Egyptomania by Rachel Louise Driscoll

 

When we think of the rise of Egyptology, I think our minds often turn to the Art Deco Egyptian Revival of the early 20^th century with Carter and Carnarvon’s hunt for King Tutankhamun’s tomb.  In truth, however, Egyptomania – the fascination for all things Ancient Egypt – actually goes back further than that to the 19^th century and beyond.  This was a time when the Rosetta Stone arrived at the British Museum, the hieroglyphs were deciphered in a race between Britain and France, Amelia Edwards published her travelogue about her journey through Egypt and Nubia entitled A Thousand Miles up the Nile, and characters like “Mummy” Pettigrew hosted their infamous ‘mummy unwrapping parties’.

Thomas Pettigrew, known by the sobriquet “Mummy” Pettigrew, was a 19^th century surgeon and antiquarian.  A founding member of the British Archaeological Association, he had a particular interest in mummies.  In fact, upon the association’s first meeting in 1844, he apparently unwrapped a mummy in front of his rapt audience.  At such events, Pettigrew was known to not only unroll the layers of cerement from the preserved corpse, but to also perform an autopsy.  His knowledge of Egyptian mummies was so vast that in 1834 he wrote a book called A History of Egyptian Mummies.  This work explored the ancient funerary rites of the Ancient Egyptians, including how sacred animals were worshipped and embalmed. 

Animals such as cats, dogs, ibises, crocodiles, and birds of prey were amongst the varieties of species that the Egyptians would embalm, usually through a connection to a deity.  For instance, Bast or Bastet had the head of a cat, and so cats were seen to be linked to the goddess.  Ibises were sacred and Thoth, the god of wisdom and writing, was often depicted with the head of an ibis.  Many of the Ancient Egyptian gods and goddesses had heads of animals, or were said to be able to change their form into animals – like Isis and Nephthys, the sister goddesses who could shapeshift into kites.  Mummified animals would often be buried at the sites that held particular worship for the deity that was associated with that animal, such as the many cats buried at Bubastis, the centre of Bast’s cult.

The term Egyptomania, from the Greek ‘Egypto’ for Egypt and ‘mania’ for madness, came into existence around the end of the 18^th and start of the 19^th century, and this was really when we see the increased interest in this ancient land and its rich history.  Napoleon’s Egyptian campaign helped Egyptomania take flight, inspiring the hunger for antiquities.  There was such a cry for mummies and relics when travellers came to Egypt, that supply could not meet demand, and mummy snatchers and forgers became commonplace.  New laws arose to halt illegal digs and export, but the black market of antiquities continued as more travellers sought to own their piece of history, and the mummy unwrapping parties continued.

Despite this, there were many who came to Egypt with permits for legal digs, amongst them the Scottish archaeologist Alexander Rhind, and Margaret Benson, the first woman to be granted a permit by the Egyptian Department of Antiquities.  In cases such as these, when the excavations were carried out in accordance with local law and with historical insight, provenance was not lost and knowledge increased.

I’m not sure that Egyptomania has waned so very much over the years.  Even today in the 21^st century, Egypt is consistently ranked as a top tourist holiday destination, the Egyptian exhibits are often the busiest in museums, and we still feel a thrill of excitement over the mysterious hieroglyphs on obelisks and papyri.  The age of Egyptomania is far from over, although I’m glad to say we no longer host mummy unwrapping parties or have powdered mummy in our paints like the Pre-Raphaelites did. 

If you’d like to read more about the 19^th century fascination for Ancient Egypt, then I highly recommend Amelia Edwards’ book A Thousand Miles up the Nile.  For fictional writings from the era, you might like Lost in a Pyramid; or, The Mummy’s Curse by Louisa May Alcott (quite a different read from her more famous Little Women series) and Some Words with a Mummy by Edgar Allan Poe.  And to investigate these themes further, especially those of mummy unwrapping parties and the preservation of Egyptian history, you might enjoy my debut novel Nephthys which explores the 19^th century fascination for Ancient Egypt in a gothic tale of adventure, mythology, and mystery.  Nephthys is available in hardback, with the paperback out with Vintage in February 2026, and you can purchase your copy here.  If you’re in the US, it is published by Penguin Random House under the title The House of Two Sisters, and is available here.

Instagram: @rachel.louise.driscoll

Cabinet of Curiosities - A Cat's Got In! - by Charlotte Wightwick

The last few weeks for me have been all about one thing. No, not Brexit.

February and March have, for me, been the months of The Cat. Within days of my Feline Overlord arriving, I was fully under the paw, accepting as standard the fact that I will be woken up every day at 5am by a barrage of yowls, followed by a large furry creature sitting on my head, attempting to lick my face and demanding I get up to feed it. Not to mention all the 'help' I get whenever I sit down to write anything.

Stevie the Cat, helping. Source: C. Wightwick

The joys of cat ‘ownership’ have made me wonder what feline artefact should be placed in the Cabinet of Curiosities to celebrate the thousands of years that humans have been domesticated by cats.

The obvious place to start is of course ancient Egypt, where cats were famously worshipped as gods and millions of cat mummies have been found. Personally, I’ve never quite got over the horror/ fascination of seeing kitten mummies at the British Museum as a small child: somehow the idea disturbed me more than the idea of embalmed people. I’m not sure what this says about me – nothing good, I fear. 

Ancient Egyptian cat mummies

Source: Wikipedia Commons

One of my favourite ‘real life’ historical cats is Pangur Ban, the subject of a ninth-century Irish poem, who spends his time hunting mice while his master, the monk and author of the poem, styles himself as a hunter of words. As a lover of medieval history, there’s something about this poem that really appeals to me: it gives me an incredibly vivid image of a tonsured and robed monk, writing long into the night with only his white cat, chasing mice through the library, for company.

The next candidate for the Cabinet of Curiosities has to be the suit of feline armour recently doing the rounds on Twitter, reportedly made for Henry VIII’s cat Dagobert. I suspect I wasn’t alone spending a few confused minutes wondering how on earth one persuaded a cat to wear said armour (presumably a LOT of whatever the sixteenth century equivalent of Dreamies were) before finding out that Dagobert probably never existed, and the armour is modern, created by Canadian artist Jeff de Boer. A disappointment.

I saw my final option on Twitter too, but this one is attested by the good folks (and specifically Mark Forsyth, author of A Short History of Drunkenness) at History Extra. And it’s a good one: the ‘Puss and Mew Machine’: a mechanical cat-shaped gin dispenser. The machine was a way of illegal gin-sellers avoiding the swingeing taxes that the government had imposed in an effort to ban drinking among the lower classes in the eighteenth century. You can find out more at https://www.historyextra.com/period/georgian/gin-craze-panic-18th-century-london-when-came-england-alcohol-drinking-history/. I knew there was something missing from my life, and now I know what it is.

So, which feline delight shall go into the Cabinet? A mummified kitten, a ninth-century monk’s companion, some impossible feline armour or a mechanical gin-dispensing cat? Its tricky. But as a ‘word hunter’ myself, I think it will have to be the memory of a small white cat, over a thousand years old but immortalised forever:

I and Pangur Bán, my cat
'Tis a like task we are at;
Hunting mice is his delight

Hunting words I sit all night.

Written by an unknown Irish monk, 9th century. Trans Robin Flower. 

The page of the Reichenau Primer on which the Pangur Ban 

poem is preserved. Source: Wikimedia Commons

Pepys, Egyptian Mummies and Wool Smuggling. by Deborah White

Our guest this month is children's writer Deborah White. Welcome Deborah! (If you read to the end you will discover how seriously she takes her guesting responsibilities).

Deborah White was born in Devon, but lived in an 18ft caravan on a farm in Buckinghamshire until she was three. She loved to read and write stories on her 1914 portable Corona typewriter and secretly dreamed of being an actress. She was inspired to write Wickedness after reading that Samuel Pepys went to see a preserved mummy at Egyptian exhibition in London in 1668.

I am not a historian and I never thought I would write anything even remotely historical, but a serendipitous discovery changed all that. Reading Pepys Diary one summer (as you do!) I came across an entry that referred to an Ancient Egyptian mummy (May 12th 1668. ‘And so parted, I having there seen a mummy in a merchant’s warehouse…all the middle of the woman’s body black and hard’). That little throwaway comment piqued my interest and the more I found out about knowledge of Ancient Egypt in the 17th century, the more fascinated I became. And once I had decided to set part of Wickedness and its sequel Deceit in the 17th century, of course I had to do research. Lots. I ended up with pages and pages of stuff. And I collected little snippets of information I thought I would never find a use for. (Rose Tremain was right when she said you have to do the research and then forget it or it will swamp your narrative. My first drafts were definitely swampy in places.) But one of those little snippets came in unexpectedly useful: wool smuggling. I remember being brought up short when I first read about it. Wool smuggling. Why on earth would anyone want to smuggle wool? But of course like anything, if there is an imbalance between production and need there will always be people profiting from that. (Currently one of Europe’s more bizarre smuggling rackets is the illegal importation of Chinese garlic into the EU.)

The thing was I had to get two of my characters, Margrat and Christophe (neither of whom had ‘safe conduct’ documents) from England across to France ‘under the radar’. Who was already crossing the Channel regularly and in secret? Smugglers. And when I began researching the sort of smuggling that was going on along the Kent/East Sussex coast in the 1660s, I discovered it was largely wool. Apparently by the 17th century it had reached epidemic proportions because English wool was in such high demand in France and the English textile trade was in a poor state. In 1660 it was forbidden to export wool. In 1662 the death penalty was introduced for anyone caught smuggling it. Smugglers then armed both themselves and their ships. Any attempt at arrest was very violently resisted. Why not use guns when, if you were caught, you’d be hanged anyway? (‘As good be hanged for an old sheep as a young lamb.’ This proverb from John Ray’s 1670 collection seems appropriate!) By the 1670s, 20,000 packs of wool (Say 20 fleeces per pack/bale) were being smuggled to Calais annually. That’s 400,000 fleeces a year. (The population of London was approximately 500,000 in 1666.)


The other development that made smuggling much easier, first appeared in Europe in the 15th century. This was a change to how ships were rigged. The introduction of fore and aft rigging made tacking into the wind possible. No more having to wait until the wind was in the right direction. Brilliant! The old square rigged ships could only sail when the wind direction was favourable and so were forced into using proper ports where the ships could stay safely moored up until the wind changed. But smugglers using small fore and aft rigged boats could sail into little hidden bays or even berth straight up onto a beach (as I had my smuggler’s boat do in Deceit.) Obviously this is a huge advantage when you are doing something illegal! And using prominent landmarks to navigate by (The spires of Reculver church for instance were very easy to spot from the sea…so the beach below became a popular landing spot for smugglers.)

A postcard from 1913 showing the spires of the church at Reculver

I also found out that smugglers from around the Romney Marsh area were known locally as owlers. (According to the OED, it was first recorded as a noun in 1690. Although my second novel Deceit is set very slightly earlier, I refer to my smugglers as owlers.)

Maybe they were called owlers because they worked at night. Or because the owl call could easily be used for communication between smugglers…just as the little pewter owl token, passed from one hand to another was a sign of trust. But what a nice little bit of period detail. And dear reader…I used it! Now all I need to do is find a use for all that research into 17th century French theatre design…

Debbie (on left) takes blogging for the History Girls very seriously. Dressed up in a toga (sheet), she is about to sail (fore and aft rigged sailing vessel of course) through the Corinth Canal with her friend Sheila.

You can read more about Deborah and her books at www.deborahwhiteauthor.com