The best books to explain why there’s an Egyptian mummy in your back garden

This short story involves a Frenchman, an antique store, a mummified foot, and a little too much wine.

We understand mummified bodies better by placing them in context. The other books do that historically, but this one does something very well: it showcases the enduring obsession with Egyptian mummies coming to life, in a rather enthralling fiction story, by a French writer.

I like it especially because Gautier did see the foot in question in the collection of a man called Dominique Vivant Denon, who is central to French museums, and to Egyptology, and brought the foot from Napoleon’s expedition.

I imagine Denon and Gautier having a chat: the fine line between fantasy and reality, ever so paradigmatic of France’s attitude to foreign bodies collecting.

This was the first book to introduce me to the relation between race studies, eugenics, and archaeology.

It was quite a revelation: I was volunteering at the Petrie Museum at the time, and the book uncovers the dodgy relationship between Petrie and Francis Galton.

It was pivotal in transforming the ways I looked at familiar places: it reminded me that places I called home, like the Petrie Museum but also the Louvre, have been very exclusionary to many. It taught me to look differently at places I navigate on a regular basis, to look for the other story.

You’ll then have to listen to the Bricks + Mortals podcast on the history of UCL buildings, and your wanders in Bloomsbury won’t be the same again.

It took me far too long to explore the history of medicine and the links between Egyptian mummies and medicine. Now, that’s all I talk about, and this book was pivotal in doing just that.

It’s a fascinating dive into the collections of human remains in Britain but is also an observation of the construction of medical knowledge through bodies. It is an academic book, one that I couldn’t put down.

After reading it, I started to explore the history of mummies and medicine and uncovered another story about a mummified foot. While Denon and Gautier were drinking coffee in Paris talking about a mummified foot, someone else did the same over tea in London.

The Whole Picture is a very recent book, that needs little introduction: that’s always the sign of a great book.

It does something very well: it explains what all those talks about looted art and artefacts and colonialism, and repatriation, are all about, without patronizing anyone, but without letting museums get away with their narratives either.

I remember reading it and thinking that it was about time I picked up my little idea and write my own book: I stand on the shoulders of fierce writers and thinkers and game-changers.

This book will make you ask questions, and it will make you avoid one Parisian museum in particular; and I very much concur this. You’ll have to read the book to find out which one.

I try to avoid big statements when they end up on the internet, in case my opinion changes. But this is the best research book I have read; and I do not believe my opinion on this will change.

Through the lens of three black women who lived in nineteenth-century Paris, Mitchell takes us on a journey to uncover the history of French representations of black women, the history of displaying black bodies, and racism in France.

If you read one book to understand why Egyptian mummified bodies have been collected, displayed, retained, and studied, this is your book.

It’s not a book about Egyptian mummies at all; it’s a book about the contexts that legitimized their possession, and the race studies that ensued, in Paris and London.