The Unlucky Mummy is an Ancient Egyptian artifact in the collection of the

British Museum The British Museum is a public museum dedicated to human history, art and culture located in the Bloomsbury area of London. Its permanent collection of eight million works is among the largest and most comprehensive in existence. It docum ...

London London is the capital and largest city of England and the United Kingdom, with a population of just under 9 million. It stands on the River Thames in south-east England at the head of a estuary down to the North Sea, and has been a majo ...

. The identity of the original owner is unknown. This "painted wooden mummy-board of an unidentified woman" was acquired by the British Museum in 1889. The mummy-board has acquired a reputation for bringing misfortune, and many myths have developed around it.

Overview

The name 'Unlucky Mummy' is misleading as the artifact is not a mummy at all, but rather a gessoed and painted wooden 'mummy-board' or inner

coffin A coffin is a funerary box used for viewing or keeping a corpse, either for burial or cremation. Sometimes referred to as a casket, any box in which the dead are buried is a coffin, and while a casket was originally regarded as a box for jewel ...

lid. It was found at Thebes and can be dated by its shape and the style of its decoration to the late

21st 21 (twenty-one) is the natural number following 20 and preceding 22. The current century is the 21st century AD, under the Gregorian calendar. In mathematics 21 is: * a composite number, its proper divisors being 1, 3 and 7, and a defici ...

or early

22nd Dynasty The Twenty-second Dynasty of Egypt is also known as the Bubastite Dynasty, since the pharaohs originally ruled from the city of Bubastis. It was founded by Shoshenq I. The Twenty-first, Twenty-second, Twenty-third, Twenty-fourth, and Twenty-f ...

(c 950–900 BC). In the British Museum it is known by its serial number EA 22542. The beardless face and the position of the hands with fingers extended show that it was made to cover the mummified body of a woman. Her identity is not known due to the brief hieroglyphic inscriptions containing only short religious phrases, and omitting mention of the name of the deceased. The high quality of the lid indicates that the owner was a person of high rank. It was usual for such ladies to participate in the musical accompaniments to the rituals in the temple of

Amen-ra Amun (; also ''Amon'', ''Ammon'', ''Amen''; egy, jmn, reconstructed as (Old Egyptian and early Middle Egyptian) → (later Middle Egyptian) → (Late Egyptian), cop, Ⲁⲙⲟⲩⲛ, Amoun) romanized: ʾmn) was a major ancient Egyptian ...

; hence early British Museum publications described the owner of 22542 as a 'priestess of Amen-Ra'.

E.A. Wallis Budge Sir Ernest Alfred Thompson Wallis Budge (27 July 185723 November 1934) was an English Egyptologist, Orientalist, and philologist who worked for the British Museum and published numerous works on the ancient Near East. He made numerous trips ...

, Keeper of Egyptian and Assyrian Antiquities from 1894 to 1924, also suggested that she might have been of royal blood, but this was pure speculation and is not supported by the

iconography Iconography, as a branch of art history, studies the identification, description and interpretation of the content of images: the subjects depicted, the particular compositions and details used to do so, and other elements that are distinct fro ...

of the lid.

Physical attributes

The mummy-board is in length and made out of wood and plaster. The detail is painted upon the plaster, and hands protrude from the wooden mummy-board. For its age, the mummy-board is of good quality.

Exhibition history

The mummy-board was donated to the British Museum in July 1889 by Mrs Warwick Hunt of

Holland Park Holland Park is an area of Kensington, on the western edge of Central London, that contains a street and public park of the same name. It has no official boundaries but is roughly bounded by Kensington High Street to the south, Holland Road ...

, London, on behalf of Mr Arthur F Wheeler. It was displayed in the 'First Egyptian Room' of the Museum from the 1890s and has remained on public view ever since, with the exception of periods during the First and Second World Wars, when it was removed from its case for safety. It has left the Museum on a number of occasions, in 1990, when it formed part of a temporary exhibition held at two venues in Australia and between 4 February to 27 May 2007 along with 271 pieces the 'Unlucky Mummy' was exhibited at Taiwan's National Palace Museum during a press conference. The mummy to which the article belonged is said to have been left in Egypt since it never formed part of the collections of the British Museum. The mummy board is currently displayed in Room 62.

Unlucky myths

The mummy-board has acquired a reputation for bringing misfortune, and many myths have developed around it. It has been credited with causing death, injury and large-scale disasters, with one story ending by saying that the "mummy" was being moved from the British Museum to New York on the RMS ''Titanic'' when it sank. None of these stories have any basis in fact, but from time to time the strength of the rumours has led to enquiries on the subject. A disclaimer written by Wallis Budge was published in 1934, and yet since that time the myth has undergone further embellishment. The Unlucky Mummy has also been linked to the death of the British writer and journalist, Bertram Fletcher Robinson. Robinson conducted research into the history of that artefact whilst working as a journalist for the ''

Daily Express The ''Daily Express'' is a national daily United Kingdom middle-market newspaper printed in tabloid format. Published in London, it is the flagship of Express Newspapers, owned by publisher Reach plc. It was first published as a broadsheet i ...

'' newspaper during 1904. He became convinced that the object had malevolent powers and died three years later, aged 36.

References

External links

British Museum page
{{coord, 51.5197, -0.1278, display=title Ancient Egyptian objects in the British Museum Curses