volume 2 - Robert Bedrosian's Armenian History Workshop

Fate of the Egyptian Dead. 381
them up whenever they thought that there was jewellery
on the body or amulets in the wrappings and between
the bandages. Nevertheless I was able to acquire several
mummies which have materially lengthened the series
in the British Museum and filled up several gaps in
it, the oldest being the sun-dried body of the neolithic
Egyptian already mentioned (p. 360), and the most
modern the almost shapeless bundle of plaster and rags
in its wooden coffin with a vaulted cover of the Roman
Period.
APOLOGIA.
My endeavour to make the British Museum collection
of mummies as representative and as complete
as possible has brought upon me much criticism, and
I have been called " sacrilegious," "inhuman," "brutal,"
" wicked " and " diabolical " ;
and the epithets " ghoul,"
and " body snatcher " have been frequently applied
to me by those who do not know the fate which has
always befallen mummies in Egypt. One gentleman
writes to me saying, " The Egyptians took infinite
pains to hide the bodies of their beloved dead, and to
preserve them intact to await the resurrection, and
you go and break open and rifle their tombs, and drag
out their poor bodies, and bring them to England to
become gazing-stocks for irreverent crowds in the British
Museum. When you don't do that you do worse, for
you strip the dead of their wrappings, and steal from
them everything which you think worth stealing, and
then you leave them naked, and they, the brutal natives,
who are not much more brutal than yourself, either
burn them or toss them out into the desert for the wolves
and jackals to mangle. A fig for the science of Egyptology
if it makes its votaries ill-treat and destroy the
dead, even though they be only African pagans."
Another critic, an ecclesiastic, wrote to me very angrily
and told me that by exhibiting even partially unrolled
mummies I showed great disrespect for the dead and
that by placing the naked body of the neolithic Egyptian
on a board in a case in the First Egyptian Room,