WHERE DOES OUR FASCINATION WITH ANCIENT EGYPT COME FROM?
In hindsight: The mysteries of mummies have their roots in British fantasy novels
The 2017 version of the film The Mummy starring Tom Cruise contains, for an Egyptologist, many amusing and outlandish ahistorical plot points and paranormal events. The film, like many in its genre, represents ancient Egypt as a liminal zone between humanity and the supernatural. It pays virtually no deference to two centuries of scholarship on ancient Egypt conducted within the academy. As such, the film offers an interesting case study for our larger societal tug-of-war between intellectualism and popular culture. The role of mummies in this battle may appear trivial at first; but in fact, it is a good example of where our thirst for entertainment subverts our thirst for knowledge.
The genealogy of The Mummy is complex and far more intriguing than the film itself. It is saturated with ideas from twentieth-century monster films and nineteenth-century horror stories. It all adds up to something we might call “Egyptomania.” And in order to understand Egyptomania, and specifically the Mummy, we need to consider several lines of thought: the academic discipline of Egyptology, the British colonization of Egypt, and late Victorian and Edwardian mummy fiction.
The word “Egyptomania” refers to the renewed interest by Westerners in everything pertaining to ancient Egypt. But people have been enchanted by ancient Egypt since the Graeco-Roman period: King Ptolemy II (308–246 BCE) commissioned the Egyptian priest Manetho to write a history of ancient Egypt in Greek; the Romans imported ancient Egyptian gods, erecting a temple for the cult of Isis at Pompeii and one to Serapis in Puteoli in the early second century BCE; and throughout the Middle Ages mummies were featured in fashionable unwrapping parties that aimed to scare and entertain the guests. Well into the twentieth century, corpses were ground into mummy dust and sold in apothecaries as medicine.
The academic discipline of Egyptology began about 200 years ago with Napoleon’s military invasion of Egypt from 1798–1801, which inaugurated the first wave of Egyptomania. The Egyptian artifacts that were uncovered, and the publications they generated, stimulated the imaginations of Europeans. But despite a growing interest in all things Egyptian, the mummy as we know it today, had not yet come into being.
Scholars and artists associated with Napoleon’s Egyptian expedition worked to record both ancient and modern aspects of the country, including Dominique Vivant Denon’s two-volume Voyage dans la basse et la haute Egypte (1802) and the state sponsored Le Description de L’Egypte (1809). Before Napoleon’s invasion, the study of ancient Egypt was based on Egyptian monuments uncovered in Roman ruins, mostly in Italy, since few Europeans visited Egypt between the Arab conquest in 641 CE and the late 1600s.
Another consequence of Napoleon’s mission was the discovery of the famous Rosetta Stone, a stela containing a Ptolemaic temple decree written in two languages (Egyptian and Greek) and three scripts (hieroglyphs, demotic and Greek), that led Jean Francois Champollion to decipher Egyptian hieroglyphs in 1822.
One of the first mummy stories was The Mummy! by Jane Loudon in 1827, followed shortly thereafter by Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s The Last Days of Pompeii in 1834, Edgar Allan Poe’s Some Words with a Mummy in 1845 and Theophile Gauthier’s “Le Pied de Momie” in 1863. It was this last story that intimated some of the themes that would excite late Victorians. Nonetheless, there were few mummy stories before 1882, the year the British seized Egypt.
For about three decades, beginning around 1879, there was a large increase in Egyptological Romances that featured mummies. The three most influential authors were Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, H. Rider Haggard and Bram Stoker, although they were not the only ones to write on this topic.
In 1892 Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s story Lot №249 helped to popularize the nefarious revived mummy, which reinforced the idea of Egypt as a land beyond human comprehension. This was after Conan Doyle made his first trip to see the Egyptian collection at the Louvre in Paris. In fact, this visit inspired his story. But for most authors of late Victorian and Edwardian mummy fiction the mummy was female. In this way, she departed from how the mummy was characterized in Lot №249 in that she was perfectly preserved in her youth and beauty and she was attractive to modern British men, who wanted to kiss her and marry her. In fact, early mummy stories were politically charged love stories where the mummies acted as objects of male desire. She was a creature of imperial fantasy and Britain went crazy for her for a short time. It was these late Victorian and Edwardian stories that set the stage for the mummies that would appear on the silver screen in the twentieth century.
Western popular culture grew less interested in mummies after Egypt officially became a protectorate in 1914. In the 1920s, Egyptians themselves began to embrace Pharaonic history, ushering in a new national discourse that juxtaposed the Egyptian Pharaonism cultural movement with colonialism. British fiction also changed at this time. Mummies became male competitors as opposed to the salacious female mummies of yesteryear.
For most British authors the mummy was female, perfectly preserved in her youth and beauty. Mummies acted as objects of male desire; she was a creature of imperial fantasy.
In November 1922, the discovery of King Tut’s tomb in the Valley of the Kings unleashed a third wave of Egyptomania. This sensational archaeological find triggered a press frenzy all over the world. The excavation revealed the richly colored wall paintings that enveloped the young king’s sarcophagus and a large treasure trove of golden artifacts. It also unleashed a wave of mummy curse tales, which though they had appeared in the nineteenth century, multiplied with the discovery of King Tut’s tomb. Reported in the New York Times on December 22, 1922, a cobra resembling the rearing serpent of the royal uraeus broke into Carter’s home and killed his pet canary. According to the New York Times, the Egyptian locals believed this was a warning from the world beyond to leave the dead alone.
The idea of the king’s curse was further perpetuated by the mysterious death of Lord Carnarvon, the patron of the dig. Just two weeks after the opening of Tut’s tomb, Carnarvon died of blood poisoning, apparently the product of a mosquito bite and a shaving cut. All of the stories surrounding the discovery of this tomb helped strengthen the extant characterization of the mummy as monstrous, vengeful, and bearing a curse. In the 1970s, the world tour of King Tut’s treasures (followed by another tour in the early 2000s) offered subsequent opportunities to refresh popular fascination with this alluring but dangerous vision of ancient Egypt.
Parallel to each fantastical discovery or lurid tale of magic, sexual desire, or vengeance has been a development of an increasingly rich, rigorous, and scholarly discipline of study devoted to Egypt’s history. Today, Egyptology is a robust academic discipline comprising hundreds of scholars and thousands of publications and documentaries. Yet the ancient Egypt that the broader public knows is the one from films such as The Mummy — a land of magic and mystery, a narrative born from Western imperial appetites and male sexual desires.
These popular depictions misrepresent Egypt’s past and conflict with what is actually known to be true about this distant world. Although each of these waves of Egyptomania has been inspired by new knowledge seemingly grounded on a “scientific” approach to the subject, what has emerged from the Western creative imagination continues to grow ever-more divorced from scholarship and research. So while the latest book by an Egyptologist may sell several dozen — or even several hundred — copies at the bookstore, Tom Cruise’s The Mummy grossed $409 million worldwide. It was the #2 film in America the weekend it opened… second only to Wonder Woman.
Kelly-Anne Diamond is Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of History at Villanova University
