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. To envision the great Assyrian bull just a floor below Egyptian mummies and beside Ibis figures is exciting, provocative, and—though only made possible by an imperial violence the poem critiques—one of the greatest ways archaeological excavation facilitated historical and personal fantasy. To track archaeology’s role in shaping several key discourses of modernity, my study invokes a range of ancient
extraordinary characteristics, making it easier to believe these to be true. An article published in All the Year Round (18 February 1860) discusses this connection between tradition, authority, and false notions: DID you ever behold an Egyptian mummy, or a Yarmouth bloater, or a red sprat, or a Dutch herring, or a rat that had been starved to death in a hole in a wall, or a pig reduced to the condition of bacon arid ham, or a handful of last year’s dead flies in a garret? Do you think that by any process of steaming, or stewing, or simmering, or steeping; that by any
, illustrated by his acquisition of two Egyptian mummies, one from an English collector and another through contacts in Egypt. 61 This was his last hurrah, for he died three weeks after his return to New Zealand with his new acquisitions largely uncatalogued. The Canterbury Museum clearly owed a great deal to Haast’s energies, his international contacts, his wheeling and dealing in exchanges, and his vigorous
, his reputedly popular museum survived until 1899. It apparently contained specimens of natural history, cultural and archaeological materials, and even Egyptian mummies. Official encouragement was, however, given to early scientific endeavour. Lieutenant Governor Simcoe, who was a correspondent of Sir Joseph Banks and had an interest in systematic agriculture, was the patron of an early scientific
’s description of Cesare: ‘He was the most awful-looking man – it was horrible – all grey and strange – and his clothes looked like – almost a mummy’s wrappings.’ This description paints a slightly different picture from the iconic image of Conrad Veidt in the 1920 film. By likening the character to an Egyptian mummy, the BBC version creates an image more like Boris Karloff in the Universal Picture The Mummy
Periodically a serpent or crocodile would escape, but no (recorded) harm came to visitors or beasts.142 The popularity of the live animals was equalled only by the ancient Egyptian human remains, which like the vivarium were viewed by more than 80 per cent of those of visited in 1974 – just as the Egyptian mummies were arguably the most Visitors: audiences and objects 177 popular archaeological items at the British Museum, so too in Manchester.143 Kathleen Wright visited the Museum in 1924, and still remembered the mummies vividly more than eight decades later: I loved
was honed by his scientific training to report on both the detail and causes of their preservation, for the audience for whom he was writing: the Royal Society. He lived at a time of increasing experimentation with embalming methods and when other well-preserved bodies were the subject of scholarly discourse and acquisition: the saintly remains that opened this chapter, lime-encrusted Romans from stone sarcophagi or the Egyptian mummies that were also unwrapped on the autopsy tables (Riggs 2014 ). As Balguy records, after the initial curiosity of reopening the