Author: SJ Wolfe, with Robert Singerman
Publisher: McFarland, 2009
Price: £28.50 (paperback)
Isbn: 9780786439416

What is almost as good as seeing an ancient Egyptian mummy in an American museum? This book. The ransacking of ancient Egypt­ians – and their antiquities – was shameful, but it makes for great reading.

SJ Wolfe, of the American Antiquarian Society, does a remarkable job of cataloguing and describing the importation of the coffins and their contents from the arrival of the first one in 1823.

Mummies captivate us, and they were no less captivating to those in the 19th century who were seeing them for the first time. Then, the venue was not a museum and the exhibit was not appropriately contextualised. Instead, it was the front window of a candy or clothing store in a bid for more business, and the customers it drew were sometimes allowed to touch the mummy.

Mummies were brought over from Egypt to preside over a charity event or to reside in a library. They dramatised the exotic in dime museums, confirmed the pseudo-scientific in phrenology circles, and were the centre of attention at public lectures and private “unrollings”. They were sought by a president (Grover Cleveland) and by the father of a presidential assassin (Junius Brutus Booth).

Wolfe has ferreted out handfuls of period ads, illustrations, and quotes from contemporary magazines and newspapers to show the ways these travellers from the Old World were made to serve in the New World. As she relates in this book, mummies were given as a reward to diplomats, seized for non-payment of debts, and used in college pranks.

Wolfe paints stark contrasts, sometimes unintentionally: the mummy of a woman claimed to be the princess who rescued the baby Moses from the bullrushes versus the mummy of a baby smuggled out of Egypt in the valise of a minister. She teases out the discrepancies about mummies which were in such abundance that they were used as medicine, paint, and fuel for trains.

The author also unravels the story of the mummy-wrapp­ings which were used to make the rag paper that was blamed for an epidemic of cholera. She refutes the notion that mummies caused the disease, but identifies the mills that imported mummy rags, and even reprints a broadside that brags about the paper on which it was printed!

Mummies were a commodity in the 19th century, but were not as precious as we now regard them. Of the 560 that Wolfe documented as having been brought to the US, some were stored under beds and in attics when they weren’t on display. If the new climate did not agree with them and these desert-dwellers rotted in the humidity, they were simply removed to the dump or burned. It was no great loss to have one buried in the San Francisco earthquake and another consumed in the Chicago fire.

Not only were there plenty to go around, but contemporary “tramps and beggars” were suitably wrapped and passed for authentic ancient mummies. In such cases, the public may have been none the wiser, since one dead Egyptian looked much like another, based on the descript­ive newspaper copy (this from 1866): “…body and face are as black as night and look tough and leathery. The features are sharp and the head narrow. The flesh is considerably shrunken and the chin is very sharp. The row of front teeth are exposed to view and look like a circle of pearls. The tongue protrudes slightly and looks like a piece of thin black sole leather.”

And every single mummy seemed to be exactly 3,000 years old!

The text is painlessly readable, since the author relegates the formal documentation to append­ices and backmatter. These include chapter notes, suggested readings, a list of mummies not mentioned in the text, descript­ions of the coffins, a thorough bibliography, and an index. All of that and it’s got Egyptologist Bob Brier’s stamp of approval in the form of a foreword.

I have only the merest of critic­isms:
1) that the author omitted the umlaut on our beloved Mütter Museum in Philadelphia, and
2) that she barely touched on the remarkable story of how the royal mummy of Rameses the Great (since returned to Egypt) became an anonymous exhibit at a museum in Niagara Falls.

Aside from that, Mummies in 19th-Century America is both a delightful read and a priceless resource and goes into the “perman­ent collection” of my own little cabinet of curiosities. You should get one for yours, too.