[DL] Just to start the whole "mummy" thread again... :-)

["Leybourne, Brian" <Brian.Leybourne@airnz.co.nz>]

This could make an interesting base for an adventure...

In the 18th Century the French Kings started a craze for Egyptian artifacts,
and naturally that meant mummies too. Expeditions were sent out to search
for antiquities culminating with Napoleon's invasion. By the turn of the
19th Century Egypt, and her mummies, became the fashionable playground of
the rich and the British in particular. Hotels began to open to cater to the
new tourists (this is where the first travel agent, Thomas Cooke, made his
name by organizing 'package tours'). A typical amusement for the dilettante
Egyptomaniacs was to be guided to a tomb where they would 'find' a mummy.
The mummy was then brought, with great jollity, back to the hotel where it
was laid out on a table and unwrapped for everyone's amusement. The
entertainment over, it was thrown out with the trash. Early archaeologists,
such as ex-circus strongman Giovanni Belzoni, were more tomb robbers than
scientists, gathering treasure and crushing mummies underfoot. 
Further humiliation awaited the Egyptian mummy with the coming of the
Industrial Revolution and the American Civil War. An enterprising native of
Maine, one Isaac Augustus Stanwood, latched onto a clever way to save money
and circumvent the severe paper shortage caused by the war. He began buying
mummies by the boat load. He used the incredible amount of yardage that the
Egyptians used to wrap the bodies to make the butcher's brown paper for
wrapping meat. He reduced the linen to a pulp in huge vats and then produced
the paper. The brown color was caused by the resins and oils used in the
embalming process. The price of Egyptian mummies was so cheap that the cost
was only 50% of what Stanwood have had to pay for American rags! A local
outbreak of cholera, falsely attributed to using mummies to wrap meat in,
led to the end of this practice - but the tradition of using brown paper to
wrap meat still exists to this day - that and for grocery bags. 

Brian "Suddenly not so hungry" Leybourne.

--
Brian Leybourne
Enterprise Administration Specialist
Air New Zealand Central LAN Management 

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