WHILE IT WAS NOT SOMETHING that Mair often talked about, one of his fondest ambitions was to bring a major exhibition of the Chinese mummies to North America and Europe. He wanted to share the thrill he felt when he first saw them, and he knew from earlier experience that Western audiences would be captivated by such an exhibit. In the mid-1990s, Discover magazine had decided to run an article on these ancient bodies and, while trying to illustrate the story, the editorial staff arrived at an inspired idea for photography. They contacted Jeffery Newbury, a prominent Los Angeles portrait photographer who specialized in television celebrities and temperamental rock stars. Newbury’s subjects ranged from the murdered rap star Tupac Shakur to the cast of the television hit Friends and the media mogul Oprah Winfrey. Newbury worked in a rarefied Beverly Hills world of publicists, stylists, hairdressers, and makeup artists, but he was sufficiently intrigued by the call from Discover to take the assignment. He flew to Ürümchi. With an eye for the exceptional, he immediately grasped the visual essence of these mummies: their ravaged elegance and their lithe grace. This he successfully captured on film. He returned to Los Angeles with a superb shoot, and nearly everyone who saw it wanted to see these bodies in the flesh. By his art, Newbury created mummy celebrities.
When the photos finally appeared in Discover, they made quite a splash, and Mair began scouting out the possibilities for a major mummy exhibit. He discovered that the University Museum in Philadelphia was too small for the expected visitor hordes and that it lacked the necessary climate-control systems to conserve the bodies. So he approached the Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History, whose management leapt at the idea. To negotiate a deal, Mair and several of his colleagues made repeated trips to Beijing, while the Los Angeles museum sank nearly $300,000 into exhibit planning. But to the immense disappointment of all, China’s cultural czars refused to send a single mummy—and this at a time when the Chinese government was currying favor with America in hopes of winning the coveted preferred-trading-partner status. One high-ranking Chinese official finally explained the situation to Mair. The mummies, she explained coolly, had nothing to say about the history of China.
In turning Mair away, however, these cultural arbiters spurned a rare opportunity to capture the imagination of the world. Mummies, after all, have immense public appeal. When the venerable British Museum launched its new Egyptian funerary gallery in the spring of 1999, people jostled three deep in front of the mummies, craning this way and that to get a better glimpse. Braving the crowds, visitors came to rub shoulders with immortality, to slake their thirst for the exotic, and to satisfy their taste for the macabre. And they had a very good time. The gallery was a rave hit. But experienced museologists had expected this: they were well aware of the mummy phenomena. “The first thing that people ask us when they come in the doors,” confided Rosalie David, the keeper of Egyptology at the Manchester Museum, “is ‘Where are the mummies and where are the dinosaurs?’ ”
Indeed, mummy experts have known about this strange phenomenon for nearly two hundred years. In Victorian times, for example, some entrepreneurs catered to the public fascination by holding what were quaintly called mummy unrollings. In theaters and lecture halls across Europe, they climbed up on stages and unwrapped mummies for the benefit of the paying public. By all reports, the audiences were spellbound. Such shows, it seemed, tapped deep into their psyches. Watching an ancient human emerge from thick bundles of tattered yellow cloth was, as I had discovered in Egypt, like attending a strange kind of birth. With each discarded coil of cloth, the unwrapper released someone into the world again. Delivered from the anonymity of its cloth womb, a mummy was a recognizable person again, a human being with a past, a present, and a future.
The fashionable set loved these unrollings, and everyone who could afford a ticket bought one, from countesses in their egret-feather hats to poets in their shiny black waistcoats. But not all nineteenth-century unrollers were in the simple business of serving up sensation. As mummy experts are beginning to discover, some unwrappings assumed a strangely political message in the years leading up to the Civil War in the southern United States. As a small but influential coterie of scientists bent the truth and fudged data, mummies became potent propaganda tools to battle abolitionists and to advance a cause dear to the hearts of many southerners: slavery. A century and a half later in the sultry Mississippi port of New Orleans, a young mummy expert was beginning to cast light on this strange form of political deception, illuminating just what happened when the living manipulated the dead for their own bigoted ends.
WITH ITS GRACEFUL columns and gleaming white stone, Gallier Hall aspires to the sculptured beauty of an ancient Greek temple. Harking back wistfully to a vanished, irretrievable past, it is redolent of the Old South and the Louisiana that was. Built in New Orleans at a time when sugarcane and cotton were kings, when steamboats plied the muddy channels of the Mississippi, nervously skirting the shoals, and when healthy young black men were prodded and poked, then auctioned off at the city’s slave market for $1,800 or so each, Gallier Hall served for more than a century as New Orleans’s city hall. But it wasn’t always mired in building permits and city bylaws. During the first few years of its existence, before the Civil War broke out and before Confederate battlefields claimed so many of New Orleans’s young men, Gallier Hall was a popular calling-in spot for traveling lecturers and itinerant preachers. Known then as the Lyceum Hall, it was a temple to learning and faith. And on the evening of February 28, 1852, the cream of New Orleans society swept up the stairway for a performance that promised to be the talk of the town for weeks to come—the final lecture by British Egyptologist George Gliddon.
A handsome man of forty-three, Gliddon was a familiar figure in the American South. With steamer trunks laden with Egyptian curios and Middle Eastern oddities, he had spent the better part of the past decade tramping up and down the Atlantic seaboard lecturing on the mysteries of ancient Egypt. A consummate showman, he had earned considerable fame from his performances, attracting some of the best scientific minds of his day. But Gliddon had grander ambitions still: he craved the acclaim of the crowd. So for the grand finale of his lecture series in New Orleans, he proposed to unroll a mummy, one of those he had recently acquired from the land of the pharoahs. For the first time ever, the citizens of New Orleans would be invited to gaze upon the face of an ancient Egyptian.
Dazzled by this, the audience would be more receptive than ever to his theories, or so Gliddon hoped. Through his studies of mummies, skeletons, and ancient art, he had become keenly interested in the origins of racial differences, particularly those related to the Caucasoid and Negroid races. A strong supporter of slavery and a scientific magpie who wove together odd bits of data, Gliddon argued that the “peculiar institution” of slavery had existed since the dawn of humankind, and was hence part of the natural order of things. He also suggested that God had deliberately created an inferior black race separately from a superior white race. Gliddon and his associates called this theory polygenism, and it played very well in the South, particularly among local plantation owners. They craved some kind of a divine sanction for their enslavement of black Africans, and Gliddon seemed to offer them one. “He was helping to build the framework of the southern position for the Civil War,” said Guido Lombardi, as we stood together one early fall night on the gleaming steps of Gallier Hall.
Lombardi, a Peruvian mummy expert, had spent nearly three years delving into the story of Gliddon and his once famous unwrappings. All but forgotten today, the nineteenth-century Egyptologist had been relegated to a slender footnote in the history of the American South. But while studying in New Orleans five years ago, Lombardi came across an intriguing clue to Gliddon’s popular shows. Piecing together, bit by tiny bit, details of Gliddon’s public life, Lombardi became fascinated by the tale. He rooted through dusty archives and ransacked libraries for clues. He peppered Egyptologists from England to Egypt with questions. He dug up Gliddon’s obscure books and read every word. In the end, he became an expert on Gliddon’s unwrappings, but not without a cost. A gentle man, Lombardi had long dreamed of earning a Ph.D. in anthropology. But his studies of Gliddon consumed so much of his energy and finances that he finally didn’t have enough of either to continue his studies at Tulane University.
Lombardi is a short, sturdy, amiable man with the rounded, hunched shoulders of someone who spends a lot of time at his desk. A medical doctor by training, he has a large jutting jaw and a pronounced overbite and wears dark wire-rimmed glasses. Excitable and enthusiastic by nature, he frequently claps his hands together when he is making a particularly good point in conversation, which is often. He possesses a kind of genial Old World politeness rarely seen in North America these days, particularly in anyone under sixty. Lombardi is thirty-five. And he is very organized. When I paid him a visit in New Orleans, he shook my hand the first night, then immediately handed me a detailed printed itinerary of how we would spend our time together, scheduled down to the last hour.
When I first visited him in New Orleans, Lombardi lived in a small apartment near the Tulane University campus. During one of our early conversations, he confided that he missed his family’s rambling house in Lima with its swimming pool and garden of rare cacti that he had helped collect. In Peru, he explained, young men traditionally lived with their parents until they married. Lombardi had yet to take that step and he had been rather lonely in New Orleans. Few people there seemed to share his enthusiasm for mummy unwrappings, and he constantly felt as though he had to explain himself to the people he met. “People say, ‘How can you be a doctor and then after that become a student again? You must be crazy.’ Because the image of a doctor here in America is to become rich.” Lombardi, however, seemed the antithesis of an American doctor. He took buses and walked wherever he went. He carried a nylon backpack over his shoulder and watched every nickel and dime he spent. He loved his studies with a kind of monkish fervor. “I just don’t have the approach that the largest satisfaction in life is to make a lot of money.”
One of Lombardi’s largest satisfactions in life is to find and study mummies, particularly those forgotten or lost to scholarship. He never expected that this solitary pursuit would lead him to someone like Gliddon. But that was exactly what happened. He was chatting one afternoon with a fellow doctor at Tulane University, Antonio D’Alessandro, who specializes in tropical medicine. By chance, D’Allesandro recalled hearing of two Egyptian mummies on display in the university’s medical school. Lombardi picked up on this at once. The idea of finding a pair of Egyptian mummies stashed away in some forgotten attic was incredibly appealing to the young scholar.
Lombardi asked around at the anthropology department and recounted the story to the archivists and librarians he had cultivated since arriving in New Orleans. Two or three remembered something about the mummies, but they had no idea what had happened to them. Lombardi dug out a slender file on the mummies at the archives. To his disappointment, it did little more than confirm their existence, so he started asking everyone he met for leads to the whereabouts of the bodies. People just looked at him and shook their heads. Finally, he confided the story to a classmate, Sharon Halton, who had worked as a secretary in the medical faculty. Halton offered to make some phone calls. A few months later, she contacted him. One of the retired doctors she talked to remembered something about the Egyptian mummies. In the late seventies, he told her, the university had rescued two Egyptian mummies from a room under the bleachers of Tulane Stadium, where the two corpses had inadvertently attended three Super Bowls. In a brief flurry of interest, the medical school had exhibited the finds, then stowed them in the basement of the Howard-Tilton Library. No one had seen or heard of them since. Lombardi hung up in a fever of excitement. “I don’t know if you believe in destiny,” he said. “I don’t believe in it, but when things like this happen, it makes you wonder.”
He didn’t think any of this story sounded at all strange. He was accustomed to finding mummies in weird places. At the age of ten, he had come across a mummy while attending a birthday party for a friend, the son of a high-ranking Peruvian navy official, on an island naval base. “Part of the tour we were given was to walk around part of the island, and I still remember, someone said, ‘Look, what’s there?’ ” Lombardi turned to where the man pointed and saw a mummified body with bits of orange feathers sticking out from the sand. He learned later that an entire Dutch fleet had taken ill offshore with cholera in 1624. Racked by diarrhea, many of the men had perished, and since they were already badly dehydrated from the disease, they had swiftly mummified. The body in the sand was one of those men; the feathered hat suggested he was a senior officer. “I think the one I saw was a Dutch admiral,” said Lombardi.
So he didn’t for a moment doubt the story about the mummies at the Super Bowl. He hustled over to the library and spoke to several of the librarians. They dug out some keys. In a small basement stairwell, where students sometimes sneaked away to have a smoke and a private flip through skin magazines, Lombardi found a glass display case covered by a plywood lid. He called a friend to help him lift the lid. His heart was pounding as he heaved it off. Inside were the bodies of two Egyptian mummies. One, nearly ebony in color, was exquisitely preserved. “I could hardly believe it,” Lombardi recalled, “and at the same time, I was thinking, ‘Oh God, thank you for this miracle that has happened.’ ”
Whoever stowed the bodies in the basement had also left a clue to the story behind them. A small cardboard sign written in India ink lay beside one of the bodies. It read: “The mummy was obtained from the Werda, Thebes, about 1844–45. Presented to the Tulane University in 1851 by Geo. Gliddon & Prof. J. C. Nott.”
THERE WERE FEW mysteries that tugged so strongly at the scientific imagination in the early nineteenth century as that of the ancient Egyptians. Researchers knew frustratingly little about the architects of the pyramids and the sculptors of the Sphinx, and science seemed to have little help to offer. Antiquarians had yet to learn how to extract valuable information about the past from the ground, for archaeology was in its infancy and linguists had yet to crack the seemingly impenetrable code of Egyptian hieroglyphical writing. It was only in 1822 that a young French scholar, Jean-François Champollion, found the key to reading the strange bird- and human-studded script on the Rosetta stone. Even after Champollion’s prodigious feat, answers about the Egyptians were slow in coming. Scholars had yet to decipher fully the hieroglyphics and work their way through thousands of papyri, pottery fragments, and temple walls.
In the absence of evidence, European intellectuals speculated wildly about who the ancient Egyptians were. Modern Egypt, after all, boasted a rich commingling of peoples. Which of these—if any—was responsible for the ancient glories of the Nile? Scholars were divided. During explorations of ancient Egyptian temples, some had noticed painted and sculpted scenes that reminded them of a nineteenth-century slave raid, with Caucasian-like men wielding clubs over black captives. From these scenes, they concluded that ancient Egypt was inhabited by a ruling white class and an army of black slaves. But others were not so sure. They pointed to fleeting passages in the texts of classical writers. The Greek historian Herodotus, for example, described the Egyptians as “black in complexion and wooly headed.” From such passages, some intellectuals concluded that the wonders of the Nile were the products of black genius.
Without physical evidence, however, it was impossible to settle the matter. The only obvious way to tease out the truth, reasoned scholars such as England’s Samuel Johnson, was to examine the ancient Egyptians themselves. But this was not nearly as simple as it sounded. Most Egyptian mummies were so slathered with embalmers’ resins and so altered by time and mummification, that it was difficult to reconstruct their faces or glimpse their original skin color. If researchers wanted to identify race, they had to devise another way of doing it. As it happened, a young German physiologist and comparative anatomist, Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, had come up with a new method for doing so in the late eighteenth century.
Like other thinkers of his age, Blumenbach was intensely curious about the origins of human differences. He wondered whether people as physically diverse as the Hottentots of Africa and the Mongols of Asia were truly members of the same species. To examine the question, he collected human skulls from around the world and took careful measurements of them to see whether they shared common characteristics that set them apart from other primates. He also made note of what he considered any defining facial feature, such as the broad flat nose of some black Africans. After years of diligent work, Blumenbach, who is often considered a father of physical anthropology, concluded that all human beings belonged to just one species. But he observed that there were significant physical differences in the human family. In his classic work, On the Natural Variety of Mankind, published in 1776, he proposed dividing Homo sapiens systematically into four distinct races—Caucasian, Mongolian, Amerindian, and Black African. Only later, in 1795, did he add a fifth race, the Malayan.
Blumenbach thought that these races had likely evolved as a consequence of different environmental conditions. But he was puzzled. Which was the original stock? He decided to search for the answer among Egyptian mummies. Like most other intellectuals of his time, Blumenbach believed that the world began just centuries before the dawn of civilization along the Nile: the Old Testament provided evidence for as much. So it seemed likely to the German anatomist that the ancient Egyptians would closely resemble primeval humans. Blumenbach began searching for some of their bodies to study. He traveled to England, contacting among others the British Museum, which obligingly gave him permission to unwrap three of its mummies, the only time in its venerable history that it has ever sanctioned such a procedure. Blumenbach happily went to work. He unraveled the bandages, took notes on his subjects’ facial features, and measured their crania. Then he compared these measurements to those he had obtained for each modern race. He concluded that the ancient Egyptians he’d examined were Caucasians. Such research confirmed his suspicions about the primacy of the white European. “The Caucasian must, on every physiological principle,” he observed in 1825, “be considered the primary or intermediate of these five principal races. The two extremes into which it has deviated, are on the one hand the Mongolian, on the other the Ethiopian [Black African].”
But this was just a small study. To generalize and to answer many other scientific questions, anatomists needed to examine more mummies. Inevitably this meant more unrollings. Before too many years had passed, these events assumed the peculiar trappings of a university anatomy lesson: that is to say, they became very public. In Europe, anatomists had long been accustomed to subsidizing their work by selling tickets to their dissections. Anyone could attend and the performances were carefully staged. As one of the instructors read aloud from an anatomy text, another cut open the cadaver with a surgical knife. A third person, known as the ostensor, gestured toward the organ or structure being described. The best anatomists attracted large, festive audiences. In France, for example, the local nobility swanned in wearing masks and sipped at glasses of fine wine as they watched the demonstrator carve up a fresh cadaver.
Early mummy experts took due note, modeling their unrollings after these lessons, and it wasn’t long before shrewd minds realized that handsome profits could be made from such performances. In 1837, the year Queen Victoria ascended to the throne, a prominent Egyptian antiquities dealer, Giovanni D’Athanasi, decided to stage a major mummy unrolling in London. D’Athanasi had surmised that nothing would advertise the forthcoming public sale of his collection of Egyptian sculptures and papyri better than such an event. So he asked a famous English mummy expert, Thomas Pettigrew, to conduct the affair and rented space at Exeter Hall, a new building on the Strand devoted to educational, religious, and philanthropic gatherings. To publicize it all, D’Athanasi printed handbills boldly announcing that “The Most Interesting Mummy that has as yet been discovered in Egypt will be unrolled in the large room at Exeter Hall, Strand.” The tickets cost six shillings for a reserved seat next to the operating table, four shillings for one on the balcony or a platform seat, and two shillings sixpence for those situated elsewhere in the hall.
On the evening of April 10, 1837, nearly five hundred people squeezed into Exeter Hall. Society hostesses, gadabouts, members of Parliament, artists, and diplomats took their seats next to antiquarians and Egyptologists. As Pettigrew crossed the stage and gestured toward the recumbent figure of the mummy, the expectant crowd fell silent. It was not, however, the show they had hoped for. Though Pettigrew easily stripped off the outer bandages, he could not pry loose the hardened resin that encased the body like ebony cement. He tried hammers, knives, and chisels. Finally he gave up in frustration. “Finding it impossible to make greater way in removing the obstacles interposed by the preparation,” noted the reporter from London’s Literary Gazette dryly, “it was announced that the task would be carefully completed elsewhere, and the results submitted to the view of the public.”
Embarrassing as this debacle was for Pettigrew, a serious scientist, it did not deter other unrollers—far from it. Mummy unwrappings became all the vogue in the fashionable set. In the late spring of 1850, for example, Lord Londesborough sent out dozens of invitations to his friends for an afternoon get-together at his city home. Nicely engraved with a line drawing of an Egyptian mummy, the invitations politely announced the feature attraction: “A mummy from Thebes to be unrolled at half-past two.” Other curiosity-seekers followed suit, unwrapping mummies in stately homes and city museums across England. “If you look in the local archives,” observed John Taylor, an Egyptologist at the British Museum, “everyone who had a mummy in some far-flung place did a similar thing. They unwrapped it with a little audience and a brass band playing a tune.”
Few, however, paid much mind to science. Some barely bothered to unveil the entire body: it was enough for spectators to gaze at the face. They had no way of knowing, after all, who it was wrapped in all those yards of tattered linen: the mystery gave free rein to their imaginations. The mummy could have been someone famous, the Queen of Sheba, perhaps, or the Egyptian princess who rescued baby Moses from a watery death on the Nile. The audience yearned for some hint. Was the face young and beautiful looking? Bedizened in jewels? Modestly coiffed? They had to see for themselves. An unwrapping mingled the spiritual and the carnal, the morbid and the melancholy, the fantastic with flesh and blood, scientific investigation with chamber of horrors. It was a potent blend.
But by the 1850s, public and scientific enthusiasm for these spectacles was beginning to wane in England. Scholars were beginning to translate the hieroglyphical texts, revealing much more of ancient Egyptian life than could be gleaned from a quick unrolling. The accurate translation of sarcophagi inscriptions had stripped away the mystery of the mummies’ identities. The bodies belonged to ordinary Egyptians—priests, singers, artisans, and the like—not the fabled figures of the Old Testament. The immense public appetite for all things ancient Egyptian had become sated for the time being in Europe. It would not rage again until Howard Carter broke the seals on Tutankhamen’s tomb.
Across the Atlantic, however, Americans were still caught in the thrall of Egyptomania. There, a handsome young Englishman, George Gliddon, had begun unrolling Egypt’s ancient dead in the guise of science.
“BY NOW,” LOMBARDI said over dinner one evening, “I am well acquainted with George Gliddon because he is like a living person to me.” Gliddon, he explained, had all the right credentials for a lecturer on Egyptology. The son of an English merchant, he had spent much of his childhood in Alexandria, where his father served as British consul. At the family dinner table, the Gliddons had introduced their precocious son to some of the most famous men in nineteenth-century archaeology—from Sir John Gardner Wilkinson, the founder of British Egyptology, to John Lloyd Stephens, an American writer and explorer who was the first to recognize the stone temples of Central America as the ruins of the ancient Maya.
The young Gliddon proved an apt student with an eye for personal advancement. He sopped up details of the antiquities trade and read as much as he could on Egyptology. He helped his father arrange for the export of archaeological finds from Egypt. When a post for an American vice-consul opened in Cairo in 1832, the twenty-three-year-old landed the job. And it was there, while attending to visas and customs documents, that he came to the attention of the viceroy, Muhammad Ali, Egypt’s mercurial sovereign. The powerful ruler took a shine to the ambitious young scholar. “One of the ideas Muhammad Ali had at the time was to industrialize Egypt’s production of cotton,” observed Lombardi, “so he sent George Gliddon to the United States to gather information and purchase machinery.”
Gliddon was fascinated by America. He was thrilled by its immigrant energy, so different from the drowsy towns of the Nile he’d left behind, and he relished its freedom from convention. He was not at all perturbed by the inequality that wriggled like a giant worm through the American heartland. In his travels through the South, he didn’t blink at the institution of slavery nor at the sight of gangs of black field hands picking cotton by hand. Nor was he put off by the attitudes of many white southerners who saw the black race as less than human. Gliddon, like many other European gentlemen of the age, happened to share these views.
So the young diplomat had been not at all averse to helping out a prominent Philadelphia scientist with his studies on the origins of race. Samuel Morton had published widely on subjects ranging from anatomy to geology, but he was best known for his work in physical anthropology. Like Blumenbach, said Lombardi, “Morton was an academic headhunter.” He collected human skulls from correspondents in distant parts of the world, amassing what was later dubbed the American Golgotha. To conduct his studies, Morton measured various aspects of these skulls, including the cranial capacity. He believed this latter measurement was the most important of all, suggesting that it revealed not just brain size, but also intelligence. The larger the brain, the smarter the person. He filled each skull with either white mustard seed or lead shot, then measured the contents. From this he concluded that the largest brains were Caucasoid and the smallest were Negroid. That an elephant’s brain was larger than that of a human being did not trouble him. Nor did scientific rigor. Studies by American paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould have shown that Morton fudged his data—possibly unconsciously. He randomly pooled larger male skulls with smaller female skulls. He also seems to have packed Caucasoid crania tightly with seed and Negroid crania lightly.
Morton, as scholar William Stanton has pointed out in his book, The Leopard’s Spots, privately believed that white people were destined to be masters and black people fated to be slaves. In Morton’s view, God himself had created these differences, fashioning each of the races separately in the Garden of Eden. But the Philadelphia scientist lacked proof, so like Blumenbach he looked to Egypt for help. He had dashed off a letter to Gliddon, requesting assistance from the young vice-consul in obtaining a collection of ancient Egyptian skulls. Morton was keen to demonstrate that racial differences in intelligence dated back to the early days of Egyptian civilization, just short of the biblical date for creation.
Gliddon happily accommodated, corresponding at length with this new friend. He rounded up nearly one hundred ancient Egyptian skulls and twenty mummified heads and packed them off to America. The mummy heads proved particularly important to Morton. Some looked Caucasian to him, others like black Africans, and a few resembled mulattos. Morton was immensely pleased to see such racial diversity at so early a date. It lent further credence, he explained to Gliddon, to the theory of multiple creations. Morton then set about measuring cranial capacities. He was even more pleased. Ancient Caucasian-looking Egyptians had large brains; those who looked black possessed rather small ones. These disparities, concluded Morton, were “as old as the oldest records of our species.” Both Morton and Gliddon were thrilled with the results, which seemed to bolster their theories of multiple creations. There had not been just one Adam and Eve, they concluded, but many—in fact, a pair for each of the races.
Inspired by Morton’s work, Gliddon began scouring Egyptian ruins for other evidence that would support his mentor’s theories. He took copious notes on tomb and temple walls that portrayed black slaves, ignoring the fact that these were war captives from powerful black kingdoms to the south. He paid close attention to the new dates emerging for the beginnings of Egyptian civilization. He also began planning his emigration to the United States. It occurred to him that he could earn a tidy living there by giving public lectures on Egyptology and promoting Morton’s theories. Increasingly, Gliddon saw parallels between the Deep South and ancient Egypt. “Negroes were numerous in Egypt,” he wrote, “but their social position in ancient times was the same as now, that of servants and slaves.”
GLIDDON WAS A great hit in the United States in the 1840s. As a touring Egyptologist, he packed lecture halls from Philadelphia to Savannah, learning how to capture the public imagination. He always wore black, like a preacher, and spoke learnedly in language larded with scientific sounding words. He never saw a polysyllabic word he didn’t like. But in spite of his bombast—or perhaps because of it—he became very famous. Leading scientists flocked to his lectures; prominent writers debated his ideas. Edgar Allan Poe made Gliddon a character in one of his lesser-known stories, “Some Words with a Mummy.” Poe seems to have thought Gliddon a bit of a fool. “It will be readily understood,” observed Poe dryly, “that Mr. Gliddon’s discourse turned chiefly upon the vast benefits accruing to science from the unrolling and disemboweling of mummies.”
A shrewd showman, Gliddon went to great lengths to keep his lectures lively. He purchased an immense painted scroll by English panorama painter John Martin that depicted famous scenes along the Nile, from the Colossi of Memnon to the Pyramids of Giza and the harbor of Alexandria. As he lectured, stagehands busily rolled the scroll, giving the audience the illusion of riding a riverboat down the Nile. A pianist played what passed for Oriental music and Gliddon paced back and forth like a caged lion, picking up one, then another, of the more than six hundred props he liked to travel with, telling some fantastic tale about each. Reporters of the more discriminating sort were much amused. “Of Sampson’s foxes he’d a tail,” pilloried one critic, “Wrapped up in fair Delilah’s veil / And in some antiquated pan / he’d had some toe-nails from Japan / And he declar’d he had a snail / Fresh from the back of Jonah’s whale… .”
Even so, Gliddon was never quite satisfied. He dreamed of a bigger and better show. From his travels to England, he knew that nothing would pack the house like a mummy unrolling. He obtained a small shipment of mummies from a friend in Egypt who had visited a site known as Werda. Then Gliddon enthusiastically set about planning a grand affair for Boston in 1850. To prime his audience, he announced that he would unwrap the daughter of an Egyptian priest, information he claimed to have gleaned from deciphering hieroglyphs that covered one of the sarcophagi. The local press frothed at this news. In their excitement, however, reporters confused the daughter of a priest with a princess, transforming Gliddon’s mummy into Egyptian royalty.
This only added to the enthusiasm of Bostonians. On the final evening of the lecture series, two thousand people—from poet Henry Longfellow and Harvard University president Jared Sparks to anatomist Oliver Wendell Holmes and famed Swiss naturalist Louis Agassiz—took their seats in the hall. “They were the crème de la crème of Boston’s scientific community,” noted Lombardi. “Everyone was there.” In two earlier lectures, Gliddon had removed the princess’s outer bandages in a kind of scientific striptease, tantalizing the audience while searching the linen for amulets and other treasures. That evening he planned on unveiling the princess in all her beauty. He sliced through the bandages and chipped loose the clots of resin. But as he tossed aside the last linen strip from her loins, a loud gasp arose in the front row. The princess had a generous penis. Gliddon was in a state of shock. “The mummy was clearly a man,” said Lombardi, “and it was very embarrassing. Everyone in the audience began to laugh.”
So stung was the Egyptologist by the ridicule that he quickly dashed off letters to Boston newspapers accounting for his error. The mistake, he claimed, arose from the poor handwriting of the coffin maker. But the damage had been done to his reputation as an Egyptologist—at least in the North. Humiliated, Gliddon retreated to the Deep South, where fewer hard questions would be asked about his credentials and his theories. He went to stay with Josiah Nott, a prominent New Orleans physician, a disciple of Morton, and a vocal supporter of polygenism. “Regarding Gliddon’s slavery position,” said Lombardi, “it was the perfect place to come.”
Surrounded by congenial companions, Gliddon announced a new lecture series at New Orleans’s Lyceum Hall and promised to unwrap yet another mummy. This would be a more intimate affair, as the Lyceum held only two hundred or so people. “The interesting thing,” said Lombardi, “is that Gliddon announced this time that he didn’t know a thing about the mummy. He said there was no evidence to point to the mummy’s sex. I think he had learned to be quiet.” This newfound discretion paid off. The New Orleans unrolling went off without a hitch. According to the Daily Picayune, Gliddon boasted to his audience that “if some of [Egypt’s] savants could be resuscitated, they would conclude we had been apt pupils; and that we knew and did some things which they, in all the pride and perfection of their art and learning, were not quite up to.” He then concluded the lecture by donating both of his unwrapped mummies to the city’s medical school.
But Gliddon couldn’t quite forget his public humiliation in Boston. He desperately wanted to salvage his scientific reputation. After Morton’s death in 1851, he tried teaming up with Nott to write a definitive work on the origins of the races. Published in 1854, their collaboration bore the ponderous title Types of Mankind: or Ethnological Researches, Based upon the Ancient Monuments, Paintings, Sculptures and Crania of Races and upon Their Natural, Geographical, Philological and Biblical History. In it, Gliddon and Nott outlined their theories in 738 pages of almost unreadable prose and mercilessly tiny type. But if they were expecting to win lasting scientific kudos and droves of new supporters, they were much mistaken. The book garnered poor reviews immediately and, within years, its central tenet, polygenism, was entirely discredited. Charles Darwin’s new theory of natural selection and human evolution laid waste to all the old creationist ideas—including polygen- ism. And anthropologists ultimately abandoned simplistic attempts to define human races by such crude characteristics as skin color or cranial capacity.
Gliddon, however, didn’t live long enough to witness this humiliation. Nor did he see the destruction during the Civil War of the Old South he cherished. Perhaps it was just as well. Struggling financially, the Egyptologist accepted work in 1857 with the fledgling British-Honduras Railway. He moved to Central America and never returned. He quarreled with his colleagues and was sacked from the railway within months of his arrival. In a Panama hotel, he committed suicide at age forty-eight, reportedly swallowing an overdose of opium.
ON MY FINAL afternoon in New Orleans, Lombardi took me to his small lab at Tulane. Little more than a back room in the university library, it was only a shade bigger than a closet, really, and yet it was the epicenter of Lombardi’s world in New Orleans. Flipping on the lights, the young physician edged past a pair of ancient Egyptian coffins leaning against one wall and reached for a pair of latex gloves. Then he dramatically lifted the sheet from the table closest to the window. Lying on the table was the sadly crumbling body of the mummy that George Gliddon had unwrapped with such disastrous results in Boston.
Resting gently on a bed of soft white tissue paper, the man looked battered and worn, with a large, ugly, gaping hole where his nose had once stood. His face was as parched and cracked as dried mud, and his torso, or rather what remained of it, lay in tiny flakes and crumbs. It was impossible to say what had once been bits of pleura, heart, or kidneys. Not even his remaining bones lay in their correct position. It looked for all the world as if someone had put his body in a plastic bag and given it a cruel shake, and I pitied this man his miserable fate. He was destined for dust now, as sure as I was standing there. It was only a matter of time. He had been reborn at Gliddon’s touch into a world of sorrow.
For months, Lombardi had been examining him delicately, trying to salvage something lasting from all this decrepitude. He had gently X-rayed what he could. He had measured and described and taken detailed notes. In doing so, he had discovered a final surprise. Easing his hand beneath the man’s skull, he lifted it up into the air and cradled it in his hand. “The head was severed,” he explained, “so they must have measured it and estimated the size, but they were very, very biased.” Rotating his hand, he pointed with a latex finger to a small section at the back of the mummy’s head. It took me a moment to catch his drift, but then I saw what he wanted me to see. A thick strip of linen bandage clung to the cranium, cemented there by the embalmer’s black resin. “They didn’t remove all the bandages,” said Lombardi, shaking his head, and I understood at once. The bits of linen would have made the head look larger, would have clinched Gliddon’s case. Lombardi smiled as he watched my dawning understanding. “Perhaps Gliddon held it out in front of the people in the theater and maybe he said, ‘Look at this big head. It’s as large as the ones of modern people.’ ”
Gazing at this final duplicity, I understood at last how easy it was for the living to manipulate the dead, how simple it was to turn them to their own purposes, put words in their mouths, and fit a placard into their hands. The mummified dead are plastic to our touch and we the living can mold and arrange them however we choose. Scholars and scientists who fought for the dignity of humankind, who stood against bigotry and prejudice, whether they were aimed against the descendants of America’s black slaves or the early inhabitants of China, had good reason to be suspicious of the everlasting dead. They looked harmless. But there were times when they carried a big club.