How does the object exist in the archive, especially when that object has been subject to as many techniques, and fantasies, as the Egyptian mummy? I present here two case studies—object biographies, in their way—that exemplify archival practices in relation to the mummy and the museum, first the assemblage of specimens prepared in the 1820s, and now in the British Museum, and second the skeleton destined for the Manchester Museum in the 1920s. Like Edwards and Hart’s ‘mixed box’, each example preserves the traces of earlier archiving practices thanks in part to fairly benign institutional neglect. They are in some ways singular examples, but they speak to more generic trends, the first arising in the early decades of any practice one could characterize as ‘museal’ and the second firmly within the discourse of cataloguing, classification, storage, and the body discussed above. These boxed bodies represent two distinct historical stages in techniques of collecting and archiving objects, in particular the ancient Egyptian mummy. It is this particularity that helps us see the impact of the archive in its wider sense—for each body entered the archive as a signifier of race, one of the dominant concerns of the colonial era and its archival traces.
Dr Granville’s mummy
Egyptian mummies, and parts of mummies, were nothing new to Europe by the time the physician and ‘male midwife’ (obstetrical surgeon) Augustus Bozzi Granville set about unwrapping and dissecting a mummy in 1822—the original archiving process of my first example, known today as ‘Dr Granville’s mummy’ (Riggs 2014, pp. 49–56; Riggs 2016). A brisk trade in powdered mumia operated for medicinal purposes in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, and whole mummies (some now identified as forgeries) or parts of mummies sometimes featured in collections of curiosities, like those of Hans Sloane and Peter Paul Rubens. When the savants attached to the Napoleonic invasion of Egypt acquired mummified heads at Luxor, one was earmarked as a gift for Empress Josephine. Beginning in the late eighteenth century, however, the preserved bodies of ancient Egyptians offered more than curiosity value: Johann Blumenbach, whose work on natural history divided humankind into five distinct races, studied mummies in order to place the ancient Egyptians in his scheme (‘Ethiopian’, he thought), a challenge that natural historians and physician–anatomists like Georges Cuvier in France, James Pritchard in the UK, and Samuel Morton in the USA soon took up, drawing contradictory conclusions (Pritchard sided with Blumenbach, while Cuvier and Morton argued that the Egyptians were ‘Caucasian’ types or sub-types: see Champion 2003).
Medical science, as it emerged in the early nineteenth century, was ideally positioned to contribute to the emanant construction of race, not to mention that of gender and the study of disease. It was against this backdrop that Granville devoted six weeks to the anatomical analysis of an Egyptian mummy given to him by one of his patients. The unwrapping took place at Granville’s London home, with colleagues and students invited around to observe and discuss the process. The bulk of the time was devoted to dissecting this ‘most perfect specimen’, the body of an older woman whose heavy breasts and skeletal proportions Granville first measured with care, observing too the shaved head and body hair that stubbled the skin’s surface. Granville made preparations of the mummy’s skin (including the perineum), muscle fibres, and organs, notably an ovarian growth he judged to have been the cause of death. The skull and pelvis deserved particular attention because, as Granville reasoned when presenting his results to the Royal Society, the race of the female skeleton could be identified as securely from the latter as the former, if not more so. Citing Cuvier—and using Cuvier’s method of identifying race from facial profile angles, itself derived from that of eighteenth-century Dutch anatomist Pieter Camper—Granville characterized the mummy as Caucasian. To prove the point beyond doubt, at his Royal Society lecture Granville presented the mummy’s pelvis next to the pelvis of a ‘Negro girl’ he also had to hand, presumably acquired through his own medical practice (Riggs 2014, p. 54).
When the dissection was complete, Granville commissioned a wooden cabinet with glazed drawers and sectioned compartments, in which he arranged the specimens prepared from the organs, muscle, and skin, as well as seeds, resin, and bitumen found among the mummy wrappings (Fig. 2). The specimens were laid out in the compartments for maximum visibility, with handwritten cards that label each specimen pinned to the paper lining of the drawer; conservation treatment at the British Museum in 1998 preserved as much of this arrangement as possible—apparently original to the late 1820s or early 1830s, and certainly predating Granville’s 1853 donation of the specimen case and coffin lid to the museum. Granville’s method of boxing the prepared remains was done with demonstration in mind, and is in keeping with the preparation of anatomy and pathology specimens in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries by medical specialists themselves, many of whom took pride in forming such collections and thus displaying their manual, and intellectual, dexterity (see Alberti 2011, pp. 14–18, 103–106; Riggs 2016). Granville may have used the glazed drawers in subsequent lectures he gave on Egyptian mummification at the Royal Institution, recounted in his autobiography (Granville 1874, II, pp. 209–210; Riggs 2014, pp. 55). Also incorporated in the cabinet were other materials related to Granville’s study of mummification, including the legs and arms of stillborn foetuses (again, almost certainly from his medical practice) which he had prepared according to what he presumed were ancient embalming techniques (Granville 1874, II, pp. 211).
In bringing together material forms (human remains, textiles, plant and mineral samples) that later museum classifications kept separate, Granville’s specimen case owes much to late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century anatomical practices. Yet it also exemplifies the principle of respect des fonds that would emerge in archival science by the mid-nineteenth century (see Meehan 2014), and to this day, the cabinet and its varied contents remain united through their association with Granville himself. Until the 1853 donation, the cabinet remained in Granville’s possession, at home, together with the associated coffin lid and samples of linen removed from the mummy; it is unclear what became of the bones and skull that had been such a point of interest in discussing the mummy’s race. With its neatly written labels, divided drawers, and glazing, Granville’s cabinet suggests that at this point, archiving the mummy entailed visibility as much as containment, and text as much as object—although not yet any systems of numbering or registration. These would come once the coffin lid and cabinet entered the British Museum, where they were assigned a number starting with the registration date: 27 September 1853 (now written 1853, 0927), followed by .1 for the coffin lid and .2 for the cabinet as the first and second objects registered that day. In keeping with concerns about cataloguing arrangements in the British Museum, which were the subject of Parliamentary investigations during the same decade (see Moser 2006, pp. 174–176), curator Samuel Birch began a parallel register specific to the Egyptian collection, coded ‘EA’ for Egyptian antiquities and numbered in a continuous, ongoing sequence. Hence, the coffin lid became EA 29781, but the cabinet has the higher (i.e. later) number EA 75991, assigned only in the 2000s. Several pieces of associated textiles are likewise numbered EA 75992 to 76014. These textiles and a tissue specimen were not registered at all in the museum until 2005, a fate all too common as museum collections grew and ideas about what and how to register objects changed.Footnote 1 By 2005, they were still wrapped in paper with an 1832 watermark and labelled (as ‘mummy compresses’) in a similar nineteenth-century hand to that deployed in the cabinet drawers.
Tellingly, in the archaeologist Flinders Petrie’s (1904) handbook Methods and Aims in Archaeology, he advised excavators against labelling only the wrapping paper placed around objects, ‘which may be all thrown away’ (Petrie 1904, p. 52)—a pointed rejection of labelling techniques like those deployed for the Granville material. A few decades on from Granville’s donation, and even longer since the cabinet had been so carefully prepared, Petrie raged against the failings of ‘blue-blooded dilettante collectors’, whose inadequate recording techniques meant that ‘[o]ur museums are ghastly charnel-houses of murdered evidence; the dry bones of objects are there, bare of all the facts of grouping, locality, and dating which would give them life and value’ (Petrie 1904, p. 48). Although Granville could hardly be blamed for the British Museum’s application of its own recording techniques, or for the means by which his mummy had been acquired, he himself was disappointed by the treatment of his cabinet in the museum’s Egyptian galleries. It was in a large glass case, he wrote, but not displayed ‘in the manner best adapted for the instruction or the amusement of the public’, since both the ancient specimens and his foetal experiments were confined as if in ‘a museum clausum, as some funny gentleman appertaining to the museum once said to me’ (Granville 1874, II, pp. 211). From the description, it appears that Granville’s dissatisfaction hinged on the issue of visibility: the museum seems to have shut the neatly labelled and partitioned drawers of his cabinet.
The archival trajectory of ‘Dr Granville’s mummy’—from cutting-edge science in the 1820s to outdated embarrassment (reading between the lines) in less than half a century—is important for understanding the emphasis on cataloguing, classifying, and physically ordering collections and information, of all kinds, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The new vigour of the archival impulse, exemplified by Bertillon’s cards and filing cabinets, arose in response to preceding methods of archiving and storage, offering innovations with the utopic aim of not only improving but perfecting the processing of objects and information. Like all utopias, it depended on the rejection, supplanting, and even erasure of what had come before. And because these archival practices were materially embedded in the day-to-day work of institutions like the museum, and thence in the discourse of several fields of expertise, it can be argued that they were drivers of, not simply reactions to, epistemological change. Registers, card files, specimen boxes, and storage drawers may represent boundaries and auxiliaries in relation to the objects that were the primary focus of collecting and interpretation activity, but they were fundamental in developing ways of thinking about the ‘dry bones’ they contained.
Skeleton O3353
The museum and its archival processes similarly had more influence on the aims and operation of related fields, such as archaeology, than they have often been credited with. The expansion of a colonial infrastructure in Egypt, especially after British forces occupied the country in 1882, facilitated large-scale excavations and the subsequent division of finds between the French-run antiquities service and a host of European and North American museums. Museums were not passive recipients, however, but active instruments whose interests were uppermost in the minds of archaeologists like Petrie when deciding what to keep and record in the field (Stevenson 2014). Thus, though Petrie’s Methods and Aims manual emphasized field recording (1904, pp. 48–59), these overlapped with the techniques that were used (or should be used) in museums; a chapter on packing and unpacking antiquities—how to build a crate, what cushioning materials to use—was grounded entirely in the shipment of antiquities to museums overseas (Petrie 1904, pp. 105–113). Petrie warned that ‘unpacking is generally left in museums to be done by rough labourers, who may entirely overlook needful precautions or even throw away the most valuable things in the boxes’, repeating his caution against labelling only an object’s wrappings (Petrie 1904, pp. 112). In the early twentieth century regime of order, the vicissitudes of previous archival regimes were to be avoided in favour of an over-arching logic—but what logic did the Egyptian mummy now have?
Petrie’s work in Egypt is the source of my second example, another fragmented body—this time stored in a wooden drawer with brass runners (Fig. 3), here seen in a low-resolution photograph taken in the storerooms of the Manchester Museum in late 2005, for database records. The storage cabinet to which the drawer belonged, likely dating to the 1920s or 1930s, was by then long gone, or at least impossible to identify anywhere else in the museum. The drawer, with its skeletal contents, sat on a high shelf, uncovered and apparently untouched for a considerable length of time. It contained the skeleton of an adult male, minus the skull, derived from Petrie’s 1922 excavations at the site of Abydos in southern Egypt, where the first kings of Egypt were buried. The excavations operated under the auspices of the British School of Archaeology in Egypt—not a government-backed entity, as its name suggests, but an organization Petrie founded in 1905 to coordinate and raise money for his own activities in the field.
While in some ways the Manchester Museum drawer may seem more random in its arrangement, and its isolation, than Granville’s—an impression exacerbated by the evident lack of conservators’ intervention, and the film of black dust on the surfaces—it is in fact an orderly and complex bringing together of object and archival documentation in one place, and as aesthetic in its layout as the Granville cabinet. Two identical cardboard boxes with lids, on each of which is written ‘Part of skeleton O3353’ (underscored), contain the hand and foot bones and are aligned in one corner of the drawer. Around them are the long bones, sacrum, and scattered vertebrae. A card dated 7 August 1922 and written in the same hand as the cardboard boxes—identifiable as the handwriting of the assistant-in-charge, Winifred Crompton—again identifies the skeleton by the number assigned in the museum registration process: O3353. According to the registration system Manchester had adopted in the late nineteenth century, the alphabetic prefix ‘O’ associated this object with ethnographic, not Egyptological, material (Alberti 2009, pp. 132–134). As we will see, this was a significant choice not only for the skeleton’s ‘life’ as a museum object, but also for what it reveals about the motivation for collecting the skeleton in the first place. The handwritten card goes on to state the excavation site, tomb number, and date, as well as the donor (the British School) and a parenthetical note that the skull and lower jaw had been stored separately. If the note and the arrangement of the bones in this drawer are contemporaneous, as I suspect they are, then the drawer was too shallow to accommodate the cranium. The registration number O3353 is inked onto each bone, in some cases almost overwriting the earlier, pencilled annotation 541, which was the tomb number assigned to the burial in the excavation record. ‘Every bone of a skeleton should be marked, and always on one fixed position for each bone’, Petrie had advised in Methods and Aims (Petrie 1904, p. 51). Last and not least, also placed in the drawer is a photographic print of the skeleton in situ, the photograph being well established by this time for its usefulness in producing typologies of difference, whether of living humans (in anthropology) or of objects, including archaeologically recovered human remains.
The documentation with the bones, including the photograph, connects these skeletal remains to a larger archive stemming from Petrie’s work at Abydos, which lies on the west bank of the Nile around 450 km south of Cairo. The skeleton was one among many preserved in some 500 brick-lined graves in the low desert plateau. Positioned in neat rows, the graves are contemporary with the burials of Egypt’s earliest kings and date to the First Dynasty, c. 2950 to 2775 BC; they may contain—as Petrie surmised—the bodies of members of the royal entourage, put to death at the time of the king’s burial (O’Connor 2009, pp. 172–174). The question of whether these individuals were conscious at the time of burial drew Petrie’s attention to skeletons like 541, whose arrangement in the grave might have suggested ‘conscious action’, one arm spread out as if attempting to raise the arm—uncannily alive and dead at once (Petrie 1925, p. 8). In Petrie’s published report, the skeleton from tomb 541 can be traced through this textual narrative, to the photographic plates (an image identical to the print in the storage drawer), to the excavation registers (that archival word again), which charted what he considered each burial’s key characteristics (Petrie 1925, p. 8, pls. xiv [photograph], xvi [plan of graves], xx [register]). From this, we learn how rare the skeleton’s survival is, for almost all the other bones from the Abydos graves were buried together at the site:
The bones of the first dynasty burials were collected; of the skulls I measured 80 in fifteen dimensions, paraffined them, and 60 were brought to the Eugenics Department, University College. The long bones I measured, of 96 individuals, and then reburied them in a pit in the fort of [king] Khosekhemui where we lived (Petrie 1925, p. 9).
The Manchester skeleton was one of only two preserved in full; the other, from tomb 537, joined the skulls selected for the eugenics laboratory founded by Petrie’s late friend and UCL colleague Francis Galton, whose use of statistics and composite photography had done so much to establish techniques of archival control over the body (Sekula 1986).
Writing race on the archival body
Here is the connecting thread between these two Egyptian bodies, archived one hundred years apart, each according to the methodologies and scientific rationale of its day. The respective archival practices were inextricable from the colonial and imperial discourse of race, which they did not reflect but actively helped construct. Where Granville engaged with the work of natural scientists like Blumenbach and Cuvier, Petrie engaged with techniques of racial classification that had developed in anthropology and archaeology out of such initial forays, in tandem with the development of measuring and recording methods such as anthropometry, craniometry, and photography (Stocking 1987; Young 1995; Challis 2013; Gange 2013, pp. 289–301). Galton’s theories informed Petrie’s thinking in several ways, including his identification of what he termed the ‘new’ or ‘Dynastic’ race, who invaded Egypt from the north, via the Levant. These invaders were, he thought, responsible for changes in material culture identified in the archaeological record, which preceded the formation of Egypt’s early state; in other words, new and better blood led to new and better forms of material culture and social organization (Sheppard 2010). To Petrie, the First Dynasty skeletons at Abydos represented the next stage of racial (and thus cultural) development in Egyptian history. Although bodies of the same period, even from the same site, were wrapped in resin-soaked linen in an early form of mummification, Petrie’s excavation did not observe traces of soft tissues or wrapping on these particular remains. Instead, their bare bones lent themselves readily to anthropometric techniques and determined their next destinations, either the UCL laboratory or the ethnography—not Egyptology—collection of the Manchester Museum.
Stored separately, as the curator’s handwritten annotation in the drawer records, the missing skull of the Manchester skeleton is an archival absence that underscores the centrality of race in the larger project of archiving the Egyptian mummy. The depth of the drawer may have precluded its inclusion with the rest of the bones, but so too might other uses to which it was put in the museum, for teaching or display. By 2005, when I photographed the lone drawer during a survey of ancient Egyptian human remains in the collection, the whereabouts of the skull were uncertain. Dozens of skulls from multiple sources had been re-boxed, and in some cases registered or re-registered, a few years before I came to work at the museum. The responsible researchers had identified each skull as ‘Negroid’ or ‘Egyptian’ on the storage boxes and in the bound register, based on criteria that were never specified. Was the skull from Abydos tomb 541 among those boxes, re-numbered and hence overlooked? The archival trail of the skeleton had already taken at least one turn since the bones were lain in the drawer: at some point, O3353 was re-registered—but the bones not re-marked—with an Egyptology sequence number 6785, turning it into a double of itself under the purview of both ethnography and Egyptology (which were in Crompton’s joint control until her death in 1932; Alberti 2009, p. 71). In the typewritten register entry for 6785, the tomb number was transposed to 415, as a result of which the current database record (composed without seeing the assemblage in the drawer) expresses uncertainty over which tomb number is correct.Footnote 2
The palimpsestic nature of the archive, which has made it such a productive conceptual framework for historians, philosophers, and contemporary artists (among others), is integral to its material make-up, too: we might say that the palimpsest is in the archive’s very bones. The registering, recording, and storage or mounting history of a museum object is part of its object biography, charting its relationship to communities of practice and their constructions of knowledge. But as practices that also help connect the object to an archive beyond the museum, these actions can further be understood, and interrogated, through theories of the archive. In fact, a deeper engagement with archival science and archival theory appears to me to be essential to any effective critique of museological practices and disciplinary histories—all the more so where that most ‘archival’ of disciplines, archaeology, is at stake. Greater dialogue between museum and archive studies offers a benefit at the level of both theory and practice, which are, or should be, in any case intertwined. My focus here on what is archival about the museum is one example, another being the reverse—what is museal about the archive? ‘The object’ is as constructed as the archives that have conjured and sustained its existence: we cannot apprehend one without the other.
The archive fever Derrida (1996, p. 91) diagnoses is a ‘compulsive, repetitive, and nostalgic desire’ to revert to a place of perceived origin, which is what makes the archaeological metaphor of his, and Freud’s, arguments so apt. Recognizing the constructed nature of the archive and its indebtedness to structures of patriarchal power should facilitate the only return that is possible, namely, revisiting the archive to enable other orderings to be made and other stories to be told; it is Derrida’s call for a democratization of the archive that has made the concept a powerful tool in postcolonial studies (Harris 2005; compare Matthews 2015 on ‘archival activism’). Created under conditions of power imbalances and in the service of racial science, actual archaeological archives, such as the ancient Egyptian human remains I have considered here, are ripe for decolonization—which more numbers or better boxes only frustrate, rather than enable. More numbers and better boxes, or more detailed finding aids and larger databases, may be the desiderata of professional archive and collections management, often with sound reasons. But used uncritically, they serve only as another overlay on the palimpsest. Disruption must start from first principles.