Like many kids, the Ancient Egyptians fascinated me. I read everything that I could find about them. I know “many” does a lot of work in that first sentence, but please extend a little forbearance my way. Sometimes I like to pretend that I’m not a nerd. The relative uniqueness of my middle school obsession aside, I found myself entranced by the Ancient Egyptians unit in social studies. The Ancient Greeks and Romans also captured my interest, but the Egyptians came before them in the lesson plans, so they have a special place in my heart. The Nile River, the pyramids, mummies, King Tut, and the Sphinx all still conjure up memories. I read books about Ancient Egypt, non-fiction, and fiction - shout out The Amulet of Samarkand and Egyptology – watched movies and went to museum exhibits about Ancient Egypt. I’d be lying if I said this obsession stopped in middle school. Hell, I saw that godawful Tom Cruise movie The Mummy in theaters.
American media takes some of the blame for my obsession with early Nile Delta civilizations. Mummies, boy kings, and ancient curses have been the subject of movies, TV shows, and countless fantasy and fiction pieces. As a kid who read predominately science fiction and fantasy, those tales immediately drew my interest. A lot of fantasy and sci-fi authors just steal from Egyptian legends anyway. Egyptian civilization felt, and still feels, impossibly old, lasting in some form or another for thousands of years. The fact that many of the pyramids still stand remains an amazing feat of human engineering, especially in today’s world where everything seems built to break the second you buy it. On top of that the coterie of Gods worshipped by the Egyptians – Isis, Osiris, Thoth, Ra – to name a few, evoke the imagination in ways that few others do. Mummification, so odd to modern eyes, provides a boogeyman and a touch of the occult to everything that Ancient Egypt touches. A ripe mélange for waiting for a nerdy kid to get sucked into.
Of course, and here comes the downer note, the evils of colonialism, orientalism, and various other forms of racism completely cloud my view of all of this. Much of the US and the European world’s knowledge of Egypt comes from a relentless thieving of their artifacts, and a plundering of their cultural heritage. French, English, and various other European colonists raided tombs, desecrated graves, and destroyed holy sites in the name of “exploration.” That’s not even mentioning the political and economic pillaging of the people of Egypt during this time. They helped create and spread myths about the Ancient Egyptians at the same time they emptied the Pyramids in the name of science. In one of the more obscene violations of Ancient Egyptian culture, rich Europeans in the 16th and 17th centuries ate mummies in an attempt to cure themselves of various diseases. Treating people they saw as beneath them as food. Racism can be subtle, but it often isn’t.
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It is primarily from the British, though the rest of colonizing Europe did their part, that we get ideas of Ancient Egyptians as “mysterious,” and “occult,” as well as ideas that they couldn’t have done all that they did. Racism is at the core of the idea that aliens built the pyramids. I mean, if humans love anything it is stacking big things on top of one another. The excavation and sale of cultural touchstones brought in millions of pounds for rich English royalty and businesspeople and destroyed places like Cairo for a long time. Ideas of ancient curses dooming grave robbers to unsightly deaths, mummies walking around with outstretched arms, all these ideas come from colonizing Europeans. The truth is that Ancient Egyptians are no odder than any other ancient peoples. It wasn’t just the Ancient Egyptians who wrapped their dead. People all around the world use mummification practices and they are commonplace today. We just call it preservation or embalming to make it seem less foreign. Hell if you want odd, the Greeks worshipped a God who turned into a swan to seduce human women and thought unibrows represented superior intelligence. They also staged violent gladiatorial combat for the delight of screaming crowds. Okay, maybe that part isn’t that different from modern times, but still.
Very real differences, both biological, and more significant to this piece, cultural, sociological, and political, exist between modern peoples of all places and people of the ancient past. The people of Ancient Greece, Mesopotamia, the Americas, China, wherever, are as different to the people reading this as a dog is to a cat. They have the same number of eyes and legs, but beyond that, the differences are stark. Ancient peoples thought about and lived in the world in far different ways than we do. To say it in fancier words, they had different cosmologies than us. Different epistemologies, different ways of knowing how the world worked, and different ways of interacting with it. The past is a foreign country as they say. They had problems specific to them, unrecognizable as issues to us today. None of that is inherently wrong or bad, just different.
They were still humans, however, so the similarities that are there are important. The mummification process helped develop medicine, bringing ideas of suturing, stitching, and other advanced medical techniques to the world. Egyptians learned a lot about the body and made important advances in math, farming, and building technology during the time of the Old and New Kingdoms. There is a lot that modern peoples owe to the Ancient Egyptians.
All of this is not to say that no one should ever use mummies in fiction or talk about the pyramids again or whatever. It’s still very cool to think about. I would love it if when I died, I was met by a god with the head of a dog who weighed my soul against a feather. The Egyptians also named a collection of texts about the afterlife Book of Emerging Forth into the Light – this is more commonly known as the Book of the Dead, but that name came from a German guy in the 1800s – which is pretty sick. The trick, as with pretty much everything in the world, is to treat it with respect. To understand that you are a visitor, and you should do things that visitors do. Understand that you’re ignorant, that you’ll probably mess up something, and that you should apologize when that happens. Don’t be an asshole, basically. Easier said than done, I guess.
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Another great read, Dylan.
Sorry that I have been absent for a little while. I know that you live for the feedback, so here is a minor dose of life for you.
It is not too often that my people get to read something referencing both Egyptians AND Germans in the same piece without some prayer to the dead or the like being offered, but we are a kind and forgiving people so I just focused on my enjoyment of your prose.
Thanks.
Your writing never ceases to entertain and educate.