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to shelter the body of Saad Zaghlul, the founder of the party. Later the Nationalist government fell and was replaced by a hostile coalition that wanted to lessen the propaganda impact of Zaghlul and his mausoleum. In order to diffuse public interest, the new prime minister ordered the royal mummies to be placed in the tomb alongside the Nationalist idol. Then the Nationalists got in again and decided that too much admiration was being lavished on the mummies, and not enough upon their hero. They sent a curt message to the museum, ordering the authorities to come and get their old kings. Somewhat nonplussed, the museum authorities hired a couple of ambulances, and in the dead of night entered the mausoleum. The last funeral cortege—to date—of the royal dead of ancient Egypt wound through the streets of the sleeping city into a court of the museum, and the bodies were reverently placed in an unused room.

For some time thereafter it was necessary to secure permission to see them from the appropriate Egyptian ministry, and only scholars and distinguished visitors were accorded the privilege. Now the only criterion to which tourists are subjected is the payment of a sizeable fee. Not all the mummies are on display, only those that have been stabilized and put in climate-controlled glass cases. Among them is Ramses II, the greatest traveler of the lot; a few years ago he was taken to Paris to be treated for insect infestation by experts there.

Perhaps the exorbitant admission charge does deter the great majority of the irreverent. There is so much to see in the Cairo Museum that only mummy buffs and archaeologists are apt to pay an additional sum for the privilege of gazing on the ghastly remnants of the long dead. Certainly these tattered specimens deserve the courtesy of silence, at the least, and their present setting, quiet and dimly lit, is conducive to respect. We had a couple of mummies at the Oriental Institute when I was a student there—two little old ladies (they were certainly old) who were known to the students as Mert and Mabel. I found them just as interesting as anybody else did, but I used to cringe at those nicknames. I am not sure that I would recommend a visit to the royal mummies at Cairo as an enjoyable experience. Sekenenre is there, the holes of the battle ax piercing his skull and his mouth agape in the last horrid scream of anguish; Ramses II, the great warrior and womanizer, still has some nasty, rusty white hairs on his withered skull; even Seti I, who must have been a particularly stately and handsome man, is very dry. One comes away with a great thirst, and with a dim reluctance to eat or drink anything for a little time. The sunlight seems too bright, and the noises of the city streets strike strangely on the ear.

MUMMY MUSICAL CHAIRS

The two caches of royal mummies did not contain such spectacular artifacts as did the tomb of Tutankhamon. In terms of historical value, however, they ought to have been more important; for, as we have mentioned, anthropologists can learn a great deal from human remains. One group of mummies from the Deir el Bahri cache dates to the Twenty-first Dynasty, family members and associates of the priest-kings Pinudjem. Another group from that cache includes kings, queens, and officials from the late Seventeenth through the Twentieth Dynasties. Add to this latter collection the royal mummies found in the second cache, in the tomb of Amenhotep II, and we have almost all the great kings of Egypt’s glory—Thutmoses, Amenhoteps, Rameses, Seti I. An examination of these mummies, surely, could answer some of the questions still remaining about length of reign and family relationships.

Once the mummies were in the museum, Maspero called in Sir Grafton Elliot Smith, one of the foremost anatomists of his time, to unwrap and examine them. The process went on for several years; not until 1886 were the majority of the remains unwrapped.

Maspero knew that the mummies weren’t in their original coffins or bandaging. Hieratic inscriptions, written on coffins and shrouds by the priests