How long one must be dead before his “relics”—including not only his
remains proper, but the several appurtenances thereunto belonging—cease
to be “sacred,” is a question which has never been settled. London was
once divided in opinion, or rather in feeling, as to the propriety
of publicly exhibiting the body-linen worn by Charles I when that
unhappy monarch had the uncommon experience of losing his head. Not
only was this underwear shown, but also some of the royal hair which
was cut away by the headsman. Many persons considered the exhibition
distasteful and in a measure sacrilegious. But the entire body of the
great Rameses has been dug out and is freely shown without provoking a
protest.
Rameses was a mightier king than Charles, and a more famous. He was the
veritable Pharaoh of sacred history whose daughter (who, I regret to
say, was also his wife) found the infant Moses in the bulrushes. He
could also point with pride to his record in profane history, and was,
altogether, a most respectable person. Between the power, splendor and
civilization of the Egypt of Rameses and the England of Charles there
is no comparison: in the imperishable glory of the former the latter
seems a nation of savage pigmies. Why, then, are the actual remains of
the one monarch considered a fit and proper “exhibit” in a museum and
the mere personal adornments of the other too sacred for desecration
by the public eye? Probably political and ethnic considerations have
something to do with it: perhaps in Cairo the sentiment would be the
other way, though the stoical indifference of successive Egyptian
Governments to mummy-mining by the thrifty European does not sustain
that view.
Schliemann and many of his moling predecessors have dug up and removed
the sleeping ancients from what these erroneously believed to be their
last resting-places in Asia Minor and the other classic countries,
without rebuke, and the funeral urn of an illustrious Roman can be
innocently haled from its pigeon-hole in a _columbarium_. We open
the burial mounds of our Indian predecessors and pack off their skulls
with never a thought of wrong, and even the bones of our own early
settlers when in course of removal to make way for a new city hall
are treated with but scant courtesy. There seems to be no statute of
limitations applicable to the sanctity of tombs; every case is judged
on its merits, with a certain loose regard to local conditions and
considerations of expediency.
It was an ancient belief that the shade of even the most worthy
deceased could not enter Elysium so long as the body was unburied,
but no provision was made for expulsion of those already in if their
bodies were exhumed and used as “attractions” for museums. So we may
reasonably hope that the companions of Agamemnon contemplate the
existence of Schliemanns with philosophic indifference; and doubtless
Rameses the Great, who, according to the religion of his country, had
an immortality conditioned on the preservation of his mortal part, is
as well content that it lie in a museum as in a pyramid.