13. Mummies Were Unwrapped at Parties
Some of the things that people did to impress their guests and know the satisfaction of having thrown a good party is downright bizarre. Case in point: mummy unwrappings. During the 1800s in Europe, particularly in Victorian England, so-called Egyptomania was taking over. People could not get enough of the artifacts from the exotic land that Britain was colonizing. The demand for mummies, in particular, was so high that some Egyptians took lesser-known mummies and put them in more prestigious places, giving the mummified individuals the appearance of being more critical.
And what did the elite of England do with these mummies? They unwrapped them at dinner parties, revealing the corpse inside. These were highly dramatized affairs, with the person doing the unwrapping concocting a story about how this individual was connected to the Biblical figure of Moses or some other fanciful tale. To complement the mummy unwrapping, many also used the new invention of the X-ray machine to take X-rays of the guests (with their consent; no one at the time knew of the harmful effects of radiation).
Although this trend was mostly an English one, there are some indications that it spread to the United States, as Egyptomania spread there, as well. After all, what better way to leave a truly lasting impression on your guests than by revealing a 4000-year-old corpse? Especially when you have the money to do it.