Fun Things to do with Your Stolen Mummy

We Victorians find travel so enriching. Nothing is more exciting than a trip abroad: seeing the sights, meeting interesting new people, removing bodies from their sacred burial grounds. But now that you have arrived home, you might be wondering what to do with that stolen mummy on your hands.

Here are some fun ideas!

Eat it
Paint with it
Throw a party with it

Read on for details and helpful tips!

Your New Stolen Mummy

Here in 1800s Britain, we in the upper class suffer from an affliction. Egyptomania is sweeping through our fashion, literature, and art. Why, we are positively infected. And I must tell you, I don’t wish to be cured!

Our fascination was born back in 1798, when that scamp Napoleon invaded Egypt. As Europeans made our way across the land, we discovered all sorts of things that had already existed for thousands of years. Like the Rosetta Stone, and glorious, elaborate tombs. We Victorians do appreciate a good mourning.

Helplessly, we fell under the sway of Ancient Egypt. We built auditoriums and cemeteries that imitate tombs. We use Egyptian motifs in our furniture, textiles, and wallpaper. Women wear scarabs in their jewelry. The 10th Duke of Hamilton was such an Egyptology fan that he requested to be mummified after his death. His wishes were obeyed.

It’s the late 1800s now, and steam travel has made Egypt a holiday destination. Pack clothing suitable for ruin-climbing and camel riding! Desecration is the sincerest form of flattery, so plan on tea parties in the temples of Luxor and carving your initials into the pyramids. We also take any interesting thing we come across. It turns out that the much less interesting modern Egyptians are so poor, they will part with their heritage when we throw a bit of money at them.

So it is foolish NOT to return from an Egyptian vacation with a mummy. But once you have propped it up in the parlor, you may be wondering what to do with it.

Our peers have come up with some options.

1. Eat It

Funny story — In Ancient Persia, a naturally occurring substance leaked from the side of a mountain. It was black and syrupy, and locals called it mumia. Persians used mumia for a variety of purposes: as a building material, as an adhesive, and when ingested, as medicine. It was said that this precious sticky stuff could cure breathing problems, heart ailments, and digestive issues.

Europeans came along and astutely observed that mumia kind of sounds like mummy. And since we assume everyone in the Middle East speaks the same language (Not Ours), we made the leap from “mumia” to “eating mummies is healthy.” At first we considered mumia to specifically be whatever goo we could scrape from within an Ancient Egyptian mummy, but over time mumia began to mean the powder produced by grinding up whole mummies. Language evolves! It’s fun.

Medical Cannibalism is nothing new — we’ve been eating pieces of people for centuries. People used to guzzle the warm blood of slain gladiators to cure epilepsy, for example. But mummies are exotic — they’re considered a cure-all. Plus, we’re certain they were all pharaohs, and we quite like the idea of ingesting royalty.

Since the 1600s we’ve been able to count on our local apothecary stocking ground-up mummy, stored in a cute little jar. But if you’ve got a stolen mummy lying around, why not DIY? Ask your cook if you’ve got a meat grinder. Then ask your cook to grind up your stolen mummy. (We’re upper class; we’re pretty loose with the “Y” part of DIY.)

Sprinkle some into your tea when you’re feeling poorly. It is sure to cure you. Plus it adds a lovely brown shade to any beverage.

Which leads to my next idea.

2. Paint With It

If you look past the boobs, well-armed child, and pantsless dead guy, you might see mummy.

Mummy Brown is a shade that has been described as “between burnt and raw umber on the color spectrum.” And that, Crayola executives, is how you name a color. The pigment is the color of a mummy. It is also made of a mummy. Think of that the next time you come up with a name like Jazzberry Jam.

To make Mummy Brown, ground mummy is mixed with white pitch and myrrh. (Tip: Finding these other ingredients might take some legwork to track down. Have the cook do it.) The color winds up warm, vibrant, and translucent.

Mummy Brown was popular among the PreRaphaelites earlier this century. While it is not possible to tell if mummy was used without destroying the painting, odds are very good that this pigment was used in works by Eugene Delacroix, William Beechey, and Dante Gabriel Rossetti.

In fact, Mummy Brown remains so high in demand that the tubes you buy in stores may not be authentic. Some Mummy Brown paint contains 0% mummy! The color just comes from ground-up domestic criminals. It is an outrage.

So if you choose to use your stolen mummy in this way, and you know any latter-day PreRaphaelites, you might turn a profit.

There’s mummy all over that kitchen!

3. Throw a Party With It

You know what’s boring? Blowing out birthday candles. Why not unwrap a mummy instead? Invite an ancient dead body to your party, and your guests will be talking about your event for weeks.

Most stolen mummy unrollings are public events, in the name of “science.” Europeans have been publicly dissecting cadavers since 300 BC. Medical students attend for the anatomy lesson. Others just appreciate the entertainment value. We can’t help it — some of us simply love to learn.

Mummy unrollings are similar, although we are only pretending they are educational. When Thomas Pettigrew gave his sold-out presentations in the 1850s, he actually made his audience sit through a lecture about Egyptian history before he got to the good stuff. Then he unwrapped the mummy slowly, like a cadaver striptease. And here’s a fun touch: he often passed the parts around the audience for examination.

Pettigrew performed 40 or so unwrappings. Following his success, one Egyptologist at the British Museum said, “everyone who had a mummy in some far flung place did a similar thing. They unwrapped it with a little audience and a brass band playing a tune.”

In truth, anyone with a stolen mummy can perform an unrolling. They have been done in curiosity shops, museums, and private homes throughout Europe, and even across the pond. Before the Civil War, one American’s mummy events took a detour — during the presentation, he explained why whites were superior to other races! George Gliddon’s unrollings simultaneously exposed dead Egyptians and justified slavery.

So why not host a mummy unraveling in your home? Serve a nice meal, then bring out the guest of honor. Serve wine while you repurpose the table. By all accounts thousand-year-old dead people stink, so you may want to have flowers around.

Tip: Do not make promises about your stolen mummy — Mr Gliddon’s face was quite red when his well-advertised Egyptian Priestess turned out, upon unwrapping, to be male. And while mummies were originally looted from well-appointed graves, at this point the demand for them is so high that poverty-stricken and opportunistic Egyptian grave robbers have been stealing the bodies of non-Pharaohs. So don’t make any promises to your guests about jewelry! What you can guarantee is an exciting event, followed by confusion when you task your servants with disposal of a corpse.

A mummy is sure to make your next party memorable. But perhaps while you are looking at the dead human who has been stolen from the community where it belongs, unrolling it, eating it, or making it into paint just doesn’t feel right to you. There is a fourth option.