After Dark: Myths, Misdeeds & the Paranormal - The Victorian's Dark Obsession with Ancient Egypt

Episode Date: January 19, 2026

The Victorians had a lot of twisted fascinations, but their fixation on Ancient Egypt might be the darkest of the lot.From 'mummy unwrapping parties' (yes, really), to gothic stories of romances with mummified bodies and beetles that came to life.Was this a desire to connect with the past? Something darker? Or maybe both.Joining Anthony and Maddy today is historian and author Dr Jay Sullivan, to help us uncover the truth.This episode was edited by Tim Arstall. Produced by Stuart Beckwith. The senior producer was Freddy Chick.You can now watch After Dark on Youtube! www.youtube.com/@afterdarkhistoryhitSign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe.  You can take part in our listener survey here.All music from Epidemic Sounds.After Dark: Myths, Misdeeds & the Paranormal is a History Hit podcast. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

London 1842. In a Mayfair drawing room, thick with heat and incense, a crowd gathers around a long, draped table. The smell hits first. A sour, resinous sweetness rising from the 3,000-year-old body laid out before them. Thousands of miles from where it was laid to rest. Silk dresses rustle. Gentleman crane forward as the surgeon slides his blade. beneath ancient linen. Layer after layer is peeled away, greeted by murmurs of hungry fascination. A woman fans herself, eyes alight, a man pockets a bead torn from the corpse. This isn't history. Its desecration masked as entertainment, the sacred dead reduced to spectacle. Beneath the candlelit gasps, however, lurk much dark truths. The Victorians had a problem, a twisted fixation. In drawing rooms and lecture halls, society gathered for mummy unwrapping parties. As the empire expanded into Egypt, so did its anxieties and intrigue, fears of revenge, of stolen treasures, of ancient powers that might

strike back at their colonial thieves and a macabre fascination. Today we're diving into the obsession, the exploitation and the horrors Britain tried to keep buried. Was this the Victorian's darkest obsession? And helping us today on this journey into the Victorian fascination with Egypt is Dr. Jay Sullivan, historian and author of Egyptian Gothic 1884 to 1920. Jay, welcome to after dark. Thank you. Great to be here. We're really happy to have you. Let's start at the beginning, I suppose. what sparked the Victorian fascination with ancient Egypt?

And do we need to go a little bit further back to the beginning of the 19th century? That's my suspicion. I mean, you definitely know, as you're both Georgian historians, that it did not happen that Queen Victoria stepped onto the throne. And we were like, whoa, Egypt, now I'm interested. There is exploration to Egypt way before this period. There's a huge amount of interest in Egyptian artifacts, in exploration of Egypt itself,

even though it was quite an expensive and laborious process to travel. I'm sure we'll get to that later on. But at that period before the Victorian area, it's quite difficult to get there. There's a lot of fascination. Some of it's biblical. There's a lot of belief that stories from the Bible were drew explicitly from Egypt. There's a lot of early archaeology where they're trying to find out if those stories are true and find archaeological evidence for that.

So there's that. And that's one fascination. And at that period, there's also, we'll just skip straight into the dark star. In the Georgian period, people were also eating mummies. They were taking it for medicine. Apparently it was ground up into powder and mixed with chocolate or alcohol, both of which I think is absolutely rancid. Don't know which one, I wish one.

You're making each of those things much worse by adding mummy to it. You never want surprised texture in either of those things. So yeah, there's a big period of fascination before we get into Victorian Egyptomania. And a lot of that is sparked the more modern Egyptomanias we would think of it. It's sparked by Napoleon's invasion of Egypt. He brings in a huge amount of resources, a big pet project for him. So loads of French archaeologists go out there. They make a lot of discoveries.

They really push down knowledge of Egypt forward. And it comes from there, really. That's where you start to see a movement from more like eating mummies and these pyramids are cool. Maybe they're to do with the Bible into more of archaeology and as we know it today. And I suppose that's that kind of the... exoticism in advertor-comers of Egypt in the 19th century. You know, you talk about Napoleon invading, and there's this idea of that it's, for a lot of people back home,

either in France or in Britain, that it's this far-off place. And there's a lot of travel writing, isn't there, in this moment as well? So people are able to experience it through objects brought back, but also through people literally documenting their experiences and writing about this landscape. Yeah, definitely. It's a really popular place for travelogs, and that is throughout the 19th century.

You find that people will try, It's not quite your lads abroad Italy trip. It's a bit further than that. But many people would visit. There's a lot of drawings that come out of that period. People would go and paint there. They would bring back small momentous from their travels. But it was the kind of thing that was really popular to read.

And that doesn't go either. Like Amelia Edwards wrote a thousand miles up the Nile in the 1880s. And this is a chunky travel log. It's thousands of pages. It's illustrated. And these were high-quality things that people would read and consume. And often the easier access to print magazines was great for this as well. You would find people would slice up their travel logs and they would appear in like English news,

Illustrated London News, as a way for people to read and record their experiences. So it is a really popular topic. And I would say as it was harder to get there at that period, it's quite a long journey. You find that people do want to experience it through print and consuming it in that way as well. but there was also as well as travel logs a lot of exhibitions on Egypt as well and Dickens writes about going to one where apparently you like sat in a boat and there was like a sensory experience where you would travel up the Nile and I that feels very modest yeah it feels like those immersive chute and carmoon Pompeii things that the tune is constantly

blasting me with yeah yeah at first you're like cool and then you're like please let me go how much of it yeah and then it's like how many of these things suddenly are there um one of the things that intrigued me about you said, you know, what are going from, oh, these are fascinating pyramids and actually, but let's find out a little bit more about them. And there's always this idea of control through knowledge as well, isn't there? When we talk about particularly British exploration, one of the things that's always struck me is this idea of hieroglyphics. And you see on the documentaries, they go into the tunes and they're just like, and there is the bull. And we know that the bull means X, Y, and Z. And I'm like, how? Who told you this? And actually, you might be

able to tread a bit of light on this kind of decoding the hieroglyphics. Yeah, it's a really interesting thing. So I think, as you're saying, we always think of this. And in movies, from like the mummy, even things that are just set in Egypt, they do walk in, they go, oh, cursed will be the man who's definitely. You're like, why is it in perfect grammar? In its syntax, what is this? But yeah, people had no idea and it wasn't translated until around 1860 and the rosetta stone was the cause of that. So when Napoleon was defeated one of the things that the British do is we like loot, we kept the rosetta stone in England and eventually it was translated. So there was Egyptian on there as well as other languages. So by translating that, we managed to translate hieroglyphs.

But before that, they were just pretty pictures. You would have the Egyptian hall in Piccadilly. this has hieroglyphs on the outside. They don't mean anything. They just look great. And there's a lot of Egyptian-eyzed artifacts there, which are in the Egyptian style. We just have pretty prints on them, and we didn't know what that meant. So it wasn't until we could translate things via the Rosetta Stone. So thanks again, Napoleon.

That we could begin to feel closeness with these people because we could read their text. And one of the most famous ancient Egyptian one is a laundry list of complaints. It's like a legal letter before action. So you could read these things. And through that, that day-to-day minutia of people's lives, you can feel that feeling of closeness. And I do really think that is one of the reasons why we feel as Victorians, and I would say as modern people closer to Egypt in a way

than maybe like, I don't know, ancient Mesopotamia or somewhere where that language is lost. Of course. Yeah. And I suppose as well, thinking about sort of colonial overtones of this, I suppose, It's thinking about 1854 when the great exhibition happens, you know, this great moment in Victoria and Albert's tenure, I suppose. And it's, you know, Albert's very much sort of in control of what's happening. That there's the Egyptian court there, isn't there, at Crystal Palace? And that Egypt, ancient Egypt becomes explicitly part of the vocabulary of colonial Victoria in Britain, doesn't it?

Yeah, 100%. And there is this feeling that it's a great empire in the same way that the British Empire is grey. And it's not just Egypt. The Victorians were really fascinated with ancient Greece and ancient Rome in the same reason. And it's all about comparing imperial might and projecting that online. There have been previous great empires. And we are by extension apart of that, which is why you have things like the Egyptian court. And that's about scale as well.

It had huge statues and some recreation, some genuine artefacts, and people could really immerse themselves in that. And one thing that my book talks about quite a lot is this kind of sensory experience. And things like that are about overwhelming power when you see something that's such a visual spectacle, it really is quite a powerful feeling. And that was definitely a moment for them. And I suppose as well, maybe because the perceived version of ancient Egypt that the Victorians inherit and that they perpetuate themselves and create, in fact, in a lot of ways, you're saying that it's very sensory. I think that's really interesting because a lot of the Victorian fascination, I suppose, tips over into the occult and this interest in sort of Egyptian magic.

And maybe more so than ancient Roman or ancient Greek empires where, you know, everything is very sort of classical and more attuned to the 18th century and those ideas of sort of order and rationality. And the Victorians take up ancient Egypt as this quite alien othered thing that isn't, you know, it's quite mysterious to them, it's quite unexplainable and it has that sensory element. Do you think that's fair to say? No, I definitely do. And one really good example of this is a group of people called the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, who I always describe as the worst bunch of theatre kids you could possibly imagine. They are incredibly rich. They've got a A real mixture of backgrounds.

Alistair Crowley is one of them. Like W.B. Yates is one of them. A woman called Florence Farr, who was both a playwright and an activist. There's also Annie Hornerman, who is daughter of Frederick Hornerman, who founded the museum. So all of these people, they get together

and they create this magical cult. And there's headdresses, there's robes. There's different, a bit like Scientology, actually, there's different levels that you can progress up to through skills and magical spells. There's naturally a whole load of sex magic

because what else you can do There's no other way And it's all very dramatic They have their photos taken in these long robes They hang around in the British Museum reading room And naturally it all implodes They all fall out It actually culminates

With Alistair Crowley trying to invade their headquarters In London And there's a big hoo-ha And he gets booted down the stairs By one of them And he like skulls off And so it is, it's big student infighting drama.

I love it. I'm obsessive. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You sound insufferable. Yeah, you wouldn't want to have a pint with them. But it's really fun to think that while people are visiting the British Museum looking at artefacts, this lot are scuttling around creating their own magical world within the space.

I'm sure it's really annoying for the security guard. Yeah, totally. Guess how rich we are, guys, we can do this. Speaking about visiting, this, of course, is a time when Egypt is visited slash invaded, It's occupied by Britain in 1882. This is surely going to influence the travel of items, of stories, of histories, of mythology from one country to the other. Do we see this as a real kind of cementing moment of some of the legacies that we're left with today?

Yeah, definitely. I mean, what's interesting about Egypt is, and this definitely bubbles over into fiction, is the more that we try and contain it and control it, the more an imaginative other world bubbles up. And there is a real space for, we tried. So there was a period where we banned export of artifacts from Egypt to the UK. So technically it was illegal unless there was archaeological purpose or some reason. This didn't help. Yeah, probably added to the mystique of it all.

She underground to make it more desirable. Except now, instead of being able to take a whole mummy home with you, you would be like, you know, I can't get all of that in my case without getting called. So now people will start breaking off bits. This is when we have a huge export in hands and feet and heads as well. Do I imagine that heads aren't that portable? I can't imagine they sold many. And then you get this.

This is clearly before the age when your suitcase would be scandal. Yeah, clearly. I imagine it was just running on prayer at this point. If anyone even looked, I'm sure if you had enough money, you could slide it away. Yeah, of course. So yeah, small pieces of memento's jewelry, bits of body parts, hands, feet will come back. And it's a very strange thing when you think that, A mummy is essentially a corpse, but there is a real blurring between what is subject and what is object, what is artefact and what is body.

So we do have this trade coming back to the UK still. Let's talk a little bit more about mummies then, because Jay, in your work, you write explicitly about what you call the Egyptian Gothic. And of course, you know, we know about Victorian Gothic literature, your Dracula's, your woman in white, all of that. And that's all very Eurocentric. And, you know, we have sort of the big hitters of that. Where does Egypt fit into that genre of literature and art in this period? And specifically the mummy, in my notes it says there's a boom in mummy literature, which I'm so obsessed with. So what is that and how does that manifest?

Sure. So first up, disclaimer. In the book, I call it Egyptian-Ized Gothic. And that's because it's an imagined space. This is very much a white male creation of what Egypt is. So there's no actual... This is not Gothic literature coming from Egypt. There's no Egyptians writing this at the time.

There is in the present day, but not then. There are no actual well-rounded Egyptian characters here to add some balance. It's very much like stereotypical figures here. This is imperialism in literature. Yeah, 100%. But the weird thing about mummy fiction or Egyptianized Gothic or imperial Gothic, whatever you want to call it, is that it appeared in 1884. It bubbled up.

It was hugely popular. More popular than Dracula. There's a text called The Beetle, which outsold Dracula. I've never even heard of the Beatles. Oh, and it's insane. It's got a shape-shifting beetle creature that terrifies a politician. It, like, kidnaps his girlfriend and shapes her head. I really highly recommend.

There's King's a Classic Edition. Wow. But there's loads. That was huge, though, at the time. It was huge. It was way more popular than Dracula. And they were huge. There was over 50 of these texts.

They were a couple every year. right through to World War I, paper rationing didn't stop this, there was still three or four a year, and everyone that you know and love from the Gothic period had a turn on this. Arthur Conan Doyle's got a short story. Ram Stoker wrote one as well, Louise and May Alcott of Little Women's Fame. She was at it, like, hugely, all these big games were dealing in this genre. That's so interesting. And it was kind of a bit like now when last year, every pop star you know decided to have a go-at-a-country album.

Or a children's book? Yeah, it was a bit like that. Everyone had a Bosch at an Egyptian Gothic story, got it out of their system and mostly moved on. Yeah, yeah. Very unusual. I have a list of some of the themes that are explored here. And, you know, they are sort of staples of, I suppose, the Gothic more generally. But there are things here that really speak to this sensory element of the imperial imagination of ancient Egypt.

You know, there's something here about the sort of the sensory that speaks to the imperial imagination of Egypt, the version that is inherited by the Victorians. have things like the senses being explored so things like touch, taste and smell, body horror more generally, which of course, you know, appears in the Gothic genre across the board, but interesting to think about it in terms of the mummy element here. In my notes I have here, vengeance of stolen goods, okay, interesting, but also mummy romance. Yes. Stop it. What, mummies having romance with each other? No. No, no, no, no, oh, you wish. But no. Do you know I don't? Go on. No, unfortunately, it is more easy. You know, Egyptologists having romances with mummy.

No. Because why not? And this is definitely an imperial rapist colonisation metaphor. Yeah. But it's a trope. It's deeply troubling when you actually stop and think about that. Yeah, luckily none of these are illustrated. I thank my stars every day, as that would have been an interesting PhD project.

But what happens is genuinely an Egyptologist will go into a tomb, he'll discover a mummy, he'll open up that lid. And conveniently she'll be perfectly preserved. Always a woman. And she will be young and beautiful and fan. Like she just died. So I called them Sleeping Beauty Mummies in the book. And this is a term that is used by other historians

because of that kind of state of perfect preservation. And now you'll be blissfully relieved to hear that there's never a moment of consummation. So what happens is as soon as they reach out to touch or to kiss or to possess, they always crumbled into dust. Okay. And I have always read this as a kind of an escape. So they would rather be completely removed from existence than dabble in this

romantic. Well, it's not really a romance, is it? Yeah, it's very one side of romance. But they do crumble to dust and remove themselves. So any kind of creepy necrophilia prospect there is actually gone. But it's not a one-off thing. It's not like one person was like, I know. There's a couple of them and they come up quite frequently

and there's often seen, so Bram Stoker in Jewel of Seven Stars has a scene where all of the explorers and medicine men and doctors they gather around the mummy and they unwrap her and a woman rushes out and it's like, oh no, it's rape. Like, please, I don't expose her, you can't. It's, you know, she's a woman and they say that she's not a woman, she's been dead for centuries. So there is this really unusual

sort of sex as domination that happens throughout these tracks. And you see that repeated in Hollywood films as well. I'm thinking out what's the latest iteration of the mummy that was the Tom Cruise film with a female mummy, you know, and it's very much like she's very sexualised and objectified. Tom Cruise has a mummy film.

Yeah, don't. Yeah, don't. I vote. Best to skip. But I mean, that's so interesting just in terms of, I suppose, you know, what is going on there in terms of the colonial imagination? Is this about just the exoticism of the past of ancient Egypt in particular, but in and then sort of colonisation as sort of rape fantasy, I suppose,

but is there something as well about the otherness of Egyptian women that allows European men in the context of this literature to have that sort of desirous gaze and, you know, sometimes going beyond that and touching? There wouldn't be suitably expressed. I mean, obviously, sex is discussed in all kinds of ways across Gothic literature, but is there something about this context, the colonial aspect, the otherness of the bodies themselves, these women, that allows for an exploration of sexuality, male European sexuality,

that wouldn't be acceptable were the context different? No, I definitely think so. And there's a couple of plot lines, just another shout out for the Beatles, because he gets himself in this sticky, Beatal, situation because he goes into what they call the native quarter of Cairo and he peeps through the window in a bar and sees a singer in there and he gets irresistibly drawn into the space that he shouldn't be allowed in. I mean, the metaphor is not even subtle at this point. And because of that,

that's what kicks the whole events off. And I would say this kind of sexuality is definitely about creating a safe space to explore these fantasies. A safe space for European men. Of course, as always. There's definitely that. But what is interesting in these stories is there's always like a caveat of whiteness. So she'll be perfectly preserved. And oh so white, like marble, very, very white. You know, there will always be that kind of caveat and like Hed writer Haggard She, which I arguably would say comes into this imperial romance, horror fiction. She's described as both like Nubian but kind of Greco-Roman. So it's very much a projection of what they want to see. It's like a caveat of. this is an acceptable body because she is Egyptian, but Egyptians at this period, we believe, are descended from white people because they couldn't possibly be descended from anyone else. Right. And can reach me, idea that this is part of an expanding empire

and also a dwindling empire at the same time. It's like it's expanding into Egypt, but it's also having trouble elsewhere. And the figure of death coming into a, like, are these people? Or are they bodies? Are they artifacts? Are they objects? And it's moved into like a fantasy space. You talk about like the empire is sort of shrinking elsewhere

or there's, you know, rebellions and India and all of that in this century. There's a kind of, this is like escapism from that, even though the Brits really are in Egypt at this moment. Like it's very much like, here's a version that we can all enjoy that's safe, nobody's rebelling against us in this version of it. It's really bloody unsettling. Yeah, definitely. And it is a very good place for these people,

are good, arguably for them, to play out those kind of fantasies. Because at the end of it, the mummy is nearly always forage, it's put back in its sarcophagus, the fret goes away and we all go home happy. So it is absolutely nothing like real empire with rebellions popping up everywhere, with this sense that actually maybe this isn't a great method of expansion. There is nearly always a resolution at the end of it, and it neatly wraps things up in a way that real life just doesn't. And I do think that's part of the appeal in the way that it maps,

stability on what is a very end of Victorian era, very unstable time. But also at the same time, it shows that the popularity of these Turks implies that not everyone was like, Yeh Empire. There's a real desire to explore what is happening around them, this kind of rising up of supposedly governed forces, the idea of the past essentially coming back to bite you in the ass. Like there's no, yeah, there's no escape there at all. It's very much you can reach. out and take those artefacts, but the artefacts might reach back and take you. Yeah. Yeah.

You mentioned earlier just thinking beyond the literature now and into sort of real history, real events, I suppose, that there was a trade, an underground trade in Mommies. And you spoke about, you know, the just sort of very early years of the Victorian period when early travellers, usually richer men who'd done the grand tour and wanted something a bit more, you know, further afield, a bit more, again, quote unquote, exotic. would bring things back. And then obviously you get the kind of, you get the Suez Canal opening in 1869. In the 1870s, you get the Thomas Cook tours of the Nile that are beginning. So there's more accessibility. And as you say, people are bringing back sort of little stolen pieces

of mummies. But the mummies that are making it back home, or the pieces that are making it back home, they are presumably put on display. They are experienced and prodded and poked in all these different ways. I have something here in my notes called the mummy unwrapping party. And I would just, I need you to explain this, Jay, because this, I can completely see this happening. I can completely imagine the context, the aesthetic of a gathering like this, but was this something that was really happening? Is this a social activity people are doing on a regular basis? It is both a social activity and a scientific activity. So these can happen in private residences, if you want, instead of your murder mystery party, you bring a mummy over and some mates and crack open at it.

Or they're also taking places at places like UCL. So University College London hosts one. It's quite famous. H. Rider Haggard attends. So they're very popular activities. I mean, how widespread, hard to know, because mummies are quite difficult to unwrap because they're covered in sticky bitchement. It is not like the toilet paper Scooby-Doo mummy. You don't just catch it on a nail and off it goes.

It's not like that at all. So it's quite a messy activity. Apparently it took an incredibly long time. But how it would go was you would attend this and slowly but surely some kind of person with a scientific background, Egyptologist is probably a bit too strong a term. But someone who vaguely knows how to get the wrappings of. A learned man. Yes, a figure of society.

A local butcher. Someone who's got some scissors. And they would slowly unwrap it. And as they did, they would talk for the revelations that they could find along the way like, oh, this is a woman. this is probably a high priest. It's normally always an interesting figure. It's like reincarnation fantasies, isn't it? You're always Cleopatra.

You're never a medieval set. Yes, yeah, yeah. So they would unwrap that. And as they went, there would be trinkets, like gems and jewelry buried in the bandages. And if these came out, they would hand them out amongst guests, kind of like little party bags that are kids children, like, party. But joy.

It's so interesting to think, you know, this is, the 19th century is the real serious, birth of archaeology. We have antiquarianism in the 18th century and even in the 17th century, but this is at the beginning of people trying,

in some quarters, to take archaeology seriously, to take antiquarianism seriously, to document what they're finding, to store, collect, curate things in a meaningful way, albeit with the overtones of colonialism and, you know, it's not like this

is happening in their sort of contextless way. But this just seems so at odds with that move towards historical understanding. Was there push back against events like this in Britain at the time? Or was this just accepted that rich people did this and they were allowed to get on with it? So yeah, there was some pushback on this. But to be honest, there was quite a lot of cognitive dissonance happening here.

It wasn't as simple as museums and archaeology good and unwrappings and stealing hands bad. And so talking about H. Rider Haggard again, that famous author, He both attended Mummy Unwrapping Parties and wrote a four-part series for the Daily Mail called The Trade and the Dead, where he said that the behaviour of people in Egypt digging up tombs was absolutely disgusting. But at the same time, disgusting English, but at the same time he was picking up bandages and rolling them in his hands and smelling them at UCL. So there's no clear set yet. You can feel the beginnings, but it's definitely not that. There'd be no point in me sitting here today going, isn't this off?

I would have been there. I absolutely would have been there. There's just no point in me saying. Well, clearly, there's people who were interested in history are attending these things. Yeah. Yeah. Now, can I ask as well, you know, so they've unwrapped, right? They've unwrapped the body and they've taken items from the body.

What happens to the body? Do we know? The body would have been completely destroyed. So the stickiness of the bandages, as you tear away from that, I mean, if you've ever removed a plaster from your own leg, but then times up by 5,000 years, different materials, they were completely got torn apart. often. So the damage to the mummy at the end of it was no longer usable. You couldn't put it on display. So often these were discarded. I think now because we think of museums as keeping things preserved

and behind glass, but that's not a Victorian attitude. Things were very impermanent. And again, sensory, right? It's coming back to this idea of this is an experience, this is an immersive experience. You get to experience the mystery of this unwrapping and get to partake in some of the jewels and, you know, go back to the moment this person was wrapped up and undo it. and then it's done. Yeah. There is no sense of your hands are covered in acid. Please don't touch that.

To be fair, as you said, I read 100% smell that bandage. I'm one of those people who definitely drink the wine found in ancient Egyptian chimes. I just know I am. So while I'm like, this is not good, guys, I 100% can understand that need to touch the past. In the context of that time and you feel as it, it's almost time travel, isn't it? It's too alluring if you're kind of of that mindset. it. I have a name here, which is dramatic, which is Thomas Mummy Petagrew. Tell us a little bit about Tommy. Sure. So that would be Pettygru's Mummy, and he is famous for launching the Mummy

Unrapping Party. So he did more of these, and I would argue anyone else recorded, but as well as this, this blend of, this isn't quite science yet. It's definitely showmanship. You get this early kind of theatrical circus vibe. So you've got this early kind of theatrical circus vibe. So you're will see dramatic posters advertising these events, getting people to come on down, step right up, step right up. And so he wasn't that popular with more serious types. So your Petrie Museum Society, well, like, absolutely not. This is terrible practice.

But very popular with the general public. I see. Yeah, right. So that is how he made his name by unwrapping mummies. It's interesting, like you say, the dichotomy between sort of spectacle and performance. and serious scholarly work, whatever that looks like in the 19th century. You know, it's so kind of interwoven and there are obviously competing extremes, but there's a whole mess in the middle of people who are willing to go along with the spectacle

in order to have that proximity and that experience. Obviously, today we're still very interested in mummies. And we've spoken to the brilliant Dr. Campbell Price before from Manchester Museum about, you know, He's the curator of Egypt and Sudan there, I think now. That's his title. But he always tells us about it was seeing mummies in a museum that sparked his interest as a child. And that's so many people's ways in to think about history. But in the 19th century going into the 20th century, is there a little bit of a fading of interest and sort of gothic fascination with Egypt and the mummy? Does that go away? Because I'm thinking about things like Agatha Christie's death on the Nile, which isn't explicitly

about mummies, but, you know, has so much of that mystery and the sort of exoticism of the Nile and it surrounds, that's still happening in the early 20th century. So is there a diminishing of that, or is it still going strong? I mean, there is a cutoff point where I would say that the Egyptian Gothic as a genre falls off a cliff, essentially. And that is because you get, so 1920, 1922, and Tutankhamun's tomb is opened. And shortly before that, the occupation, illegal occupation of Egypt by the British had ended. So when two in Carmen's tomb is discovered, that means that the objects that are found are kept within Egypt and the discussion of the discovery is tightly reined in by the press,

how a cart makes an exclusive deal with the Times and everything goes through the Times. So the fact that you no longer have that tangibility, that accessibility to Egypt, I think that causes this kind of uneasy squirmie feelings about empire in Egypt to end. And the genre does slowly peter out. And it's a tendency as well that with Tud and Common, you have the sort of story of the curse as well that comes afterwards. And I've always thought about that as just being sort of imperialist fantasy. But actually what you're saying about the sort of the squirmie unease of empire

and sort of like, should we really be doing this? That's making more sense to be now to think about how people would say, you know, the objects in his tomb were cursed and, people supposedly died or had terrible accidents as a result, that there is a kind of a reassessment of empire and what the role of the Brits is in this moment? No, definitely. But, I mean, the idea of the curse that steps off the page into real life

is also arguably a Victorian invention as well. So there's the unlucky mummy at the British Museum. It's not a mummy, it's a mummy board, but you can't go see it. Wait, what's a mummy board? A mummy board is the panel that goes in top of... Yeah, I mean, no real Egyptologist here, but that is essentially what I'm going to imagine Egypt, guys, don't. And the story of that was the guy who took that, which happened during the Boer War, he exported it back to England and people are like, oh, it's cursed, it's cursed, it's cursed. And he did end up dying.

And I would say it's the closest you can get to a mummy curse. So what happened was he was told that his remains would apparently be swept away to see. and not retrieved. And then when he was out hunting, he got squashed by an elephant. A very angry elephant, he shot it. It didn't quite work out for him. And it stepped on him. It kind of squashed him to a vicarious colonizer jam.

And then his friends were like, oh, we better get that body back. You know, I think his mom's going to want that. And they couldn't. The elephant was fuming. It wouldn't let him anywhere near. And then there was a big storm. And when they came back the next day, he'd been washed away. So that kind of two and common curse is rooted in other, you know,

type imaginative curses. And he's killed doing other colonial activities. Yeah, yeah. I mean, he sounds like not a great guy all round. Yeah, interesting. But there's definitely roots in that way back to the Victorian era. So while we tend to think of Tutankhamun's Curses, a standalone cultural thing now is...

It had a precedent. Yeah, there's definitely roots in the Victorian era. And you were saying, Jay, that yes, there was a bit of a knockoff on some of the more popular stories with the Toon Community Tomb, but then you were about to say, but it sounds like there's some form of longevity going on there as well. No, definitely. There's still

Egyptian Gothic in the present day a little bit. The cinema has killed this fiction almost entirely because now when we think of the censorium and we think about a sensory experience, we think of film. But there are a few. Anne Rice has a not very good Ramsey's the Dam

trilogy, which is I haven't read all of them. I struggle to make it past the first one, but it still exists. Yeah, there's obviously Agatha Christi. And there's a few others. well, there's a couple of like Gothic, 80s horror nasties in the 80s that are called like things like Obelisk. So it does exist, but the frantic rate of fiction that was pumped out from

1880 to 1920 is completely not comparable. Before we go, Jay, I think it would be remiss not to ask you this. What are your thoughts therefore on the proposed remake of the 1990s classic, The Mummy? I mean, I'm absolutely strict. I've never seen any of them Do you like the It's Brendan Fraser right Yeah Yeah

This is Go home immediately Like leave now and watch it I can't But okay I'll love to at some point over Christmas No I am really excited I think it's going to be

Brilliant Who isn't it Hopefully Brendan Fraser Again Yeah I think it's the same best I'm asking you like Casting director Yeah I'm not

If they need me to tell them Yeah Toys They can call me Yeah please Do you see that franchise Is inheriting from the Egyptian Gothic of the Victorian era

because it has a lot of the same kind of colonial tropes and the casting is not exactly Egyptian, you know, everyone is pretty white in it. So, you know, are there, is there a line to be drawn between those two things? Yeah, definitely. And I mean, the 1930s mummy borrows so heavily from the Egyptian Gothic genre

and then mummy movies today borrow so heavily from the mummy. So there is definitely a free line there. Which is nice. It's nice that it continues on. It's so interesting isn't because we often, when we're talking with Egyptologists specifically about ancient Egypt, we are going, oh, why is it so fascinating? Why does it so endure? Why do people are people so fascinated by this? And actually, obviously there's so much, there's a wealth

of information to keep us fascinated from ancient Egyptian times. But this has a lot to answer for it, I think, as well, in terms of why modern audiences still go, what's going there? Yeah, yeah. to be fascinated. What is that doing? I mean, you know, you even mentioned Scooby-Doo. You do, you grow up with the mummy being very close to you in terms of proximity of entertainment. I do have a question, though, about the beetle, because now I'm fascinated about this.

Is the beetle a literal big beetle or small beetle, or is a beetle man or a man with like beetle features? What is the beetle? It is a shapeshifting person of interterminate gender, which is the biggest horror for Victorians, obviously. because sometimes they describe them as an incredibly ugly woman or a very powerful man and they have magical powers and stuff.

But then they transform into a beetle. Presumably a large beetle or it wouldn't be very scary. However, there is scenes where a genteel Victorian woman feels the creeping of a beetle rustling up her skirts and obviously the only thing she can do is take all her clothes off. Naturally. Naturally. To be fair, if I had a beetle crawling on me,

I would absolutely. do that. Yeah, I mean, it must have taken forever, though. So, yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm panicking here, but it's going to take a while. So, yeah, it is. It's both. I honestly recommend.

If you're going to pick up one from this, that is the most bad shit one of all, and I highly recommend. You think there's a, not for me to make, because it's not my gig, but do you think there's like, you know, we see Dracula so often, we see Frankenstein so often. And actually, this comes into it, right? That galvanism thing and reanimating mummies. It's all part of this conversation as well.

But, like, is there a movie in that? Is there a movie in that Beatle book or is it just too wild? Do you know what? I think if Del Torres Frankenstein it hasn't been scratched, he could definitely have a crack at it. But I think the problem of a lot of these stories and the reason that they don't really make it into cinema is that they're quite weird to us.

They're even describing the plots, they're funny. They're often, they're not scary anymore. The thought of being like, I'm not sure if that is a man or a woman. It's not terrifying for normal people. So, I really, not sure. I would love to see someone have a go here, though. It sounds like there's a lot of material there. Yeah.

Well, if you're out there in your filmmaker and you're looking for a new project, get in touch with Jay. The Beatles. Who wrote us? And Richard Marsh. Okay. Okay, there we go.

And if you need some light, totally normal reading, then sure, go for that. Thank you very much for joining us for this episode, listening along or watching on our YouTube channel. If you have future ideas for the show, anything Egypt related, Victorian-related, or anything in between,

you can get in touch with us, after dark at history hit.com. See you next time.