The Strange Tale of Cursed Mummies and the Ship They Nearly Destroyed

​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.
 
This curious traveler had purchased two Egyptian mummies in Alexandria, one of a man and the other of a woman, in order to transport them to Europe. He had them cut into six parts which he had enclosed separately in as many chests made of dried tree bark, and in a seventh chest he had put the idols which were found with the bodies of these two mummies. This he did because the Turks prevent the sale and transport of these corpses, imagining that the Christians could compose (with them) some sort of spell that would cause misfortune to their nation. This Polish lord availed himself of winning over by money, and by wine, a Jew, who had the commission to inspect the chests and the goods which were within them. This commissioner had all the chests loaded into the ship, saying that it was only seashell being carried to Europe.
 
“Before going to sea (said this gentleman), I found a priest who was returning from Jerusalem, and who could not finish his journey without the help I gave him on this occasion by taking him aboard our ship. One day, when this good man said his Breviary, a furious tempest arose. He warned us that, besides this danger, there were great obstacles to our journey, from two specters which continually fatigued him. The tempest having ended, I dismissed his vision, because I would never have imagined that my mummies would be the cause; but afterwards I was obliged to change my mind when there arose a new assault rougher and more dangerous than the first, and when the specters appeared again to our priest while he made his prayers in the guise of a man and a woman dressed as were my mummies. This obliged me to ask the Captain for permission to enter the magazine, with the intention of secretly throwing my chests into the sea. This he did not wish to grant me because of the impetuosity of the waves that would have flooded his ship; but at last, when the storm gave way to a bit of calm in which we could recognize the constellation called St. Germain, he permitted what he had previously refused me. I had the seven chests thrown into the sea. This could not, however, be carried out so skillfully that the Master was not informed of it, and then, quite joyful, he promised us that we would have no more storms, and the good priest had no more visions. However, that did not prevent me from receiving a severe reprimand from the Captain for having brought aboard his vessel these mummies, for which the sea has so great an antipathy. But the Theologians of the island of Crete, when we had landed there, justified my conduct, saying that it was permitted to Christians to transport these mummy corpses for the relief of the infirm, and that the Church should not forbid their use.”

​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.