OBJECT FILE
The 'Unlucky Mummy' (British Museum EA 22542)
FOLLOWThe British Museum, Room 62, London, United Kingdom
THE OBJECT
A gessoed and painted wooden mummy-board (inner coffin lid), 162 cm, from Thebes, 21st–22nd Dynasty (c. 950 BC), of an unnamed woman of rank, possibly a priestess of Amun-Ra. Given to the British Museum in July 1889 by Mrs Warwick Hunt on behalf of Arthur F. Wheeler (registration 1889,0731.1). It has been on display since the 1890s except in wartime. It is a coffin lid, not a mummy.
REPORTED ACTIVITY
The legend — that the object killed or ruined each of the Englishmen who bought it in Egypt in the 1860s, that the journalist Bertram Fletcher Robinson died in 1907 from writing about it, and that it was aboard the Titanic — was spread by W. T. Stead and Robinson's circle; the British Museum has stated the object never left London and was never sold to New York. Nothing about the Titanic is true.
WHERE IT IS NOW
On public display — kept by The British Museum. The British Museum, Room 62, London, United Kingdom.
PROVENANCE · 1 ENTRY
TRACE ON THE MAP →1889 — CURRENT LOCATION
The British Museum (donated by Mrs Warwick Hunt for Arthur F. Wheeler)
The British Museum, Room 62, London, United Kingdom
Acquired in Egypt in the 1860s by Wheeler's circle (Luckhurst 2012); dates for that are not on the record and are not given a row.
Source: British Museum collection record EA 22542, registration 1889,0731.1
PERSONAL ACCOUNTS · 0
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