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obtained. 78 Carrying out unlicensed activities where such a licence is required equally engages criminal liability. 79 Ownership of body parts 80 18.10 The vexed question of whether we own our bodies is only fleetingly addressed in the Human Tissue Act 2004. We noted earlier the ancient common law assumption that there is no property in a corpse. That statement must be qualified. Consider the Egyptian mummies held in the British Museum. Do they belong to the British Museum? Or might we lawfully help ourselves to one or two? R v Kelly 81 confirmed
encompass literal meaning – artefacts for use in the home and everyday experience in terms of curriculum, pastime, environment – but also embrace notions of familiarity, suitability and British national or imperial identities. It has become a cliché that ‘the past is a foreign country’: the chapters in this volume negotiate the relationship between the British nineteenth-century present and national and ‘othering’ past narratives, which could both need domesticating. Zimmerman's exploration of Egyptian mummies (and, punningly, the role of real and
Center in Egypt 43, 113–27. David, R. (2008), ‘The ancient Egyptian medical system’, in R. David (ed.), Egyptian Mummies and Modern Science (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press), 181–94. Dawson, W. R. (1967), ‘The Egyptian medical papyri’, in D. Brothwell and A. T. Sandison (eds.), Diseases in Antiquity: A Survey of the Diseases, Injuries and Surgery of Early Populations (Springfield, IL: Charles C. Thomas), 98–111. Dupoirieux, L. (1999), ‘Ostrich eggshell as a bone substitute: a preliminary report of its biological behaviour in animals – a possibility
and portrayed aspects of its society and culture, ancient and modern, as the locus of grave threat. It includes texts by major popular authors such as Arthur Conan Doyle, Bram Stoker and H. Rider Haggard and by less well-known contemporaries such as H. D. Everett and Guy Boothby, not to mention scores of ephemeral periodical tales by entirely forgotten authors. The key image to emerge was that of the vengeful Egyptian mummy which, like Stoker’s Dracula and Stevenson’s Jekyll and Hyde, has persisted into modern popular culture. Though the current treatment of the
‘Some Words with a Mummy’ (1845) which was published posthumously alongside this tale in an anthology of his works in 1852. This illustration is the earliest known visual depiction of a revived Egyptian mummy, a character that later became an archetypal figure in Victorian literature. Day situates the unknown artist's vision of the fictional mummy Allamistakeo within the history of visual and literary depictions of mummies and the sociopolitical discourses they articulated, comparing the illustrator's engagement in contemporary debates with those suggested by Poe
features Baudelaire lying down, wrapped in linen like an Egyptian mummy, while a statue of a Thinker stands above, meditating on his remains. 47 In this sense, the Egyptian imagery on his cenotaph compares with that of Wilde's own tomb, located in Cimetière du Père Lachaise, cut by Jacob Epstein, and which features a prominent sphinx. But in Mallarmé's reading of Baudelaire, if the Egyptian is allied with death, this is not simply a question of lifelessness: far from figuring as a petrified ‘granite’ or ‘lifeless
they remained distinct from the rest of the collection, their fame (or infamy) rendering them iconic. These included such notable quadrupeds as Mr Potter’s cow, last individual of a herd of white polled cattle in Lancashire, and ‘Vizier’, Napoleon’s Arabian charger.25 The cotton merchants William and Robert Garnett donated sarcophagi housing the mummified remains of ‘Asroni’ (later ‘Asru’), a royal maid of honour, thereby providing the Ancient Egyptian mummy that was ubiquitous in British collections from the seventeenth century onwards.26 More unusually, the
water was involved in the process of preservation, the results of immersion were not constant or predictable. Such observations led these authors to make comparisons with other well-preserved remains – the Grewelthorpe Moor bog body was described as ‘tanned and dried in a remarkable manner, somewhat like an Egyptian mummy’ (Lukis 1892 : ix). Leigh ( 1700 : 64) (who noted almost in passing the discovery of bodies ‘entire and uncorrupted’ from the bogs of Cheshire and Lancashire) notes the peculiar power of a ‘bituminous Turf’ from Hasil (near Ormskirk) that was
Constantinople’ were published in 1761. When seeking membership of the Royal Society in 1748, Porter confessed that he was no adept: ‘what I would want it for would if I ever return make use of it for my instruction and amusement’.29 Porter’s investigations in Turkey and the Levant encompassed printed books, Biblical manuscripts and mathematics. He took no great interest in antiquities beyond their acquisition for others on commission, nor was he a patron of the arts. Odds and ends: shells, fossils, medals, corals and Egyptian mummies fell into his hands from time to time, to
’s interest in the educational possibilities of exhibitions, as well as their curiosity in all things unusual. Significantly, this was a taste that permeated across the country; it was manifest in the provinces as well as in the imperial metropolis of London. 23 Historians are increasingly aware of the ‘regionally inflected character’ of Victorian science and its adjunct: the museum. 24 In September 1821, for example, the Newcastle Literary and Philosophical Society received a case from a Mr Douglas containing an Egyptian