Gabe Moshenska
@gabemoshenska
I want Ken Railings to walk in here right now and say 'Pam Shortt's broken both her legs and I wanna dance with you’
Why would I buy this doohickey when I can bake, roast and even dehydrate outdoors for free?
For international cat day here’s Gizmo and Widget my very international (Greek/Dutch/Swiss) moggies.
And a very detailed receipt from the Nile Hilton Hotel on Tahrir Square, Cairo - close to the old Egyptian Museum. Two pizza dinners and an Ibis lunch! I've redacted name of traveller. Date of trip is Feb 1987.
Tickets for the Luxor Temple and the son et lumière show at Karnak.
Business card for a souvenir shop in Luxor, 'Infrunt' of Isis Hotel.
I love finding stuff tucked inside old books. Just bought this 1986 Cairo museum guidebook in a charity shop for 25p. Inside I found...
1844: archaeologists let an anatomist take a look at bones from a barrow and SURPRISE the assigned sex doesn't match the grave goods.
'The Vandalic spirit of utilitarianism' would be a great halloween costume. (From the Proceedings of the Committee of the British Archaeological Association, 1844)
These are by members of the Thomas Wright faction, taking aim at Albert Way and his faction, and sucking up to Lord Albert Conyngham. Proper "you're devastated right now" territory.
Combustion chamber from V2 missile reused as flower pot on grave of 4 killed in explosion. Koewacht, Netherlands/Belgium.
Trying to track down the earliest scientific studies of mummy wheat, c.1830. Anybody know who 'Dr Gay in Paris' might be? He sounds fun.
'On the Advantages of the Study of Archaeology': paper read at the 1849 congress of the British Archaeological Association by T.F. Dillon Croker, then aged 18. Transcript in alt text. Good insight into early archaeological thinking - quotes extensively from philosopher Madame de Staël.
Here's the confusion: Anton Momber was the author - it was his dissertation - and Gladbach was the respondent in the thesis examination. That's why his name is printed at the bottom of the title page.
I did finally track it down in a bookseller's catalogue printed in Leipzig in 1739, and it turns out Gladbach wasn't the author, it was somebody called Momber Ant.
Which is odd, because here it is listed in the catalogue of the library of the Medical Society of London. And I know Pettigrew used that library because he was the librarian at the society for more than a decade. Which means that he might well have written that catalogue entry himself.
Today I've been chasing up one specific footnote in Pettigrew's book: a reference to a book that doesn't seem to exist.
In 1834, having conducted five unrollings and witnessed a couple more, Pettigrew published 'History of Egyptian Mummies', the first study of its kind published in English. It included chemical analyses by Michael Faraday and illustrations by George Cruikshank, both childhood friends of Pettigrew.
Mummy unrollings were part of the centuries-long Western fascination with Ancient Egypt. And also part of the almost-as-long Western obsession with exhuming, anatomising, measuring, viewing, othering, owning, and displaying non-white bodies - and specifically Egyptian human mummified remains.
Thomas 'Mummy' Pettigrew (1791-1865) is best known for his public lectures where he unrolled Egyptian mummies. I've been studying Pettigrew for more than fifteen years and I'm currently writing a book about him. I am having... so much fun.