The Inspiration for Bram Stoker’s The Jewel of Seven Stars?

In earlier blog about a recent ACCES meeting at Manchester Museum I discussed the careers of two northern collectors of Egyptology with links to the North West. One was Aquila Dodgson. The other collector, Thomas Sheppard, was a larger-than-life character (seen holding up the local antiques shop in a cartoon above) who has been described as ‘one of the most successful museum curators of the first half of the 20th century’. Sheppard’s success in creating new museums in Hull was largely down to his collecting activities. He collected practically anything and everything during his 40 year career, including Egyptology. The reason for talking about him at a seminar about  Egyptology in the North West was an unexpected link to the Manchester mummy Ta-sheri-ankh brought to my attention by Campbell Price, Curator of Egypt and the Sudan at Manchester Museum.

Mummy of Ta sheri ankh (courtesy of Campbell Price, Manchester Museum)

Campbell told me that Ta-sheri-ankh came to Manchester Museum via Salford Museum, which had acquired her and her coffins from Newport Museum in South Wales. Sir George Elliot MP (1814-1893) donated the mummy to Newport in 1888, and this is where Sheppard comes in. In the 1930s Sheppard purchased a mummy from Whitby Museum. The museum authorities were rationalising their collection and Sheppard bought the mummy and its handsome coffin for £15. The Whitby mummy had been presented by none other than Sir George Elliot MP who lived at the town’s exclusive Royal Cresent. So both mummies, Ta-sheri-ankh and the Whitby mummy, came from Sir George Elliot originally.

Thomas Sheppard and the Whitby Mummy in Hull in 1935

This common origin may shed light on speculation that it was the mummy from Whitby that inspired Bram Stoker (1847-1912) to write The Jewel of Seven Stars, a horror novel, first published in 1903.  Stoker had an interest in ancient Egypt from contact with Egyptophile William Wilde, the father of Oscar, in Victorian Dublin. Stoker is known to have visited Whitby in August 1890 and on certain websites is said to have stayed with Sir George Elliot. Barbara Belford in her biography of Bram Stoker describes the stay in Whitby in some detail. It provided Stoker with inspiration for part of his Dracula story. But she does not refer to Elliot. So when it is claimed that this was when Stoker saw the mummy now in Hull Museums and that this inspired The Jewel of Seven Stars I ask what is the evidence for this connection with George Elliot?

What is much more interesting to my mind is the fact that in publicity about his acquisition of the Whitby mummy, Sheppard referred to the mummy as being that of an Egyptian princess, although he couldn’t be sure of the translation of her name.

Newspaper cutting referring to mummy as that of a princess

That Sheppard referred in the publicity to Hull’s mummy being the mummy of a princess is interesting but not unusual, as royal pedigrees were commonly given to mummies to add to their attraction. In reality, there is no reason to consider the mummy in Hull Museums – in a plain coffin – to be a princess. However, of the two mummies once owned by Sir George Elliot MP in Whitby, the mummy of Ta-sheri-ankh is the more likely candidate for royalty, with her gilded coffin face, mask and brightly painted coffin. Is it possible that this information somehow got transposed to the other Egyptian mummy, the one that Sir George gave to Whitby Museum, and which was purchased by Thomas Sheppard? Was the claim that the mummy that went to Hull was a princess simply repeated by Sheppard for publicity purposes? That would certainly fit his M.O.

What I am  suggesting is that when Sheppard bought the Whitby mummy there some lingering memory at Whitby Museum of a mummy once owned by Sir George Elliot that was believed to be an Egyptian princess. This is, after all, what underlies the headline of the publicity surrounding the mummy that ended up in Hull. In Hull Museum’s documentation of this mummy it is noted that the mummy was once believed to be a princess, although CT scanning in the early 2000s for a TV documentary revealed it was a male.

Of course the biggest obstacle to the mummy of Ta-sheri-ankh having inspired Bram Stoker is the fact that the latter is said to have visited Whitby in late July/August 1890, when Sir George Elliot had given Ta-sheri-ankh to Newport in 1888. However, Ta-sheri-ankh was a visually stunning female Egyptian mummy, and perhaps Bram Stoker had access to information about her mummy at Sir George Elliot’s residence in Whitby, if that is indeed where he stayed or the residence he visited. Did Bram Stoker visit Whitby at an earlier date but everyone refers to the 1890 visit because that is what inspired some of the Dracula story? I don’t know but if this were the case, it would make Ta-sheri-ankh the source of Stoker’s inspiration, rather than the Whitby mummy, later acquired by Hull Museums. Or could Stoker have seen the mummy later acquired by Thomas Sheppard of Hull Museums at Whitby Museum? We know he used the library in Whitby. Could the Whitby museum authorities at that stage have used information originally referring to Ta-sheri-ankh in their documentation of the mummy they’d acquired from Sir George Elliot?

Is it possible that Thomas Sheppard’s press release about the mummy of a princess from Whitby, then confirms that he was drawing on information transposed from the mummy of Ta-sheri-ankh? If that happened, could not Bram Stoker have had access to the same information?

Sir George Eliot gave Ta-sheri-ankh to Newport, and in time she came to Manchester Museum via Salford. Could Manchester’s mummy then claim to be the mummy that inspired Bram Stoker to write The Jewel of Seven Stars?

Of course we can’t be absolutely sure and any additional information about Sir George Elliot MP and his mummies would be very much appreciated.

Anna and Campbell

Thanks are due to Campbell Price and Anna Garnett who kindly shared information about the Newport mummy and to Paula Gentil, Curator of Archaeology at Hull Museums, who provided the wonderful photograph of Thomas Sheppard with the Whitby mummy. The mask that Ta-sheri-ankh wearing in the photograph has been conserved and can be seen in the Egypt Room in the Discovery Centre at Manchester Museum.

ACCES Meeting at Manchester Museum

ACCES meeting at Manchester Museum last Friday

Last Friday, November 15th 2013, Campbell and Anna kindly invited me to contribute to an ACCES Workshop at Manchester Museum about ‘Egyptology in the North-West: Contextualising your Collection’. There were people there from the Garstang Museum, World Museum Liverpool, Kendal Museum and Macclesfield West Park Museum. I spoke for about 20 minutes about two collectors of Egyptology in the North of England: Aquila Dodgson (1830-1919)  and Thomas Sheppard (1876-1945) of Hull Museums.

Although both are best known for their work east of the Pennines, Aquila Dodgson’s first job was as a Congregational Minister before later switching to a career in textiles in the North West. This financially more lucrative employment provided opportunities to travel to Egypt and to fund the work of researchers such as William Flinders Petrie. As Campbell remarked, “Dodgson’s a mini Jesse Howarth!”.

Dodgson had a collection of Egyptology which was partly dispersed at his death, and so Dodgson Egyptology can now be found in Manchester Museum, Leeds Museums and Queen’s College at the University of Melbourne in Australia. I showed photos of Dodgson objects acquired by Leeds some years ago and Campbell and Anna brought out some of the recently-acquired Feather collection which also includes Dodgson specimens.  It was very useful to confirm that a distinctive type of label with a red border was indeed a Dodgson and not a later collector’s label. If any readers out there happen to have Egyptology labelled in this way, do let us know.

Dodgson Egyptology from the Feather collection at Manchester Museum

Dodgson objects in Leeds Museums (N.B. red border labels)

The other collector, Thomas Sheppard, was a larger than life character who has been described as ‘one of the most successful museum curators of the first half of the 20th century’. Sheppard’s success in creating new museums in Hull was largely down to his collecting activities. He collected practically anything and everything during his 40 year career, including Egyptology. The reason for talking about him at a seminar about  Egyptology in the North West was an unexpected link to the Manchester mummy Ta-sheri-ankh brought to my attention by Campbell. As this is quite a long and involved story I’ll write about this in a separate blog.

Consultation about Scanning the Head of Worsley Man

Powerful high intensity scanning equiment at the HMXIF, University of Manchester (photo: Sam Sportun)

In an earlier Blog I wrote about scanning the head of Worsley Man  as part of a research project carried out by a team of specialists from Manchester and Nottingham universities and other organisations . 

One of the new findings to emerge from the recent study was the discovery of a previously undocumented third cervical (neck) vertebra, which had a section created by the chopping action of a sword, or, just possibly, the action of a saw. The team wanted to study the section in more detail using a high resolution scanner to verify how the head was removed from the body. This may appear macabre but there is evidence that some bog bodies were dismembered and parts disposed of in different locations, possibly marking the  boundaries of a territory or for other reasons that we can only speculate about.

Last week Sam Sportun, Senior Conservator at Manchester Museum, and I went over to the Henry Moseley X-ray Imaging Facility on the university campus to speak to staff about the practicalities of scanning Worsley Man’s head. We’d like to know whether the section of the damaged vertebra was cut or sawn; whether the cord buried in the flap of soft tissue that survives does indeed go around the neck as a garotte; and what is the composition of anomalous material in a tooth? But the technology will investigate more nuanced questions which we are only just beginning to appreciate.

However, before we reach that point we’d like to gather any comments about the proposed work.  Human remains in museums are an important source of information for learning about life in the past. We accept that material of this kind has different meanings to different people and we’d welcome any comments in advance of scanning Worsley Man.

When John Connelly came across the human head whilst was stacking peat blocks on Worsley Moss in August 1958 little can he have  imagined the long-term research ramifications of his discovery. The head has been the subject of a Coroner’s Inquest, an exhibit in a Pathology display, a museum specimen and now the proposed subject of a detailed scanning.

Incidentally if anyone knows of Mr Connelly or his family we’d be really interested to hear from you.

Hairdressing in Ancient Worlds

Shall I take it bit more off the top for you sir?

Another one of those unique opportunities to record an unusual  job in the Museum came up recently when Gabby, one of the conservation placements, was putting the facial reconstructions back in the second case.  

Philip II’s hair was in a slight state of disarray and Gabby kindly reached into the display to ‘tease those tangled tresses’ back into place.

Not a problem the real king would have troubled himself over unduly, I’d imagine, as he enforced Macedonian hegemony over Greece and made plans to take on the Persian Empire.

Had he troubled more over his coiffure, might the course of history have been different? Somehow I can’t imagine him saying: “Cancel the battle of Chaeronea – bad hair day!”

Or was it only the Spartans who took pains over their hair? The study of hair in archaeology and ancient history is by no means a brand new speciality but this must be pretty well unique as a niche activity!

The Car Park Years II

Stephen Devine, Curator of New Media, pointed out that the skeleton of a knight had been discovered underneath a car park in Edinburgh. It reminded me of the cartoon in one of the newspapers when the Richard the III story broke last month.

It showed a man paying for a car park ticket. The different rates were advertised on a Leicester City Council ‘Pay and Display’. Short Stay was defined as up to two hours. Long Stay was defined as ‘upto 500 years’!

In this most recent case perhaps the cartoon could be re-run with the rates shown as ‘over-knight’…

Joking aside, some of you may keep up with this and other blogs using RSS feeds. For those of you who don’t but would like to know more there’s information here : http://www.digitaltrends.com/how-to/how-to-use-rss/

In basic terms these are links using RSS to subscribe to a site or blog to make sure you become aware of new content.

The reason I mention this is that Stephen Devine tells me Google are killing off one of their services – Google Reader.

We don’t want any of our readers missing out on new posts so if you do use Google Reader here’s a link to some alternatives that you may find useful;

http://lifehacker.com/5990456/google-reader-is-getting-shut-down-here-are-the-best-alternatives“

Richard III – the Car Park Years

So it’s official. After a lead-in longer than waiting for the release on DVD of the last season of Mad Men it has finally been confirmed that the bones dug up in a car park in Leicester are indeed those of Richard III.  The revelation has generated enough press coverage to repaper Buckingham Palace, although that may not be the most likely venue for redecoration given the Palace’s opposition in principle to digging up their royal predecessors for questionable DNA testing.

That the resting place of the last of the Plantagenet line, the supposed hunchback with a withered arm, was one of the first burials to be uncovered by trail trenching was a fluke. Archaeologists hardly ever find what they set out to discover, least of all with their very first trench. The king’s body had been dumped unceremoniously in a grave barely large enough to contain him in the nave of the Church of the Grey Friars. It had suffered a number of indignities that must have been a frequent occurrence at the time but which must surely strike us today as disturbing and gratuitous. Despite his ruthless reputation, as seen by his seizure of the throne and mysterious disappearance of the Princes in the Tower, Richard was undoubtedly a brave man who died heroically on the battlefield fighting for his crown.

Richard died bravely in the thick of his enemies (from The Ranger 1967)

In the Channel 4 documentary the cavalcade of grotesques, eccentrics and auto-didacts surrounding Richard included a Joanna Lumley look-alike and apparently a hobbit. The programme told us more about the people fronting the programme than it did the dead king, and featured some melodramatic overreaction to seeing the bones laid out at the University of Leicester that even embarrassed the speaker’s family. The osteologist wisely steered clear of the amateur theatricals of draping the as-yet unidentified remains with Richard’s standard.

Elsewhere you could see the long-cherished beliefs about Richard being demolished wholesale. Confronted with a skeleton with scoliosis – yet to be identified as the dead king – you could see the President of the Richard the Third Society’s horror as she realised that years of passing off Richard’s reputed physical appearance as the product of Tudor propaganda may have been a complete waste of effort.

Medical experts later said that outwardly few people may have known that he suffered from this condition save for noticing that one of Richard’s shoulders was slightly higher than the other. If the king really had been a hunchback as the Tudors said, did it also mean he really was the ruthless monster who had his nephews murdered in the Tower? One should always be wary of judging people in the past according to the standards of one’s own day but the attempts to sanitise Richard’s posthumous reputation began to look like an elaborate academic construct built on sand. By ensuring that a potential threat was neutralised in this way Richard may have been no worse than any other of the hard-headed aristocrats of the time but it was not for nothing that former Yorkists switched their support to Henry Tudor.

The academic reasoning behind the facial reconstruction revealed dramatically at the end of the programme some 90 minutes later – it felt like the viewer had been in the car park for years – derives ultimately from pioneering work carried out at the University of Manchester and the Manchester Museum. Richard the Third joins the cast of well-known historical figures, including Philip II of Macedon, Lindow Man and Croesus of Lydia whose facial features have been reconstructed.

Facial reconstruction of Richard III

Nemi’s boyfriend Grim from the Metro

Is this the closest we’ll get to the dead king?

An Unusual Appointment at the Dentist’s

Edentulous jawbone or mandible from the human remains collection at Manchester Museum

When Andrew Shelley, a dentist working with the School of Dentistry at the University of Manchester, contacted me to ask if the Museum has an edentulous mandible in its collection, my first instinct was to reach for the dictionary. As it turned out, an edentulous mandible is one that has lost all its teeth and I’d seen a specimen whilst working on the Heronbridge skeletons with Dr Robert Connolly during preparations for the Ancient Worlds displays.

It was one of the specimens that sadly has no associated information except for a label with the letter ‘C’. We did not know what that means nor how old the mandible was but the label suggested it was of 19th century date. I duly confirmed that we did indeed have an edentulous mandible. Andrew proposed to scan and x-ray the mandible and to use the images in his research.  He is investigating the best ways of imaging patients who are unfortunate enough to have lost all their lower teeth and require dental implants to support a removable denture.

What Andrew told me next was slightly worrying because, in order to replicate the appearance of an x-ray or scan taken of a living patient, the mandible had to be soaked in water. This would give the appearance of tissue and blood surrounding the jawbone. Ordinarily soaking a museum object in water is the last thing curators want to do (unless it’s waterlogged wood or some other organic material). However, we did not know where the specimen came from and Andrew’s research will be of benefit to real life patients.  My first response was to seek the advice of colleagues in conservation.  So much depended on ground conditions in which the mandible had been buried but after discussing the matter with Irit Narkiss in the conservation team at the Manchester Museum we decided to proceed cautiously.

Edentulous mandible in its bath of water

So it was in the first weeks of January I found myself in the School of Dentistry watching the process of x-raying the mandible. Most people can be forgiven for feeling a little apprehensive about a visit to the dentist’s but in this case but in this case I can honestly say I had been positively looking forward to it.

The mandible had to be supported in a head-shaped container and Andrew positioned some human vertebrae or neck bones in the container to make the x-rays look even more convincing. The mandible in its bath of water was x-rayed and scanned in the same way as a living patient.

Preparing the mandible for x-ray in the School of Dentistry (January 2013)

The mandible was fitted with a denture in the same way as a modern patient as can be seen in the image below.

Edentulous mandible with modern denture

The aim is to find out how dentists’ treatment is affected by the different imaging techniques. In some cases the required information can be gained by plain x-ray film rather than exposing the patient to a higher level of radiation from a dental CT scan. It may be that, in some cases, the treatment plan would be the same regardless of which imaging technique is used.  Andrew hopes that the project will lead to guidelines for dentists that will help them choose the most efficient imaging technique for each case and so reduce both the radiation dose and expense.

X-ray of the jawbone in its bath of water at the School of Dentistry

This is not the end of the story because Andrew has to find 6-8 edentulous mandibles for his study. The Manchester Museum is pleased that it has been able to help colleagues in the wider university by making available a specimen in the collections and that this work will benefit patients in dentistry.

As for the mandible that was soaked in water, Irit Narkiss informs me that it has dried out nicely, apparently no worse the wear for its recent outing. We look forward to hearing in due course from Andrew how his work progresses.

X-ray of edentulous jawbone. Image courtesy of Andrew Shelley, Manchester School of Dentistry

Dark Age Skeletons in the News

Julian from the MEN and I with one of the Heronbridge skulls

Today the MEN are coming again to take photographs of our ‘Dark Age’ skeletons from Heronbridge.

We are not examining them with the same state-of-the art technology as we used for Worsley Man (that may come later). But we do have the invaluable assistance of Dr Robert Stoddart, who is quietly reconstructing the sequences of blows that each of these men suffered on the battlefield.

It really is a revelation. Hollywood may give the impression that an ancient battle was a display of fancy sword-work, a veritable fencing match between the protagonists, but the reality, so far as the bones are telling us, was brutally pragmatic: chop them off at the knees, bring them down and slice and hack at the head to make sure they were dead.

These men didn’t go through a fencing match but a meat mincer!

It brings home to you the callous almost industrial nature of killing on the battlefield and fills you with a sense of compassion for the men who experienced this brutality.

Details of their lives and deaths are slowly being revealed by Dr Stoddart and will be shared with the public when we run our Heronbridge dayschool on 29th March. You can find out more by visiting the Manchester Museum website or contacting Phyllis Stoddart (phyllis.stoddart@manchester.ac.uk).

‘Dark Age’ Skeletons in the Manchester Museum

One of the Manchester Museum’s skulls from Heronbridge

As part of the work on our Ancient Worlds displays I have recently been looking at the Museum’s collection of human remains. Unfortunately much of it is poorly documented but after some detective work I discovered an important group of skeletons that originally were excavated at Heronbridge near Chester in 1930-1. There is good reason to believe that the dead were casualties of the Battle of Chester (c.AD 616) and that they were buried on or close to the battlefield.

When archaeologists excavated the same site in 2005 they recovered two male skeletons. The radiocarbon dates put them in the early 7th century AD. The evidence of wounds that they suffered, especially noticeble on the men’s skulls, shows that they died under violent circumstances. They are likely to come from the Battle of Chester which is described by Bede in his Ecclesiastical History of the English People (II, 2). The Manchester Museum’s skeletons were also recovered from burial pits at Heronbridge and all things considered they must relate to the same historical event.

King Aethelfrith of Northumbria made a pre-emptive strike on the Britons of North Wales who were allies of a rival claimant to the Northumbrian throne. During the Battle of Chester (c.AD 616) Bede writes that Aethelfrith ordered his soldiers to kill monks who were praying for the success of the Britons. The monks were slaughtered.

‘Dark Age’ re-enactment enthusiasts from a film at Stoke Musuem

Aethelfrith died some time later when he in his turn was attacked by King Raedwald of East Anglia. Raedwald is believed to be the king honoured by the rich grave goods at Sutton Hoo. Edwin, the rival claimant, became king of Northumbria.

These discoveries throw light on a fascinating but dimly understood period in early Medieval English history, the time of the so-called Dark Ages. Incredibly rich discoveries such as those excavated at Sutton Hoo in the 1930s, or the material found in the Staffordshire hoard, show that the metal-workers of this time produced objects of great beauty for important people in their society.

The Lindisfarne Gospels show the mixture of different artistic and cultural influences from the various peoples – Angles, Saxons, Jutes, Franks, Picts, Irish and Britons who were then living in Britain. Perhaps it was not so very different to the multi-cultural and multi-ethnic society we live in today?

The Heronbridge skeletons are a timely discovery for consideration as part of the Ancient Worlds displays. They were also the subject of a longer talk at the Yorkshire Archaeological Society in Leeds in November 2013.