Frank L. Holt's "A Mystery from the Mummy-Pits"

Frank L. Holt is Professor of History at the University of Houston. His previous books include When Money Talks: A History of Coins and Numismatics, The Treasures of Alexander the Great: How One Man's Wealth Shaped the World, Lost World of the Golden King: In Search of Ancient Afghanistan, and Into the Land of Bones: Alexander the Great in Afghanistan. Holt is also a prolific writer for the public, with essays appearing in Newsweek, American Scientist, Archaeology, History Today, Archaeology Odyssey, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Saudi Aramco World, and other widely read publications.

Holt applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, A Mystery from the Mummy-Pits: The Amazing Journey of Ankh-Hap, and reported the following:

Every detective wonders what little clue might finally resolve a perplexing mystery. It might be a whiff of poison, a spent bullet, or lipstick left on a champagne glass. On page 99 of A Mystery from the Mummy-Pits, that clue takes the form of a few scraps of newspaper and an American Express mailing label. The real surprise is that this incriminating evidence was found stuffed inside the coffin of an ancient Egyptian mummy. Most detectives do not face a millennial ‘crimeline’, but this case was unusual in every respect – including the bizarre clue that would eventually turn the tide:

Inside the coffin of Ankh-Hap... the extraneous materials all date to a nine-week span between March 25 and May 29, 1914. Most of the scraps came from Rochester, New York, with a connection there to a company founded in 1862 called Ward’s Scientific Establishment. What was the possible link between this business and the HMNS mummy?

I had moved the mummy of Ankh-Hap from the Houston Museum of Natural Science to a research lab for a pioneering CT-scan. The resulting images looked like crime scene photos. Hidden beneath his wrappings, the deceased was missing much of his skeletal structure including most of his ribs, spine, and arms. There were wasp nests in his fractured skull and a set of wooden poles ran through his body from head to ankles. Radiocarbon analysis showed that the coffin, wrappings, and internal poles dated from very different periods. To explain these findings, I needed to retrace the mummy’s travels. The paper scraps led me to Henry Augustus Ward (1834-1906) and the story of commercial mummy trafficking in America. His correspondence and company records revealed a macabre trail between the mummy-pits of Egypt and his storage shelves stocked with mummies and assorted body parts. How and when poor Ankh-Hap left those shelves for a busy afterlife in Texas, including being lost in an abandoned restroom, would call upon other clues beyond the scope of page 99.

Overall, readers will find page 99 a fair reflection of this book, which unfolds as a true-to-life (and death) mystery based upon numerous historical and scientific clues. If there is any shortcoming in the test, it is that whole chapters take us beyond the individual case of Ankh-Hap to examine the larger context of mummies in modern American life, literature, and movies.

Learn more about A Mystery from the Mummy-Pits at the Oxford University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: The Treasures of Alexander the Great.

The Page 99 Test: When Money Talks.

--Marshal Zeringue