In 1822, France formed the first official study of Egyptology, and the European fascination with Egypt - dubbed “Egyptomania” - kicked into high gear. Horatio Nelson obliterated the French navy on the Nile and essentially left Napoleon stranded in Cairo.īut while Napoleon’s Middle Eastern campaign was failing, the scientists he brought with him to Egypt were beginning to explore the region and unearth countless finds - including the Rosetta stone - which they took from burial sites and sent back to French and later British museums. Napoleon’s initial 1798 attempt, which was spurred partly by the desire to block English trading routes and partly by his fascination with the region, was mostly successful - or it was until British Adm. The European interest in Egypt was sparked by an odd episode in history: the year Napoleon spent invading the country. “There’s been interest in mummies since the 18th and 19th century, when English travelers went to Egypt and took mummies like souvenirs,” Vicky Almansa, an Egyptologist at Brown University, told me in a phone interview.

Mummies - the preserved bodies of ancient Egyptians - have been a cultural fascination since the early 19th century, when interest in archaeological excavations of Egyptian tombs swept across Europe. Mummies have long been cultural mainstays, but not always for the greatest of reasons It's there that the mummy in pop culture resides - and the lack of attention to this heritage may be at the root of the new film’s critical and commercial failure. The answer lies at a strange crossroads, between humanity’s fear of the unknown, the war between science and religion, and our love of adventure. So how did this unlikely film spawn a beloved 1999 reboot and a disastrous new revival that serves as the rocky kickoff for an entire slate of new films in Universal's upcoming “Dark Universe”?

In fact, its titular monster is barely shown as a mummy at all.

An eerie, surreal film, it’s part of Universal’s proud lineup of monster movies - but even for its day it was unique, focused more on atmosphere and character development than on traditional horror scares. The 1932 film The Mummy is an unlikely progenitor of one of the major summer movie revivals of 2017.

Why mummy