Ancient Egyptian Mummy Unwrapped: People From Victorian Era Used To Party During Unrolling

Egyptians used mummification to preserve the body for eternity. They believed that a mummified body was the home of the soul or spirit, but some didn't see it that way.

Ancient Egyptian Mummy Unwrapped

Europeans were interested in Egypt's idea of an afterlife that involved mummies. During the 18th and 19th centuries, the obsession was so prevalent that they called it "Egyptomania."

This interest began in the 15th century when traders brought mummies into Europe for strange, frequently gruesome purposes, including mumia, manufacturing medicine from ground-up corpses, and even developing the paint hue known as "mummy brown."

But by the 19th century, interest in ancient civilizations had been partly rekindled by Napoleon's campaigns in Egypt and Syria, and demand for mummies had reached an all-time high. Of course, not in an academic sense, but in a "let's get together and unwrap some mummies" type of sense.

Unwrapping get-togethers were precisely what they sounded like. Victorians would congregate, enjoy some food and beverages, and then start to unravel a mummy.

Even though it may sound strange, English physician and surgeon Thomas Pettigrew invented this peculiar type of entertainment. Some tales of mummy unwrapping ceremonies date to much older eras, but they were undoubtedly not as popular or commonplace.

On Jan. 15, 1834, Pettigrew hosted a sold-out event featuring an unrolling of a mummy. The gathering promised the audience that Pettigrew would be slowly unfolding an actual Egyptian mummy from the 21st dynasty in front of the lucky Londoners who had managed to get tickets for that night's Royal College of Surgeons event.

The pretense of conducting medical research during the unwrapping was soon gone. Mummies became exciting rather than therapeutic. An entertaining dinner host who could unwrap presents in front of guests was wealthy enough to afford a real mummy.

Since Shakespeare's time, Europeans had been purchasing mummies to use as medicine, color, or even charms. However, after the Napoleonic wars and England's colonial expansion, there was a resurgence of interest in Egypt's past to the point where, in the words of the French aristocrat and Trappist monk Abbot Ferdinand de Géramb to Pasha Mohammed Ali in 1833, "it would be hardly respectable, on one's return from Egypt, to present oneself without a mummy in one hand and a crocodile in the other."

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Mumia Questioned

When there were no antibiotics, doctors would prescribe ground-up skulls, bones, and flesh to treat everything from migraines to swollen ankles to the plague.

In 1564, Guy de la Fontaine, a royal physician, observed fake mummies created from dead peasants in Alexandria and questioned whether mummification was a helpful cure. He understood that people may be tricked. They weren't constantly devouring actual mummies from antiquity.

However, the forgeries highlight a crucial point: there was a persistent need for dead tissue to be used in medicine, but there weren't enough actual Egyptian mummies.

Mummy medicines continued to be sold by pharmacists and herbalists into the 18th century.

In 2021, scientists could unwrap an Egyptian pharaoh's mummy while leaving the mummified body intact. They "digitally unwrap" Pharaoh Amenhotep I's body using a computed tomography (CT) machine.

Carrie Arbuckle MacLeod, a Canadian archeologist specializing in ancient Egypt, was in awe after seeing the results. She said it was better than the "mummy unwrapping parties" because the previous approach was disrespectful. She also believed that CT scanning should only be done for a purpose and with respect.