What is Egyptomania and why is it Gothic?

From Rome to Arnold Vosloo's Imhotep: why are we obsessed?

It’s perfectly good manners to pay homage the greats who have gone before you. Was I inspired by the likes of Wilkie Collins, the Bronte sisters and Daphne Du Maurier to write my own Gothic fiction? Yes, I was. Were the ancient Greeks and the Romans inspired by elements of ancient Egypt? Yes, they were. Was Shakespeare inspired by the works of Ovid and Plutarch? Yes, he was.

You see where I’m going with this. Since the times of the Greeks and then the Romans, there has been a fascination with ancient Egypt. This fascination rolled into the late-18th century when Napoleon first visited the pyramids, and still continued well into 1980s pop songs and of course, Brendan Fraser as the dashing rogue Rick O’Connell in The Mummy. OK, you can shut your mouth now—we have more to discuss!

Brendan Fraser, Rachel Weisz and John Hannah in The Mummy, 1999.

Why Egypt?

Egypt is thought to be one of the very first civilisations in the world. Egypt and the abundant treasures found there have wooed the western world with legends of magic, mysticism and eternal life.

Then there’s horror, of course.

Imhotep kissing Evie in The Mummy, 1999. Image courtesy of IMDB.

The dark side of Egyptomania.

Egypt, even in the time of Alexander the Great, was a different country to what it was in the time of the pharaohs. Alexander liberated the Egyptians from their Persian rule, and for centuries afterwards, Egypt had a rocky run of it. The Ptolemies may have run the country in their Greco-Egyptian way until Rome finally conquered it in 31BC, but when that fell through in AD 642, they endured centuries of continuous invasion from various Eastern and European powers. When it was an Ottoman colony in the 18th century, it was reduced to nothing more than a neglected agricultural arm of the empire. It was only when Napoleon brought the French army to the country in 1798 that modern European interest in Egypt began.

This revival of interest in Egypt was thanks to the many scientists that accompanied Napoleon and recorded the remains of ancient Egyptian monuments.

In 1822, Jean-François Champollion deciphered the hieroglyphs using the Rosetta Stone which Napoleon’s troops had found in 1799. This was the beginning of scientific Egyptology as we know it today.

Bearing in mind what we’ve learned about political and military upheaval in Egypt during the years of foreign occupation (which didn’t end until the 20th century!), many tombs had already been raided long before the Europeans came. However, there was still plenty to find.

Mummy mania:

This is probably the most disturbing corner of Egyptology: Mummy mania.

Not everyone in Europe had an inherent respect for Egyptian artefacts. For example, in 1890, a cargo ship containing 180,000 mummified cats docked at Liverpool. What were the cats for?

Fertilizer.

As a port-city supplying the Lancashire mills with cotton from Egypt it was easy to bring Egyptian artefacts into Liverpool, including 180,000 mummified cats in 1890 that were auctioned off for fertiliser! —Museum Of Liverpool.

This isn’t the worst thing. Mummia, a type of bitumen found in Western Asia, had been used as a cure-all for centuries. Its popularity grew and as supply failed to meet demand for this rare and wonderful mineral, suppliers looked to the tombs of Egypt to find more.

Actual Mummies are thought to have been put into pills, powders, tonics, creams and paint. Many an unsuspecting European had tried the stuff, never really realising where it came from.

Egyptian Mummy Seller, 1875. Photographer unknown.

Is this seller selling actual ancient remains or are these people from the local cemetery? It became really hard to tell.

Don’t worry… it gets worse.

Not only could the European tourist purchase a mummy from a vendor on the streets of war-torn Egypt, but they could bring them back to their various countries for study, for their private collection, their local museum… or their social gatherings.

Mummy unwrappings began as a scientific activity: medical schools and museums would use them to study the mummification process, learn about how the ancient Egyptians might have lived, what diseases they suffered from and so on…

And then, by the mid-19th century, people were unwrapping them as the main event at dinner parties for entertainment.

Mummies served many purposes: some were used to create mummy brown pigment or were stripped of their wrappings, which were subsequently exported to the US to support the paper-making industry. The author Mark Twain even suggested that mummies were burnt in Egypt as locomotive fuel.

I told you it got worse. You don’t know how many times I grimaced writing this. It’s just awful. Absolutely awful.

But hey, horror is horrifying because of how much of real life lurks within it.

Why is Egyptomania Gothic?

Egyptomania naturally gives way to Gothicism. In a time of scientific and industrial progress, people could enjoy the dark legends of curses and ancient mysticism to playfully challenge their loyalty to logic and reason. Don’t forget that as Christianity dominated western society at the time, paganism and the occult was as frightening as it was titillating for the curious scholar and the parlour room ladies.

19th century Egyptian Gothic stories:

Egyptian Gothic began in 1827 with The Mummy! A Tale of the Twenty-Second Century by Jane Loudon. This was the first example of the supernatural mummy becoming a threat to Western civilisation. Following Loudon are these stories, only some of which I’ve mentioned here for the sake of the email limit.

• Théophile Gautier wrote Le Pied de Momie [The Mummy’s Foot], followed by Le Roman de la Momie [The Romance of the Mummy] (Gautier 1858) Both of these stories explore romance and the mummy.

• Lost In A Pyramid, Or The Mummy’s Curse by Louisa May Alcott (1869)

• Sir Henry Rider Haggard’s She (1887)

• Richard Marsh’s The Beetle (1897),

• Bram Stoker’s The Jewel of Seven Stars (1903)

All of these tales explored the Gothic in the form of:

• The mummy’s curse.

• The story of a male protagonist and a female mummy romance.

• The doppelganger in Gothic fiction ie the modern female character who is a dead ringer for an ancient princess, and will do as a vessel for the resurrection, or the modern love interested for the mummy.

The Victorians and Edwardians:

Consider Lot 249 (1892) or The Ring Of Thoth (1890) by Arthur Conan Doyle: both stories linger on the possibility of defying death. Lot 249 is more of a horror tale than The Ring Of Thoth, but both effectively capture the Victorian fascination with mysticism and the quest for eternal love and life. Thinking also of Stoker’s The Jewel Of The Seven Stars; the quest for immortality and eternal love courses through the central vein of this story. These two things are two innermost desires of man. When the prospect of immortality or eternal love are on the table, this opens the door for the Faustian element of Gothic literature: what will you give in exchange for this treasure?

European tourists in Giza, 1911. Unsplash.

Further into the 20th century

Egyptomania wasn’t done with in the 20th century, and it had no intention of slowing down. With the increased accessibility of long-distance travel, more people were able to see the magic for themselves, and if they couldn’t, we had cinema! The Hammer horror film The Mummy is dripping with mysticism and magic, and we also have a classic love story. The appearance of a love that can’t die, no matter how many centuries have passed (or millennia in this case) or whether or not it is permitted, is a common theme in Gothic fiction: Heathcliff and Cathy have an unrelenting obsession with each other in Wuthering Heights and it does not end at death.

Gothic fiction and curses go hand in hand. In real life, the legend of the curses of Tutankhamun’s tomb caused a media frenzy.

No curse had actually been found in the tomb, but deaths in succeeding years of various members of Carter’s team and real or supposed visitors to the site kept the story alive, especially in cases of death by violence or in odd circumstances. Alleged victims of the curse included Prince Ali Kamel Fahmy Bey of Egypt, shot dead by his wife in 1923; Sir Archibald Douglas Reid, who supposedly X-rayed the mummy and died mysteriously in 1924; Sir Lee Stack, the governor-general of the Sudan, who was assassinated in Cairo in 1924; Arthur Mace of Carter’s excavation team, said to have died of arsenic poisoning in 1928; Carter’s secretary Richard Bethell, who supposedly died smothered in his bed in 1929; and his father, who committed suicide in 1930.—History Today

All of these people had been with Carter during his excavation of King Tut’s tomb, and the media had a field day with it. The legend of this curse continues today.

The Gothic always draws inspiration from real life, and as Ancient Egypt evokes associations with the past haunting the present, curses, spirits unable to rest, vengeance from beyond the grave and ethical dilemmas, there’s a lot here to play with by way of a Gothic horror tale. It naturally leans into the occult, forbidden desire, the quest for immortality, the supernatural and of course, love and decay.

Gothic Egyptomania in Cinema

In The Mummy (1959) Kharis, High Priest and the guardian of Princess Ananka’s tomb, does his duties well, but being a human and all… he has feelings. Kharis secretly loved the princess, even though their love was forbidden. As if the unrequited love and her untimely death wasn’t enough, it just gets worse for him when he is caught trying to resurrect her with the scroll of life; and naturally, what with Egyptian curses being what they are… he is resurrected by an unwitting Englishman and possesses the form of a mummy-shaped juggernaut, wreaking havoc on the Egyptologists. This combination of doomed love and the relentlessness of indescribable power is evocative of nature and the supernatural very much putting the Victorian man of reason in his place. The world and the weather are often wild and uncontrolled in Gothic fiction, and each will sometimes seem like a character in its own right, growing moody to support the inner turmoil of the hero’s mind, for example.

Christopher Lee as Kharis, The Mummy. Image courtesy of Hammer.

To ensure that cinema-goers were never starved of Mummy love stories, a film of the same name returned to our screens in 1999 featuring Brendan Fraser, Rachel Weisz and Arnold Vosloo as Imhotep, the thought-to-be-long-dead and disgraced High Priest with wandering eyes. Admit it, we all loved the soldier zombies, the thought of a City Of The Dead and a magical book that brought people back to life including your sexy girlfriend who was now free to date you as she’d left her other man in 21st century BC.

Why are these stories still appealing? Because we’re still people and we’re still on that everlasting quest for eternal life and love.

I recently read Anne Rice’s The Mummy, set in Edwardian England, and wow, did Rice go to town on this trope. I thoroughly enjoyed the book, and I thought the combination of romance and horror was so utterly Gothic. Ramses is a through-and-through Byronic hero; he is immortal, but not infallible. I loved that. Looking at it through the female Gothic lens, the character of beautiful, scholarly Julie is staring down the barrel of Patriarchal demands of her life and—if she does go ahead and marry her fiance Alex—her body. She is limited in her choices, despite having so much to offer. Only in her immortal love interest does Julie see a possibility of living a life outside the conventions of her time.

The immortality of Egyptomania

The ancient world of Egypt still continues to fascinate to this day. The Grand Egyptian Museum in Cario has just opened. It is said to have the world’s largest collection of Egyptian artefacts (and why wouldn’t it?) and millions of people are going to come here and explore the wonders of this ancient civilisation.

King Tutankhamun’s sarcophagus

We are coming to the end of 2025, and I have just finished my Gothic short story collection The Shade In The Sands And Other Stories. After exploring all of these themes and Gothic tales, I feel I am absolutely not adding anything new to the Egyptian Gothic canon (although you can be the judge of that, of course) but as Lisa Kuznak says, ‘it hasn’t been done by you.’

Overall, this is an incredibly fascinating and exciting sub-genre for me. I hope you enjoyed this article. If you did, don’t forget to hit me with a sign of life via the like, share or comment buttons.

Next week, I’ll be sharing the story behind the collection and what inspired me to write each tale in The Shade In The Sands.

Further Reading:

What makes it Gothic and not just ‘horror’?

The Shade In the Sands: Excerpt.

Egypt’s Grand Museum Opens, displaying Tutankhamun for the first time.

Tutankhamun’s Curse