Why Were the Victorians So Obsessed With Mummies?

Few ancient civilizations have captivated imaginations quite like Egypt. In the 19th century, this fascination peaked with a craze known as “Egyptomania” in the United Kingdom and United States, permeating architecture, fashion and popular culture.

Victorians were especially interested in mummies. In ancient Egypt, the practice of mummification was a sacred ritual, in which embalmed bodies were wrapped in hundreds of yards of linen to preserve the deceased for the afterlife. To the Victorians, however, mummies became commodities, a source of macabre entertainment, scientific discovery and even medicine.

“Egyptomania became a mass rather than a niche concern in the wake of Napoleon Bonaparte's dramatic invasion of Egypt in 1798,” says Alex Chase-Levenson, an associate professor of history at Binghamton University.

Bonaparte famously brought antiquaries and other scholars with him to Egypt, where they scoured the country for artifacts, collecting items such as the Rosetta Stone. “Over the next two decades, English and French consuls in Egypt unscrupulously recruited people to seize as many antiquities as they could, which now form many of the collections in the British Museum, Louvre and Egyptian Museum of Turin," Chase-Levenson says.

Along with political interest in Egypt came cultural interest in the pyramids and aspects of its ancient culture—including mummies. Following Bonaparte's invasion, the Description de l'Égypte (1809-'29)—a popular series of publications—catalogued aspects of ancient Egyptian life and was sold throughout Europe and the United States, explains Meghan Strong, an archaeologist and the director of collections at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History.

Interest in ancient Egypt continued to grow following Jean-François Champollion’s decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphics in 1822 using the Rosetta Stone. It continued throughout the Victorian period, which began in 1837. “It's very much a part of the colonial practices at the time," says Strong, author of Sacred Flames: The Power of Artificial Light in Ancient Egypt. Importing mummies became another way of asserting dominance over Egypt itself. 

From the 1800s to the early 1900s, the Egyptian revival influenced architecture, art, fashion, music, decor and popular culture. “There were cigarette boxes, advertising campaigns—you could furnish your entire home and self in Egyptian-themed stuff,” Strong says. Famous poet Robert Southey even complained that "Everything must now be Egyptian." Industrialization in Victorian England—specifically the mass production of goods—made these trends possible.

During the peak of Egyptomania, wealthy people weren’t satisfied with reproductions. They wanted to own actual mummies, and it wasn’t enough to simply have them in their possession.

Victorians had a preoccupation with death, the supernatural and the afterlife. "There was a massive interest in the occult during the Victorian period, and interest in ancient Egyptian religion played really well into that,” Strong says. "You would have someone who's incredibly wealthy and maybe fascinated with the occult, and they would have a huge dinner party, invite all their friends, have this great [mummy] unwrapping, maybe bring in someone to do a seance."

Mummy unwrappings were done for both entertainment and scientific purposes. In addition to people hosting mummy-unwrapping parties in their homes, these events took place in academic settings—most famously led by Thomas Pettigrew, a British surgeon with an interest in Egyptology.

“Over the next two decades, Pettigrew established himself as a kind of expert in mummy unwrapping, sponsoring dramatic unwrapping events both for medical scholars at the Royal College of Surgeons and for high society,” Chase-Levenson says. “At one such event, the Archbishop of Canterbury himself was apparently unable to get into the room because it was so popular. Aristocrats, diplomats and politicians attended these.” 

However, Chase-Levenson points out that there wasn't much scientific value to these unwrappings. “The point was more the exoticism of the unveiling of something almost inconceivably ancient—a kind of 3,000-year-old time capsule.” They could uncover jewels or just enjoy the macabre spectacle of seeing a well-preserved ancient body.

Victorians also had a paint color known as “mummy brown” or “Egyptian brown,” which contained ground-up mummy. The color came from a dark, resin-like substance called bitumen, believed to have been used in the embalming process. 

“It very quickly became a black market trade, so that you had just as much likelihood to get mummy brown paint that was actually made with mummy versus not,” Strong says.

Perhaps the most unusual use for mummies in the Victorian era was grinding them into a powder for a medicine called “mumia.” Mumia had been part of the apothecary trade since the Middle Ages, says Strong, and is mentioned in Shakespeare and Francis Bacon's writings. “Many scholars of that time talked about mumia as being this great medical cure for all kinds of things,” she says.

During the Victorian era, mumia was sold as a prepared substance that doctors could prescribe. “If you were wealthy enough to have your own mummy-unwrapping party, then you could take pieces of the mummy, ground it up and give it to your guests as a take-home favor,” Strong explains. Mumia could be consumed as a powder mixed with hot water and made into a tea. It could also be mixed with water and applied to the skin as a poultice or under bandages to treat a wound, she notes.

A combination of people seeking mummies for mumia, mummy brown paint and unwrapping parties led to a boom in the illicit mummy trade, including fake mummies made from robbed corpses.

“From the first Egyptian antiquities brought to the British Museum and Louvre, mummies were a very popular display,” Chase-Levenson says. For example, by the 1850s, the space in the British Museum dedicated to ancient Egypt ballooned, expanding to more than 9,000 square feet—about seven times larger than it had been in the 1830s, he notes.

But by the early 1900s, Egyptologists, doctors, pharmacists and other scholars began to push back against the idea of using and displaying human remains. By the early 20th century, as archaeology became more professionalized, the phenomenon of mummy unwrapping largely died out, says Chase-Levenson.