Because the sleep of the dead is light. The mummy as a fictional character, an eastern scourge against foolish profaners

Abstract

Encouraged by the growing success of travel literature in the eighteenth-century Europe, by the informations that boldest romantic explorers provided and by fascination for the Near East that the recent discoveries in Egyptology had aroused in readers, throughout the XIX and XX we witness the flourishing of an orientalized horror narrative whose main protagonist is the mummy. Under the influence of fashionable spiritualism and the latent remorse caused by the looting of cultural heritage that the Napoleonic campaigns had started, a mummy revived and thirsty for revenge because of the wrongs suffered, because of plundering from its land by foreign hands, is shaped. A mummy that sometimes even insists on make up for lost time by looking for an old love.