Marianne Brocklehurst and Mary Booth had to be very quiet. Their rooms on their rented houseboat, or dahabeah, were small, and the coffin they were trying to move took up most of the space. They hoped to unwrap the mummified remains within the small (only about five feet long) but “very prettily painted case” they had purchased from a dealer near Thebes, in southern Egypt.
They were excited—they’d finally gotten their hands on the mummified human remains they’d spent weeks hunting down—but also nervous, because if their Egyptian crew knew what they had acquired, how they had acquired it, and what they were about to do with it, there was a real risk the women would be stranded on the Nile.
Marianne and Mary, known to history as “the MBs,” were wealthy women from Macclesfield, outside Manchester, England, who toured Egypt on a dahabeah between 1873 and 1874. They came from families made rich in the textile mills of the Industrial Revolution. Like other women traveling in Egypt in their era, they went because they wanted to see the country and hopefully collect some artifacts. The British writer Amelia B. Edwards, author of A Thousand Miles up the Nile (1877), and her group were traveling on the Philae at the time. Together, the groups sailed up and then down the river, exploring, writing, drawing, and hunting (both animals and antiquities).
If their Egyptian crew knew what they had acquired, how they had acquired it, and what they were about to do with it, there was a real risk the women would be stranded.
In 1873, when the MBs purchased the coffin, buying antiquities was a generally legal practice, if you bought from the museum in Cairo or from a known dealer. The MBs, on the other hand, bought their coffin directly from Egyptian diggers—right out from under the nose of Egypt’s best site guards.
They knew that Auguste Mariette, the founder and head of the Egyptian Department of Antiquities at the time, was, according to Marianne’s diaries, “very stern and cruel with these contrabandists if he catches them.” But, at the same time as Marianne distanced herself and Mary from “these contrabandists”—which they themselves were—the two women also admitted that they “liked the idea of smuggling on a large scale under the nose of the Pasha’s guards.”
So smuggle they did. After a few close calls with the site guards, the ladies got the coffin on board their boat and into their sleeping quarters for safekeeping under the cover of darkness. Exhausted, they didn’t have the energy to do anything with the mummified remains that first night, but they had to be mindful of their crew. In fact, their cook had worked for Mariette, and they were sure he’d turn them in if he found out.
For two days the MBs stored “him”—they were certain the remains were male—in the linen closet, carefully watching all those on board, until they were finally able to open the coffin. They found “him to be altogether a festive object and not at all a funereal old frump,” so they were a little disappointed when, after sawing through the wood, they found “the mummy of a little boy, about 12 years old, no ornaments, papyrus, scarabs, not even a little god or two had been placed on his little person.” They carefully re-wrapped the remains, hoping that no one might notice the “peculiar mummy ‘bouquet,’ might sniff him out and bring us all to grief.”
In the end, the MBs got the coffin and its resident back to England with little trouble. There, they sent the coffin to Samuel Birch at the British Museum, who informed them that they had the remains not of a young boy but of a girl, Sheb-nut, “a singer in the inner sanctuary of a temple.” Sheb-nut’s remains now lie in the Macclesfield, a museum founded and funded by the MBs, and where much of their important collection from several trips to Egypt is now on display.
Sheb-nut is one of thousands of ancient Egyptians whose remains were taken from their grave, procured either through legal means or illegal ones, and brought to Europe for display in a private or public collection. Her story is not particularly unique, but we know about her because her story was chronicled by another pair of women in Egyptology.
Kathleen Sheppard is a professor of history at Missouri S&T who writes about the women in early Egyptology
