold-painted cloth because that was what the gods’ faces were made of.
If the owner, or the rellies, could afford it, the body was coated with resin after the drying process, a resin made especially from the pistacia tree. The ancient Egytian word was sineture (sp?) – “that which makes divine”. It again helped up the mummy on the level of the gods.
You could buy happiness in the afterlife, it seems, or at least the status of a god.
More here.
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