Horrors! They were straight, white, cis, bearded MEN? What is the world coming to?
Conventional thinking about the mummies of ancient Egypt has been that they were meant to preserve the body of the deceased, so that the soul could return and re-inhabit the body in the afterlife.
A new theory has come forward, the foremost proponent of which is Charles Price of the Manchester (England) Museum.
Price says the Egyptians’ actual intent was to produce statues.
Never mind that no such statue with a mummy at its core has ever yet been found outside, or standing erect. Mummies are normally found inside tombs, with the deceased lying flat on his or her back inside a sarcophagus.
Price says the Egyptians regarded their royalty as gods, and such statues would be consistent with the worship of gods. Never mind that many more than just royalty were mummified; mummies at one time were so common, they were even sold on the street.
“The Egyptologists advancing this view say that the Victorians who first studied mummies concluded that preservation was the goal due to their own macabre fascination with the afterlife.”
Macabre?
Apparently there is little textual evidence to back up either claim.
Apparently also, the foremost argument in favor of either theory lies not in the merits of the claim itself, but the merits of the people who advance it.
“A lot of what we say when we describe ancient Egypt is less about what actually happened in ancient Egypt and more about the assumptions of Victorian upper-middle-class white, cisgender, bearded men,” Price said.
Can there possibly be any merit in any concept such folk come up with?
Comments