Marie Corelli's 1897 novel Ziska: The Problem of a Wicked Soul begins and ends in the sands beneath the Great Pyramid with the ever-watchful sphinx looking on. In the novel's prologue a voice arises in the darkness, and as it dissolves, a figure takes shape: “a Shadow and a Shape that flitted out like a thin vapor from the very portals of Death's ancient temple, and […] resolved itself into the visionary fairness of a Woman's form—a Woman whose dark hair fell about her heavily, like the black remnants of a long-buried corpse's wrappings” (8). Ziska, a reincarnated ancient Egyptian harem dancer, is both heroine and villain of the tale. Still bearing signs of her own mummification, she awakens in late nineteenth-century Egypt to exact revenge for her murder in a past life at the hands of her lover Araxes, now reincarnated as a Decadent French painter named Armand Gervase.

A few years after the novel's publication, in November 1901, Corelli delivered a lecture for the Edinburgh Philosophical Institution entitled “The Vanishing Gift: An Address on the Decay of Imagination.” In her speech she observed, “The colossal architecture of the temples of ancient Egypt, and that marvelous imaginative creation the Sphinx, with its immutable face of mingled scorn and pity […] these are all visible evidences of spiritual aspiration and endeavor” (FO 277). For Corelli archeological remnants provided a window into both spiritual and material domains, and their endurance solidified a material and spiritual connection between past and present peoples. Archeology had developed as a discipline throughout the nineteenth century, and by the 1890s, archeological exploits pervaded the popular press and filled museums and private collections with artifacts. Especially after 1882, when England began its informal occupation of Egypt, imperialists and plunderers brought ancient Egyptian artifacts back to England by the boatload, and archeological adventure inspired works by many of Corelli's contemporaries. In fact, through an article published on March 24, 1923, in the Daily Express—“Pharaoh Guarded by Poisons? Lord Carnarvon Warned by Marie Corelli”—Corelli became responsible for perpetuating one of the most famous archeological stories to date. Citing “a rare book” in her possession “which is not in the British Museum,” she warns, “The most dire punishment follows any rash intruder into a sealed tomb,” instigating the legend of the curse of Tutankhamen's tomb (“Pharaoh”).