Mummies are cool. They’re gross, but they’re dry. And they’re scary, but they’re slow. (It’s like they’re in an eternal sack race.)
Anyhow, way back in the ancient Egyptian administration, people had a tough time at funerals. Say old Uncle Sput lived through 100 Nile floodings and finally breathed his last. What were you going to do with him? Nobody wanted to waste scarce bottomland on a cemetery. So, they’d just take him West out into the desert and plant him.
Have you ever tried to dig in dry sand? As soon as you throw away each shovelful, more sand slides back into the hole. You could keep on doing that forever. People got fed up and sort of covered their deceased with a respectable level of loose desert, mumbled to the Hawk God of Darkness, or whatever, and shuffled home.
Trouble was, when they came back later with a barley offering or a nice papyrus arrangement, the wind would have uncovered Uncle Sput and you had to do it all again. They quickly saw two things:
- There was no way they were going to keep digging for the rest of their lives
- Uncle Sput looked about the same each time he reappeared. Kind of crumbly maybe but not wet-zombie nasty.
Finally, some bright Egyptian had an oil lamp go off over his head. (This was before lightbulbs, so that’s what their ideas looked like.) What if they dried out the old coots on purpose? Then you could stack them (respectfully) like cord wood in the shed.
They tried all sorts of methods and concoctions to perfect the process. Today some museums have mummified cats. People didn’t “worship cats;” those were just for practice. They finally managed to get the outsides all crisp, but after a few months it was clear to anybody with a nose that they’d missed something. That’s when they realized it took more than the “exterior only package” to do the job.
“You mean we gotta scoop out the insides, too? Yuck. Don’t look at me. Where’s the new guy?”
The first person to get the full treatment was Pharaoh Utmost I. It took months, salting him down, putting up his guts in jars like Granny’s okra, but in the end, he was a prime piece of Royal Jerky. However, they still had to bury him.
Remembering the hassle with Uncle Sput, they didn’t even try to plant his various remains. Instead, they just laid him out on the sand and built on top of him.
It was going to be a giant cube, but some engineer who had stayed awake during the lectures pointed out that they’d have a heck of a lot fewer stones to haul if they just made the whole monument come to a point.
And that’s why we have the pyramids.
Maybe Pharaoh thought he was hedging his bets keeping his body from rotting away. But even if you decided you didn’t want to spend eternity in the Realm of the Hippo God, would you really want to get reassembled from all those dusty pieces?
“Just add water”? I don’t think so.
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