The pyramids of Egypt were never meant to be wonders for tourists or curiosities for scientists. They were sanctuaries of eternity; royal tombs built for the pharaohs and nobility of ancient Egypt, who believed that death was not an end but a passage into divine immortality. The bodies mummified within were sacred vessels, preserved through ritual so the soul,the ka and ba, could live forever. To disturb them was an act of profound impiety. Yet, over centuries, those resting places were plundered, desecrated, and carted off; their sacred bodies displayed in foreign museums under the guise of “archaeology” and “science.
The violation began long before modern archaeology. In medieval Europe, ground-up mummy powder “; called mummia was sold as medicine, believed to cure a host of illnesses. Thousands of ancient mummies were desecrated, crushed, and consumed across the continent. By the 16th century, mummy trade had become so profitable that counterfeit “mummies” were produced by drying the bodies of criminals or slaves and selling them as ancient relics. The sacred had already become commodity and it was about to become spectacle.
When Napoleon invaded Egypt in 1798, he brought not only soldiers but also scholars, the savants who produced the monumental Description de l’Égypte. This ignited Europe’s Egyptomania. The “discovery” of ancient Egypt became a matter of imperial prestige. Napolean was one of the early plunderer.
Soon came the treasure hunters and showmen. Giovanni Battista Belzoni, a former circus strongman turned explorer, was among the most infamous. In 1817, Belzoni blasted open the tomb of Pharaoh Seti I in the Valley of the Kings, prying away exquisite wall reliefs and removing the sarcophagus, which now lies in London’s Sir John Soane’s Museum. He desecrated other tombs, looting their contents with dynamite and brute force. His exploits were hailed as heroic in England; in Egypt, they were vandalism of the highest order.
Meanwhile, the mummy trade became fashionable in Europe. In Victorian London, “mummy unwrapping” parties were a social event. Guests gathered in candlelit drawing rooms to watch as linen was peeled away from a preserved body; a ritual humiliation of the ancient dead, transformed into entertainment for the elite.
The result of this plunder filled Western museums. The British Museum amassed hundreds of mummies, coffins, and funerary objects during the 19th century, many acquired under dubious colonial authority. Among its most famous is the “Ginger” mummy, one of the oldest naturally preserved human remains, taken from Gebelein. The Louvre in Paris displayed mummies from Saqqara and Thebes. The Neues Museum in Berlin exhibits the bust of Queen Nefertiti, excavated in 1912 by Ludwig Borchardt and illegally transported to Germany, where it remains despite Egypt’s repeated requests for repatriation.
Even the Rosetta Stone, the key to decoding hieroglyphics, was seized by the British after Napoleon’s defeat and has remained in London ever since, another symbol of intellectual theft under imperial pretext.
Western archaeologists and collectors justified their actions through a paternalistic narrative: that Egypt, under Ottoman and later British rule, was incapable of preserving its own past. They claimed they were rescuing history from neglect and looters; while being the greatest looters themselves. The very notion of “archaeological excavation” in the 19th century often meant destruction: tombs blown open, mummies unwrapped for curiosity, and treasures sold to private collectors.
It is telling that no such acts were permitted on European soil. The tombs of kings in Westminster Abbey or Saint-Denis were sacred; their disturbance would provoke outrage. But the tombs of the Pharaohs, rulers no less revered in their own time, were treated as fair game. The colonial gaze saw the Egyptian dead not as ancestors of a living civilization, but as objects of study, ownership, and pride.
By the late 19th century, Egyptology had rebranded itself as a science. Yet even under this banner, the violence persisted. Bodies were dissected to study embalming techniques; skulls were measured under racial “anthropology” theories; and mummies were displayed as curiosities.
For example, the mummy of Pharaoh Ramses II was shipped to Paris in 1976 for “preservation”, a process that involved exposure and examination more befitting a laboratory specimen than a revered monarch. Similarly, the royal mummies of Deir el-Bahari were unwrapped in Cairo in the 1880s before European dignitaries and scholars.
Today, many of these mummies lie exposed in glass cases in foreign lands: Seti I’s sarcophagus in London, Thebes’ nobles in Berlin, priests of Amun in Paris,far from the sands and prayers that once consecrated them.
In modern times, Egypt has been fighting to reclaim its heritage. Dr. Zahi Hawass, the country’s former Antiquities Minister, has spearheaded campaigns to bring back key artifacts, including the Rosetta Stone and Nefertiti’s bust. While some museums have returned minor items, the great symbols of ancient Egypt remain abroad, their possession justified by colonial-era laws and “scientific” rationales.
This resistance reveals a deeper hypocrisy. Western nations that protect their own war graves, royal tombs, and memorials with utmost sanctity refuse to extend the same respect to Egyptian ancestors. A mummy, to them, is not a person but a specimen.
To the ancient Egyptians, the tomb was not a ruin but a living home for the dead; the mummy was the physical anchor of the spirit. To disturb it was to break the harmony between the mortal and divine. The foreign excavations, grave-robbing, and exhibitions of these remains are therefore not acts of knowledge, but of sacrilege.
It is time to ask: would the remains of Queen Elizabeth I or Napoleon be unwrapped, dissected, or displayed in a foreign land? The answer is unthinkable and yet, for Egypt’s dead, it has been normalized for centuries.
The Western desecration of Egypt’s tombs stands as one of the most shameful contradictions of modern civilization; the pursuit of enlightenment through the violation of sanctity. The pyramids were not built to be entered, catalogued, or displayed. They were temples of eternity. The mummies within were not curiosities; they were consecrated bodies of faith.
To disturb them is to misunderstand them; to display them is to dehumanize them. True civilization lies not in what we uncover from the sands of another culture, but in how we honour what they held sacred. Until Egypt’s sacred dead are treated with the same reverence accorded to Western remains, the moral shadow of this desecration will continue to haunt the so-called guardians of human heritage.