Mummies and Corpses

I've been wanting to recommend The Phoenix Comic for a while. It's produced by David Fickling and arose out of the ashes of the DFC, another very good comic.

A regular feature of The Phoenix is Corpse Talk where the corpses of historical figures are invited to sit and chat with the host. The list of guests includes Winston Churchill, Julius Caesar, Henry VIII, Abraham Lincoln, Jane Austen, Blackbeard, Albert Einstein etc., etc. 

What penetrating questions would your children ask these figures from history? 

We used Kar2ouche in the past in a similar manner to interview Henry VIII about his wives and I remember William Shakespeare being interviewed as part of a Tudors green-screen video made at the CLC. These are fun ways to engage the children with "thinking" about historical characters and events.
Cleopatra is included in the Corpse Talk list and she leads me nicely into mummies. There is a lot of information about Egyptian mummies and the mummification process always fascinates children. The Egyptian mummies are artificially preserved whereas, if you want to extend their mummy knowledge, those found in the Andes of Peru have mummified naturally in the cold, dry conditions. There are other South American mummies deserving of research and also those of western China. In her book, The Mummies of Urumchi, Elizabeth Barber describes the 4,000 year old "chinese" mummies with their remarkable Caucasian features and the wonderfully preserved woollen cloth (of Celtic origin) so reminiscent of Scottish tartans.

Original woollen cloth

Reconstruction

Of course, preserving human bodies is only a short step from preserving food, another fascinating science topic.
How many ways are there to do this? 
How many were available in past times?