A Mummy Head in Cincinnati

According to Louis Leonard Tucker's “‘Ohio Show-Shop’; The Western Museum of Cincinnati 1820-1867,” in A Cabinet of Curiosities; Five Episodes in the Evolution of American Museums (Charlottesville, Va..: University Press of Virginia, 1967), the Western Museum of Cincinnati was formally dedicated on 10 June, 1820. It was begun in 1818 by the efforts of Daniel Drake, William Steele and other Cincinnatians, who assembled a vast collection of shells, fossils, foreign coins, Native American artifacts and “Egyptian oddities.” In October 1822, the museum acquired several hundred birds and other objects of natural history, coins, medals and Egyptian and Roman antiquities, as well as the head of an Egyptian mummy, “found in the catacombs of the celebrated Thebes.” A number of papyri, votive statues and other objets d’art were also added to the collections. More items followed in 1823, including Egyptian and Native American items, but no further mummies are mentioned.

An article in the 11 November 1824 Cincinnati Emporium stated that the newly appointed curator of the Western Museum, Joseph Dorfeuille, had

“several years since procured from Mr. Belzoni, the celebrated traveler, a number of Egyptian curiosities [including] an embalmed head from the catacombs at Thebes.”

Prior to becoming the curator of the Western Museum in 1823, Dorfeuille had been an adventurer of sorts, traveling to distant lands and collecting objects which he then displayed in order to make a livelihood. Dorfeuille promptly incorporated his collection with that of the Museum. In the 13 March 1824 issue of The Cincinnati Literary Gazette a “new song” for the Western Museum was printed, to be sung to the tune “Songs of Shepherds in Rustical  Roundelays.” One of the stanzas related:

 “Lo here are true mummies of early antiquity,  disentombed from the shores of the Red Sea or Nile: but they now look disconsolate, ghastly and ricketty, and grin at the visitors more than they smile …” 

            This begs the question of just how many mummy heads did the Western Museum have, one or two? From the poem it would appear there were “mummies” and so it is not unlikely that Dorfeuille could have acquired a head from the catacombs at Thebes as a gift from Belzoni which he added to the existing head which was donated in 1822. There were untold mummies in the sepulchers at Thebes and so stating that the head was from there is not a distinguishing characteristic. It does not really matter how many the Western Museum had, it had at least one, and for twenty-five cents (children half-price) any Cincinnatian or river traveler or immigrant who went through the city could see everything in the Museum.