Search results
You are looking at 1 - 10 of 12 items for
- Author: Angela Stienne x
- Refine by access: All content x
Two mummies buried in a museum garden … a coffin that rotates … skulls amassed for dubious research … What if the most interesting stories about Egyptian mummies are not the ones you know?
Mummified explores the curious, unsettling and controversial stories of the Egyptian mummies held by museums in France and Britain. From powdered mummies consumed as medicine, to mummies unrolled in public, dissected for race studies and DNA-tested in modern laboratories, there is a lot more to these ancient human remains than meets the eye. Following mummies on their journeys from Egypt to museums and private collections in Paris, London, Leicester and Manchester, the book revisits the history of these bodies that have fascinated Europeans for so long.
Mummified explores stories of life and death, of collecting and viewing, and of interactions – sometimes violent and sometimes moving – that raise questions about the essence of what makes us human.
In this brief opening chapter, the author tells the story of how she came to be interested in Egyptian mummies. It was while working as a summer gallery attendant at the Musée du Louvre in Paris that she first learnt of the strange and often troubling stories behind how these ancient remains came to be held in European museums. She would go on to make these stories and the ethical questions around the possession and presentation of human remains the focus of her academic career. The chapter concludes with a description of the Mummy Stories project, which gathers people’s accounts of their interactions with Egyptian mummies from around the world.
The introduction addresses the question of what, exactly, a mummy is. After asking why people often have difficulty in accepting that mummies are not simply ‘artefacts’, but human remains, it gives a summary of the known facts regarding the process of mummification, from both cultural and scientific perspectives. Observing that the term ‘mummy’ and its variants have been used to mean different things throughout history – from the preserved body itself to the coffin it was kept in, and even a form of powdered medicine – the author argues that the Egyptian mummy is ultimately a social construct. Furthermore, we do not fully understand what the people who practised mummification thought about it.
This chapter begins with the figure of Henry S. Wellcome, the businessman who founded the Wellcome Historical Medical Museum. Wellcome amassed a huge collection of ancient Egyptian materials, including human remains such as skulls. Today, many of these are still held at the Wellcome Collection in Bloomsbury.
The presence of such materials in an institution dedicated to the history of medicine is no accident. As the chapter explains, people in the medieval and early modern periods consumed mummies in a powdered form, known as mumia, in order to treat illnesses. This practice fell away around the end of the early modern period, but medical interest in mummies remained strong, increasingly focusing on the question of how these bodies could be so well preserved. This gave rise to the practice of ‘openings’, where anatomists would dissect mummies, often before an audience of the public.
The chapter describes the activities of two Frenchmen, the chemist Guillaume-François Rouelle and the mineralogist Frédéric Cailliaud, who played roles in advancing the scientific study of Egyptian mummies. It concludes with a more recent example of a medical examination: a CT scan of a mummy named Tamut, carried out at the Royal Brompton Hospital in the early 2010s.
This chapter begins with Bes-en-Mut and Ta-Bes, two mummies located at the Leicester Museum & Art Gallery. They were acquired by John Mason Cook, son of Thomas Cook, who used his connections to bring them to England around 1880. This is one of many instances of calculated enterprises for removing mummies from their resting places in Egypt and displacing them to Europe.
Travelling back further, the chapter looks at the example of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, a British aristocrat who attempted to acquire a mummy in the early eighteenth century. By this point in time, mummies were sought-after items among the European elite, who displayed them in private cabinets of curiosities. The practice was particularly widespread in Paris, since there was not yet a centralised museum. Major collectors included Joseph Bonnier de la Mosson and the Comte de Caylus.
The final part of the chapter explores one of the most representative episodes of power and displacement in French history: Napoleon’s expedition to Egypt. Although the cultural element of this expedition is usually distinguished from the military element, they were closely related. Indeed, the cultural expedition and its resulting publication, Description de l’Égypte, have been used to depict the campaign in a more favourable light.
"This chapter looks at incidents where the display and preservation of Egyptian mummies in European museums went wrong. It begins with the example a mummy that was gifted to the British Museum by William Lethieullier. The mummy itself disappeared in the 1800s, but its coffin remains in the collection, bearing the holes from a device that was once used to make it rotate.
The second story told in this chapter relates to the opening of France’s first public collection of Egyptian artefacts in 1827, under the direction of curator Jean-François Champollion. Champollion’s notice for the opening refers to three mummies, but today only one remains. So what happened to the others?
The final part of the chapter recounts the fate of the British Museum’s ‘Unlucky Mummy’, a mummy that is reputed to have brought misfortune to all who have encountered it. Like the Lethieullier mummy, all that remains of it today is a coffin.
This chapter focuses on Dominique Vivant Denon, director of the Louvre in the early nineteenth century and possibly the most prolific mummy collector in Europe. Denon was a member of the scientific commission that accompanied Napoleon’s expedition to Egypt. He returned to France with a mummified foot, which became the centrepiece of his collection and inspired a story by the celebrated writer Théophile Gautier.
Denon went on to acquire a full mummy from the collection of Napoloeon’s wife, Joséphine de Beauharnais, following her death. This mummy became the subject of a private unwrapping, for which we have a detailed report and sketches. Denon also acquired two mummy heads, one of which remains in storage in the Louvre to this day.
The chapter concludes with an earlier story about a mummy’s foot. In 1763, doctors performing the first dissection of a mummy in Britain were surprised to find an onion attached to its foot. A quarter of a century later, in 2016, the author encountered this same foot by chance in the Hunterian Museum in London. This strange relic raises uncomfortable questions about the treatment of human remains and the ethics of displaying them in museums.
This chapter begins at the Exposition Universelle de Paris in 1867, where archaeologist Auguste Mariette conducted the public unrolling of a mummy. The displaying of human remains gained a new level of popularity in nineteenth-century Europe, and there was particular interest in bodies that differed from the norm of the able, white body. A notable example is Julia Pastrana, who was first exhibited alive as ‘the ugliest woman in the world’, and then dead as an example of preservation techniques.
Two men who advanced the display of mummies as a form of entertainment in this period were Giovanni Battista Belzoni and Thomas Joseph Pettigrew. Belzoni organised an exhibition at the Egyptian Hall in London in 1821, using atmospheric reconstructions of the tomb of Seti I and clever marketing techniques to draw massive crowds. In the 1830s, Pettigrew, a doctor by training, became the first celebrity mummy unroller, presenting numerous sell-out events in London.
The chapter closes by looking at a more recent unrolling: a televised dissection conducted at the Manchester Museum in 1975. Although presented as cutting-edge science, this event was not so different from the unrollings of the nineteenth century, and raises similar ethical questions.
This chapter explores the popular nineteenth-century theory that ancient Egyptians were in fact white people. It begins with the story of Saartjie Baartman, also known as the ‘Hottentot Venus’, an African woman who was taken to Europe in the early nineteenth century and used to promote the development of ‘scientific racism’.
Scientific racism drew on the work of Georges Cuvier, who pioneered the field of comparative anatomy. He used Baartman’s body to argue for his theory that White people and Black people are different species. Cuvier’s theory fed into another question that was being heatedly discussed at the time: whether the ancient Egyptians were Black or White. Many Europeans refused to accept that such an advanced civilisation could be related to the modern-day inhabitants of Africa, and sought any means they could find to prove their belief, including craniology and other pseudo-sciences.
The rest of the chapter recounts several incidents where mummies were dissected to prove that they possessed distinctive White features, by Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, Augustus Bozzi Granville and others, before returning to Saartjie Baartman, whose remains were restored to South Africa for burial in 2002.
This chapter opens with a recent story concerning the mummy Takabuti. In 2020, researchers discovered that Takabuti’s DNA was closer to that of Europeans than of modern Egyptians, a finding that harks back to earlier studies of the so-called ‘White mummy’.
Travelling back to the late nineteenth century, the chapter introduces Flinders Petrie. Petrie was a highly successful archaeologist in his day, whose legacy is now being questioned because of his pseudo-scientific racial theories. Examining skulls from the earliest period of Egyptian civilisation, Petrie posited the existence of a ‘new race’, distinct from the local populations, that was responsible for the achievements of Egyptian culture.
Another form of the quest for the ‘White mummy’ can be found in the present day. The documentary series Ancient Aliens, which attracts as many as 2 million viewers per episode, advances the theory that ancient civilisations were in fact created by aliens. While this is an even more outlandish theory than Petrie’s, it shares the racist assumption that Africans could not be responsible for creating a great civilisation.
The chapter ends with a trip to the Musée de l’Homme in Paris, which has an extensive collection of human remains, including thirty-three Egyptian mummies. It reflects on recent efforts to address the presence of African heritage in European museums.