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The Mummy's Curse: The True History of a Dark Fantasy By Roger Luckhurst (Oxford University Press, 2012, 321 pp. £18.99. Reviewed by David Seed
Roger Luckhurst's new study sets out initially to contextualize the famous curse attached to Howard Carter's opening of the tomb of Tbtankhamun in 1922-3 by examining two less famous curse stories which preceded it: Thomas Douglas Murray's revelation of an Egyptian priestess and Walter Ingram's opening of an Egyptian priest's mummy case. This discussion sets the tone for Luckhurst's whole volume which presents fascinating examples of cultural mapping where rumours of curses were spread by the tabloid press and by representatives of different disciplines. The "unlucky mummy" story attached to Murray's actions was variously promoted by the journalist W.T. Stead, the Egyptologist Ernest Wallis Budge, and the writer Arthur Conan Doyle. As Luckhurst shows again and again, the early twentieth century saw a bizarre combination of science - especially archaeology - and occult practices like communicating with the dead or scrutinizing phantasmal photographs. And all this was played out against the backdrop of empire. This where Luckhurst's second broader subject emerges.
The Mummy's Curse jumps back from these curse stories to the beginning of the nineteenth century in order to trace out the history of the British fascination with Egypt as an exotic space. The first wave of this Egyptomania can be dated...