Another Larkin Mummy

On 10 August 1824, the New York Evening Post ran an illustration of an elaborate mummy case which had been brought to the city by Captain Larkin Thorndike Lee, of Beverly, Massachusetts. Larkin Lee and Larkin Turner were not related, but both had been named for Deacon Larkin, them man who loaned his horse to Paul Revere for the famous ride.

Lee had obtained the mummy from Alexander Grant,  who was touted in a pamphlet which accompanied the exhibition as "one of the modern travellers who has penetrated into the high regions watered by the Nile, and even visited Nubia and Abyssinia." According to the same pamphlet:

"The mummy now offered for the inspection of the curious, was obtained by Mr. G together with several others, from the catacombs, or repositories of the dead, ... as he was occupied with a company of thirty labourers, in ransacking the ruins of Thebes."

This last reference to “ransacking” is enough to cause a collective shudder in the ranks of present-day archaeologists. “Scientific archaeology” was decades in the future; most so-called archaeologists at this time were little better than treasure seekers. The much-touted Belzoni was no more than a former circus strong-man turned inventor,  who had gone to Egypt to sell a water wheel contraption, and who had returned with mummies and artifacts which had been looted, and in some cases, literally blown out  of their resting places by explosives. Sir  Flinders-Petrie, generally regarded as the father of “modern” archaeology, was not even born until 1853.

It has not been possible to positively identify this particular Alexander Grant and so nothing much more is known about him.