Selected Mummy Readings, and the Books That Would Catch Us Out

The load-bearing eight

Of the works on the register, eight carry the rest: two documents older than the calendar, three works of fiction that invented what everybody now takes for fact, one letter, and the two films that between them supply every image you already have. Read those and the other forty-four stop being surprising.

1. The Abbott Papyrus the Theban necropolis commission · 1110 BC

   The oldest inquiry in any register the paper keeps: an official investigation into tomb robbery which found the seals largely sound and the staff responsible. The register's leading finding, stated at the time by the people who discovered it.

2. Histories, book II, 86 to 88 Herodotus · 430 BC

   The procedure, in three grades, with prices and a count of the days. The only filing on this register that describes the method rather than the result, and the only place the wrappings are identified as household linen.

3. The Mummy! A Tale of the Twenty-Second Century Jane Loudon · 1827

   The first mummy in English fiction, revived by galvanism in 2126 and largely employed as a political adviser. The register's only card set in the future, and one of very few that treats a preserved occupant as a resource rather than a hazard.

4. Lost in a Pyramid; or, The Mummy's Curse Louisa May Alcott · 1869

   Where the curse enters fiction, fifty-four years before it entered the newspapers, in a weekly paper, over the name of the author of Little Women. The filings that adopt the rule after it cite no document.

5. The Ring of Thoth Arthur Conan Doyle · 1890

   An immortal priest waits three thousand years for his love's mummy, in the museum that holds it. The earliest filing on the register to carry the reincarnated-bride plot, which a good deal of what follows carries too. The 1932 film tells a story strikingly like this one; whether it took it from here is a claim nobody here has checked against a source, and the register rules on the resemblance only.

6. Marie Corelli's letter to the press Marie Corelli · 1923

   Where the curse attaches itself to a real excavation, in one letter from a novelist. The headlines it set off are not filed here, because a run of coverage is not one work. Absent from the excavation's own records, then and since.

7. The Mummy Karl Freund, with Boris Karloff · 1932

   The founding film, and the plate this seasonal run was missing. Karloff is wrapped for one sequence and calm, upright and immaculately dressed for the rest of it. Almost nothing the public pictures is in here.

8. The Mummy's Hand Christy Cabanne, with Tom Tyler · 1940

   Kharis, the shuffle, the dragged foot, the useless arm and the tana leaves. The most consequential set of inventions on the register, made for a supporting character in a sequel and fixed in place by being repeated three more times.

The shelf

This register grades a claim about real people, real excavations and real remains, and it is not competent to settle all of it. These are the works that would let a reader check the register. Where a book is here because it caused the story rather than because it establishes anything, its caveat says so.

• The Mummy's Curse: The True History of a Dark Fantasy Roger Luckhurst · 2012

  The best single volume on the curse and on the fiction that built it, and the book to start with if you read only one. Where I would send a reader who wants the 1890-to-1932 question settled properly, since the register itself declines to settle it.

• The Mummy's Curse: Mummymania in the English-speaking World Jasmine Day · 2006

  The unwrapping culture, and the best account of how the lecture became a dinner party in the retelling. The register's 1834 and 1850 cards are filed the way this book argues they should be.

• Unwrapping Ancient Egypt Christina Riggs · 2014

  Wrapping, unwrapping and display, and the ethics of the museum case. The book behind this register's rule that a displayed body is a person and not an exhibit.

• The Mummy in Ancient Egypt: Equipping the Dead for Eternity Salima Ikram and Aidan Dodson · 1998

  The method and the grave goods, set out properly. The reference behind the register's reading of a burial as a provisioning exercise for a journey with no resupply.

• Akhenaten: History, Fantasy and Ancient Egypt Dominic Montserrat · 2000

  Traces the curse fiction back to 1869 and to a magazine story, which is the finding this register leads with and did not make on its own.

• The mummy's curse: historical cohort study Mark R. Nelson, BMJ 325 · 2002

  Primary, and the only test of a folk rule on any of the paper's registers that reports a p-value. Twenty-five exposed, nineteen not, P = 0.87.

• The Tomb of Tut.ankh.Amen, three volumes, and the Griffith Institute's excavation records Howard Carter and A. C. Mace · 1923 to 1933

  Primary, and the object cards behind it are online. This is where a reader goes to confirm that the best-documented tomb ever emptied contains no curse inscription, and to see what a genuinely complete household inventory looks like.

• The Curse of the Mummy Paper Joseph A. Dane, Printing History · 1995

  Why the mummy-paper story has never produced a source. The register declines the claim on the strength of this article and would revise if somebody found the invoice.

• Egyptian Mummies: Unraveling the Secrets of an Ancient Art Bob Brier · 1994

  Popular, readable, and by the author of the modern experimental replication of the method.

  Use it for the method and not for anything it says about the curse. Nobody here has verified the date or the publication of the replication itself either, which is why no card for that experiment appears on the register.

• Tutankhamen and Other Essays Arthur Weigall · 1923

  A contemporary of the excavation who helped feed the curse story to the press and later distanced himself from it.

  Self-interested on precisely the question this register is grading. Quote it for what it caused; do not rely on it for what happened.

• The Curse of the Pharaohs Philipp Vandenberg · 1975

  The credulous bestseller, and the reason a great many readers believe the register's leading finding is the other way round.

  Cite it only as an example of the genre it belongs to. It is a source for the story and not a source for the fact, which is the distinction this whole register runs on.