Showing posts with label mummy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label mummy. Show all posts

Thursday, May 30, 2024

May 30 2024 - Seti is a Must See

 

Now I am confused.  Was Seti (or Sety) the greatest king of the Egyptians or is he the greatest mummy of the Egyptians.  A program on television last night described his mummification as the most sophisticated of any.  The mummy is on display at the Egyptian Museum in Cairo. The methods used to make his face to look life-like are complex.

His sarcophagus was alabaster.  Can you imagine?  I saw a picture of it in a British Museum.  

All that lavish attention spent towards getting Seti into the afterlife in good shape.  What about the regular Egyptians?  Did they have an afterlife?  Here's one article on the subject:
 

 "The dead had to negotiate a dangerous underworld journey and face the final judgment before they were granted access. If successful, they were required to provide eternal sustenance for their spirit. These things could be achieved if proper preparations were made during a person’s lifetime."

Can you imagine being stuck preparing for your retirement, and then for your afterlife?  What a burden.  With all our social issues, this seems like we have a much brighter perspective on living and dying. 

Here's more:

"The dead were granted a plot of land in the afterlife and were expected to maintain it, either by performing the labour themselves or getting their shabtis to work for them. Shabtis were small funerary statuettes inscribed with a spell that miraculously brought them to life, enabling the dead person to relax while the shabtis performed their physical duties."

And the afterlife is known as the "underworld" - this can't go very well.  And it goes into eternity, doesn't it?  



“To die, to sleep – to sleep, perchance to dream – ay, there's the rub, for in this sleep of death what dreams may come…”

Hamlet knew a thing or two about the Egyptians - even though everything we know about them came after the Rosetta Stone when their language could be interpreted.  


Our picture today comes from an Australian cemetery.  
 

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Sunday, January 29, 2023

Jnan 292023 - Ancient Mummy X-rays

 

It was a century ago in November that Howard Carter opened the tomb of the boy king Tutankhamun. vHe found gold and jewels, furniture, clothing, and the famous gold face mask.

The finding that was extraordinary was a dagger in the mummy's bindings.  It was made of iron, before a time when the Egyptians learned to smelt. It could have come from the ancient Hittite Empire but that turned out not to be the case.  

The dagger was analyzed with X-rays and found to be made of meteoric iron.  The meteorite is known as Kharga.   The investigations have continued, and it is considered a possible wedding gift to Amenhotep III by the king of Mitanni. This was bolstered by the fact that the team found the gemstones in the gold hilt had been attached with lime plaster. Although lime plaster was commonly used in Mitanni at the time, Egyptians preferred to use gypsum plaster.

More X-ray activity has been occurring recently.  Here's a headline: "Scientists unwrapped the secrets without unraveling the mummies."  They used "The Advanced Photon Source"  X-ray machine.  

What did it see? The preserved remains of what is likely an ancient Egyptian girl about five years old.

"Experts dated this particular mummy back to the Roman era (beginning in 30 B.C.). It was discovered in Hawara, Egypt and excavated in 1911, eventually making its way to the library of the Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary on Northwestern’s Evanston, Illinois campus. In 2018, the mummy became the centerpiece of an exhibition on campus, joining a series of Roman-Egyptian mummy portraits, representations of people embalmed within mummies that were excavated from areas near Hawara."

There are many X-ray projects now.  We'll never get tired of Egyptian Mummies.  They represent a universally fascinating and compelling time in history.

My version of gold - captured reflections of the sunset on water.

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marilyncornwellblogspot.com

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