Sir Alexander Seton's Troublesome Bone... Again

After writing my last blog post, I began wondering about the original owner of that cursed bone. I didn't expect to find anything out about her, but Alexander's various reports of his visit to the tomb included specific information that turned out to be extremely helpful, 

According to his memoir, Alexander and Zeyla Seton stayed at the Mena House Hotel in Cairo, where ‘the great Pyramid towers over the hotel’. The guide, Abdul, told Alexander that new tombs had recently been discovered ‘behind the Pyramid’. They were not of any great importance, Abdul explained, but one of the tombs was going to be examined the following day, and he could arrange for the Setons to see inside it.

The tomb was ‘pre-mummy era’ and ‘had at one time been filled by the mud of the Nile’. The Setons descended about thirty stone steps to reach the burial chamber and there saw the remains of a skeleton lying on a stone slab. The skull and leg bones were clearly visible, and the spine was almost intact, but few of the ribs remained; ‘water and mud had removed most.’ There was no inscription present to identify the tomb’s occupant, but she was described by the guide as ‘a high-class girl’.

After looking at plans of the area around the great pyramid, I concluded that the tombs ‘behind the Pyramid’ (in relation to the position of the Setons' hotel) and ‘not of any great historical value’ must be the mastabas¹ of the Central Field, many of which were excavated by Selim Hassan² (see photo right) between 1929 and 1939. His findings were recorded in his ten-volume work Excavations at Giza. The excavations of 1936 were covered in The Mastabas of the Seventh Season and Their Description.

The seventh season began on 1 October 1935, and reaching the tombs turned out to be ‘strenuous and exhausting’ as the workmen had to clear large mounds of debris several metres high; chippings, debris, and rubbish had formed a solid mass, cemented together by mud-laden storm water.

In one unplundered tomb, entrance to which was gained via a sloping passage, the sarcophagus was ‘entirely filled with mud’; it had seeped through holes and cracks in the mortar of the chamber and had to be extracted from the sarcophagus ‘flake by flake’ to reveal the skeleton of a woman. Though there was no inscription to identify the occupant of the tomb, its position, between those of two members of the fourth dynasty Khafra family, suggested the deceased female was a member of that royal family.

Hassan designated the tomb ‘The Mastaba of the Princess, Daughter of Khafra’; it is now referred to as G8250. A report of the tomb's discovery in the Illustrated London News (11 April 1936) included a photograph of the portrait head found in the tomb (see below), and described the position of the skeleton when it was uncovered: ‘extended on its back with head to the north’.

There were various other items found in the tomb—jewellery, beads, pottery, the bones of a sacrificial ox, etc—but by the time the Setons visited it these would have been removed, leaving only the skeleton for them to see.

I could be wrong (though my husband insists that this is never a possibility!), but Alexander's description of the tomb, its location, the timing, and the skeleton's muddy condition strongly suggest to me the one discovered by Selim Hassan. And given the amount of coverage the discoveries in Egypt got, and the detail included in reports, I'm surprised nobody saw the connection between the troublesome bone and the mud-covered occupant of G8250 at the time. 

For more information about the various excavations in Egypt, there's The Giza Project at Harvard University. In addition to plans and the such like, you can read the various volumes of Selim Hassan's Excavations at Giza.

__________
1 Mastaba: a type of ancient Egyptian tomb; a flat-roofed, rectangular structure with sloping sides.
2 The Egyptologist Selim Hassan was the first native Egyptian to be appointed Professor of Egyptology at the University of Cairo.

Sir Alexander Seton's Troublesome Bone

I have a liking for tales of cursed Egyptian objects; that's one of the reasons I am so fond of Out of the Ages by Devereux Pryce. There's something very appealing about the idea that a person who has the cheek to remove a relic from an Egyptian tomb will end up haunted or, better still, dead under mysterious circumstances. After the discovery of Tutankhamen's tomb, tales of curses and death coming on swift wings to those who entered tombs and removed relics were very popular, and yet people (well, well off ones anyway) still took souvenirs from burial sites. That's what Sir Alexander Seton and his wife did, and—if you believe his account of what followed—their souvenir gave them nothing but trouble.

According to his account in the Daily News (2 April 1937), Alexander and his wife, Zeyla, visited Egypt in 1936 and stayed for a time in Cairo. Having received permission from 'someone high in Egyptian Ministerial circles', they visited the excavations at Giza, which at the time were not open to the public. They were shown a newly-opened tomb, and then, noticing numerous bones lying about the place, Zeyla 'expressed a great desire' to have one (because taking a bone home as a souvenir when you visit a grave is a perfectly normal thing to do). A local was persuaded to crawl into a hole to retrieve a bone, and the Setons were very pleased with their relic, which they 'treated as a joke'. At least, this was the account given to the various newspapers at the time. According to Alexander's version of events in his unpublished memoir, Zeyla went back alone to the tomb to swipe a bone without his knowledge.

However the bone came into her possession, an Egyptian guide begged Zeyla to return it to its tomb, but she refused, and it remained with the Setons throughout the remainder of their holiday. It then travelled with them when they returned home to 15 Learmonth Gardens in Edinburgh (Alexander making the journey a month before his wife, who is shown with the troublesome bone in the image below), and that was when their troubles began.

According to the Daily News report, both Alexander and Zeyla became quite ill, but they did not at first suspect the bone, which was kept in a glass case in their drawing room, of being the cause. Some time later, a young nephew, who had been told nothing of the bone, was frightened one night when he saw 'a figure walk across the landing into the drawing-room.' Then another visitor to the house saw the same figure, and the Setons began to associate their troubles with their Egyptian relic.

In January 1937, a friend of the Setons warned them, during a card reading, that 'there was some curious influence in the house', and a short time after this Alexander became ill again. Towards the end of the same month, Zeyla fell ill, followed by their child, their nurse, and their maid, and Alexander experienced a feeling which he described as 'merely dread of knowing one was not alone.' Alexander took the bone to an eminent surgeon and was told that it was a female sacrum (a triangular bone in the lower back). Like the Egyptian guide, the surgeon suggested that the bone should be returned to Egypt.

In March 1937, Alexander went into his drawing room one afternoon to find, to his amazement, that the glass case which contained the bone had been completely shattered, despite the fact that the room had been empty. Alexander insisted that he was 'not a frightened housewife', and not in the habit of smashing his own glassware, and suggested that 'the old story that the Egyptians particularly had powers of cursing anyone who disturbed their earthly remains had something in it.'

According to a report in the Weekly Dispatch (28 March 1937), as a result of the sacred bone's presence there were two fires at the Setons' home, guests complained of seeing a robed figure, and no maids would remain in the house; it was also claimed that the maid of the surgeon who examined the relic broke her leg when she fell down some stairs while fleeing 'a robed figure'. By the end of March, Alexander (pictured right) had announced that his wife intended to travel to Egypt to return the bone to its tomb (Daily Mirror, 29 March 1937).

On 9 April, Alexander gave an account of the strange events surrounding the Egyptian relic at a meeting at Edinburgh Psychic College. Shortly after he finished speaking, Mrs Bateman, a well-known clairvoyant from London, took to the stage and foretold that if the bone was not returned to Egypt within six weeks 'blindness will come upon those who touch it' (The Scotsman, 10 April 1937). As far as I am aware, nobody did go blind, but the table upon which the bone rested was said to have been 'lifted by an unknown agency, carried to the middle of the floor, and overturned.'

A couple of months after the bone's case was destroyed, The Scotsman reported on 20 May that Alexander had found the bone and its new case smashed to pieces the previous day, and that he intended to give both a decent burial. Following the bone's destruction, all was quiet for a while (Chelmsford Chronicle, 11 June 1937).

But in August, the troublesome bone was in the news again when the Sunday Post reported that Zeyla was planning to go to America to take part in a radio dramatisation of the Setons' story, as suggested by Robert E. Ripley of 'Believe It or Not' fame. Coincidentally, the bone fragments, which had given the Setons no trouble for months, suddenly set themselves on fire inside a drawer; Alexander had extinguished them with a soda syphon. Zeyla expressed her willingness to take part in the dramatisation 'for the fun of the thing', and Alexander was planning to take part in a similar broadcast in this country.

In his unpublished memoir, Alexander's version of the burning of the bone is very different from that given to the newspapers. Having decided that something had to be done about the troublesome relic, he enlisted the help of his uncle, Father Benedict of St Benedict’s Abbey at Fort Augustus. Following an exorcism, the bone was burned, and Alexander made sure that not a single fragment of it survived.

By the beginning of 1938, both dramatisation projects had fallen through, and Alexander announced again that the bone was being returned to Egypt, this time by a friend whom he would not name in case an attempt was made to steal the relic (Dundee Evening Telegraph, 10 January 1938). According to the newspaper report, what remained of the bone was being kept in a cupboard at Learmonth Gardens. It is difficult to understand, though, what could be kept in a cupboard or returned to Egypt as the bone had been completely destroyed by this time.

Anyway, interest in the Egyptian bone was very much on the wane by this time. Luckily, the Setons had another relic waiting in the wings. In June 1938, the Daily Record reported that, while at his club, Alexander had received a mysterious note about a buddha figure that had been given to his father by a friend who'd been present during the looting of Lhasa. It was the buddha, the note claimed, that was responsible for the Setons' misfortunes. It went on to say that Alexander would find the figure lying on the drawing room floor with a damaged arm when he returned to Learmonth Gardens. Sure enough, the buddha was exactly where the mysterious note said it would be when Alexander got home, and its arm was indeed damaged. Alexander claimed to have no belief in magic, but he was 'beginning to wonder'.

The Setons divorced in 1939. Both remarried and attempted to move on, but Zeyla wasn't terribly happy, suffered from ill health, and died in 1963 at the young age of fifty-nine. Alexander remained firmly convinced that taking a relic from an Egyptian tomb brought bad luck, and that the bone he and his wife had brought back from Giza had had an evil influence upon his life. He died nine and a half months before Zeyla at the age of fifty-eight.