The Portland daily press., 1882-06-23
Magazine Excerpts.
THE FREIGHT THE JULY ARGoSIES
BRING.
Mummies as Bric.a-Brac.
amelia Edwards in Harper's.l

amelia Edwar ds in Harpers.]
Unfortunately the modern traveller is not
content to collect merely beads and funereal
statuettes and such small game. He must bring
home an ancient Egyptian IN proprid persona.
The amount of business done of late years in
this grim kind of bric-a-brac has been very
considerable. A foreign agent and wine-mer-
chant of Cairo assured me when I returned
from the Second Cataract in 1874, that he lad
that very season already passed" and shipped
no less than eighteen Theban mummies; and
many other agents were most likely equally
busy and equally successful. Amenhotep III.
artfully slowed away inside crocodile, or Hat
asu rolled up in the folds of sketching tent,
may easily have been slipped through the AL
exandria custom-honse by one of these gentle
men. Mummies, however, are expensive hob
bies, only to be INDUCED in by the wealthy.
From $50 to e100 was at that time the average
price of a full sized specimen, while from e10
to G12 was asked for baby. / must not be
supposed to imply that the general mummy
market was supplied by the brothers Adder
Rasoul Their goods were too precious and too
perilous to be parted from except under condi-
tionS of elaborate secrecy and exorbitant pay
ment. The purchaser of the Plnotem papyrus
paid e400 for his bargain, and it may be as
suned that royal mummy from the same
source would have cost at least double that
sum. That Rameses III. was, as lately as
1880, actually offered for sale to wealthy
American (who did not, however, believe In
the genuineness of the article as reported, and
declined to deaD is a fact for which have the
authority of one of that travellers compan-
ions. --, =
ry tourist is of quite another class He belonged
= IL 1.Ax-.& hat tn% rc
he was an architect, sacred scribe, civil or
military official. Such mummies, ranging
chiefly from the XXIst to the XXVlth Dynas-
ties, form the staple of Theban trade: AS for
the Theban fellah, mummy hunting is his he
reditary vocation. He passes his life in digging,
finding, hiding and selling; his home is an emp
ty sepulchre; his shirt is made of mummy cloth;
his children's playthings and his wife's orna-
ments are spoils of the dead. His forefathers
have subsisted for generations by this equivocal
industry, and his descendants will subslst by it
for who shall say how many generations to
come? Even now, after centuries of spoliation,
the soil needs only to be dug a little deeper in
order that the spade may strike lower stra-
tum of graves. And if this be true of mine
SO long and so persistently worked as the me-
cropolis of Thebes, what must be the sepul-
chral wealth of thousands of other burial fields,
some partially and some wholly UNEMPLOYED?
To this day the mountain ranges and shifting
sands of Egypt conceal some hundreds of mil
lions of mummies DR.. Birch-counting from
B. c. 2000 when mummification was supposed
to have been first practced, down toA. D. 200,
when it may be said to have Observation-Disclosures
the approximate number of bodies embalmed
during that period at 42O,OOO,OOo. But recent
explorations among the pyramids OF Sakkara,
and the discovery of the mummied corpse OF
King Merenra With Dynasty, must hence
forth compel Us to ascribe much earlier date
for the beginnings of the art. would venture,
in fact to carry it back to B. G. $500, or even to
B. c. 1000 SO assigning period of 47O0 years
for the observance of the process, and approx
mately estimating the gross number of num-
mics of all epochs at not less than 731 O00, 0O0-
a gigantic total Yet when it is remembered
that the rites of mummifcation were performed
not only for every Egyptian man, woman, and
child, gentle or simple, but for every stranger,
no matter what his nationality or religion, for
nal, for every leper and outcast, this presumed
total of 731 OOO, 900 falls probably far short of
the actual number.