The Empty Casket

In 1810s, explorers in Cheops’ Great Pyramid brought word to England that the Pharaoh’s tomb was plundered, his sarcophagus empty. (In The Mummy! we learn it was just a decoy tomb.) Lord Byron, in his long satirical poem Don Juan (1819–1824)—perhaps the longest poem in English—memorializes the event this way:

What are the hopes of man? old Egypt’s King
Cheops erected the first pyramid
And largest, thinking it was just the thing
To keep his memory whole, and mummy hid;
But somebody or other...