AS DELICATE AS WE OFTEN are in our treatment of the newly dead, we are considerably less circumspect when it comes to human beings who perished hundreds or even thousands of years ago. Time, that great effacer of human memory, eventually turns us all into mere objects, simple arrangements of hard bone or heaps of fine dust that are valued—or not—according to the whims of the living. Death is a great leveler, it is certainly true, but the relative rarity of mummies sets them apart from all other kinds of human remains, endowing them with a special cachet. This mark of distinction has not always served the world’s mummies well, however, for it has attracted the calculating eyes of the marketplace.
There have been many stories told over the years about the mummy trade. Some are undoubtedly true, but others are almost certainly apocryphal. The great American humorist Mark Twain seems responsible for one of the most tantalizing. While writing Innocents Abroad in the 1860s, Twain journeyed to Egypt, where he caught wind of a story that clearly captured his fancy. The trains that puffed across the Egyptian countryside, he wrote, were powered neither by cords of wood nor buckets of coal, as they were elsewhere at that time. The Egyptians had substituted something far more novel. “I shall only say that the fuel they use for the locomotive is composed of mummies three thousand years old, purchased by the ton or by the graveyard for that purpose, and that sometimes one hears the profane engineer call out pettishly, “D—m these plebians, they don’t burn worth a cent—pass out a King!”
So striking was this brief sketch that Twain’s tale has lodged itself firmly in mummy lore. No mummy expert has ever been able to authenticate the story, however, although several have tried and written about their frustration. Twain seems to be the only published source—and a rather suspect one at that, given his penchant for fiction and his own published disclaimer. “Stated to me for a fact,” he observed of the train tale in a note to Innocents Abroad, “I only tell it as I got it. I am willing to believe it. I can believe anything.”
Other accounts of mummy commerce are equally slippery, however, and deserve the same kind of caveat emptor. A particularly popular yarn relates to paper. During the mid-nineteenth century, American mills regularly recycled rags to make paper, since no one had yet discerned all the possibilities of wood pulp. As the demand for paper soared, so too did the need for old cloth, and during one shortage, several East Coast mills reputedly imported Egyptian mummies by the shipload and hired local women to strip them of their wrappings. The heaps of ancient linen were fed into mechanical beaters and rollers, which in turn churned out a brown wrapping paper that many grocers favored. According to paper historian Dard Hunter, the Syracuse Standard was so impressed that it published an entire issue on these sheets. But this mummy paper was not the saving grace that it seemed. Disease carried in the ancient linen wrappings is said to have spread through the mills: to prevent further outbreaks, the American government required the sterilization of all rags.
This story has all the classic elements of modern pulp fiction: greed, impiety, and stern retribution for the guilty parties. As such, it has aroused the suspicion of some mummy experts over the years. In the mid-1990s, Joseph Dane, an American English professor, went hunting for proof that mills had ever recycled mummy wrappings. He was unable to uncover a single shred. He came across no conclusive records of the trade nor even a single example of the paper—surprising given how novel these sheets would have seemed at the time. Moreover, if the mummy-linen edition of the Syracuse Standard had ever existed, it had vanished without a trace. “Nonetheless,” concluded Dane rather cheerfully in a paper, “this appealing legend persists, and versions are found in standard paper histories both preceding and following Hunter.”
Embellishing on the strange history of the mummy trade seemed rather like gilding the lily to me; it was quite fantastic enough on its own and needed no help from others. For hundreds of years, European grocers, apothecaries, paint makers, antiquities dealers, artists, diplomats, lords, dukes, and princes had snapped up Egyptian mummies whenever and wherever they could, buying them in bulk or purchasing them one by one. A great deal of money had changed hands. Reading brief accounts of this trade, I had grown increasingly curious about it. How, I wondered, had Europeans ever developed such an appetite for withered human flesh? And how far were buyers and sellers prepared to go to satisfy their hunger? The pursuit of answers led directly to the dust of mummies ground to pieces in the mortars of Europe’s ancient apothecaries.
FEW SIGHTS INSTILLED such dread in the hearts of the sick and wounded in Renaissance Europe as the appearance of the local doctor. Carrying clinking bags of bloodstained knives and cradling murky jars of sinuous leeches, the physician was the sure harbinger of torments to come. European medicine had advanced little since the time of Hippocrates, and in the effort to improve upon classical remedies, European doctors had experimented blindly. Their treatments were little short of barbaric. They poured boiling oil on the bodies of gunshot victims. They seared the stumps of amputees with red-hot pokers. They slathered the skin of the syphilitic with toxic mercury and slit the veins of the anemic, bleeding them nearly two pints at a time until they were so feeble they could no longer rise from their sickbeds. Then physicians pulled out evil-looking devices resembling bicycle pumps for administering enemas to their patients. This they did as many as three or four times a day.
That so many perished in their physicians’ arms is scarcely any wonder. Death must have seemed a welcome reprieve after days of medical torture. In such an age, Europeans were hungry for a miracle drug, any drug, that would free them from the most menacing ministrations of the medical profession. Mummy became that drug. Made from the pulverized flesh and bones of the preserved Egyptian dead, mummy was touted as a Renaissance panacea. Just a small dose, it was said, could cure any one of a host of ailments: poisoning, incontinence, migraines, abcesses, giddiness, paralysis, fractures, internal ulcers, contusions, concussions, scorpion stings, and vertigo. Mummy looked loathsome and it tasted vile. It brought on fierce heart pains and churned the stomach. It induced vomiting and invariably soured the mouth with a terrible taste. It was also very expensive. But all this seemed a small price to pay for freedom from the physician’s torments.
Europe’s wealthy intelligentsia swore by the drug. The French king Francis I, a patron of Leonardo da Vinci and the very soul of an enlightened Renaissance monarch, wore a small packet of mummy and powdered rhubarb around his neck to remedy any emergency. His daughter-in-law, Catherine de Medici, was equally enamored. As a young mother of thirty in 1549, she sent her own chaplain all the way to Egypt in pursuit of the ancient drug. Others were similarly besotted. The great English philosopher Francis Bacon praised the powder and attempted to analyze its powers. “Mummy,” he pronounced, “hath great force in Staunching of Bloud; which, as it may be ascribed to the mixture of the Balmes, that are glutinous; so it may also partake of a secret Propriety; in that the Bloud draweth mans Flesh.” Physicians across the continent agreed, prescribing it to anyone who could afford the price. Indeed, one eminent Genoese surgeon was so impressed that he listed it among the remedies that no village or ship should ever be without.
The great difficulty, however, was in finding an adequate supply. Real mummy was a rarity, for Egypt did not look kindly on people pillaging its ancient cemeteries. To stop the trade, authorities imposed stiff fines and dismal jail sentences, but this did not deter the adventurous. In 1586, Sir John Sanderson arrived in Egypt and set off promptly to see the pyramids and an ancient human burial ground, the Momia, that lay a few miles distant. Scrounging through dunes strewn with lengths of tangled linen and ragged bits of bone, Sanderson found a tomb lined with Egyptian mummies. He lowered himself into it by rope and rummaged about with great delight. “I broke off all parts of the bodies to see how the flesh was turned to drugge,” he wrote later, “and brought home divers heads, hands, arms and feet for shewe.” After slipping a bribe to local officials, he loaded six hundred pounds of mummified corpses on a ship bound for England and there sold them for a tidy profit.
Just how many other Egyptian mummies were shipped to Europe for this trade is unknown. But the traffic was immensely popular and surprisingly long lasting. For centuries, the English, the French, the Spanish, the Germans, and just about everyone else in Europe traded in mummies as curiosities and commodities. They bought them from antiquities dealers and exhibited them as souvenirs and treasures in glass boxes. Or they purchased them from tomb robbers and ground them up limb by limb to make medicine and manufacture artist’s pigments. And this they did for many centuries. “People were still advertising in 1904 in London’s Daily Mail for a mummy to make into pigment,” marveled Sally Woodcock. “Mummy only died out because of the lack of availability of mummies.”
Woodcock is a young English art conservator who works in London’s Guildhall Art Gallery in the heart of Moorgate. She makes her living restoring old paintings, which is how she first got interested in the mummy trade. A cool and self-possessed woman in her mid-thirties, with chin-length straight black hair, a fringe of neat bangs, and a valentine-shaped face, she was dressed the day we met in casual clothes topped by a crisp navy and white striped apron. She looked scrubbed and immaculate, something of a feat under the circumstances. For weeks, Woodcock had been climbing up and down scaffolding to restore one of Guildhall’s treasures, a sprawling eighteenth-century scene of a famous naval battle off the coast of Gibraltar. It was an immense piece of conservation work, but Woodcook was clearly enjoying herself. She described at some length both the history of the battle and the background of the painting, marshaling the minutiae of dates and personalities as effortlessly as a historian. For Woodcock, God was definitely in the details, and she mustered each fact as briskly as a general commands his troops.
She began delving into mummy commerce almost by chance. She was working at the time as a researcher at the Hamilton Kerr Institute in Cambridge, sorting through ledgers and papers that once belonged to Roberson and Co. A venerable old English firm dating back to the Victorian era, Roberson and Co. had been in the “colormen” business, assisting wealthy artists in their work. Roberson employees had ground pigments, stretched canvases, hiked finished paintings to exhibits, and generally helped out in whatever way their affluent clients desired. But some years back, the company fell on hard times, closing its doors and selling off its name. Its dusty records ended up under a sheet of polyethylene in a leaky attic. It was Woodcock’s job “to make something of this stuff.” While doing this, she came across something very odd. “What they had was a little jar, with bits of mummy—mummified human remains.”
Woodcock had read at university about the predilection of some European painters for mummy, or Egyptian brown as it was sometimes known. She had even seen it listed from time to time as a pigment in technical reports by fellow art conservators. But until she opened the small jar she hadn’t given mummy much thought. Staring down at scraps of tarry human flesh, she was stunned and more than a little repulsed by the lengths some people had gone to for art. But as someone who loves rooting about in history and ferreting out the facts, she was also extremely curious. So she set about combing Cambridge’s libraries for clues.
She learned, to her surprise, that the Egyptian mummy trade was born almost by accident, from a scholarly muddle over the translation of a few old Arabic medical books. The ill-fated texts concerned bitumen, an old catch-all term for asphalt and other similar natural hydrocarbons. Medieval Arab physicians, as it turned out, were very fond of bitumen. They employed it as a salve for cuts, bruises, and bone fractures. They also prescribed it as an internal medicine to treat everything from stomach ulcers to tuberculosis. But they achieved their best results from a specific type of bitumen, a black rock–asphalt that seeped from a mountain in the Darábjerd region of Persia. This substance was known locally as mumiya.
All this was clear enough; the trouble arose when European writers began translating these passages from Arabic. They were baffled by the word mumiya and some had ended up taking a stab in the dark at its meaning. Gerard of Cremona, a celebrated twelfth-century translator and a man of considerable erudition, had read classical accounts that described the use of bitumen in Egyptian embalming. So he assumed that mumiya referred to “the substance found in the land where bodies are buried with aloes by which the liquid of the dead, mixed with the aloes, is transformed and it is similar to marine pitch.” Unfortunately, no one thought to question this definition, competent Arabic translators being rather few and far between at the time. So the idea that mumiya came from the embalmed Egyptian dead stuck in Western minds. Apothecaries in London, Paris, and Venice began clamoring for the new wonder drug, mumia or mummy, and people began referring to the ancient bodies themselves as mummies.
In some ways, this was very good timing. By the twelfth century, Europeans were traipsing back and forth to the Middle East in record numbers. It was the height of the Crusades. In Palestine, European knights learned firsthand of mummy as Jewish physicians daubed it on their injuries. The reputation of the drug for healing sword wounds and mending broken bones grew, and when the armies of Christendom finally limped home from the Middle East, they brought back not only an appetite for Eastern spices but a fancy for medicinal mummy. Thus the mummy trade was born, and by the early fourteenth century it was a flourishing business. According to the records of one Florentine merchant in the Bardi banking house, mummy was one of 288 spices and comestibles regularly imported into Europe.
Egyptian officials, however, were none too pleased by the bizarre new appetites of Christians. They cracked down as best they could on those smuggling mummy, making this a dangerous line of work. In 1424, for example, officials in Cairo rounded up a ring of grave robbers who had assembled a huge pile of mummies from local tombs. Under torture, the accused men confessed to their crimes, describing how they had stewed the mummies in vats, skimmed off the dark black oil in pots, and hawked the precious substance to European buyers, who paid as much as twenty-five pieces of gold per hundredweight. After recording these confessions, Egyptian authorities threw all the thieves in prison.
Fearful of arrest, some mummy merchants approached the trade from what they hoped would be a safer angle. They became mummy counterfeiters. In 1564, Guy de la Fontaine, a physician from the Spanish kingdom of Navarre, described some of their handiwork after paying a visit to a merchant in Alexandria. At de la Fontaine’s request, the Alexandrian had displayed his inventory, a stack of thirty to forty mummified bodies. When the physician began to pepper him eagerly with questions about ancient Egyptian mummification practices, the merchant laughingly explained that he had embalmed the bodies himself. Some of the cadavers were recently deceased slaves; others were simply dead Alexandrians he had managed to acquire. The merchant had no idea what diseases they had perished from, nor did he particularly care. Mummy after all was just mummy.
De la Fontaine’s story was not the worst to reach European ears, however. Other travelers of the age recounted even more troubling gossip about the counterfeiters’ practices, accusing Ethiopian physicians of employing live victims to make mummy. “They take a captive Moor [sic], of the best complexion,” noted one Friar Luys, “and after long dieting and medicining of him, cut off his head in his sleepe and gashing his body full of wounds, put therein all the best Spices, and then wrap him up in Hay.” After burying the cadaver in moist ground, added the friar, they dug their victim up and hung him to dry in the sun, “whereby the body resolveth and droppeth a substance like pure Balme, which liquor is of great price… .”
The gruesome tale was likely the product of an overactive imagination, but European intellectuals who heard such stories were much disturbed by them, and physicians who bothered to carefully test the drug grew leery of it. The brilliant sixteenth-century French surgeon Ambroise Paré, an early expert on the sterile treatment of war wounds, ranked mummy with such fictional panaceas as unicorn horns, noting that “this wicked kinde of drugge, doth nothing helpe the diseased… .” Other scholars, such as the seventeenth-century Dutch physician Petrus Baerdt, were shocked to think that what passed as some miraculous elixir from ancient Egypt was likely no more than the “arm or a leg of a decaying or hanged leper or of some whorehopper suffering from syphilis.” And a few, like the Dutch writer J. van Beverwijck, took square aim at the trade on moral grounds, noting that it desecrated graves, rendered the dead into commodities, and turned “ourselves, like some fierce Indians, into cruel cannibals.”
Still, many Europeans thought mummy preferable to the painful exertions of their doctors, and apothecaries kept dispensing the drug. When supplies of Egyptian mummy—counterfeit or real—ran low, shop owners freely substituted. In northern Europe, some pulverized the leathery bodies that turf cutters occasionally happened upon in the bogs. One enterprising merchant, Moses Isaak, let it be known that he would pay a good price for any such body recovered from the bogs of the northern Netherlands, and local villagers happily accommodated. Between 1784 and 1803, they sold twelve bog bodies to Isaak. Four were human. Two were dogs. Six were horses.
By the early twentieth century, even this bizarre supply seemed exhausted. Few apothecaries had any real mummy remaining in stock. According to the 1905 edition of Hagers Handbuck der Pharmaceutisichen Praxis, an important German pharmaceutical text, “The mumia which is met in trade is mostly only an imitation, consisting of resinous red-brown or brown-black pieces, mixed with some browned bone remnants and little pieces of linen. The mumia is stocked in pieces and powder. If one should obtain and give true mumia, don’t forget to test for arsenic content, especially arsenic sulphide.” Soon after, chemists began clearing their shelves of their mummy jars. No one wanted to be associated any longer with a trade in dead bodies.
ONE OF THE most astonishing things that Sally Woodcock turned up during her research was an article published in 1903 in London’s Illustrated Mail. Entitled “Pictures Painted with Mummies,” it contained several photographs. The afternoon I visited her, Woodcock showed me copies of them. The first depicted a middle-aged colorman from Roberson and Co. His sleeves were rolled neatly to his elbows and he stood in front of a bright window, resting his hands on a flat-faced grinding stone called a muller. Dark scraps of something that looked like licorice curled on a granite slab nearby. But it wasn’t licorice. “See,” said Woodcook, “he’s grinding up a mummy. And those are the kinds of pallet knives you need because you scrape and grind, scrape and grind, and scrape the paint back into a pile. Then you grind it again.”
Woodcock flipped to a second photo. It showed another Roberson employee. Elderly and hunched, with a full white beard and round face, he stood over a shiny cylindrical machine injecting mummy into a row of silvery paint tubes. Woodcock shook her head and then pointed to a third photo of a labeled tube. “There it is,” she observed, looking up, a note of disbelief in her voice. “That’s mummy.”
No one knows just when artists first began daubing mummy onto their canvases. For centuries, apothecaries and colormen were closely linked—often they were one and the same person—so it is difficult to say whether they were dispensing mummy as a medicine to the sick or as a paint to the artists in their clientele. “You find colormen who sold pigments, canvases, and drugs,” said Woodcock, “and in a lot of their recipe books, there’s recipes for cures and there’s even recipes for food. There’s recipes for pickled onions next to arsenic green.” But Woodcock thinks that Europe’s artists picked up on mummy very early. She bases this belief on a text from 1598 she found at Cambridge. In it, the writer alluded to a still earlier treatise describing the use of mummy by Italian painters as early as the twelfth century.
That artists came to fancy a pigment made from mummified human flesh is not entirely surprising. European painters were continually experimenting with color, occasionally going to bizarre and lavish lengths to make a brilliant splash. To make a rich deep black, they packed scraps of elephant ivory tightly in clay pots and then heated them in kilns. To render the traditional blue robes of the Virgin Mary during the Renaissance, they bought an expensive gem, lapis lazuli, and ground it into powder. And in later times, they sought out ever more exotic sources. To obtain a beautiful golden yellow known today as Indian yellow, they purchased soil from India that was drenched in the urine of cows fed a special fodder—mango leaves.
So medieval European artists are unlikely to have blanched much at the thought of buying ground up human bodies. The bitumen-like powder made a lovely transparent brown color when added to oil or amber varnish, and it was almost impossible to duplicate without skillful blending of many other pigments. Mummified human muscles reportedly made the finest mummy, and artists loved the silky feel of it: it had a kind of sensual ease. “It flows from the brush with delightful freedom and evenness,” wrote one nineteenth-century English fan. “Thin films spread upon a white ground are extremely lovely and enjoyable by painters who understand and appreciate the refinements of their art.” Mummy was also fairly versatile. Artists could apply it as a glaze or daub it lightly on a canvas to capture the buttery tones of shadows or the dark swaths on water in the middle distance. There was only one drawback from the aesthetic point of view. Mummy cracked terribly. Within a few years, a painting glazed with it looked much like a crocodile handbag. “It obviously was something that wasn’t suitable,” said Woodcock.
Some painters didn’t care much about posterity, however. Nor were they terribly concerned where the mummy on their palettes came from. During the French Revolution, artists obtained it wherever they could. Almost a year to the day after the overthrow of Louis XVI, France’s new masters decided to commemorate the great revolutionary event. They dispatched a group of workmen equipped with hammers and crowbars to the royal abbey of Saint-Denis in Paris, the solemn burial place of most of France’s kings and many of its queens. As a monk looked on in disbelief, the workmen began shattering the royal sepulchers, one by one, tossing the bodies into a mass grave north of the church. Then they pried open urns in the chapel and scooped out their contents, holding up the mummified hearts of the French kings. Some of the vandals toted these withered body parts off to a local apothecary, who paid them gladly and crushed them to make paint. According to one story, Alsatian artist Martin Drolling bought some of this sovereign paint and applied it to a portrait, which now hangs in the collection of the Louvre.
The vogue for mummy continued almost unabated in the art world throughout much of the nineteenth century. But by the late Victorian era, people were beginning to shrink from it. In 1881, the prominent London-based painter Lawrence Alma-Tadema was shocked to find his colorman at work one day casually grinding up bits of an Egyptian mummy. Alma-Tadema, who had made his reputation in part by painting Egyptian scenes of beautiful women in diaphanous linen gowns, had had no idea what mummy truly was. He hastened to relay the news to friend and fellow artist, Edward Burne-Jones. Burne-Jones, too, was stunned. After a moment’s thought, he hurried off to his studio and returned with a tube of mummy in hand. He wanted to give it a decent burial. “So a hole was bored into the grass at our feet,” noted Georgiana Burne-Jones later, “and we all watched it put safely in, and the spot was marked by one of the girls planting a daisy root above it.”
BUT THE TRADE in mummies didn’t die. Renouncing ancient cadavers as raw materials, many wealthy Europeans were decorating their drawing rooms with the actual dead, a fashion originally spawned by a young Corsican who dreamed of becoming another Alexander the Great. Born into a noble family and educated in a series of French military colleges, Napoleon Bonaparte was determined to leave his mark on the world. “I am destined to change the face of the world; at any rate, this is my belief,” he once wrote his brother Joseph. In 1798, the young general believed his great chance had arrived: he had received orders from the French revolutionary government to conquer Egypt as a stepping stone to capturing India. Well aware that Alexander the Great had made his reputation in the East, Napoleon drew up ambitious plans: he decided to plant a French colony in Egypt. To lay a secure foundation, he recruited nearly 150 French scientists to accompany him and to furnish advice on all aspects of Egypt’s natural history, ancient history, economy, and industry.
Napoleon found Egypt rather more than he had bargained for. No sooner had he taken Cairo than English warships slipped into the waters near Alexandria and sunk most of his fleet with its tons of scientific gear. But the French general and his scientists were not about to let a mere catastrophic defeat get in their way. While the young general tried tightening his hold on the country, his savants swept out into the countryside, observing, recording, and sketching. Some fell helplessly in love with Egypt’s ruins. They measured the Sphinx, exhumed the Rosetta stone, mapped the Valley of the Kings, and marveled at the great temple of Amun at Karnak. They also vacuumed up antiquities, and even the young general himself was soon infected with the fever of collecting. When a combined English and Turkish force drove him finally from the Nile, Napoleon packed two mummy heads in his bags. One he kept for himself; the other he gave to his errant wife, Josephine.
Napoleon’s army of scholars documented their travels up and down the Nile with exceptional thoroughness. Their final report, Description de l’Égypt, ran to twenty-four volumes; five were devoted to magnificent engravings of Egyptian antiquities and monuments. The French discoveries launched the discipline of scientific Egyptology and set Europe on fire with a seemingly unquenchable Egyptomania. “Everything now must be Egyptian,” noted the English writer Robert Southey rather dryly in 1807, “the ladies wear crocodile ornaments and you sit on a sphinx in a room hung round with mummies and the long black lean-armed long-nosed hieroglyphical men… .”
With Europe aflame, the diplomatic corps in Egypt went on an unprecedented collecting spree. Sending their assistants into the field, they crated up antiquities for the new national museums that had opened their doors in Europe. Henry Salt, the British consul in Alexandria, acquired three huge collections of Egyptian antiquities, which included many splendid mummies. He sold one of his collections to the British Museum and a second to the Louvre in France. After his death, a third went up for auction in London. The most popular pieces were Salt’s mummies. To keep the crowds rooted to their chairs until the end of the day, the auctioneers cleverly reserved the embalmed corpses for the last sales. One—“the mummy of a female of high quality, 5’4" high with its case highly painted and ornamented”—was a particular hit, commanding £105 before the hammer fell.
The new Egyptian exhibits further fueled the public fascination and crowds of wealthy young Europeans began converging on Alexandria and Cairo. Some stricken with tuberculosis thought of emigrating to Egypt, thereby taking advantage of the dry desert air. But most arrived on a grand tour of the Holy Land, wintering along the Nile before moving north in the spring to Syria, Lebanon, and Palestine. At the Great Pyramid of Giza, they hired local men—three per climber—to heave and pull them to the top. Along the banks of the Nile, they arranged for their transport south. A party of four could hire a private yacht known as a dahabieh and a captain known as dragoman for just £224, and sail the Nile for ten weeks attended by a cook, a manservant, and a cabin cleaner. “The traveler,” noted one Lloyd’s guidebook, “was a perfect king in his boat.” In the afternoon sun, those aboard could laze under an awning on the deck, sipping tea from china cups, smoking a pipe, and gazing out at the crocodiles sunning along the banks. In the evening, they could dine on linen-covered tables set with crystal, silver candlesticks, and bottles of French champagne. And, of course, they could stop in whenever they chose at the towns and ruins and cemeteries that lined the Nile, picking up mementos of their voyage along the way.
Mummies were the most Egyptian—and hence the most desirable—of souvenirs and some travelers insisted on hunting for them on their own. At el-Cheguel Guil, the French novelist Gustave Flaubert and his companion Maxime Du Camp crawled wormlike through a black passage to an underground mummy grotto. “We have to drag ourselves along flat on the ground—exhausting,” Flaubert noted later in his journal. “If one were alone, one wouldn’t go very far; fear and discouragement would win out. We twist, descend, climb; sometimes to squeeze through I have to inch ahead on my side and several times go flat on my back, propelling myself by my vertebrae, like a snake.” Flaubert hated it, but he found little relief in the grotto itself. Both he and Du Camp were terrified lest a stray spark from their candle set the entire chamber and its resinous mass of mummies ablaze. Just such a tragedy had claimed the lives of an American traveler and his party twenty years earlier. But the two French travelers weren’t to be denied their trophies. Du Camp asked the guides to carry out a “supply of embalmed human limbs and crocodiles.” Flaubert took only a mummified human foot. It sat upon his desk until he died.
More cautious travelers were content to buy mummies from dealers, but they had little guarantee that they could ever get the bodies home. In 1835, the Egyptian government tightened its grip on the antiquities trade, officially banning export of the country’s ancient treasures. But even this did not stop determined collectors. In England, Rosalie David found the diary of a young woman who tried smuggling a withered cadaver aboard her boat with disastrous results. Removed from its dry tomb, the mummy began to decay alarmingly, and the cook, who had been in the service of Egypt’s viceroy, soon sniffed out the secret. Terrified that he would report her to the authorities, the woman and her companion stole up to the deck one night and tossed the mummy overboard. Only the coffin made it back to England.
Some passengers relished the intrigue of smuggling, however, and in certain circles returning home with a mummy was regarded as an admirable sign of resourcefulness. “It would hardly be respectable,” noted Father Geramb at one point to the Egyptian ruler Muhammad Ali, “to present oneself in Europe without a mummy in one hand and a crocodile in the other.” Such respectability called for new levels of deviousness. It was simply impossible to cram a whole mummy into most steamer trunks, and larger shipping containers attracted too much official attention. So European tourists began demanding smaller mummies, specifically sawn-off heads, hands, and feet. Sellers suddenly found themselves in the grotesque business of dismembering bodies, and all their hewing and chopping resulted in the strange wealth of ancient body parts that floats around Europe and North America today. Nearly every major museum owns a collection of such mummified hands and feet. Some possess heads mounted in Victorian glass cases, suitable for the mantel. They were, after all, perfect Victorian keepsakes—exotic relics from someone’s great Egyptian adventure, wizened badges of courage, bittersweet reminders of the death that awaits all, and clear tokens of life everlasting—in one form or another.
Even so, it wasn’t easy to keep a mummy intact in the cold damp of an English country home, and many were lost entirely over the years. At the Manchester Museum, David has been trying to track down dozens of Egyptian mummies mentioned in Victorian journals and diaries in hopes of gathering samples from them for her mummy tissue bank. Occasionally she finds them in odd places, stuffed in the attics of private homes or crammed into a corner of a backroom in a public school. “We went to see one in North Wales a few months ago,” she said, “and that was a stately home. The current owner’s great-great-grandparents brought it over from Egypt as a souvenir.”
Occasionally, however, some of these imported mummies make it onto the open market. In the mid-1990s, an antique dealer in Wiscasset, Maine, put an ancient Egyptian mummy up for public sale in his shop. Reputedly brought to the United States in the 1920s by a wealthy shoe manufacturer, the mummy had been exhibited for years in a small family-owned museum. When the museum closed its doors, the mummy was sold to an antique dealer in Wiscasset. The dealer believed his new purchase to be the rarest and grandest kind of mummy, an ancient Egyptian princess. For such a rare treasure, he asked a handsome price: $20,000. When a reporter from Boston dropped by his shop, she was appalled to see a human being offered for sale. She began making phone calls. By the time she was done with the matter, the United States customs service had launched an investigation of the mummy and placed a seizure notice on it.
But the mummy was not quite as advertised, noted writer David Hewett in the Maine Antique Digest in 1997. When Egyptologists from the Boston Museum of Fine Arts arrived in Wiscasset, they noticed—with a surprise rather similar to that of unroller George Gliddon earlier—something unexpected curled along the princess’s groin. It was a shriveled penis. No one else had ever spied it there. In all likelihood, guessed the Egyptologists, the mummy was an ordinary temple priest. Hearing this, officials at the Egyptian embassy in Washington waived their right to recover the body. In Egyptian terms, the mummy was simply too commonplace to bother with. But outside the land of the Nile, Egyptian mummies had become rarities. The temple priest’s mummy remains on sale. According to one Internet report, the shop owner declined a swap of four rebuilt Harley-Davidson motorcycles: it wasn’t enough. “I heard of a guy who sold a mummy hand,” the dealer allegedly told reporters. “The guy got $40,000 for just a hand. Come on, I’m willing to sell a head, a chest, hands, arms, and legs—an entire mummy—for $40,000.”
Crass as these remarks sound, it bears remembering that few of us are entirely innocent of trade in the mummified dead. As much as we deplore trafficking in the ancient dead, most of us have taken part at one time or another in this commerce. The days of pulverizing mummies to fill paint tubes, as Sally Woodcock discovered, or grinding them in mortars for medicine have mercifully vanished, but a new kind of mummy economy has emerged to take its place, a kind of mummy.com. Capitalizing not on real flesh, but on the steady delivery of sensational new mummy stories and images, it seeks to satisfy our seemingly insatiable appetite for the everlasting dead. Today mummies are big business, and the modern media does its best to serve up a steady diet of mummy movies, mummy documentaries, mummy television specials, mummy advertisements, mummy Web sites, mummy posters—and, of course, mummy books.
And in this, I am no better than any of my colleagues. In choosing to write about the preserved dead for magazines and books, I, too, have begun trading in their withered flesh.