An illustration of mummies from Providence Public Library Special Collections

Folio Balcony & Mummies

April 26, 2016

Today I got to visit the elusive Folio Balcony and I noticed a big blue book on a shelf  titled ‘Necropolis of Ancon in Peru.’ It was a book of water color drawings of German Ethnologists digging up tons of peruvian mummies published in 1887. It’s unfortunate that the W. Reiss and A. Stubel dug all these folks up, but I’m glad they at least had an unnamed artist document everything before they dragged them out of the ground and sloshed them across the Atlantic back to the Royal German Ethnological Museum. If I get mummified I don’t know if I would care if anyone dug me up as long as they waited 1,000 years or so. But my guess is that they’d have preferred to be in a Peruvian museum if nothing else.