In a word, brilliant. Jasmine Day fills in a huge gap between popular culture and the scientific study of mummies. She unravels the ancient Egyptian mummy not to reveal the body, but what it has meant and how it has been used and understood. A few caveats: this is no picture book, although it does have illustrations. The Mummy’s Curse may be read for pleasure, but be prepared for a new insight every other page. Her ethnographic surveys are explained in the appendix, the sources are documented in a lengthy bibliography and substantial endnotes, and the whole thing is cross-referenced in a subcategorised index. But don’t let the scholarly apparatus scare you.

Read on…

The Mummy’s Curse begins with the premise that mummymania – the popular fascination with Egyptian mummies – has been neglected by academics as “low culture”. She then explains it, anchoring it in two events more than 100 years apart: Napoleon’s conquest of Egypt in 1798 and the discovery of the nearly intact tomb of King Tutankhamun in 1922, which happened to coincide with the dawn of mass media. The author understands well that the dominant reading of a subject changes over time, just as the mummification techniques of the Egyptians did.

She begins with a look at what mummies meant in early popular culture by going back to the original sources – themselves antiques by now – to set the record straight in several respects. For instance, she confirms that mummies were used as fertilizer and had been ground up as an ingredient in paint pigment, but refutes the notion that they were burned for fuel on trains, tracing this commonplace to a joke by Mark Twain.

Day lays out the conceptions about Egyptian mummies a century ago, when they were characterised as coming to life (an idea that has stayed with us). This reanimation occurred either to romance mortals or to retaliate for the disturbance of their tombs. At the same time, they were ubiquitous, considered to be interchangeable and in never-ending supply. They were spoken of as being “mined” like ore.

The book makes some remarkable connections. For instance, the debut of Christmas gift-wrapping in 1840 introduced the idea that what is wrapped is meant to be unwrapped. Unwrappings of even royal mummies were social events rather than scientific studies, and in this way many mummified ancient Egyptians became separated from their identities.

Day examines the recurrent theme of the curse of the pharaohs, which was (and is) guaranteed to sell books. As soon as the film industry was born, the sensationalism surrounding mummies was translated to the screen in the form of the horror movie. Mummy films, then, are almost as old as cinema itself but they really took off with Karl Freund’s The Mummy (1932). The idea of graves plundered to supply cadavers for medical dissection probably did compound the distastefulness of mummies being exhumed and dismembered.

In our own day, the mummy has been tamed. Mass-produced toys, popular cartoons and comics, and oft-repeated jokes have reduced these preserved human beings to funny creatures that have joined witches, skeletons, and ghosts in the American Hallowe’en pantheon. “Mummy” is groaningly punned with “mommy” and wrappings become bandages – or worse, toilet paper. The result of this reduction of the mummy to a simpleton and the butt of jokes, concludes the author, is that the living and dead have become conflated, confused. It is as if the mummy, the result of the preservation of a body, had never been alive. The coffins that were intended to protect the remains have become merely props, usually positioned upright so that the ambulatory mummy can easily step out. In the classic films, the mute mummy expressed itself through violence, but the mummy of children’s fiction is a friendly clown, pathetic and ineffectual.

Day finds that the public – deprived of public unwrappings and the black market in antiquities – became frustrated that mummies were no longer (literally) within their grasp, until they began identifying with the archæologists. Once they did, the idea of the mummy as victim interfered with their vicarious participation and required that the mummy in popular culture become an aggressor. Thus the evil mummy was born… unless the mummy was female, in which case the media turned her into “eye candy for men, with a removable wrapper”.

Armed with her thesis, Day tackles on foot the popular stereotypes of the museum visitor. She lays some of the blame for perpetuating the misconceptions on the museums themselves. Because almost all of the items on display came from tombs, the idea that ancient Egyptian society was death-obsessed is perpetuated. Timelines are not provided and mummies from dynasties thousands of years apart are displayed as a group, so mummification is seen as a static process that didn’t change over time. And natron – the salt by which they were preserved – is never mentioned, leading many visitors to conclude that merely wrapping the body preserved it.

So we have inherited many conflicting ideas about mummies – romantic but unhygienic, soulless but reanimated, sympathetic but scientific, victimised but malevolent, dead but alive. To this day, the public’s sympathy vacillates between the mummies and their excavators. The Mummy’s Curse concludes that the integrity of mummies beyond their Egyptian context and the reason for their perennial popularity in many media is the power to signify age, decay, pollution, death, and difference.

She believes that mummies – already more lifelike than most human remains – need to be humanised through more sensitive methods of presentation. Since their conservation requires that they be exhibited under glass, even their authenticity is challenged by museum visitors who are unable to discern whether the wrappings contain a real human body.

Because they have been removed from their tombs, mummies are viewed as “melancholy monuments to a fruitless quest for immortality”. Did they fail, or did we fail them?