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Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei on Saturday swore that Iran would avenge the killing of his father, the former Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei.

“We pledge to avenge your pure blood and the blood of all the martyrs,” said Khamenei, who took his father’s place as the head of Iran’s leadership after a deadly Israeli airstrike in late February.

“This vengeance is what our nation is demanding, and this must definitely be done,” he added.

The new threats come after the breakdown of a ceasefire between Washington and Tehran. The U.S. launched new strikes on Iran earlier this week in response to the Iranian regime’s attacks on shipping in the critical waterway of the Strait of Hormuz.

The U.S. has given Iran until Saturday to stop its attacks in the strait. Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi travelled to Oman for talks to mediate the dispute.

Meanwhile, U.S. President Donald Trump issued threats of his own, promising to “completely decimate and destroy all areas of Iran” in response to any attempts on his life.

Mojtaba Khamenei has not been seen in public for months, and has been rumored to have been left disfigured after being injured by an airstrike.

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In most areas of archaeology, excavators painstakingly dig layer by layer to reveal not just buried artifacts but also charred seeds, broken bones and microscopic grains of ancient pollen. This delicate process is followed by months of intensive lab work to study the newfound remains. But there is one kind of archaeologist that takes a different approach to understanding the past. Experimental archaeologists replicate how people did things in the past, using techniques they recreate from archaeological information and modern knowledge.

In his new book, " Dinner with King Tut: How Rogue Archaeologists Are Re-creating the Sights, Sounds, Smells, and Tastes of Lost Civilizations " (Little, Brown and Co., 2025), science writer Sam Kean explores the experimental side of archaeology. Through a series of ancient and modern vignettes, Kean discovers how Stone Age city dwellers kept their houses cool 9,000 years ago, how the Romans used needle and thread to style hair, and how bog bodies were formed in Iron Age Europe.

In this excerpt, Kean meets two men who used ancient techniques to diligently mummify a human body in an effort to understand how ancient Egyptians took care of their dead.

Related: Read our interview with Sam Kean on 'Dinner with King Tut'

Cultures throughout history have mummified their dead, and a handful still do today, but Egyptian mummies remain the most iconic. Unfortunately, the Egyptians wrote down virtually nothing about their embalming process. This leaves experimental archaeology as one of the few avenues available for understanding mummification, and several practitioners have indeed re-created mummies in modern times. In most cases, they work with animals, but a few intrepid souls have mummified human beings, most famously when Bob Brier and Ronn Wade did so in 1994.

The cover of "Dinner with King Tut: How Rogue Archaeologists Are Re-creating the Sights, Sounds, Smells, and Tastes of Lost Civilizations." (Image credit: Little, Brown & Company / Hachette Book Group) Wade grew up wanting to be a mortician like his father. After a stint as a medic in the Vietnam War, he became an anatomist and eventually the head of Maryland's state anatomy board. Brier also has training in anatomy, but is an Egyptologist by training and passion. He's accumulated so many books on Egypt over his life that he rents a second apartment just to accommodate them. Brier and Wade selected their mummy from the pool of people in Baltimore who donated their bodies to science. Ultimately, they settled on a seventy-six-year-old Caucasian man who died of a heart attack. His identity remains secret, but a bit crassly, Wade nicknamed him E. M. Balm.

For authenticity's sake, Brier and Wade used replicas of pharaonic-era tools and materials, including linen wraps, an oddly wide wooden embalming table, and copper and obsidian blades — although they quickly abandoned the copper ones, which couldn't cut flesh well. Before starting on their mummy, they practiced one important step on other cadavers: extracting the brain. Instead of using full cadavers for this, they obtained some decapitated heads leftover from a medical school's plastic surgery class. ("They were looking a little weird," Brier recalls. "They'd had facelifts and such.")

From some scant references, Brier knew that Egyptian embalmers removed the brain by inserting a hooked rod through the nostrils, but the details were vague. Brier and Wade first tried scooping the brain out with such a rod, but the tissue proved too soft and wouldn't come out. They finally took to squirting water up the cadaver's nose, then used the rod to whisk the brain into a slurry. After that, it poured right out. "Like a milkshake," Brier says. "A strawberry milkshake to be exact."

Skills honed, the duo began making their mummy in May 1994. The first step involved removing his organs.

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Different organs met different fates in Egypt. Unclear about the purpose of the brain, embalmers typically threw it away. The heart, in contrast, was left in situ [in place]; it was considered the seat of all thinking, emotion, and intelligence. Abdominal organs were carefully extracted and preserved. Following this protocol, Brier and Wade made a 3½-inch [9 centimeters] incision in their cadaver's abdomen and removed the spleen, liver, gallbladder, lungs, and twenty-two feet [6.7 meters] of intestines. Given their size, extracting the liver and lungs required some creative geometry and determined squeezing. The most difficult part involved detaching the lungs from the heart while working blind inside such a tiny hole.

With the organs removed, the pair cleaned the abdomen with palm wine and myrrh, then stuffed frankincense into the skull. This was an important ritual step to prepare the body for the afterlife, and also helped kill microbes and mask bad smells. Ancient embalmers used other sacred substances as well, often imported from Europe and Asia at great cost — pistachio resin, beeswax, castor oil. Ramses the Great's mummy had peppercorns from India shoved up his nose.

Next, Brier and Wade dehydrated the body using natron, a mineral of equal parts salt and baking soda that forms naturally in Egyptian wadis, or dry gullies. Like a sponge, natron sucks the moisture out of flesh, leaving it too dry to support bacteria, maggots, beetles, and other putrefying agents; the leftover tissue is essentially jerky. (Fully committed to authenticity, Brier dug the natron himself in Egypt, and recalls that sneaking hundreds of pounds of unidentified white powder through customs at JFK Airport was one of the more ticklish aspects of the project. Luckily, he was traveling with a film crew, and could hide the powder in suitcases amid their equipment.)

In their lab, Brier and Wade placed the mummy's spleen, lungs, liver, and intestines into bowls and covered them with natron. They also packed 29 linen bags of the powder into the body's empty torso, laid the body on top of 211 more pounds [96 kilograms], and dumped 583 additional pounds [264 kg] over it. They kept the body in Wade's old office, with the heat cranked up to 104 degrees F [Fahrenheit, or 40 degrees Celsius] and dehumidifiers running night and day to simulate Egyptian air.

Over the next five weeks, the natron on top turned crusty and brown from absorbing bodily juices, forcing Brier and Wade to crack through it with an iron rod. (Today Brier remembers the odor as acrid but not unpleasant, although news reports at the time say he and Wade donned surgical masks against the smell.) Regardless, the sight of the body beneath thrilled Brier. As it dries, the skin of mummies tightens and shrivels, especially on the face and scalp. The lips retract to reveal the teeth, and skin with less melanin turns brown-yellow. Brier always wondered whether those changes resulted from the immediate mummification process, or from several thousand years of weathering in Egypt's arid climate. One glance at his mummy and Brier knew the answer: even after five weeks, "he looked just like Ramses the Great," he recalls, with leathery skin, a beaky nose, and wispy hair sticking up. The embalming process, not time, made the iconic mummies we know today.

Ramses II's long-preserved mummy. Experts have recreated the mummification process to learn more about how the ancient Egyptians preserved their dead. (Image credit: Patrick Landmann via Getty Images) Beyond changing the body's appearance, the dehydration process left the limbs as stiff as tree branches, and dropped its weight from 188 pounds [85 kg] to just 79 [36 kg]. (Thirty-one pounds [14 kg] of that represented the removal of organs.) The organs drying in the bowls withered as well, which helped explain another mystery of Egyptian mummification: as other archaeologists have noted, embalmers typically placed the organs in so‑called canopic jars, funerary vessels with slim necks — so slim that it seemed impossible to fit the larger organs inside. But the natron shrunk them down enough to slip right in.

After removing him from the natron, Brier and Wade gave Mr. Balm a full body massage with lotus, cedar, and palm oils, another step that, while important ritualistically, also had pragmatic benefits — restoring flexibility to the joints, making the mummy easier to handle. This accomplished, they wrapped the body in linen bandages. (Embalmers in ancient times started with the hands and feet, wrapping each digit separately, then proceeded to the arms, legs, and torso. The penis was individually wrapped as well — or, if embarrassingly shriveled, a cod‑piece of stiff linen was bound in place.) At this point, they let the mummy dry for three more months in the arid office, which dropped its weight to 51 pounds [23 kg]. Afterward, they added several more layers of wrappings. In between the layers, they slipped magic amulets and scraps of papyrus with spells on them, a common practice in ancient times.

For the past three decades, the mummy has been lying in a metal casket in Maryland, stored at room temperature. Brier and Wade have partially unwrapped it twice to check for rot, but found nothing amiss. "He's dead and well," says Brier.

LITTLE, BROWN

Dinner With King Tut: How Rogue Archaeologists Are Re-Creating the Sights, Sounds, Smells, and Tastes of Lost Civilizations

Finalist for the 2026 PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award | LOS ANGELES TIMES BESTSELLER | INDIE BESTSELLER | The New Yorker's Best Books of 2025

Whether it's the mighty pyramids of Egypt or the majestic temples of Mexico, we have a good idea of what the past looked like. But what about our other senses: The tang of Roman fish sauce and the springy crust of Egyptian sourdough? The boom of medieval cannons and the clash of Viking swords? The frenzied plays of an Aztec ballgame...and the chilling reality that the losers might also lose their lives?

See how much you know about mummies with our mummy quiz!

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Notes from Poland is run by a small editorial team and is published by an independent, non-profit foundation that is funded through donations from our readers. We cannot do what we do without your support.

Poland has commemorated the anniversary of the Volhynia massacres , in which Ukrainian nationalists slaughtered around 100,000 Poles during World War Two.

This year’s events took on particular significance as they came amid a diplomatic dispute with Ukraine over President Volodymyr Zelensky’s decision to name a military unit after the “heroes of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA)”, parts of which were responsible for leading the massacres.

In a speech to mark the anniversary, Poland’s president, Karol Nawrocki, condemned the “evil ideology” of Ukrainian nationalism but emphasised he is “not condemning the entire Ukrainian nation”. Prime Minister Donald Tusk announced plans for a Wall of Remembrance in Warsaw that will include the names of victims.

Meanwhile, the main opposition party, the national-conservative Law and Justice (PiS), announced that it is submitting a proposed resolution to parliament declaring that Poland will oppose Ukraine’s accession to the European Union as long as Kyiv continues to “glorify criminals”.

Prezydent RP @NawrockiKn w #Radruż : pic.twitter.com/ZikMNd5BMD

— Kancelaria Prezydenta RP (@prezydentpl) July 11, 2026

Nawrocki has been at the heart of the recent dispute. In response to Zelensky’s decision to name a unit after the UPA, he decided to strip the Ukrainian president of Poland’s highest honour , the Order of the White Eagle.

Today, he visited the small village of Radruż in southeast Poland, less than a kilometre from the Ukrainian border. During the Volhynia massacres, Radruż was one of many villages where the UPA and the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), another nationalist group, massacred Polish civilians.

“We refuse to allow the 120,000 Poles – civilians, women and children – brutally murdered by Ukrainian nationalists to be forgotten,” declared Nawrocki.

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Poland commemorates the massacres on 11 July because that was the date in 1943, known as “Bloody Sunday” in Poland, that saw the apogee of the killings, with the OUN and UPA massacring Poles in dozens of locations.

In 2016, a parliamentary resolution declared 11 July a day of remembrance. Last year, the date was turned into an official state holiday through a law passed by parliament and signed into law by then-President Andrzej Duda.

Ukraine protested against the bill , which referred to the massacres as “a crime of genocide against the Polish population”. Kyiv said that Poland’s move to commemorate “the so-called ‘genocide’…flies in the face of the spirit of good neighbourly relations” and “does not contribute to mutual understanding”.

Ukraine has criticised plans by Poland to create a "day of remembrance for Polish victims of the genocide" carried out by Ukrainian nationalists during WWII.

Kyiv says the idea “flies in the face of the spirit of good neighbourly relations” https://t.co/zkdebpw1G4

— Notes from Poland 🇵🇱 (@notesfrompoland) June 5, 2025

Speaking in Radruż today, Nawrocki acknowledged that prewar Poland, on whose territory the Volhynia massacres later took place while under Nazi-German occupation, “was not a paradise” for the millions of ethnic Ukrainians who lived there.

But, he added, this does not justify the events that later took place, which were fuelled by the “evil ideology” of Ukrainian nationalist leader Stepan Bandera , whose followers were responsible for the massacres.

In his remarks, Nawrocki also paid tribute to the “righteous Ukrainians” who tried to help Poles during the massacres, and were as a result often themselves murdered by the nationalists.

“Today, we are not condemning the entire Ukrainian nation; we are condemning the Bandera ideology,” said the Polish president. “Today, we need truth and memory for a better future in the 21st century, without genocidal perpetrators and without genocidal symbols.”

Polish and Ukrainian media have widely quoted Poland's deputy PM as saying: “With Bandera, Ukraine will not enter the EU.”

However, he did not actually speak those words.

We explain what @KosiniakKamysz actually said and how it came to be misinterpreted https://t.co/S3bozRIJTA

— Notes from Poland 🇵🇱 (@notesfrompoland) July 1, 2026

While Nawrocki is aligned with the right-wing Polish opposition, and regularly clashes with the government, earlier on Saturday Tusk published a recorded speech that contained a similar message.

“Truth is our duty to the victims, but also the way to overcome the painful past and achieve a better future,” said the prime minister. “And truth means identifying and naming the guilty, and unequivocal condemnation of this crime.”

Tusk added that the victims also “cannot remain nameless and without a dignified burial”. His government and Nawrocki have pushed for Ukraine to allow searches for and exhumations of massacre victims on its territory. Last year, Kyiv permitted them to resume after a longstanding moratorium.

In his speech today, Tusk announced that a Wall of Remembrance would now be created in Warsaw featuring “an eternal flame and the names of each victim found and identified”.

Pamięć nie może być sługą nienawiści. pic.twitter.com/x2fdcrZV63

— Donald Tusk (@donaldtusk) July 11, 2026

The Polish prime minister also alluded to the fact that Poland expects Ukraine to acknowledge and resolve issues relating to the Volhynia massacres before it is allowed to join the EU .

“A Europe of peace and mutual respect, a Europe reconciled after World War Two, was made possible by truth and calling things by their proper names,” said Tusk. “Anyone who wishes to join this community must be ready for this truth.”

Separately on Saturday, the opposition PiS party, which is aligned with Nawrocki, announced that it was submitting a proposed resolution to parliament that would declare Poland’s opposition to Ukraine’s EU accession while Kyiv continues to “glorify criminals”.

“The EU cannot be based on an ideology that contradicts Christian, European values,” declared PiS deputy leader Przemysław Czarnek, quoted by Polsat News. “It cannot have among its members a country that openly invokes the worst possible legacy.”

📢 Składamy projekt sejmowej uchwały w sprawie sprzeciwu wobec członkostwa Ukrainy w strukturach Unii Europejskiej.  Ukraina z banderyzmem, z gloryfikowaniem ludobójców, którzy dokonali niebywale brutalnej zbrodni na narodzie polskim, nie wejdzie do UE – Wiceprezes PiS, kandydat… pic.twitter.com/lcfpqWSeMX

— Prawo i Sprawiedliwość (@pisorgpl) July 11, 2026

Notes from Poland is run by a small editorial team and published by an independent, non-profit foundation that is funded through donations from our readers. We cannot do what we do without your support.

Main image credit: Przeymysław Keler/KPRP