Articles

The Face of the Mummy: The Social Impact of Mummy’s and Mummy Unrollings on the Nineteenth Century

The Face of the Mummy: The Social Impact of Mummy’s and Mummy Unrollings on the Nineteenth Century

By Carley Henderson

Georgia State University Undergraduate Paper, 2008

Digging for Mummies (1890)

Introduction: Mummies adorn the exhibits of hundreds of American and European museums alike and their presence in popular culture of our society has been a consistent one for over a hundred years. To the men and women of the twenty-first century, the mummy still represents the mysterious and the ancient. And although we are influenced by the images and concepts of the numerous literary works, plays, paintings, and films that depict the mummy in a state of resurrection, for the modern audience the mummy is ultimately an artifact. The hard science of our time has gone beyond the hope of resurrecting the long dead; Frankestien’s monster is an impossibility.

In the nineteenth century, European and American fascination with Egypt and her mummies was at an all time high. Mummies were ground up and taken as medicine and used as pigments in paint. “Mummy cloth” was a fashionable part of female dress advertised in Harpers Bazaar. In the late 1880’s and early 1890’s, it was a rising fad, for men and especially women, to have their pictures taken posing like a mummy inside an upright Egyptian coffin.  The Washington Monument finished in 1884 was modeled after an Egyptian Obelisk, while an actual one replaced the guillotine at the Palace de la Concord in Paris. American and European authors, poets, and painters used mummies as their muses, while all manner of Egyptian antiquities, including mummies, flooded into European and American museums and private collections. Historian John Irwin appropriately uses a quote from an 1832 article in The Review, “since the days of the Romans, who plundered Egypt of obelisks…this magnificent kind of robbery never flourished more than at the present moment.”



With the onslaught of Egyptian mania, came the nineteenth century obsession with mummies and the fad of unrolling them in front of intimate and grand audiences alike. Mummies were sold in classifieds, advertised as museum attractions, became subjects of humorous and romantic tales, points of debate in theology, and were even subjects in court cases. Although the viewings and unrollings were limited in their direct impact, the fact that these were the subjects of countless newspaper articles and literary works illustrate that their presence had a remarkable impact on nineteenth century culture. And again leads us to the question; what was it about mummies in the nineteenth century that so fascinated the middle and elite classes?

Click here to read this thesis from Georgia State University

 

Sponsored Content