Mummified tissue presents challenges for fingerprinting due to rigidity, shrinkage, and other features obscuring epidermal ridge detail. A new cost-effective in-house solution was developed to obtain good quality fingerprints from mummified remains. The simplified procedure uses a sodium carbonate:sodium acetate mixture easily prepared How to cite this article: Marais AAS, van den Dool AH.Rehydration and restoration of fingerprint ridge detail in mummified post-mortem tissue: Literature review and investigation of a simplified formulation.