As I am nearing the end of writing my book about legends of the pyramids (just two chapters left!), I have unfortunately come to more recent history, and this is the period when things get really weird—not just because of crazy legends that writers felt free to make up but also because of the completely bonkers misunderstandings of everything that turn even the simplest research questions into days-long quests into the heart of obscurity. This one vexed me for far too long, but it is too weird to let go. In British archaeologist Charlotte Booth’s 2009 book The Curse of the Mummy and Other Mysteries of Ancient Egypt, the author writes: “This idea of a mummy causing a shipwreck also had its origins in fiction; it comes from a tale written by Louisa May Alcott in 1869, in which a 1699 shipwreck was caused by a consignment of mummies aboard.” In her 2011 book The Myth of Ancient Egypt, she tells the story again, though she dropped Louisa May Alcott from the telling: “This connection with mummies and shipwrecks was introduced in a story of a shipwreck in 1699 caused by a consignment of mummies on board. Mummies smuggled out of Egypt were thought to cause storms at sea, and were often thrown overboard to prevent them.” I had never heard this story, in either version, and had no idea what Booth was talking about. It turns out, neither did she. Booth is a trained archaeologist who has written more than a dozen books about Egypt. She has also appeared as a talking head on Britain’s Channel 5 and on the History Channel. But she was apparently too quick to accept summaries of summaries in a daisy chain of half-understood repetition dating back more than four centuries. In trying to figure out where the story came from, I discovered that there are a great many references placing the events in 1699 and calling it a shipwreck, but very few that offer any solid citations to document the story. That Louisa May Alcott did not invent it should be obvious from the fact that it appears nowhere in her fiction. Booth conflated Alcott’s 1869 story “Lost in a Pyramid” with the 1699 story. Why? Perhaps she was basing her summary on the 2003 Routledge anthology Consuming Ancient Egypt, which had been republished in 2009. In that volume, we read: Louisa May Alcott, best known for Little Women, has recently been identified as the earliest writer to actually utilize a mummy’s curse plot (Montserrat 1998:70-75), though a tale from 1699 of near shipwreck thought to be caused by mummies aboard may have foreshadowed the folklore surrounding a British Museum mummy often incorrectly claimed to have been aboard the Titanic (Green 1992: 35). Alcott’s 1869 story, Lost in a Pyramid; or the Mummy’s Curse, puts a feminine, if not feminist, slant on things as both the mummy and the victim are female. The source of all of this is apparently an article in a 1992 issue of the magazine KMT, devoted to all things Egyptian, though I have not read the piece, entitled “Mummy Mania: The Victorian Fascination with Ancient Egypt’s Mortal Remains” by L. Green. This is the same magazine where Robert Schoch unveiled his radical re-dating of the Great Sphinx that same year. Frankly, I don’t really care who screwed it up. I am more interested in why so few tried to figure out what the actual story was. Fortunately, Dr. Ralf Bülow was able to point me in the right direction via Twitter by linking me to a 1699 French book that does indeed tell the story. That book is Louis Penicher’s Traite du Embaumements, and in it we read a much more developed version of the story that bears only a partial resemblance to the version that we read about in many popular accounts of mummies. As best I can tell, the account has never been translated into English, so I give it here in my translation. The wording of the seventeenth-century French is a bit obscure in a couple places, but I think the meaning comes through: … But sometimes there is danger in transporting them (mummies) so far, if we are to believe the story that Radziwill recounts in the third “Letter” of his Voyages. The thing is that this event—which was not a shipwreck—did not occur in 1699. Our author is quoting from the Polish prince Mikołaj Krzysztof Radziwiłł’s 1601 Ierosolymitana peregrinatio (Voyage to Jerusalem), recounting a trip to Jerusalem and back in the late 1500s. I am not able to review the original text to test the accuracy of the French translation. According to World Cat, there are only a few copies of the book, all in Europe, and the text is not online. [Update: The book actually is online! The translation into French is accurate, but condensed. I do not really have the motivation to translate an even longer version!]
While academic literature on Egypt tends to cite the French source correctly (though often without knowing the original), it is rather astounding that popular literature has gotten the story so wrong for so long.
34 Comments
PIXEL
9/3/2019 08:49:02 am
_legends of the pyramids_
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Tudlaw
9/3/2019 10:50:52 am
I've heard George Washington didn't build the Washington Monument.
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Apu the Shopkeeper
9/3/2019 11:55:07 am
Everyone knows the pyramids were built by the lizard people with help from the star people, ancient Mayans, the Giants from the Bible after the were kicked out of heaven, the greys, the browns, the blacks, the good, the bad and the ugly and last, but certainly not the least, Peter and his rabbit.
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Minestrone Farrakhan
9/3/2019 12:11:38 pm
Yet the wicked Jews continue to steal the credit!
An Anonymous Nerd
9/3/2019 07:24:58 pm
[Hopefully the story that Khufu built the big one is included in the book as one of the legends. ]
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Jr. Time Lord
9/3/2019 09:12:05 pm
I believe Pixel was referring to the theory of Khufu being responsible for a restoration project. A common theme amongst fringe books from the 70s. Especially in regards to Atlantis theories. I think author Tom Valentine was the first I'd come across. I'm sure the idea predates him by quite some time.
Anthony warren’s free library computer
9/4/2019 12:37:46 am
Pixels were tragically sacrificed so that the previous non-sequitur could take up space not the monitor.
TONY S.
9/4/2019 12:51:41 pm
I enjoy John Romer's. His two books Valley of the Kings,and The Seven Wonders of the World were particularly enjoyable. The 4 part TV series based upon the latter was very good as well. (I wish it would be released to DVD like his documentary on Byzantium, currently it's still only on VHS. But still worth having).
TONY S.
9/4/2019 12:52:34 pm
*John Romer's works
Brian
9/3/2019 09:45:02 am
Tracking down these minutiae that lead to such bizarre modern ideas is fascinating, and I'm glad you were able to check it against the real source in Radziwiłł.
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Wavy gravy
9/3/2019 11:56:11 am
It was more likely the presence of a creepy, lecherous priest onboard that hexed the ship.
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TONY S.
9/3/2019 12:10:44 pm
Great work tracing the origins of the story. It proves once again how easily and how often things can get twisted and distorted when repeated through time without the benefit of resorting to fact checking original sources.
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Fat with bodyhair
9/3/2019 12:26:47 pm
But I clearly remember seeing the crew of Flight 19 walking off the gigantic spaceship at the end of “Close Encounters of the Third Kind.” The French guy even shook their hands! How do you explain that?
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TONY S.
9/3/2019 12:28:28 pm
Damn, I forgot about the spaceship!
TONY S.
9/3/2019 12:47:34 pm
Another thing that Booth got wrong is that, in 1699, there was no "smuggling of mummies" out of Egypt, because at the time the people who controlled the country could not have cared less about mummies, or any other ancient Egyptian antiquities. The only thing that would have necessitate secret export from the country in 1699 by would be thieves would have been treasure, something the ruling Ottomans were always on the lookout for.
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TONY S.
9/3/2019 12:50:54 pm
My bad. Booth is not the originator of that information. But she repeated it.
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Kent
9/3/2019 01:17:01 pm
"at the time the people who controlled the country could not have cared less about mummies"
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Electronic Program Guide
9/3/2019 01:34:50 pm
You should worry more about the tarry substances that are caked on and around your yellow, decaying teeth.
P.G. Grenadine
9/3/2019 02:11:21 pm
Look Asshole,
TONY S.
9/3/2019 02:39:42 pm
Kent,
Kent
9/3/2019 03:06:42 pm
No apologie necessary. "Valued" <> "banned from export".
Electronic program guide
9/3/2019 04:43:27 pm
Kent the freaky necrophiliac “values” mummies for other purposes.
Wim Van der Straeten
9/3/2019 01:38:41 pm
Arnold Vosloo, who played Imhotep in The Mummy (the Brendan Fraser movie), once remarked that it's actually strange that mummies are used as characters in horror movies because they're so slow that they pose no threat. You can easily outrun them.
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Jr. Time Lord
9/3/2019 02:10:16 pm
Medicinal mummies...crushed... snorted and smoked... for the nicotine and cocaine. That's funny!
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Hypes
9/3/2019 02:15:21 pm
No, tragic. Like most of your posts.
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Jr. Time Lord
9/3/2019 03:54:09 pm
Damn!!! I forgot to mention the medicinal mummy tea. The snorting and smoking was a made up joke. From what I understand, people actually made tea from crushed mummies, and drank it.
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P.G. Grenadine
9/3/2019 04:17:03 pm
Look Asshole,
An Anonymous Nerd
9/3/2019 07:30:31 pm
Regarding Charlotte Booth...In what appears to be a somewhat clever and deliberate slam, her Wikipedia entry has a section called "academic works" that is blank.
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Electronic program guide
9/3/2019 07:58:30 pm
Someone did something similar on Kent’s Wikipedia page, except that EVERYTHING was left blank!
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Anthony Warren is a Cwm
9/4/2019 12:04:17 am
Sounds like something a shit for brains like Anthony Warren would say.
NOT KENT
9/3/2019 11:30:07 pm
This blog is now ready for its own KENT forum.
Reply
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9/6/2019 08:02:42 pm
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Reply
Kent
9/6/2019 08:19:56 pm
Maybe the scammers were the same zealots who took Anthony Warren's Yahoo account away from him.
Reply
get rich
9/11/2019 04:38:07 pm
Welcome to brotherhood Illuminati where you can become
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