It's a wrap

The Mummy Returns has Egyptian audiences squirming in their seats, and recent discoveries of mummified animals are making the headlines. Fayza Hassan pores over travellers' accounts of their hands-on forays into the realm of the dead
"I find the practice of digging up mummies and placing them in a museum profoundly distasteful," says a young Sufi woman. "Imagine that in thousands of years our bodies are dug up and put on display for everyone to look at... Death is a private thing, and I wholeheartedly approve of the late President Sadat's instructions that the mummies be returned to their sepultures."
Jean Cocteau would not have agreed with her, or with Sadat. After his 1949 visit to the Egyptian Museum "with Dr Drioton, a jovial person who seems to infuse cheerful life into the necropolis," the famous French writer observed: "Fists closed, eyes wide open and fixed, the Pharaohs march against the void, put it to sleep, braving its powers. For this reason it does not seem a sacrilege to move them to a museum. They have exacted this nominal glory, a glory as of a tragedian in the limelight. They did not hide themselves in order to disappear, but in order to await the cue for their entry on stage. They have not been dragged from the tomb. They have been brought from the limbo of the wings with masks and gloves made of gold."
A foreign student, a Muslim, affirms that the sight of mummies does not ruffle his religious sensibility; rather, he objects to the stiff fee charged at the Egyptian Museum for admittance to the mummies' room. He does not care much for ancient monuments, but would have been curious to see real mummies up close.
This conversation is triggered by a parent's disparaging comments on the movie The Mummy Returns. Her 10-year- old son was thoroughly fascinated, but, as a former student of Egyptology, she was horrified. This should not be allowed, she says firmly, and it is not enough to dismiss the movie as yet another incursion of the cinema industry into the realm of historical fabrication. She is now looking for proper information to cleanse her son's mind of the rubbish to which he has been exposed.
*****
In the 5th century BC, Herodotus wrote about mummification and the burial customs of Ancient Egyptians, but it is only much later that mummies became an object of curiosity for Westerners dreaming of adventure in far-off lands. At first it was believed that the embalmed bodies had medicinal properties bordering on the magical. "A confusion between the black resin used in the preparation of mum/mumia, a Persian/Arabic word for bitumen or mineral pitch, held to have therapeutic powers, led to ground mummy becoming a staple of apothecaries' shops in Europe during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries," write Salima Ikram and Aidan Dodson.
Seventeenth-century French traveller and professional soldier Jean Coppin, visiting Egypt for the first time in 1638, commented that the Venetians held the "mummies in such great esteem that the Republic [of Venice] pays each one of its consuls a number of sequins just to visit the place where mummies are to be found." Coppin himself, moved by curiosity, gathered enough courage to be roped in and lowered into a well "built of dried stones" at the end of which a narrow passage led to caves carved out of the rock. There he saw "niches all around resembling coffins and this is where the dead and embalmed bodies, which are called mummies were laid to rest." He was, however, rather disappointed. The coffins were empty and to see the mummies he would have had to advance much further into the labyrinth of passages, where one could easily get lost unless one had taken the precaution of holding onto a rope tied at the entrance to be able to retrace one's steps (a practice currently followed by many visitors to these caves).
Coppin lost heart, and preferred a safer visit to the museum, where he was able to see "whole mummies wrapped in bandages three fingers wide, the legs and arms joined together like those of infants. The head, the neck and shoulders are also covered with these bandages in such a way that the whole body appears completely wrapped up, but the bandage has been draped and folded so many times around that it takes a considerable time to undo it." Coppin, probably miffed by his lack of success in the mummies' caves, was eager to let his readers know that he had nevertheless attended the unwrapping of a mummy -- an event that was later to become a popular form of entertainment in Europe. "Under the wraps," he wrote, "one finds the feet and the hands in their integrity with the nails painted gold. [The mummies] are embalmed with a black mixture which is hard and shiny and whose smell is close to that of pitch, except that it is far more agreeable." What surprised him was the fact that the linen, free of any special treatment, could remain intact for so many centuries. Only the top layers were damaged, he noticed, but the rest of the material was in perfect condition. "The faces on these bodies," he added, "are covered with something that outlines the features and in many cases it is golden plaster or a paste made of cardboard which allows the lines of the face to be seen clearly, but if one removes this sort of mask, one finds that the face underneath is completely spoiled, either because this part has not been wrapped up like the rest, or because the preparation that was applied to it has destroyed the flesh."
Coppin does not seem to have been able to carry his mummy back home, but others were luckier. Such was the abundance of mummies taken to Europe during the 19th century that the unwrappings became "very much a part of a Victorian parlour entertainment, with special invitations being issued for them," write Ikram and Dodson.
In those days, travellers often gave those less fortunate friends and compatriots they chanced to meet abroad the opportunity to attend impromptu viewings. Howard Hopley, travelling up the Nile in 1869, was invited by Mr Doubledash -- "a man well known in scientific circles and conversaziones, where he shines in a great light" -- for drinks on his boat. It transpired in the course of the conversation that he had a mummy stored under the divan. "A mummy!" ejaculated Mr Smith, their companion, springing up in horror; "I hope I haven't hurt him!"
"No, I think not; he is pretty tough. There are a couple more on deck, too -- women in boxes: but this fellow is unrolled," said Doubledash. "If you will lend a hand, we will have him out."
"Whereupon," recounts Hopley, "while one of us held a pair of candles the Thing in question was dragged from beneath the divan and laid on the table. It was the perfect body of a man mummified in youth, stiff and unyielding, as if accumulated ages had hardened it into iron... 'I bought him at Thebes,' said Mr Doubledash, pulling off tenderly some threads of mummy cloth, which still adhered to the body. Mustapha Aga hit upon a fresh tomb while I was there... I purchased the three tenants in situ. It was quite a speculation you know... but I left [the coffins] behind me for I hadn't room. Even as it is,' he added with a sigh, 'my Arabs are always stumbling over the women upstairs, and wanting to burn them. They are very good for making fires, they say.'"
The ladies, added Doubledash, were not yet thoroughly unrolled, for he wanted to save them for England.
"'In fact, I broke the head of one in tearing away her painted mask, and trying to unclasp a necklace she had on... There it is behind you, sir, on the shelf.'
"This last was levelled at Smith, who, taken in flank and now thoroughly horrified, turned sharp round to look; and there, truly enough, propped up by a powder flask, stood the ghastly thing grinning hideously at him."
Mummy unwrappings did not start in the 19th century, though; many individuals had staged such shows in previous years, comment Ikram and Dodson. "One of the earliest recorded occurred in September 1698 when Beno�t de Maillet (1656-1738), Louis XIV's consul in Cairo, unwrapped a mummy before a group of French travellers."
One is left to wonder if the Abbé Anthoine Morison, who had visited Egypt the previous year and prided himself on his close friendship with de Maillet, would have enjoyed such a spectacle. On a pilgrimage to the Monastery of St Catherine in Sinai, he recalled hearing about a village close by, named Saccara (sic), where the inhabitants were employed in finding the mouth of deep wells "into which one is lowered with much difficulty" (Morison wore his cassock during the whole trip, rendering any descent into a well even more improbable than his cautious nature would have dictated), "and in which one finds a number of caves where there are still many corpses, some embalmed with salt and pitch only, others with myrrh and aromatic drugs. The bodies of these Ancient Egyptians are decorated according to the rank they occupied in their lives and [the quality of] the linen with which they are wrapped is meant to mark a distinction between them, even in this region of darkness. The bad temper of the Arabs fortunately spared us this trip, which I would have only accomplished for the company, albeit with much distaste. The mummy is no longer considered something rare or admirable on our shores. People are realising the gross errors in which they were happy to languish until recently and today there are few pharmacists in France who, having emptied a body of its entrails to fill it with gum, perfumes and aromatic substances, preventing thus its corruption, would not be able to conserve it perfectly, if they only took the trouble of wrapping it properly and placing it in an enclosed space, protected from the air; but I would advise them to embalm their souls with the perfume of the virtues that can give them everlasting life, rather than to try to preserve the body against the tribute it owes to decay."
As an afterthought, and briefly, Morison nevertheless acknowledged that mummies, if pulverised and mixed with olive oil, were said to prevent haemorrhages and cure ruptures and dislocations. According to P Masson, author of a history of French commerce in the Levant in 1896, there was already an important commerce in "mummie" in the 1600s, as mummies had acquired the reputation of being a remedy for every kind of disease. In 1697 alone, over 80 quintals were exported.
Still, European clergymen travelling in Egypt often seem to have shared Morison's distaste for mummies. Some 30 years before him, Père Antonius Gonzales, who followed the same route in 1665-1666, had expressed an equal lack of enthusiasm. Having described at length the difficulties of being lowered down the well, he noted the bodies strewn about, "many lying on the floor wrapped in sheets, others covered in sand and a few stark naked yet undamaged. Most had little statues of clay on their chests. It is thought that they were their idols." Although the priest did not mind picking up a few of these idols to add to his budding collection, he declined to buy an entire corpse, although it would have cost him "only a few piastres." No one in his group was interested, he added dismissively.
The padres' attitude was not the norm, however, as is made amply evident by Pietro della Valle's enthusiastic mummy- hunting. He describes the expedition in a letter sent from Cairo on 25 January 1616: Having reached "the Pyramid of the Mummies" (Saqqara), della Valle set up camp and ordered the workers to start digging holes at some distance from the wells that had already been explored. He wanted to be sure that other treasure seekers had not previously tampered with any mummies he eventually discovered. Although his efforts did not yield any results, he was approached by one of the "peasants," who let him know that he had a well-preserved mummy for sale. "When these words were reported to me by the interpreter, I was immediately willing, and having left full instructions with all those who were digging, I took with me Tommaso, the interpreter, and the painter, and followed on foot after the peasant." They walked for a long time, and della Valle began to doubt the wisdom of his hasty acceptance, but finally arrived "at the spot where, near an excavated well... [The peasant] drew forth a mummy from some sand under which he had it hidden, the entire body of a dead man, which being for the most part well preserved and most curiously adorned and neat, seemed to me very beautiful and elegant. It could be seen to be a large naked man, though he was tightly bound and wrapped in a great quantity of linen cloths, embalmed with the bitumen which, when it then becomes incorporated with the flesh, is called among us mummia, and is given as medicine... In addition, spread around all over the body there was a covering made of similar cloths all painted and golden, beautifully stitched and coated, I believe with pitch, all over, and sealed at the edge with many lead seals, all of which betokens someone of consequence."
The covering of the upper part was even more enchanting to della Valle's astonished eyes than the mummy itself. It was "an effigy of a youthful man, and from head to foot his garment was adorned with so many bits and pieces of pictures and gold, with so many hieroglyphics and characters and similar fanciful decorations, that... it was the most graceful thing imaginable; moreover, men of learned curiosity can draw from this no end of proofs for the authenticity of the antiquities of those times."
Stung by mummy fever, della Valle acquired another couple of mummies of similar value and then decided to be helped down the well to see for himself if no more treasures lay buried there. He found an ornate coffin that he ordered brought out; having discoursed at length on the various processes of mummification for the benefit of his pen pal in Italy, he regaled him with more gory details with unselfconscious simplicity. Having found a broken mummy down the well, della Valle decided to acquire it too: "the body (whether it had been intact and injected with enemas or opened up and degutted one could not tell) was so crammed inside full of bitumen that it formed a solid mass, and one could scarcely know when breaking it, which was bitumen and which was bone. I must not leave out that this material was so hard that when I wanted to break it I had to pound and hammer it mightily with stones and iron tools... Of the broken pieces of this mummy, I wanted for myself the completely intact head, and a fair piece of bitumen, with a handful of those bandages; the rest of it, since I felt I had been recompensed over and above what I had spent, I left entirely to those poor peasants..." A devout Catholic, della Valle gave little thought to mummification as a religious rite and, on the rare occasions when he mentioned it, did so in passing, in tones of patronising amusement: "From all this [the breaking up of the mummy] you can see how greatly the poor Egyptians exerted themselves to preserve their bodies, if it might be possible, along with their souls for all eternity."
Whatever their feelings about mummies, most travellers were collectors who contented themselves with a few specimens and on the whole did not cause irreparable damage. The French Expedition, on the other hand, followed by the reign of Mohamed Ali, ushered in the wholesale rape of Egyptian antiquities. One of the precursors and maybe the most important culprit was undoubtedly the Signor Giambattista Belzoni, who, armed with firmans from the Pasha, conducted his operations with the greatest contempt for the havoc he wrought on his passage. Rightly, he considered himself a pioneer and scorned "the traveller [who] is generally satisfied when he has seen the large hall, the gallery, the staircase, and as far as he can conveniently go... so when he comes to a narrow and difficult passage, or to have to descend to the bottom of a well or cavity, he declines taking such trouble." Belzoni made it his business to proceed further. No abyss was too deep for him, no closed gallery too suffocating, though he admitted that "it requires great power of lung to resist [the choking dust] and the strong effluvia of mummies." He explored systematically, braving discomfort and sometimes danger and horror. "After getting through these passages, some of them two or three hundred yards long, you generally find a more commodious place, perhaps high enough to sit. But what a place to rest! surrounded by heaps of mummies in all directions; which previous to my being accustomed to the sight, impressed me with horror." A less impressionable traveller had mentioned that the rocks of these galleries were stuffed with layers of mummies alternating with layers of sand, making them look like macaroni and cheese.
Once, exhausted and overcome by the dust, the stench and the eerieness of the scene, Belzoni "sought a resting place, found one and contrived to sit; but when my weight bore on the body of an Egyptian," he wrote, "it crushed it like a bandbox. I naturally had recourse to my hands to sustain my weight, but they found no better support; so that I sank altogether among the broken mummies, with a crash of bones, rags and wooden cases, which raised such a dust as kept me motionless for a quarter of an hour, waiting till it subsided again." These difficulties never stopped Belzoni in his quest for the amulets and papyri found inside the mummies' bandages. He managed to move priceless monuments out of Egypt but could not resist robbing a grave quite like a foreign Sheikh Abdel-Rassoul. Only when Mariette created the first Egyptian Museum in Bulaq in 1878 (which after his death was placed under the able direction of Gaston Maspero) did the plunder of mummies become slightly more problematic for Egyptians and foreigners alike.
Sources:
Salima Ikram and Aidan Dodson, The Mummy in Ancient Egypt, Equipping the Dead for Eternity, American University in Cairo Press, 1998
Gilles Lambert, , JC Lattès, 1997
Amelia Edwards, A Thousand Miles Up the Nile, Parkway Publishing, 1993
Deborah Manley, The Nile. A Traveller's Anthology, Cassel, 1996
George Bull (transl.), The Pilgrim, the Travels of Pietro della Valle, Hutchinson, 1993
Georges Goyon (ed.), Le Voyage en Egypte d'Anthoine Morison (1697), IFAO, 1976
Charles Libois SJ (transl.), Le Voyage en Egypte du Père Antonius Gonzales (1665-1666), IFAO, 1977
Serge Sauneron (ed.), Les Voyages en Egypte de Jean Coppin (1638-1639; 1643-1646), IFAO, 1971
G Belzoni, Voyages en Egypte et en Nubie, Louis-A Christophe (ed.), Pygmalion, 1979
The Treasures of the Egyptian Museum, American University in Cairo Press, 1999
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