The Myth of Mummy Wheat (2017)

(Dunkin, 1851: 325–6) The myth that wheat, peas, bulbs and other plants could germinate after millennia spent sealed in ancient Egyptian tombs was a popular and pervasive one in the nineteenth and early twentieth century in countries including Britain, France, the United States, Canada and Australia where the revitalised grain was claimed to provide extraordinarily rich yields. This marked the beginning of a divide between popular and scholarly approaches to mummy wheat that would grow and harden over the following century, reflecting wider themes of authority and power in the development of British Egyptology within nineteenth-century intellectual culture. One of the first popularisers of Ancient Egyptian art and antiquities in Britain was one of Salt’s agents, the Italian Giovanni Battista Belzoni, a former circus strongman who imported a considerable number of Egyptian antiquities including many of the sculptures now in the British Museum (Mayes, 1959; Moser, 2006).

Source: olh.openlibhums.org