Pharaoh, mind if we peel you?

There is awkward, and then there is standing in a room full of strangers watching a corpse get peeled. In the 1800s, wealthy Europeans somehow decided the second option made for a lovely evening out.

Yes! Somewhere in London, a group of well-dressed people paid good money to sit in a crowded hall and watch a surgeon cut open a dead Egyptian. Nobody called the police. Nobody fainted in protest. In fact, the demand was so high that the surgeon had to tell latecomers to go home. This was Victorian entertainment, and honestly, the more you learn about it, the weirder it gets.

Can you imagine getting that invitation? "Come watch us peel a three-thousand-year-old dead guy like an onion. Drinks at seven." And people actually said yes. If I got that invite, I would have checked my calendar, pretended I had a prior engagement, and then moved to a different country just to be safe. But apparently, the Victorians had a very different definition of "a good time".

And this whole craze traces back to Napoleon. When he invaded Egypt in 1798, he did not just bring soldiers. He brought scholars, artists and scientists who documented everything they saw. Their drawings and reports lit a fire across Europe. The obsession even got its own name: Egyptomania. Wallpaper had sphinxes on it. Furniture had little pharaoh heads carved into the legs. Women wore scarab jewelry. And for the truly wealthy, there was one souvenir that beat them all. An actual mummy.

Imagine your neighbour bragging about his new car, and you just casually mention you have a pharaoh in your closet. Conversation over. You win.

Egypt at that time had almost no rules protecting its ancient dead, so tourists and traders hauled mummies out of tombs by the hundreds. Some travelers bought them the way people today buy fridge magnets. A rich man could return from his grand tour of Egypt with a mummy in his luggage, and nobody at customs would blink. The question was: what in the world do you do with a 3,000-year-old corpse in your living room? And the Victorians, bless them, came up with the strangest possible answer. Throw a party.

The Victorians basically invented the "watch me do something stupid" genre: invite your friends over, serve some drinks, then bring out the mummy and unwrap it in front of everyone. Layer by layer, bandage by bandage, the host or a hired expert would peel away linen that had not been touched in three thousand years. Guests would lean in, hoping to spot an amulet or a piece of jewelry tucked between the wrappings. To Victorian party guests, these were door prizes.

Was there a scientific excuse for all this? Sort of. The undisputed king of this weird hobby was a British surgeon named Thomas Pettigrew. He loved unwrapping mummies so much that people started calling him "Mummy Pettigrew". He held massive public unwrappings, sometimes with hundreds of people crammed into a room. Just imagine the scene: fancy hats, tight corsets, shiny monocles, and everyone squinting to see if the mummy had any jewelry hiding under its bandages.

Can you believe a corpse became the hottest ticket in town?

Well, thankfully, times have changed. As archaeology became more serious and scientific, people finally understood that mummies were not party favours or piñatas. They were priceless treasures that deserved respect and careful study, not a room full of nosy strangers poking at their bandages.

Yep, the Victorians were wrong. But wow, were they entertaining.

So, the next time someone complains that history is dull and boring, tell them about the parties where the guest of honour had been dead for three thousand years.