1586 / Saqqara

Souvenir

Tags:: 16th century,; Egypt,; John Sanderson,; mummies,; Saqqara

The twenty-eighth of April, I went to see the pyramids and momia, being of three gentlemen of Germany entreated to accompany them. The momia are thousands of embalmed bodies which were buried thousands of years past in a sandy cave, at which there seemeth to have been some city in times past. We were let down by ropes, as into a well, with wax candles burning in our hands, and so walked upon the bodies of all sorts and sizes, some great and small, and some emblamed in little earthen pots, which never had form. These are set at the feet of the greater bodies. They have no noisome smell at all, but are like pitch, being broken. For I broke off all the parts of the bodies to see how the flesh was turned to drug, and brought home divers heads, hands, arms, and feet for a show. We brought also six hundred pounds for the Turkey Company in pieces; and brought into England in the Hercules, together with a whole body. They are lapped in above a hundred double of cloth, which rotting and peeling off, you may see the skin, flesh, fingers, and nails firm, only altered black. One little hand I brought into England to show, and presented it to my brother, who gave the same to a doctor in Oxford.

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Published In

Travel

About the Text

John Sanderson, from His Pilgrims, a seventeenth-century anthology of travel writing compiled by Samuel Purchas. Sanderson imported various goods from the east, including wine, nuts, carpets, spices, and mommia, a powder derived from mummies that was sold by English apothecaries.

It is delightful to read on the spot the impressions and opinions of tourists who visited a hundred years ago, in the vehicles and with the aesthetic prejudices of the period, the places which you are visiting now. The voyage ceases to be a mere tour through space; you travel through time and thought as well.