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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
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