The Mummy! Egypt; the 1821 public unwrappings of Egyptian mummies in a theatre near Piccadilly, which she may have attended as a girl; and, very likely, the 1818 novel by Mary Shelley, "Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus." As Shelley had written of Frankenstein's creation, "A mummy again endued with animation could not be so hideous as that wretch," which may have triggered young Miss Webb's later concept. In any case, at many points she deals in greater clarity with elements from the earlier book: the loathing for the much-desired object, the immediate arrest for crime and attempt to lie one's way out
Prometheus the Fire-Bringer and then frees the Titan from his chains. Only a single line of dialogue survives from "Fire-Bringer": "Quiet, where need is; and talking to the point." This fragment is preserved in "Noctes Atticae" by the Roman scholar Aulus Gellius. Additionally, according to a scholium at line 94 of "Prometheus Bound", the Titan claims in "Fire-Bringer" that he had been bound for "thrice ten thousand years." Despite the paucity of direct evidence, Prometheus' foreshadowing of future events in the trilogy's first play suggests that the final play concerned itself with Prometheus' knowledge of a secret that could potentially lead to Zeus's