Death in a Bundle.
In Mummified, Angela Stienne explores the history of the Egyptian mummies held in institutions in France and England.
You move between Egypt, Paris, London, Leicester and Manchester as you chart the ‘displacement and dispersal of Egyptian artefacts around the world’. Whilst other Egyptian artefacts are mentioned, the primary focus of the book is, of course, the mummy, and the journeys that they have taken, removed from their resting places in Egypt to be taken to cultures and lands they could never have imagined in life.
The stories covered are often gruesome, from the bodies of long dead corpses being ground up to make ‘mumia’ - a Middle Ages curative that came about due to a mistaken belief that the bodies were coated in bitumen from the Red Sea that was considered to have healing properties. It was from this substance - the bitumen, or mumia - that mummies gained their name.
When they weren’t being ground up, mummies were, of course, put on display. I think most people today would be horrified by visiting a friend and seeing a corpse in a cupboard in the living room, but moving from the Middle Ages we enter the 17thC where the display of an Egyptian mummy, in your house, in a cabinet of curiosities, ‘became a marker of sophisticated society’.
The book weaves through colonial narratives, and takes us to an Egypt that becomes a central battleground, fought over, a site for the wider empirical ambitions of two entirely separate nations - France and England - where France sought to conquer it, in part to stymie England’s expansion to India. Set against the backdrop of a battle of two foreign nations brought to the Egyptian shore, were a group of French ‘savants’, intellectuals chosen for their scientific and cultural abilities who were charged, in part, with the gathering of ancient monuments and people to take back to France in a show of political prowess. Stienne details the bargaining of Egyptian artefacts and bodies between these two foreign nations as part of their diplomatic games - detailing a lack of compassion towards both the contemporary and ancient Egyptians…these goods were for the French or English to own, and noone else.
Once these bodies were displaced from their home country and moved to Europe we learn that there the bodies are treated with no more respect, being unwrapped for public amusement or otherwise damaged, and left to decompose in the humid environment of Western Europe having survived for 2,000 years of burial in the drier air of an Egyptian tomb, before being hidden away and buried in the gardens of the Louvre, or left in museum storage as their new final resting place. This mis-use of mummies is not confined to the past, even in recent years, we are told, these human remains have been found, discarded in local waste collection areas, having been newly abandoned.
Throughout the book is the running theme of otherness as demonstrated by the use of these long dead African bodies being used for European entertainment and, in this, Stienne chooses to go further, looking beyond the mummy, to other examples such as the use of living humans who existed outside the realms of ‘white abled bodies’ where they too were displayed for entertainment. Or through the dissection of mummies to ‘prove’ ancient Egyptians were white, with findings of such experiments then subsequently used to both justify continued colonial ambitions of the land, and for Europeans to appropriate the countries ancient achievements. Throughout these examples, Stienne is able to draw connections to wider cultural practices and ideological goals that existed outside of the interest in ancient Egypt - and I think she does it quite effectively.
As you can probably tell from the subject of my thesis, I’m particularly interested in the experiences of women, and looking at history through that perspective made certain stories jump out to me. It was shocking (though perhaps not unsurprising) to find countless examples of female bodies being used for male entertainment and being the unwilling recipients of male attention. In one story, we’re told of a public unwrapping where ‘to speed things up and hurry the endless unwrapping, the mummy is placed on its feet, which make a noise akin to wooden legs, and one can see this standing package turning, spinning, dancing appallingly, in the hurried arms of the assistants: death in a bundle’. The dehumanising language of ‘package’ combined with the reality of men paying money to watch the corpse of a long-dead woman, removed from her homeland, be forcibly stripped is an entirely uncomfortable scenario. Elsewhere a foot, removed from the leg it was once attached to, inspired both its new male owner, and a famous author who went on write a story about it, both of whom fantasised about the beauty of the women it was once attached to. That these limbs, taken from their homeland, as a result of violence enacted on their corpses were seen both as objects to be owned, but also as a source of positive emotion, allows us not only to consider what these ‘owners’ thought of their collectables, but also asks us to consider how we view these body parts, though of course now our interactions with them are typically mediated through the institution of the museum versus seeing them in private collections.
And that is precisely what Stienne wants us to do - to think about how and why we engage with these ancient bodies, often still on display for our entertainment, and to question their place in museums as well as what stories museums are telling, and not telling, us about the exhibits they hold both in, and out of, public view.
My view: I’d recommend this book - it’s engaging and very readable, and takes a subject that most people have seen either in museums or depicted in cultural media (books/TV/film) and therefore have at least some familiarity with, and asks you to think about them in a way that might you may not have done before.
