“Worked up to desperation, he applied the wires of the battery and put the apparatus in motion, whilst a demonic laugh of derision appeared to ring in his ears, and the surrounding mummies seemed starting from their places and dancing in unearthly merriment . . . .” These are the first words in English to […]
Jane Loudon’s “The Mummy” Read More »
Many, many places have I loved in London, but Highgate Cemetery has a special place in my heart. Construction began on this Victorian burial ground in 1839, when the city had long outgrown real estate for the dead. Only the very wealthy afforded tombs and mausoleums there. Tourists today can seek out the graves of
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Last on a series of posts on Victorian Egyptomania. One of the ways Victorians enjoyed themselves a good mummy was from the mummy unwrapping parties that became popular, beginning in 1821 when a man named Giovanni Belzoni did a highly publicized event near Piccadilly Circus that attracted over 2000 people. The fad took off from
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This Ancient Egyptian “shadow clock” dates to the Ptolemaic Period (330-306 BCE), but is representative of the earliest known timepieces. The earliest extant dates to about 1500 BCE, but this fragment is much more interesting to look at. Check out the parallel and oblique lines engraved on the sloping face: one would have placed a
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We might not realize it, but the Christian culture of today carries with it a footprint of the spiritual universe of the Ancient Mediterranean world. Although modern scientific models overlay most of our ideas about what the universe looks like, the pagan, Christian, and Jewish religions of Ancient Rome had undergone a sort of revolution
The Ancient Universe in Religion Read More »
Featured here is an evening sky shot of Faiyum, which for millennia was an important oasis in Egypt and definitely a place on my bucket list to see one day. The region preserves an unusual amount of evidence from the Hellenistic and Roman periods. Two recurring themes emerge from these sources — the concern with
Oasis of Faiyum in Ancient Egypt and Rome Read More »
Here’s an Ancient Egyptian tomb warning for you, just in case you were thinking of violating the resting place of the dead any time soon! In fact, these sorts of warnings were a lot more banal than figure in the imagination — more like “no trespassing” signs and less “curse of the mummy.”.
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This is one of the coolest sources of Ancient Egyptian mythology, dealing with magical healing spells, the myth of the death and resurrection of the God Horus, and, most interesting from my perspective, the enormous power of the Goddess Isis. Dating from 380-342 BCE, the “Metternich Stela” has a hecking ton of hieroglyphs detailing magical
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