From the Desk
Grading Three Thousand Years of Mummies, and Conceding Seniority
Fifty-two filings from the papyrus, the lecture theatre, the studio backlot and the museum basement. My oldest document is from 1732. Theirs include a tomb-robbery inquiry from around 1110 BC, and I am given to understand that minding this is bad form.
By Casimir Vane The Registers · Filed Under Protest 2026-10-14
Newspapers call the clippings archive the morgue. I have said before that mine is the only one with a resident, and I withdraw it, because this week I have been through a body of paperwork in continuous existence since the second millennium BC and better kept than anything I have ever filed.
I came to it from the possession register, expecting a short week. A curse is a covenant with its terms published at the door; the demons file keeps the covenants, and all this one had to do was go and read the door. There is no door. There is no inscription in the record of the best-documented tomb ever emptied, and the most obeyed rule in the subject turns out to have been written twice by novelists, fifty-four years apart.
What there is instead is three thousand years of paperwork about storage. The outbreak file is about what is in the cupboard once the door is shut. This one is the sealed container: linen, drying agents, labelled contents, a room closed on purpose, and an inventory somebody was supposed to be minding.
Not one of them was ever invited anywhere. I am admitted; they are delivered. Nearly every filing on this page is somebody else doing the lifting: the removal, the crate, the catalogue number, the case with the lighting in it. My archive turns on permission. Theirs turns on freight. I do not say that is worse than my arrangement. I say it is the exact opposite of it, and that I had never thought to notice.
One of its oldest cards is an inquiry conducted in about 1110 BC, into which of the royal tombs at Thebes had been opened and by whom. The card has what it found.
I have dined out for two hundred years on my own file opening with a government form — Habsburg military exhumation reports, signed, countersigned and sent up a chain of command — and I brought it here fully intending to place it. This register carries thirteen documents to my one, and one of the oldest of them reaches a conclusion that is still correct, which mine does not. Nobody on this page has ever mentioned any of that. They have no press office. It is infuriating.
So the leading finding was in writing before there was anywhere to file it. Where the record says who got into sealed storage, it was the people employed to mind it. That is this paper’s standing result about pantries and hall cupboards, reached three thousand years early, by audit.
The other thing, which is not funny
Cards on this register are about real bodies.
The desk has kept the same rule on every one of them. Cite the document and the museum accession where it has them. Name no modern individual beyond the documented public figures who did the work. The person on the table at an unrolling is not named here.
One filing is on this page as an absence. The desk wanted to record the press scare of 1904, in which a coffin-board in a London museum was blamed in print for deaths, accidents and eventually a shipwreck it was not aboard, because it is the dress rehearsal for everything 1923 did. It could not. The scare is not one work but a run of newspaper stories the desk has not read, and filing it as a single “press file” would have been a bundle with a tidy name on it. The board covered a woman who held an office in a temple. Her name is not ours to guess at, she was put in a case once already, and the desk is not going to put her in another one to save an argument about filing.
One card is a real museum in a real town, which holds real people. The film made about them has wrestlers in it. This desk is dry about Universal and it is not dry about that, and where the question of what is owed to remains that are on display comes up on a card, it is filed as an open question rather than as a joke. The desk does not know how those people came to be in those cases and does not print a guess.
How this one is arranged
By when the events claim to have happened rather than by publication; the house rules explain both orders and what a card is. On this subject the order needs one ruling: a prologue counts, a flashback counts, and a line of dialogue about three thousand years does not, which is why Poe’s mummy is filed in a New York parlour and Gautier’s novel at Thebes. Five works fix no period I could confirm and are filed at release with the card saying why, one of them aboard a train in space, which I prefer to inventing a century.
Fifty-two works, one to a card. Two adaptations of the same 1903 novel sit apart; the 1932 and 1999 films share a title, a studio and a priest’s name and share almost nothing else. The spin-offs, the later Aztec-mummy sequels, one television episode, the 2021 remake of the children’s television film and the 2023 animated feature are declined, and so is the press scare above; the 1923 card was cut back to the single letter it can name, on the same reasoning. Hotel Transylvania belongs to the witches, in their mixed-households section.
One card is here in order to be given away: Time Walker (1982) presents a mummy and then reveals that it is an alien, so it goes to the visitor record. I have been misfiled myself and would have appreciated the courtesy.
The register
The Storage Register
Scroll sideways. Arranged by period, with release order available above. Publication years, authors and directors are cited fact; periods, file references and dispositions are ours, and where the desk has not checked a claim the card says so.
Mummy chronology, 3067 BC to 2126
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MM-2001-RET / Earliest enacted period
Plate XLIII
The Mummy Returns
2001
Stephen Sommers
film
Plate held; no cut on file The Earliest Enacted Period On the Clock, By a Wide Margin
Period the Scorpion King, enacted; then 1933
- Classification
- A sequel, filed on its own plate. This register does not fold a sequel into its predecessor any more than it folds a remake into its source.
- Mechanism
- The Scorpion King, older than the 1999 occupant, enacted at the head of this register's clock.
- Perimeter
- The register's earliest enacted period, which arrives in a sequel to an adventure picture and not in any of the documents.
A period clock rewards the filings that bother to enact their past, and this one enacts a great deal of it, which is how a 2001 sequel comes to sit at the head of the register in front of the Book of the Dead. The desk is content with the result and notes what produces it. The documents on this page describe their periods; the films show theirs. The clock counts what is shown. That is the rule the register chose in advance, it is applied here without adjustment, and the reader is invited to note where it puts a sequel.
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MM-1932-MUM / Founding film
Plate XX
The Mummy (1932)
1932
Karl Freund, with Boris Karloff
film
Plate held; no cut on file The Founding Film, In Which He Is Wrapped For One Scene
Period a burial at Thebes, enacted; then a dig in 1921 and Cairo in 1932
- Mechanism
- Buried alive, revived, and thereafter conducting himself in a fez under an assumed name.
- Inventory
- The Scroll of Thoth, which is a spell book. The founding film runs on a document and not on a plant.
- Confidence
- The plot closely resembles a magazine story of 1890. The desk has not checked the attribution against its source, so it prints the resemblance and not the borrowing.
The image everybody carries of this film is not in it. Karloff is wrapped for a single sequence and spends the rest of the running time upright, dry, immaculately dressed and extremely calm, doing his business through conversation and a good deal of patience. There is no shuffle, no dragging foot, no outstretched arms and no herbal preparation. What there is instead is a long, quiet, entirely procedural pursuit of one specific person by somebody who has been waiting a long time and can wait a little longer. The desk notes that the founding filing of a whole popular monster contains almost none of the popular monster.
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MM-2010-JAM / Imaging and genetics
Plate L
Ancestry and Pathology
2010
Zahi Hawass and colleagues, in JAMA
official report
Plate held; imaging study The Newest Document on the Register Sorts Ahead of All the Others
Period Thebes · the family, as the scanner found them Sorted by the bodies rather than by the paper, which puts the register's newest document ahead of every older one on the period clock. The desk finds this correct and slightly unsettling.
- Mechanism
- Computed tomography and genetic testing across eleven royal mummies. Malaria and a bone disorder found; murder not.
- Inventory
- The stored contents examined without unwrapping them. Pettigrew needed a table and an audience. This needed a scanner.
- Confidence
- The desk has not verified the volume and issue of the citation and prints neither. The findings themselves are as reported.
A register sorted by period will occasionally put its newest document ahead of its oldest, and here that is the point rather than an accident. The bodies are the filing; the paper is only how the desk got to look at them. What the study demonstrates is that the stored contents can now be examined without being taken apart, which a surgeon unrolling them in front of ticket-holders could not do. The desk records one further finding of its own. Nothing in this study needed a body to be displayed to anybody, and the register keeps that distinction where it can see it.
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MM-1858-GRM / Contents read aloud
Plate XI
Le Roman de la momie
1858
Théophile Gautier
novel
Plate held; no cut on file The Tomb Is Opened in the Prologue and the Contents Are Read Out
Period Thebes · a life reconstructed from what was in the coffin Serialised in 1857. The century on the clock is the desk's placement: it has not confirmed the date the novel gives its ancient action and prints none of its own.
- Mechanism
- A tomb opened in the prologue, a papyrus found inside it, and the whole of the occupant's life read off that papyrus and performed.
- Classification
- Filed as an ancient enactment rather than as an excavation, because the novel spends its length in the enacted past rather than in the dig house.
- Inventory
- The papyrus is the item that matters. The novel treats a document found in a tomb as evidence, which is what the object cards of 1922 would do properly.
The register's first ancient filing from a novelist gets there by the only honest route available to one: it opens the box and reads the label. The frame is an excavation, the discovery is a document, and everything after it is that document performed. The desk approves of the method and notes what it costs. Once the contents have been read aloud, the occupant is no longer an occupant but a narrative, and the excavation has acquired that life along with everything else in the room. Nothing on this register removes as much from a tomb as the filing that removes nothing at all.
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MM-1999-SOM / Same name, different filing
Plate XLI
The Mummy (1999)
1999
Stephen Sommers, with Brendan Fraser and Arnold Vosloo
film
Plate held; no cut on file The Same Name, and a Completely Different Filing
Period Thebes, enacted; then a 1926 expedition to Hamunaptra
- Classification
- A remake in name. It shares a title, a studio and a priest called Imhotep with the 1932 filing, and shares almost nothing else, so it is filed on its own plate.
- Mechanism
- Imhotep runs, regenerates and commands sand. The 1932 occupant's entire method was conversation and patience.
- Inventory
- The expedition is a treasure hunt, which is where the register files the motive.
Two films, one title, one studio, sixty-seven years, and the desk can find one procedure they share, which is the live burial. The 1932 filing is a slow, quiet, single-target pursuit conducted in evening dress. This one is an adventure picture in which the antagonist runs, regenerates and commands the sand, and the expedition is a treasure hunt. Filing them separately is not pedantry. A register that folds a remake into its source loses exactly the information a reader came for, which is that the best-known mummy film among readers under forty is not a version of the famous one at all.
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MM-BC1250-ANI / Funerary equipment manual
Plate I
The Papyrus of Ani
1250 BC
the funerary workshop of the scribe Ani
official report
Plate held; papyrus The Owner's Manual, Packed In With the Goods
Period Thebes · at the burial of a scribe The desk has not checked the dating or the museum accession against the museum's own record, so it prints the conventional century as a convention and no accession number at all.
- Classification
- Filed as paperwork rather than as a book. Nobody wrote this to argue anything. It was packed with the rest of the inventory.
- Inventory
- Spells for the journey, packed in with the body. The register's first item is a document about how to use everything else in the room.
- Confidence
- What the papyrus contains is not in dispute. The century on the plate is a convention the desk has not checked against the museum record, and no accession number is printed at all.
Every storage problem this paper has written about ends the same way: the contents outlive the one person who knew what they were for. Egypt got to the answer before anyone else had properly stated the question, by putting the instructions inside the box. A Book of the Dead is a manual: spells for the journey, packed in with the owner, and meant to be read by the only reader who could not be reached for clarification. The desk opens the register here because a file about stored goods should begin at the label, and this is the oldest label on it.
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MM-2017-KUR / Procurement filing
Plate LII
The Mummy (2017)
2017
Alex Kurtzman, with Tom Cruise and Sofia Boutella
film
Plate held; no cut on file The Procurement Filing
Period an ancient burial, enacted; then the present day The film opens on a burial in ancient Egypt. The desk has not confirmed the dynasty or the century the film gives it and prints neither; the number on the clock is a placement chosen to keep the filing among the ancient prologues, not a date.
- Classification
- A remake in name, filed on its own plate. Third use of the title by the same studio in eighty-five years, and the only one of the three commissioned as the first item of a larger order.
- Mechanism
- The register's reading is procurement. The filing is organised around who placed the order, what was to be delivered against it, and what was expected to follow. Nothing followed.
- Inventory
- The order rather than the object. This is the only card on the page whose most interesting inventory belongs to the studio.
The desk files this one as procurement rather than as horror, because the interesting document is the order. A studio held a library of monsters, decided the library ought to be a connected programme, and specified this film as the first delivery against it. What arrived was one film. Nothing else was built, the programme was abandoned, and the title went back on the shelf for the third time in eighty-five years. The register keeps the card because a plan to reopen storage on a schedule is exactly the kind of arrangement it exists to record, and because this is the only filing on the page where what failed was the paperwork rather than the seal.
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MM-BC1110-ABB / Necropolis inspection
Plate II
The Abbott Papyrus
1110 BC
the Theban necropolis commission
official report
Plate held; official inquiry The Commission That Went and Checked the Seals
Period western Thebes · four days of inspections, Year 16 of Ramesses IX
- Jurisdiction
- Administrative, with a criminal tail. A commission sent out to establish which of the royal tombs on the west bank had been opened, and to say so in writing.
- Mechanism
- Ten royal tombs inspected over four days. One, that of Sobekemsaf II, found robbed. The men who worked the necropolis are where the report goes looking.
- Confidence
- The highest on the register. This is an inspection carried out at the time, by the people responsible for the storage, and the report survives.
The leading finding of this register was made three thousand years before the register existed, by a commission of inquiry, in writing, and nobody has improved on it since. Sent to establish whether the royal tombs had been opened, the inspectors found that one had, that most of the seals were sound, and that the people getting in were the people employed to look after the place. Underneath the report sits a political quarrel between two mayors, written into it, which makes this also the oldest maintenance dispute conducted through an audit. The desk notes, without pleasure, that the audit was correct.
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MM-1940-HND / Invention of the image
Plate XXI
The Mummy's Hand
1940
Christy Cabanne, with Tom Tyler
film
Plate held; no cut on file Everything You Picture Was Invented Here, In a B Picture
Period a burial, enacted in reused footage; then an expedition
- Mechanism
- Tana leaves: three brewed to keep the heart beating, nine to put him in motion. A studio invented a plant and ran four films on it.
- Classification
- The shuffle, the dragged foot, the one useless arm and the outstretched hands all enter the record here, in a supporting role, eight years after the founding film.
- Confidence
- Established and easily checked. None of it is in the 1932 film and none of it is in any document on this register.
The mummy everybody can draw is Kharis, and Kharis is a supporting character in a modestly budgeted follow-up that reused its predecessor's flashback footage. In a single picture this film supplies the gait, the arm, the brewing rota, and a botanical that does not exist. It then repeats them across three sequels, which is what fixed them. The desk's finding is the same one it reached about the vampire file and the sunlight: the version everybody knows is not the founding version, it is the version that was made four times.
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MM-1942-TMB / Change of premises
Plate XXII
The Mummy's Tomb
1942
Harold Young, with Lon Chaney Jr.
film
Plate held; no cut on file The Contents Are Shipped to New England
Period the same burial; then Mapleton, Massachusetts, "thirty years later" The film says thirty years have passed, which puts its present in 1970. The motor cars in shot are 1942. The desk prints the discrepancy and sorts on the burial.
- Jurisdiction
- Domestic, and now American. The whole apparatus — mummy, leaves, schedule — is moved to a small New England town.
- Mechanism
- Unchanged from 1940, including the brewing schedule, which now has to be kept up in Massachusetts.
- Confidence
- The internal chronology does not survive contact with the props department, and the register says so rather than quietly correcting it.
The cycle's first change of address, and the point at which the file stops being about Egypt. Kharis is shipped to a small town and the arrangement is set up again there. What the desk finds instructive is how ordinary the logistics are: somebody has to bring the leaves, and somebody has to boil them on schedule. A supernatural arrangement has become a maintenance routine, and a routine needs a person to keep it. The person is always the weak point. That is this paper's entire beat, arrived at by a studio in a hurry.
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MM-1944-GHO / Recovery of the original occupant
Plate XXIV
The Mummy's Ghost
1944
Reginald Le Borg, with Lon Chaney Jr.
film
Plate held; no cut on file The First Filing In Which the Mummy Wins
Period the same burial; then Mapleton again
- Mechanism
- Ananka has returned in a living woman, which converts the whole business from recovery of an object to recovery of a person.
- Classification
- The first filing on the register that ends with the mummy in possession.
- Cross-reference
- The reincarnated-bride tradition, which this register dates to 1890 and finds settled on screen from 1932, carried out to its conclusion for once.
This is the first filing on the register in which the mummy wins, and the register marks it for that. Kharis leaves with what he came for. The desk records that this is also the filing in which the object of the search stops being an object: what leaves with him is a woman who was alive at the start of the picture. The next instalment quietly relocates to another state.
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MM-1944-CRS / Address changed without notice
Plate XXIII
The Mummy's Curse
1944
Leslie Goodwins, with Lon Chaney Jr.
film
Plate held; no cut on file A Change of Address, Unnotified
Period the same burial; then a Louisiana bayou, "twenty-five years later" Massachusetts has become Louisiana between one filing and the next, with nothing on file to explain the move. The desk records the discrepancy and sorts on the burial.
- Jurisdiction
- Nominally the same file as 1942 and 1944, relocated to another state without a forwarding note.
- Mechanism
- Unchanged. Leaves, schedule, and somebody to keep it.
- Confidence
- The location the preceding film in the cycle ended in is now a Louisiana bayou. No filing accounts for this. The register prints it as an unexplained transfer.
The fourth and last of the cycle opens by moving the previous film's location to another state, and gets on with it. The desk has some sympathy: continuity is expensive and nobody in 1944 expected a household newspaper to be checking the county from another century. But the register exists to record what the paperwork says, and the paperwork says the contents were last seen in Massachusetts and are now in a Louisiana bayou. Filed as a change of address, unnotified, with the tenant unchanged and the arrangements exactly as before. The leaves still have to be boiled on time.
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MM-BC430-HER / Procedure, in three grades
Plate III
Histories II.86–88
430 BC
Herodotus
nonfiction
Plate held; second-hand account The Method, Quoted Like a Trade, Because It Was One
Period Egypt · the practice, as reported to a visitor Sorted to the practice described rather than to the writing of it. The generation of difference is the desk's reading and not a date.
- Mechanism
- Natron, seventy days, and a wrapping of linen. Three grades of preparation were offered at three prices and the customer chose one of them.
- Inventory
- The wrappings are household linen — sheets and garments used again, some with a name still on them. See The Linen Ledger, which was about a different century and the same cupboard.
- Confidence
- A second-hand account by a foreigner who did not do the work. It is also the only step-by-step description of the procedure that anybody filed at the time.
What survives of the method survives in a visitor's account, with the prices left in. Herodotus sets out three grades of preparation at three prices, names the drying agent, counts the days, and moves on, which is more procedural detail than everything filed after him managed between them. The desk's interest is in the shape of it: this is a service industry, quoted like a service industry, with tiers and a customer making a decision about how much to spend on a job that will never be inspected. The linen is the household's own. That detail is on the card because it is the only point in three thousand years where this register touches the laundry.
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MM-2008-DRG / Outside Egypt, in China
Plate XLIX
Tomb of the Dragon Emperor
2008
Rob Cohen
film
Plate held; no cut on file Outside Egypt Again, and the Only Card In China
Period Qin, enacted; then 1946
- Jurisdiction
- Chinese, and inside a franchise named for an Egyptian practice. The register notes the mismatch and files the filing where the events are.
- Mechanism
- A Chinese emperor, in a Universal mummy film, under a burial arrangement that has nothing to do with linen.
- Cross-reference
- Files with the two Mexican cards. Three times now the register has found the same storage problem outside the country that gave it its name.
A franchise called The Mummy arrives in China and the register has to decide what it is actually keeping. It is not keeping linen. Nothing in this burial resembles the procedure Herodotus priced. What the file keeps is the arrangement. Something was sealed away deliberately, and it was opened by people who wanted what was in it. On that test the card belongs, and the desk notes that the test has now travelled to three continents unchanged.
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MM-1957-AZT / First filing outside Egypt
Plate XXVI
La momia azteca
1957
Rafael Portillo
film
Plate held; no cut on file The First Card That Is Not About Egypt At All
Period Tenochtitlan, enacted; then a modern city Neither half of this filing's period is confirmed. The desk has not checked the date the film gives its enacted past, so the number on the clock is a placement and not a date; and it has not confirmed the city of the modern half, so it prints none.
- Jurisdiction
- Mexican. Popoca is not an Egyptian mummy, and nothing on the card is.
- Mechanism
- The register keeps the card because the arrangement is the same one in another country: something sealed away on purpose, and somebody who opens it.
- Classification
- Establishes that this register is about preserved and guarded remains, not about one country's method of preserving them.
Everything filed before 1957 on this register is Egyptian, and the desk had assumed that was the subject rather than an accident of who colonised whom. Popoca settles it. Everything the register cares about is present, and none of it is Egyptian. Three films were made inside a year, which tells you the audience recognised the shape immediately. The register's finding is that the storage argument travels, and that the only thing specific to Egypt was the excellence of the packing.
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MM-1582-PAR / Retraction, medical
Plate IV
Discours de la mumie
1582
Ambroise Paré
nonfiction
Plate held; retraction The Surgeon Withdraws His Own Prescription
Period Paris · the apothecaries' trade
- Jurisdiction
- Medical and commercial. Ground mummy was stock: sold by apothecaries as a remedy.
- Mechanism
- None that Paré could find. He had prescribed the stuff, watched it fail, and wrote up the failure rather than the theory.
- Classification
- The register's oldest retraction, and the only one on file from the person who was wrong.
This paper grades a claim higher when the person retracting it is the person who made it, so the register puts a good deal of weight on a short sixteenth-century pamphlet about a drug. Powdered human remains were a stocked pharmaceutical with a price and a supply chain, and Paré had written prescriptions for it before concluding in print that it was useless. The filing matters twice over. It is the first document on the register in which the contents of a tomb are treated as raw material rather than as a person, and it is the first in which somebody with authority says plainly that the trade is worthless.
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MM-1658-BRO / Trade note
Plate V
Hydriotaphia
1658
Thomas Browne
nonfiction
Plate held; essay Merchandise, and the Man Who Noticed
Period Norfolk
- Jurisdiction
- Literary, and unusually well informed. An essay on urn burial.
- Inventory
- "Mummy is become merchandise, Mizraim cures wounds, and Pharaoh is sold for balsams." One sentence, and the whole trade in it.
- Cross-reference
- Files directly against the 1582 retraction and the 1964 stock note. Three documents, four centuries, one commodity.
The desk files this for a single sentence, which is the most economical statement of the register's commercial finding anybody has managed. Browne is writing about burial, and in passing he records that Egypt's dead are on sale. What makes the line worth a card is the tense: is become. He is not warning that it might happen. He is noting, in 1658, that it has already happened, that everybody knows, and that the market has settled to a price.
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MM-1834-PET / Public unrolling, method
Plate VII
A History of Egyptian Mummies
1834
Thomas Pettigrew
nonfiction
Plate held; method published The Unrolling Was a Lecture, and It Was Ticketed
Period London · before a paying audience Sorted to the unrollings the book writes up rather than to its publication. The desk has not confirmed which institutions hosted them and names none.
- Jurisdiction
- Medical and public at once. A surgeon unwrapped mummies in front of an audience that had bought tickets, and then published the method so that others could repeat it.
- Mechanism
- Announced in advance, ticketed, and written up. Every part of it was public, which is exactly what distinguishes it from the dinner it is remembered as.
- Confidence
- The venues are not printed here. The desk has not checked which institutions hosted the unrollings and will not name one from memory.
The register's most misremembered filing, and the misremembering is the interesting part. What Pettigrew ran was a lecture: a ticketed, announced demonstration by a surgeon who wrote up his procedure afterwards so that it could be checked. It was a spectacle, and it was also the closest thing to a method that the nineteenth century produced. The desk notes what the book does not supply, because the omission is now the whole popular memory of the period: there is no dinner in it. There is also a person on the table, whom this desk does not name.
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MM-1840-GAU / Retail acquisition
Plate VIII
Le Pied de momie
1840
Théophile Gautier
story
Plate held; no cut on file A Princess's Foot, Bought as a Paperweight
Period Paris · a curiosity shop, and the night after The tale reaches ancient Egypt through a dream. The desk has not confirmed the period the story gives it and prints none, so the filing sorts by the shop counter, which is dated.
- Inventory
- One foot, sold loose, as a desk ornament. The register's first documented instance of a body part entering a household as a household object.
- Mechanism
- The owner comes for it, that night.
- Classification
- Filed under acquisition rather than under haunting.
The whole storage argument of this register is stated in a shop, decades before anybody thought to make a monster out of it. A man buys a foot because it will do as a paperweight, takes it home, and is visited that night by the person it belongs to. Gautier is writing a short tale and lands on the question the Abbott Papyrus opened and the museum cases have not closed: the object was removed from where it was put, and then it was sold over a counter.
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MM-1845-POE / Revival by battery
Plate IX
Some Words with a Mummy
1845
Edgar Allan Poe
story
Plate held; no cut on file The Subject Is Revived, Interviewed, and Unimpressed
Period a New York parlour · one evening Sorted by the parlour. The subject's own past is told rather than shown, and this register's clock only counts what a filing enacts.
- Jurisdiction
- Domestic. A parlour, a battery and an evening.
- Mechanism
- Voltaic current. Count Allamistakeo sits up, is shown the nineteenth century, and is unimpressed by it.
- Cross-reference
- The comic answer to the 1834 filing. Pettigrew's subject could not object; this one can, and does, at length.
Five years after a foot is sold in Paris, Poe puts the mummy in a parlour and gives the contents a vote. The vote goes against the nineteenth century. The desk files it in the parlour because that is where the story happens; the ancient half is a speech. What the card records is that the register's first satire arrives before its first monster, and that the satire is aimed at the living.
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MM-1850-LON / Invitation
Plate X
An Invitation, 10 June 1850
1850
Lord Londesborough
official report
Plate held; single card The One Invitation on File, and What It Does Not Prove
Period London · 10 June, half-past two
- Jurisdiction
- Domestic and social. A private invitation, printed, with a time on it.
- Inventory
- "A Mummy from Thebes to be unrolled at half-past Two." That is the line on file.
- Confidence
- The card exists and says what it says. The accounts of the day that survive read as a lecture with an audience, not as a dinner with a corpse on the table.
This desk deals in stationery, so it is unusually placed to say what an invitation proves. It proves that an event was arranged, that guests were expected, and that somebody had cards printed. It does not prove a menu. The whole modern image of the Victorian unwrapping party — the candles, the wine, the guests leaning in over the linen — rests on this card and on very little else, and the accounts of what actually happened on the afternoon describe an audience being addressed. Half-past two is not a dinner hour. The desk has been accused of adding the dinner itself, and files the card in its own defence.
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MM-1869-TWN / Unsourced claim, self-flagged
Plate XIII
The Innocents Abroad
1869
Mark Twain
nonfiction
Plate held; travel book The Locomotive Story, Printed With Its Own Disclaimer
Period an Egyptian railway · on the excursion of 1867
- Jurisdiction
- None. A humorist's travel book, written for an American readership that had not been and was not going.
- Mechanism
- Mummies burned as locomotive fuel. Told with a straight face and disowned in the same breath.
- Confidence
- Twain labelled it himself: "stated to me for a fact. I only tell it as I got it." The register has not found the fact.
The most repeated unsourced claim on the register arrived with a receipt attached saying it was unsourced, and a hundred and fifty years of retelling have quietly removed the receipt. The desk files it as a document because it is a documented instance of exactly the thing this register keeps finding: a story enters the record once, in a form that admits it is hearsay, and is thereafter cited as though the admission were not printed on the same page. The claim has never produced a source. The disclaimer, on the other hand, is right there, in the book, in the author's own words.
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MM-1869-ALC / Curse, first fiction
Plate XII
Lost in a Pyramid
1869
Louisa May Alcott, in Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper
story
Plate held; no cut on file The Curse Enters the Record, Fifty-Four Years Early
Period Egypt, and then a New England parlour
- Jurisdiction
- Domestic. Seeds taken from a sorceress's tomb, carried home and planted there, and the penalty collected there.
- Mechanism
- Removal and cultivation. The penalty attaches to the taking and is collected at home, which is the pattern every later curse filing copies without knowing where it got it.
- Confidence
- Established as the earliest filing on this register in which entering a tomb carries a stated penalty. It is fiction, it is signed, and it is dated.
The most obeyed rule in the whole file is fifty-four years older than the newspaper story everybody credits it to, and it was written by the author of Little Women for a weekly paper. What Alcott sets out is already the finished article: something is removed from a tomb and the penalty arrives later and at home. The desk stresses the domestic half, because it is what the 1923 letter and its headlines dropped. In 1869 the curse is a household consequence for an acquisition made abroad. By 1923 it is a headline about a dig, and the home has gone out of it.
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MM-1892-LOT / Contents used as a weapon
Plate XV
Lot No. 249
1892
Arthur Conan Doyle, in Harper's New Monthly Magazine
story
Plate held; no cut on file The First Time the Contents Were Used Against Somebody
Period Oxford · an undergraduate's rooms The story fixes no year the desk can cite, so the placement in the mid-1880s is a reading of the term it describes and not a date.
- Jurisdiction
- Collegiate and domestic. An undergraduate buys a lot at auction and keeps it in his rooms.
- Mechanism
- Revival by an unspecified process, followed by errands. The mummy is not the antagonist. It is the instrument, and it is sent.
- Cross-reference
- The counter-case to the whole reincarnated-bride tradition: this occupant wants nothing at all, and is used.
The register's nastiest filing and its most clear-sighted about the actual relationship. The undergraduate has not been cursed, chosen or pursued. He has bought a preserved man at auction, revived him, and now sends him after his enemies. There is no romance in it. The desk files it as the register's first weapon card and notes the acquisition route, which is the ordinary one: a sale room. Everything terrible in the story happens after a purchase.
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MM-1975-PTR / Audit, with a parasol
Plate XXXIII
Crocodile on the Sandbank
1975
Elizabeth Peters
novel
Plate held; no cut on file The Night Watch Finds a Man in Wrappings
Period Amarna · a dig house, and what walks past it at night
- Mechanism
- A mummy is seen walking the excavation after dark. It is a man in wrappings, which is this register's audit finding in one image.
- Jurisdiction
- Investigative and domestic at once: a dig house is a household, with staff, stores, a rota and a door.
- Cross-reference
- The same tradition the children's filings keep alive, and the same conclusion: the frightening thing is a person in costume.
The audit tradition is older and better documented than the haunting tradition, and this is its most competent entry. The narrator is presented with a walking mummy and treats it as an operational problem: who is on the premises after dark. The register values the filing because the dig house is run like a household and audited like one. The answer, as in every other audit filing from Gautier's shop to a Saturday-morning cartoon, is that the frightening thing is a person.
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MM-1890-RNG / Long wait, museum premises
Plate XIV
The Ring of Thoth
1890
Arthur Conan Doyle
story
Plate held; no cut on file The Man Who Waited in the Gallery
Period the Louvre The priest's three thousand years are narrated, not enacted, so the clock takes the museum. The desk has not confirmed the reign the story names for him and prints none.
- Mechanism
- An immortal priest waits three thousand years for his love's mummy, and the story is set in the museum that holds it. Presence and patience.
- Classification
- The origin of the register's reincarnated-bride tradition, which after this card is assumed by a good deal of what follows.
- Confidence
- The 1932 film tells this story. Whether it took it from here is a claim the desk has not checked against its source, so the register prints the resemblance and not the borrowing.
A short magazine story sets out the plot the cinema keeps returning to, and it does it with patience rather than a curse. It is the earliest filing on this register to carry that plot; how the plot reached the rest of them is a question the desk has left open on every card that raises it. The immortal wants one specific object inside one specific building. Most of the file digs, buys or steals. This one waits. The Abbott Papyrus would have recognised him at once, and would have written him up.
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MM-1959-HAM / He does not shuffle
Plate XXVII
The Mummy (1959)
1959
Terence Fisher, with Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing
film
Plate held; no cut on file He Strides, and He Goes Through the Door Rather Than Round It
Period an excavation in 1895; then England, 1898 The film opens on an ancient burial. The desk has not confirmed the period the film gives it and prints none, so the filing sorts by the dig, which the film does date.
- Mechanism
- Lee's Kharis moves at speed, and demonstrates the weight on a door.
- Perimeter
- The register's clearest counter-example to the gait rule, and its most physical door failure: the door does not fail at the lock, it fails at the panel.
- Classification
- Filed as an adaptation of the Universal cycle rather than of the 1932 film, which it does not follow.
Nineteen years of shuffling end in 1959. Lee's mummy is quick, deliberate and extremely heavy, and the film is careful to show the weight: he does not open the door, he smashes it and comes through. The desk files this as the register's strongest evidence that the gait was never a property of the subject. Why it changed is not something the desk can source, so it prints no reason. It records the result: the same character crosses the room at a stride.
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MM-1964-CMT / Exhibited for money
Plate XXVIII
The Curse of the Mummy's Tomb
1964
Michael Carreras
film
Plate held; no cut on file The Exhibitor Is the First Casualty
Period London · a paying exhibition The turn-of-the-century placement is the desk's reading of the setting. The film's own year is not confirmed here and is not printed.
- Jurisdiction
- Commercial. The contents are exhibited for money, and the exhibitor is the first casualty.
- Mechanism
- Display for money. The filing is about what is done with the contents once they are out.
- Cross-reference
- Files with the 1834 and 1850 documents. Three filings, one behaviour: the remains are taken out, and then shown.
Hammer's second mummy is the register's bluntest statement of its acquisition finding, and it makes it at a box office. The contents are put on show for money, and the man showing them is the first to go. The desk notes the sequence, which is the same one Pettigrew's audiences and Londesborough's guests were part of a century earlier and which the museum case continues in a politer form. Something is taken out of a room it was sealed into, and the next decision anybody makes about it is a pricing decision.
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MM-1903-STK / Domestic experiment
Plate XVI
The Jewel of Seven Stars
1903
Bram Stoker
novel
Plate held; two endings on file The Experiment Is Set Up in a Private House
Period London and Cornwall
- Jurisdiction
- Domestic and private. The business is conducted in London and in Cornwall, and not in Egypt.
- Mechanism
- Queen Tera planned her own return. This is the register's only occupant who filed a plan.
- Confidence
- The novel exists in two states with different endings, the later dating from 1912. The desk has not compared the texts and prints no account of what either of them does.
Stoker's contribution to the file is to bring the whole business home, to London and Cornwall. The desk has strong views about storing things at home in quantity and expects every one of them confirmed. What raises the filing above the rest is the occupant. Tera is the only subject on the register who planned her own return. Everybody else is opened by somebody with a lamp.
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MM-1989-RIC / Voluntary storage
Plate XXXVII
Ramses the Damned
1989
Anne Rice
novel
Plate held; adult filing The Occupant Who Did Not Need the Storage and Used It Anyway
Period Cairo and London · the last season before the war
- Mechanism
- Immortality, acquired long ago and still working. Ramses cannot die, and does not require preservation, wrapping or a sealed room in order to keep.
- Classification
- The register's only voluntary tenancy. He did not need the tomb and stayed in it anyway, which makes the burial a decision rather than a disposal.
- Cross-reference
- The reincarnated-lover plot at novel length, which is where the tradition gets the most room and still does not account for itself.
Rice takes the one arrangement the register never questions and asks what it is for. If the occupant is already immortal, the tomb is not preservation; it is storage, and it was chosen, which makes his burial the only one on this register that is a decision rather than a funeral. The desk finds the reading persuasive and slightly bleak. Every other occupant on this register was put away by somebody else. This one packed himself.
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MM-1967-SHR / Spell carried on the wrapping
Plate XXX
The Mummy's Shroud
1967
John Gilling
film
Plate held; no cut on file The Spell Is On the Packaging
Period Egypt · an expedition
- Mechanism
- The spell is on the shroud. The wrapping is not packing material, it is the instrument.
- Inventory
- The register's only filing in which the container carries the operating instructions on its outside, which is more than most household goods manage.
- Classification
- Files with 1932 and the Scroll of Thoth: twice on this register, the document is the mechanism.
This desk has a standing interest in labelling, and here is a filing in which the label is load-bearing. The shroud carries the spell, so the packaging is the mechanism. What earns the card is the object. A wrapping that is also a document is exactly the arrangement the Papyrus of Ani proposes, three thousand years earlier and in earnest, and here the cinema noticed that the packaging had writing on it for a reason.
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MM-1922-CAR / Excavation record
Plate XVII
The Tomb of Tut.ankh.Amen
1923
Howard Carter and A. C. Mace
nonfiction
Plate held; primary record The Record of the Find, Which Contains No Curse
Period the Valley of the Kings · from 4 November 1922
- Inventory
- Every object numbered and carded as it came out: bread, wine with the vintage written on the jar, linen, furniture, spare sandals. The only household on any of this desk's registers whose entire contents were recorded item by item.
- Mechanism
- The tomb had been entered twice in antiquity and resealed by the necropolis officials. The robbery is in the excavation's own record, at the door.
- Confidence
- There is no curse inscription anywhere in the excavation record. Carter, who opened the tomb and then spent years emptying it, died in 1939.
The desk regards this as the register's most important filing and the least dramatic, which is generally how it goes. What Carter produced is not a story about a discovery; it is an inventory, taken slowly, with a numbered card for every object, and it is the reason a reader can check anything on this page at all. Two facts in it settle two of the register's findings on their own. The tomb had been robbed in antiquity by people with access to it. And nowhere in the paperwork of the best-documented excavation ever conducted is there a curse for anybody to have broken.
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MM-1923-COR / Letter to the press
Plate XIX
Corelli's Letter
1923
Marie Corelli
official report
Plate held; one letter A Novelist Writes to the Papers, and Within Weeks the Rule Exists
Period March and April 1923 · a letter, and the death that followed it
- Jurisdiction
- Editorial, and nothing else. A letter, published. No inscription, no excavation record, and no statement from anyone who had been inside the tomb.
- Mechanism
- A novelist writes to a newspaper in late March warning that dire punishment follows anyone who forces entry to a sealed tomb. The excavation's patron dies in Cairo the following month, of an infected insect bite as the newspapers reported it. The headlines follow the death, not the letter.
- Confidence
- This card files the letter and nothing else. The coverage it set off ran across several papers over several weeks, which is a run of headlines and not one work, so the register declines to file it rather than bundle it behind this plate. The substance of the letter is on the record; the desk has not verified its exact wording against the paper it ran in and does not quote it.
This is where the most obeyed rule in the file becomes attached to a real excavation, a real death and a real family, and the sequence is worth setting out slowly because it is short. A novelist writes to a newspaper. The following month the excavation's patron dies in Cairo, of an infected insect bite as the papers gave it. The papers, holding a letter that predicted a punishment and a body that arrived on schedule, print the obvious. What the desk keeps returning to is that the excavation's own paperwork was on the table throughout, and that nobody working through it has ever found the inscription the whole edifice rests on.
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MM-1923-CHR / The answer, six months later
Plate XVIII
The Adventure of the Egyptian Tomb
1923
Agatha Christie
story
Plate held; no cut on file Six Months After the Headlines, the Answer Is Poison
Period Egypt · the season the headlines ran
- Jurisdiction
- Criminal. A run of deaths on an excavation, attributed in the newspapers to a curse and investigated by somebody who does not read newspapers for evidence.
- Mechanism
- A poisoner with a motive and an opportunity. The supernatural explanation is entertained, tested against the deaths, and dropped.
- Cross-reference
- Files directly against the 1923 letter. The two are the same year and the same country, and only one of them has a suspect.
The desk is fond of this filing out of professional sympathy. While the headlines were still running, somebody sat down and wrote the obvious counter-story, in which the deaths on a dig are real, the fear is real, and the cause is a person with a reason. Poirot does the thing the newspapers did not do, which is to ask who benefits. It took the record six months to produce a rebuttal and seventy-nine years to produce a study, and the register notes that the rebuttal was written by a novelist and has held up rather better than the letter that started it, which was also written by a novelist.
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MM-2002-BMJ / Cohort study
Plate XLIV
A Historical Cohort Study
2002
Mark R. Nelson, in the BMJ
official report
Plate held; peer-reviewed Somebody Finally Ran the Numbers
Period Egypt, 1923 to 1926 · the cohort as it stood Sorted to the exposure it studies rather than to its publication, on the same rule the register applies to every document.
- Jurisdiction
- Epidemiological. The forty-four Westerners Carter recorded as being in Egypt at the relevant time, divided into those exposed to the tomb and those not.
- Mechanism
- Twenty-five exposed, nineteen not. Mean age at death seventy in the exposed group against seventy-five in the comparison group. P = 0.87.
- Confidence
- Highest available. It was published at Christmas, which does not make it less of a study.
Seventy-nine years after a letter to a newspaper created the rule, a single author did the thing nobody had bothered to do, which was to write down who had actually been in the tomb and then find out when they died. The design is unglamorous and completely adequate: an exposed group, an unexposed group drawn from the same list and the same years, and survival compared. The answer is that the two groups cannot be told apart. The exposed mean is the lower of the two, which is the direction a curse would predict and which at P = 0.87 means nothing whatever; the desk prints the direction anyway, so that nobody can accuse it of keeping the inconvenient half back. This desk has graded a great many folk rules on its registers. This is the only one anybody has put through a statistical test.
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MM-2001-MAS / Redrawn for Saturday morning
Plate XLII
The Mummy: The Animated Series
2001
Universal Animation, for Kids' WB
animated series
Plate held; children's tier The 1999 Filing, Redrawn For Saturday Morning
Period the 1930s · continuing from the 1999 filing
- Classification
- A duplicate of the 1999 filing in a different medium, on a different schedule, for a different audience. Filed on its own plate, as this register files every adaptation.
- Mechanism
- The 1999 filing on a weekly schedule. The register notes what a weekly schedule does to a curse.
- Cross-reference
- The 1999 film, which this filing redraws.
A franchise about a permanent and irreversible awakening runs into the one form that cannot accommodate it, which is the weekly series: a form that needs everything available again next Saturday. The desk files this without complaint and with some interest, because the register keeps finding that the storage always reopens. Here it reopens to a broadcast timetable, which is a fair description of most of the cupboards this paper has surveyed.
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MM-1955-ABC / Spelling variant
Plate XXV
Abbott and Costello Meet the Mummy
1955
Charles Lamont
film
Plate held; comic filing Klaris, With an L
Period Cairo · contemporary
- Classification
- The mummy is called Klaris rather than Kharis. The desk records the spelling because the spelling is the studio conceding that the cycle is over.
- Mechanism
- Unchanged in outline and played for laughs throughout. The register files the comedy as a disposition rather than as a mechanism, because by 1955 there is no mechanism left to file.
- Cross-reference
- Files with the four Kharis filings, one letter away. The register keeps it because its business is what happened to the material.
A monster cycle ends when the studio sends in its comedians, and here the studio did not even keep the name. The name on the file is now Klaris, with an L, which is a filing decision as much as a joke. The desk files it in full rather than declining it, because the register's business is what happened to the material, and what happened to this material is that eleven years after the last sequel it came back as a comedy with one letter changed.
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MM-1964-ROB / Stock note, pigment
Plate XXIX
Mummy Brown, Discontinued
1964
C. Roberson & Co., quoted in Time
official report
Plate held; press notice The Pigment Ran Out, Which Is How It Ended
Period London · a colourman's stockroom
- Inventory
- The managing director, asked in 1964 why the colour had been dropped: "We might have a few odd limbs lying around somewhere, but not enough to make any more paint."
- Mechanism
- A brown pigment ground from mummified remains, stocked and sold by artists' colourmen until 1964, when it was discontinued because the supply ran out.
- Confidence
- The often-repeated story of a Victorian painter burying his tube in the garden on learning what was in it has not been traced to a source by this desk. It is filed as an anecdote and not as a fact.
The desk had assumed this trade ended in some nineteenth-century fit of conscience and finds instead that it ended in 1964, in a stockroom, for want of stock. That is the register's whole commercial argument in one sentence from a managing director: the material was a line item, it was ordered and reordered like any other line item, and what stopped it was a supply problem rather than a moral one. This paper writes about inventory. It knows what a stock note sounds like. It did not expect to file one about people, in living memory, in a news magazine.
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MM-1971-BLD / Stoker, unwrapped
Plate XXXI
Blood from the Mummy's Tomb
1971
Seth Holt, completed by Michael Carreras
film
Plate held; adult filing Stoker Again, Without the Wrappings
Period London · contemporary
- Classification
- An adaptation of the 1903 novel, with the wrappings taken away.
- Mechanism
- Tera, without the wrappings, which removes the costume and leaves the storage argument standing.
- Confidence
- Carries the period's nudity and gore. Flagged on the card because the register's reading panel asks for it.
The register's proof that the subject was never the linen. Take the wrappings away entirely, keep the occupant who planned her own return, and the filing still belongs on this page without argument. What that establishes is worth having: the mummy is not a costume, it is a storage situation, and every card here is about somebody opening a container that was closed on purpose. The desk marks the filing adult and moves on. It is not squeamish, but it does keep a reading panel for children and this is not going on it.
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MM-1972-GUA / Real remains, hired
Plate XXXII
Las momias de Guanajuato
1972
Federico Curiel, with Santo, Blue Demon and Mil Máscaras
film
Plate held; real remains on file Real Remains, Hired As a Premise
Period Guanajuato · contemporary
- Jurisdiction
- Municipal, and uncomfortably real. The mummies of the premise are the natural mummies of a real town, displayed in its museum.
- Mechanism
- Nothing on this card is Egyptian. These are natural mummies, so the register files them against the method rather than under it: no wrapping and no natron anywhere in the arrangement.
- Confidence
- The film is fiction. The people in the cases are not. What is owed to remains that are on display is a live question, and not one this desk will make a joke of, so the card states that the museum is real and stops there.
The register files this one carefully. As cinema it is exactly what it looks like: three wrestlers against the risen dead. But the premise is not a set. It is a real museum in a real town, and what is in the cases is a group of real people. This is the screen card on which the storage argument stops being an argument. On the fiction cards a fictional occupant is removed from a fictional room, and the desk can be as dry as it likes about it. Here the museum is real, and the desk has nothing amusing to say.
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MM-1980-AWK / Stoker, straight
Plate XXXIV
The Awakening
1980
Mike Newell, with Charlton Heston
film
Plate held; no cut on file The Same Novel, Played Straight
Period Egypt and London · contemporary
- Classification
- A second adaptation of the 1903 novel, filed separately from the first because this register does not fold an adaptation into its source or into its predecessor.
- Mechanism
- The 1903 novel filmed straight. The 1971 filing took the wrappings away; this one keeps the archaeology.
- Cross-reference
- Read with the 1903 and 1971 filings, the three make the register's longest adaptation chain: a novel and two films of it.
Two adaptations of one novel, nine years apart, and this is the one that plays it straight. The desk keeps both films because folding a remake into its source is how a register turns into a shelf with a label on it, and because the pair are genuinely different filings: the first removes the wrappings and is filed adult, the second plays the novel straight. What survives both operations is Tera.
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MM-1982-TWK / Misfiled; transferred
Plate XXXV
Time Walker
1982
Tom Kennedy
film
Plate held; filed elsewhere Filed Here In Error: the Occupant Is an Alien
Period a California campus · contemporary
- Classification
- A correction. It is a mummy filing on a California campus until the occupant turns out to be an extraterrestrial.
- Cross-reference
- Transferred to the visitor record, on the same terms as The Terminator, which that record corrected in public. The visitor record keeps file references of its own but sets no anchor on any of them, so there is nothing on that page for a link to land on. This card therefore points at the record rather than at a filing inside it.
- Confidence
- The directing credit is as this desk has it and has not been checked against the film's titles. It is printed unverified.
The register carries this card in order to give it away. It arrives as a mummy, on a campus. Then the film says the occupant is an alien, and the whole filing moves. The desk has done this before. The alien record misfiled a machine in 1984 and corrected itself on the page rather than quietly, and the same discipline applies here. A register that will not print its own transfers is a register that has stopped being checkable.
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MM-1989-PRA / Occupancy dispute
Plate XXXVI
Pyramids
1989
Terry Pratchett
novel
Plate held; no cut on file Every Occupant Wakes at Once and Complains About the Accommodation
Period Djelibeybi · no calendar applies The filing fixes no period the desk can put on a clock, so it sorts at publication, which is this register's rule for a work that gives no date.
- Jurisdiction
- Residential. Every pharaoh in the kingdom wakes at once, which turns a burial programme into an occupancy problem.
- Mechanism
- The dead rise, in a body, and are found to have opinions about the accommodation.
- Classification
- The stored contents complain about the accommodation. Filed under maintenance, where the complaints belong.
This desk has read a great many filings in which the tomb is opened and something comes out angry, and very few in which it comes out angry about the service. Pratchett's kings rise together, compare notes, and turn out to be a body of dissatisfied long-term tenants with a complaint about the accommodation. The joke is a maintenance joke and the argument is a maintenance argument. A structure built to need no upkeep still needs somebody to care about it.
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MM-1994-LAN / Exhibit, stolen
Plate XXXVIII
Bubba Ho-Tep
1994
Joe R. Lansdale
novella
Plate held; adult filing The Exhibit Is Stolen and Turns Up in a Care Home
Period East Texas · a rest home The story fixes no year the desk has confirmed, so it sorts at publication under the register's rule for an undated filing. The publication year is unconfirmed too: the desk prints the date it has and has not checked it.
- Mechanism
- A mummy stolen from a touring exhibition ends up at a rest home and preys on it.
- Jurisdiction
- Institutional. A rest home.
- Confidence
- The plan this register works from flags the year of this filing for checking, and the desk has not checked it. Both the date on the plate and the date the story is set in are printed unverified.
Lansdale takes the acquisition chain the register has been tracking since a foot was sold in Paris and follows it to the end: the contents are removed, toured, stolen, and turn up preying on a rest home. The desk files the monster second. First it files two residents, one of whom is Elvis, who deal with it themselves.
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MM-1997-UWR / Kids tier, first
Plate XL
Under Wraps
1997
Greg Beeman, for the Disney Channel
television film
Plate held; children's tier Three Children, and a Mummy Called Harold
Period a suburb · the week of Halloween
- Jurisdiction
- Domestic and juvenile. Three children and a mummy called Harold.
- Mechanism
- None filed. The desk has the children, the name and the week, and prints no more plot than it has.
- Classification
- Filed as a television film rather than a feature, on the register's rule of filing what the object actually is.
The register changes its manners the moment the audience is eight years old. The mummy has a first name, the people in charge of him are three children, and the week is Halloween. The desk files it at the head of the children's tier.
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MM-1997-MAL / Guardians, reactivated
Plate XXXIX
Mummies Alive!
1997
DIC Entertainment
animated series
Plate held; children's tier Four Guardians and One Reincarnated Client
Period San Francisco · contemporary
- Jurisdiction
- Protective. Four preserved guardians wake in a modern city because the pharaoh they were assigned to has been born again in it.
- Mechanism
- The reincarnated-subject tradition, reversed: the mummies are not pursuing a bride, they are guarding somebody.
- Classification
- Files against most of the register. Almost everywhere else the preserved occupant is the hazard; here the occupants are the household staff and the hazard is somebody else entirely.
The desk had graded a whole register of filings in which opening the box releases a problem before it reached a Saturday-morning cartoon in which opening the box releases four guardians. The inversion is complete: the mummies are the guard detail, and the person they guard is a reincarnated pharaoh. Most adult filings on this page treat the preserved occupant as the antagonist. One children's series filed them as employees.
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MM-2002-BUB / Facility, audited
Plate XLV
Bubba Ho-Tep
2002
Don Coscarelli, with Bruce Campbell
film
Plate held; adult filing The Rest Home Handles It Itself
Period East Texas · a rest home The film fixes no year the desk has confirmed, so it sorts at release under the register's rule for an undated filing.
- Jurisdiction
- Institutional. A rest home.
- Mechanism
- A mummy stolen from a touring exhibition preys on a rest home.
- Confidence
- Adult in every respect, despite a premise that sounds like a sketch. Flagged for the reading panel.
The register's most misjudged filing. The premise reads as a sketch and the film is filed adult regardless. The desk files the monster second again, as it did with the novella. First it files the two residents. The audit tradition on this register usually ends with somebody unmasked. Here the residents deal with it themselves.
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MM-2003-TUT / Service complaint
Plate XLVII
Tutenstein
2003
Discovery Kids, from the comic by Jay Stephens
animated series
Plate held; children's tier The Boy Pharaoh Is Appalled By the Service
Period a museum · contemporary
- Jurisdiction
- Museum, residential. A boy pharaoh, revived in a museum.
- Mechanism
- A complaint. It is about the service.
- Classification
- Adapted from a comic and filed on its own plate. The register does not fold an adaptation into its source.
The register's funniest filing is also its most exact. Tutenstein wakes in a museum and is appalled by the service. Most adult cards on this page treat the revived occupant as a threat. This one treats him as a tenant with a complaint. The oldest card on this register is a manual packed in for the journey. He would like to know who is running the rest of it.
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MM-2003-SPX / The premise as a control scheme
Plate XLVI
Sphinx and the Cursed Mummy
2003
Eurocom, published by THQ
game
Plate held; children's tier The Player Is the Mummy, and Cannot Die
Period a fictional Egypt · no date given Undated, so it sorts at release under the register's rule for a filing that gives no period.
- Classification
- A video game, which this register's filing kind does not distinguish from a tabletop one, so the card says which.
- Mechanism
- For half its length the player is the mummy: already dead, therefore unkillable, and that is what the game gives you to work with.
- Inventory
- The register's only filing in which being the stored item is an advantage, and the only one that gives the occupant a set of controls.
Every other filing on this register agrees that the interesting position is outside the container looking in, and one children's game hands the reader the other seat. Playing as the mummy means being permanently dead, which the game treats as equipment rather than tragedy: the design is built around a body that cannot die. The desk finds it the register's neatest single argument. Everything filed here is about what happens when somebody opens the box. This is the only filing that asks what the contents would do if they were the ones with the door.
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MM-2005-SDM / Audit, for children
Plate XLVIII
Where's My Mummy?
2005
Joe Sichta
animated film
Plate held; children's tier The Audit Tradition, For the Under-Tens
Period Giza · contemporary
- Mechanism
- The usual method, and the usual answer. The mummy is a person.
- Classification
- The audit tradition, stated for children as plainly as it has ever been stated for anybody: the frightening thing is a person.
- Confidence
- The directing credit is printed unverified. The desk has not checked it against the film.
A children's cartoon does the register's work more directly than most of the features on this page. Something ancient appears to be walking, and the investigation establishes what the audit filings on this register always establish, which is that the mummy is a person. The desk records the pattern without embarrassment, because it is the pattern: from a Paris curiosity shop in 1840 through a dig house in 1884 to this, the reliable finding of the whole register is that when remains start moving, the first thing to check is who stands to gain from the room being empty.
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MM-2014-DWH / Sixty-six seconds
Plate LI
Mummy on the Orient Express
2014
Jamie Mathieson, for the BBC
television series
Plate held; one episode Sixty-Six Seconds, Counted On Screen
Period aboard a train, in space · no year given The filing gives no date and the desk will not invent one, so it sorts at broadcast under the register's rule for an undated work. The train is in space. The desk is aware of how that reads on a clock.
- Classification
- Filed under its series because this register has no filing kind for a single episode, and the desk would rather use the nearest true kind than invent one. One work to a card: the card is the episode.
- Mechanism
- The Foretold takes sixty-six seconds from sighting to death.
- Perimeter
- The register's only monster with a published interval.
A monster usually keeps its timing vague. This one publishes it. Sixty-six seconds from the moment of sighting, which converts a haunting into a stopwatch problem and puts the survivors to work. The desk notes what is underneath the device, because it is a maintenance finding. The thing is a soldier, and what he wants is to be relieved. He is not looking for a bride or a scroll. He is waiting to be told he can stop.
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MM-1827-LOU / First fictional revival
Plate VI
The Mummy!
1827
Jane Loudon (Jane Webb)
novel
Plate held; no cut on file The First One, and It Sorts to the Far End of the Clock
Period 2126 · England, some considerable time from now
- Mechanism
- Galvanism. Cheops is brought back by electricity, three years after the second edition of a rather better known novel that used the same current.
- Jurisdiction
- Political. The revived party is mostly there to give political advice, which is not what the later filings ask of theirs.
- Classification
- The register's only card set in the future, and it therefore sits at the far end of a clock that begins in the fourth millennium BC.
The mummy enters English fiction as a consultant. Loudon's revived Cheops is not a threat, a suitor or a plot device; he is an adviser, and the advice is political. The desk marks the filing for two reasons: it is first, and it treats a preserved occupant as a resource to be consulted rather than a hazard to be contained. Almost nothing after it does.
No filings match. The register is complete; your criteria are not.
The rulings
The desk has graded the folklore against the register above: the curse, the shuffle, the leaves, the dinner parties, and what the West did with the remains once it had them. One of them has a control group. They are filed at The Storage Rulings.
What to read
Eight of these works carry the other forty-four, and there is a shelf that would let a reader catch this desk out — which, the subject being real people in real museums, matters here more than it does on my own page. Both are at Selected Mummy Readings.
Counsel asks me to state plainly: the works above belong to their respective authors, studios and estates; the file references, jurisdictions and dispositions are the desk’s own apparatus and have no legal standing whatsoever; and nothing in this register should be read as advice on the long-term storage of anything you would mind being taken. I have signed it, as usual, with my own pen.
The haunted-house register follows on Wednesday, and the two files were always going to touch, since a tomb is a property with an undisclosed prior occupant. The rule agreed between them: that register takes the dwellings the living move into, and this one takes the ones the dead were moved into. Nobody is filed twice. I go back next week to a subject that at least has the decency to be about doors.
— Casimir Vane
