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• Likely from Cairo, Saqqara, Beni-Hassan, or Dendera
• Date acquired: 1890
• BM# 1948.64.100

General Reeve acquired these mummy bones while on a trip through Egypt, Syria, and the Aegean Islands the winter of 1889-1890. Because he does not reference the bones in his published account of the trip, it is unclear how or where he obtained them. However, the canister lid lists them as being from Egypt, so it is certain that is their general point of origin.

Reeve’s visit to Egypt was a part of a larger “winter trip abroad,” the idea for which came about one night while dining with friends (Reeve, 1). After three months’ preparation, eleven people (including Reeve and his wife) set out for New York to begin their “flying trip through Egypt, Syria, and the Aegean Islands”—the tag-line for How We Went and What We Saw, Reeve’s travelogue published shortly after their return to Minneapolis. The party made an initial six-day trip to Cairo to climb the pyramids and followed this by going up the Nile to Saqqara, Beni-Hassan, and Dendera. They then made their way to the ruins of Thebes, temples of Karnak and Luxor, the Temple of Edfu, and the Philae Temple Complex before returning to Cairo for another six-days.

            The group’s excursions along the Nile were coordinated by Thomas Cook & Son through their line of first-class steamers, the passengers’ itinerary laid out for them at the start of each day (Reeve). It becomes difficult to pinpoint where, or from whom, Reeve acquired the bones as he makes mention that “each locality, as a rule, offered some specialty which we were importuned to buy” (Reeve, 92). While in Beni-Hassan, Reeve remarks that “here it was mummy cats…they were really quite curious, but crude, and did not improve on closer inspection, while they smelled to heaven” (Reeve, 92). It becomes more difficult as Reeve describes multiple trips to various bazaars that may have had bone fragments for sale, as well as “gangs of curiosity venders [whose prices were] the same whether the article was genuine or bogus” (Reeve, 106). Per How We Went, he did manage to obtain an “unbroken roll of papyrus” prior to departing Luxor, but there is no direct reference to his purchase or procurement of the mummy bones (Reeve, 126). Their trip continued on to “Beyrout” [Beirut] on February 17^th, 1890 (Reeve, 162).

Western fascination with mummies has had a long history going back to renaissance and even medieval times, though they were referred to not as objects but as a material, mummie (Moshenka). Mummie is thought to derive from the Latin word mumia, which is further borrowed from the Arabic mūmiyah (Veiga, 1). Mūmiyah is also the word for bitumen, a highly valued medicine in early modern Persia (11^th century CE) that cured “a bewildering variety of ailments” (Moshenka, 455). Thereafter, the search for bitumen drove the creation of an “illicit international market” for mummies, as it was believed that they contained the valuable mūmiyah (also mummia­­), and by the 16^th and 17^th centuries they had become a common additive in European pharmaceuticals (Moshenka, 455). “Mummy brown” was also a popular pigment for paints, but it fell mostly out of fashion because of its “resinous finish, which tended to crack over time” (Moshenka, 455). This commercialization reduced the number of true mummies available for study when British archaeologists came in force after the successful translation of the Rosetta Stone in 1822, making genuine mummies a rare find (Moshenka). 

An Ancient Egyptian’s socio-economic class determined what kind of burial they had, and mummification was costly (Wente). Considering the dryness and whiteness of Reeve’s five or so pieces, it is likely he either found the pieces in or around the various tombs and temples he visited or purchased them from a merchant after they had been cleaned to be sold. This would imply that the bones were from an Egyptian of a lower class whose grave may have not been very deeply dug, or who could not afford a complete mummification and so skeletonized. There is also the possibility that his bones are not genuine, since he more likely purchased them, but that is difficult to verify.

As Reeve does not provide a specific locale on the canister lid or reference his acquiring the bones, it is very difficult to do much more than speculate as to which site the Mohammed Ali, the Thomas Cook & Son steamer, laid anchor presented him with the opportunity (Reeve). In light of this, four likely locations have been provided, with their respective coordinates, in the identifying information above. Though this is pure speculation, considered appropriate given the circumstances, it is possible Reeve’s canister contains mummified cat bones from Beni-Hassan, but this is unlikely given his distaste for them as previously described. However, it is curious that Reeve would not have then distinguished his bones as being assuredly human, given his encounter with mummified animals. Most likely, Reeve operated under the assumption that the people he was placing the canister into the care of (i.e., Rollins College) would have merely assumed he meant human bones, and therefore did not bother to specify.

Spurred by the British craze for all things ancient Egyptian, known as Egyptomania, Americans developed their own interest in the culture (Stevenson). American museums saw the opportunity to establish themselves as equals to their British counterparts and entered into a partnership with them that ensured they would receive a portion of Britain’s discoveries and artifacts (Stevenson). Soon enough, though, the partnership became a competition, with a high demand for artifacts on either side as Egyptomania spread to the mid-nineteenth century American public (Stevenson). No artifact was more sought after, however, than mummies. This widespread fascination was due in large part to British Egyptologists’ public and private ticketed demonstrations of the unrolling of mummies from their wrappings, a practice popularized by Thomas “Mummy” Pettigrew (1791-1865) beginning in the early 1830s (Moshenka).

Pettigrew undertook these unwrappings for the sake of research and to educate both himself and his wider audience, which included anyone from other Egyptologists to foreign princes (Moshenka). These unwrappings were so popular that there is even record of the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Bishop of London being turned away because they had arrived late and lost their seats (Moshenka). Pettigrew would open each demonstration with a lecture on the relevant Egyptian history and the process of mummification before unrolling that day’s mummy layer-by-layer and passing the strips to the audience to be “touched, smelt, and tasted” (Moshenka, 454). Pettigrew published History of Egyptian Mummies (abbreviated title) in 1834 detailing what he learned, and it is still considered to be “the foundation of modern mummy studies” (Moshenka, 467).

In the midst of this craze, the Western tourism industry in Egypt boomed, facilitating public travel to the pyramids and other significant archeological sites (Hunter). Reeve even makes use of Thomas Cook & Son, the leaders in Egyptian tourism and hospitality, to plan his own trip, thereby showing its prevalence (Reeve, 3). It became common practice for tourists to trek up and down the Nile to experience the ruins firsthand, so much so that guidebooks and travelers’ accounts became hot commodities (Kalfatovic). An especially popular one was Alice Edwards’s A Thousand Miles Up the Nile which happened to be published the same year as Reeve’s own How We Went and What We Saw.

Further Reading

Bard, Kathryn A. 2015. An Introduction to the Archaeology of Ancient Egypt. New York, NY: John Wiley & Sons. http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:101:1-201502266278.

British Museum. 2017. “Everything You Ever Wanted to Know about the Rosetta Stone.” The British Museum Blog. https://blog.britishmuseum.org/everything-you-ever-wanted-to-know-about-the-rosetta-stone/.

Edwards, Amelia B. 1890. A Thousand Miles Up the Nile (version digitized by Google). London, 1890: George Rutland and Sons.                                             https://www.google.com/books/edition/A_Thousand_Miles_Up_the_Nile/T9mqZc9XYSQC?hl=en&gbpv=1.   

Hunter, F Robert. 2004. “Tourism and Empire: The Thomas Cook & Son Enterprise on the Nile, 1868–1914.” Middle Eastern Studies 40, no. 5: 28–54.   https://doi.org/10.1080/0026320042000265666. 

Kalfatovic, Martin R. 1992. Nile Notes of a Howadji: A Bibliography of Travelers’ Tales from    Egypt, from the Earliest Time to 1918 (version digitized by The Internet Archive).  Metuchen, NJ: The Scarecrow Press.    https://library.si.edu/digital-library/book/nilenotesofhowad00kalf.

Moshenka, Gabriel. 2014. “Unrolling Egyptian Mummies in Nineteenth-century Britain.” The British Journal for the History of Science 47, no. 3: 451-77.  www.jstor.org/stable/43820513.

Rare Historical Photos. 2016.“Street Vendor Selling Mummies in Egypt, 1865.” https://rarehistoricalphotos.com/egyptian-mummy-seller-1865/.

Reeve, Charles McCormick. 1891. How We Went and What We Saw: A Flying Trip through Egypt, Syria, and the Aegean Islands (version digitized by Google). New York, NY: The Knickerbocker Press.                     https://play.google.com/books/reader?id=XAZBAAAAYAAJ]&hl=en&pg=GBS.PP1.   

Stevenson, Alice. 2019. “Collecting in America’s Progressive and Gilded Eras (1880–1919).”  In Scattered Finds: Archaeology, Egyptology and Museums, 69-104. London: UCL Press.  www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv550cxt.6.

Veiga, Paula. 2012. “Studying Mummies and Human Remains: Some Current Developments and Issues.” Journal of the Washington Academy of Sciences 98, no. 2: 1-21.  www.jstor.org/stable/24536526.

Wente, Edward F. “Funerary Beliefs of the Ancient Egyptians: An Interpretation of the Burials and the Texts.” Expedition, 1982, 17–28.