Beginning in the 12th century, Arab physicians began to prescribe their patients a most unorthodox remedy: the ground remains of mummies procured from Egyptian tombs.
Mummy powder proved so profitable that soon after its introduction, Egyptian tombs were ransacked not only for the riches they might contain, but also for bodies that might be processed into the expensive folk medicine. It wasn’t long before the practice of applying mummy powder was incorporated into medieval Europe’s catalog of dubious medical practices. By the 16th century, the product had become so commonplace in both Europe and the Middle East that the once seemingly endless supply of authentic, mummified Egyptian cadavers quite literally dried up.
Mummy powder, however, was not the only everyday use of the Egyptian dead that arose before the dawn of modern archaeological preservation. In the 16th and 17th centuries, pulverized mummy was the key ingredient in a popular shade of brown artist’s pigment, and preserved human and animal remains of Egyptian origin were used in the production of this “mummy brown” paint until the early 20th century.
Whether this statement was merely jest on the part of the American literary icon, well known for his sense of humor, has been the subject of debate ever since it was published. What is known, however, is that the supply of authentic Egyptian corpses by the beginning of the 1800s was so small only that upper crust Europeans could afford to purchase one whole. In the wake of Napoleon’s conquest of Egypt, it became vogue amongst the aristocracy to hold “unwrapping parties,” where carefully preserved corpses would be haphazardly stripped of their bandages, so that revelers could gaze upon the millennia-old face concealed beneath them. Small burial ornaments concealed in the linens would then be dispensed to partygoers as souvenirs, while exposure to air caused the delicate bodies to crumble into dust, never to be seen again.
The term “Vodu” (alternately known as Voudoun, Vaudau, Voudoux, or Vaudaux and commonly corrupted as “Voodoo” or “Hoodoo” in North America) comes to us from the Fon tongue– a language prevalent in the West African Republic of Dahomey, now known as Benin.
Beginning in 1724, Spanish and French raiders descended on Africa’s so-called Slave Coast, only to pass their unwitting conquests onto colonial outposts in the West Indies. In doing so, slave traders at various points along the way managed to transfuse the native beliefs of an African snake worshipping sect to the Caribbean and the American South.
In 1782, Governor Bernardo de Gálvez , Spanish governor of the Louisiana Territory, banned the importation of slaves from the island territories of Martinique ,and later Santo Domingo (the other half of which is now known as Haiti), for fear that the Vodu tradition propagating amongst the slave population “would make the lives of the citizens unsafe.”
As slave life in the 18th century Americas mainly consisted of chains, overseers and hard labor, African slaves - and their native born children – were forced to practice their ancestors’ faith at their own peril. Enslaved men or women caught in the act of vodu faced torture or death. The sentence for those caught with voduon “fetishes” (sometimes lucky charms or sometimes of more sinister “voodoo dolls”) called for the guilty to be “imprisoned, hanged or flayed alive.”
That began to change in 1803, when, in the wake of the Louisiana Purchase, authorities rolled back restrictions on the importation of West Indian slave labor. At the same time, second and third generations of English speaking, American born slaves came into the possession of their masters’ descendents. Old barriers began to shift (if ever so slightly) and, in the early 19th century, it was not at all uncommon for slaves to tend to white children and attend plantation functions, such as weddings and receptions. In an effort to save the souls of their unconverted workers, some masters even went so far as to baptize their slave populations, thereby permanently intertwining their own Catholicism with the pagan African tradition. (In Central American cultures, this same cross-pollination resulted in the religion known as Santeria.)
But it was the post-Purchase influx of new arrivals from the Caribbean (and Santo Domingo, in particular) that truly ignited the myth of American voodoo. With slaves a common occurrence in urban areas and no more distance between plantations, it is said that Santo Domingo natives would congregate at an abandoned brick factory on Dumaine Street in New Orleans.
| True their African roots, the devotees were said to revere a priestess cloaked in a python, who would deliver fortunes and prognostications. Still in other versions, the priestess was secondary to a male “king figure,” who would administer the secretive rites. Either way, the perverse ceremonies eventually led to the invocation of the snake gods Danbhlah-Wedo, Aida-Wedo or, most popularly, Zombi – just three of the many “loas,” or deities, that populate the Vodu pantheon. |
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The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were the height of European colonial activity in the Middle East. This was a period during which the British were involved in the affairs of Egypt and the Sudan as they formed alliances in the region for economic purposes. In 1820 the British and the Gulf-region sheikhs established economic pacts that would guarantee the British access to Gulf-region resources and in 1839 they annexed Aden. The British went to war with Iran in 1856 over rights of way to India and China through Iran and later, in 1907, England and Russia would vie for power in Iran and divide it for their interests. The Italians entered the Middle East also at the beginning of the 20th century, establishing presence in Libya through a series of campaigns over a twenty year period.
The French, in turn, gained control over Algiers in 1830 and also pressed into Lebanon in 1860. In 1881 the French established a protectorate in Tunisia and would through the northern gateway of Africa establish a presence in what are today the modern nations Senegal, Mauritania, Chad, the Republic of Congo, the Central African Republic, Niger, Guinea, Mali, Cote d’Ivoire, and Benin. France’s intention was to establish a firm east-west axis of control across the African continent in opposition to the British Empire’s north-south axis of power. The two imperial powers were at odds, though by 1904 the two had reached a series of agreements under the Entente Cordiale which eventually led the way for Britain to support France’s grab for Morocco as a French protectorate. Previously, in 1869, the French and British had collaborated with their financing to assist the Egyptians in construction of the Suez Canal. 
The colonies of the Middle East were exploited for their resources and their strategic location as well as for the wealth of their artistic traditions, brought back to Europe in the antiquities trade. Sometimes with the assistance of their hosts, the British and other European powers returned to their countries with cultural treasures 
As early as the 15th century, Africa beckoned the expansionist and commercial interests of various European powers due to its proximity to the European continent and the promises of wealth and resources it offered. Between the 16th and 19th centuries, European intrusion into Africa was primarily focused on the slave trade to feed the labor needs of plantations in South and North American colonies. 
What were deemed zones of influence and commercial outposts became colonies annexed to European powers by the beginning of the 19th century. The first French colonial military foray into Africa, for example, was in Algeria in 1830. France’s King Charles X sent his army in revenge for the Algerian assault on the French Consul. As a result, in 1848 Algeria was claimed part of the republic of France and became part of one of the largest and longest lasting colonial empires in the world. French expansion into Africa continued and established France as a colonial power until the turn of the century. 
Today standing guard on the Giza pyramid complex’s eastern face, the Great Sphinx in fact predates Ancient Egypt’s most famed architectural achievements by at least 500 years. Modern archaeology tells us that the Sphinx was built during Old Kingdom Egypt’s fourth dynasty, sometime between 2723 and 2563 BC - making it the world’s oldest known monumental edifice. 
German traveler Johannes Helferich’s take was altogether different when he published a drawing in an account of his Oriental travels in 1579; here the Sphinx was definitively female, with its distinctive headdress portrayed as shoulder-length, harshly cropped hair. (Helferich’s travelogue also recounts, interestingly enough, that Egyptian priests showed him a secret tunnel within the statue in which they could hide and make it appear that the Sphinx was talking.)
The first true approximation the monument’s actual appearance comes from Richard Pococke’s Travels, published in 1743 – though he did take the liberty of penciling in the face’s nonexistent proboscis (believed to have, in fact, been destroyed at least a century before the publication of Thevet’s account). By the time Napoleon paid a visit to Giza in 1798, most of educated Europe knew the Sphinx’s true face – though its body would remain buried in the desert’s dunes, until one of many excavation attempts finally succeeded in 1936.
