I recently re-watched 'The Mummy', 2017. The one with Tom Cruise. It's growing on me, somewhat. The introduction of crusader knights at the start is an idea with potential, but nothing much is done with this. (I always thought the idea of crusaders stumbling across some potent ancient mystery during their activities in the East would make for a good story.) The film's pretty bad, from an historical point of view, in that it's claimed that a crusader graveyard found in London dates from the time of Sixth Crusade , and that the knights would have been veterans of a campaign in Egypt. The actual Sixth Crusade (1228-9) fizzled out after a failed siege of Damascus, and went nowhere near Egypt. Several Crusading endeavours, before and after the Sixth Crusade, did go to Egypt. The former included a joint Crusader-Byzantine campaign, and the latter including the Fifth and Seventh Crusades, so why the film-makers couldn't have looked it up and gone with one of those, I don't know.
The Egyptological errors in the film are equally egregious if you know anything about these things. For example the same 'expert' who claims the sarcophagus is '5000 years old' also says that it is from the New Kingdom, which was more like 3000 years ago. It doesn't look like an Egyptian sarcophagus, either, and the tomb, which looks like a cavern and not at all like a tomb, is somehow situated in Iraq, a land quite a long way from Egypt, which the Ancient Egyptians never ruled. It was not somewhere the Egyptians would have been in a position to be building tombs:
The eponymous mummy in question is one Amunet (Sofia Boutella), an Egyptian princess who made a pact with Set (portrayed incorrectly as a diabolical god of death) after being ousted from her place in the royal succession when her father sired a baby son. (After being turned into a monster she proceeds to murder her father and half-brother). This might be the silliest/least explicable part of the plot, as Egyptian royals were quite capable of getting rid of rivals, including inconvenient siblings, without resorting to satanic pacts that play havoc on the eyeballs. The career of Cleopatra, at the end of the Ptolemaic era, exemplifies that fact well enough.
Cleopatra lived closer to our time than to the time of the pyramid building pharaohs of the Fourth Dynasty, who themselves may have been the inheritors of a much older legacy. (The Ptolemies were the 32nd dynasty, and they lasted the better part of 300 years.) The longevity of Egyptian culture is quite astonishing to contemplate, and they must have known something or been doing something right to achieve so much. Nor did Ancient Egypt die with Cleopatra. The funerary custom of mummification remained popular in Egypt for centuries to come, under Roman rule, albeit with more naturalistic portraits attached to the wrappings. The emperors, though absentee landlords, continued to sponsor temple building, in the old style. Caesars were portrayed on the walls in the garb of ancient pharaohs, as had been the Greek/Mascedonian-descended monarchs of the Ptolemaic dynasty. The last known hieroglyphic inscription to be carved, before the Pharaonic civilisation and its knowledge started to slip from memory, dated to 394 AD. That was inscribed in the temple of the goddess Isis on the island of Philae, in Southern Egypt, (a goddess whose cult had meanwhile spread throughout the Roman word.) Isis's island temple was the last bastion of the old religion, only being closed on the orders of the Emperor Justinian in 530s AD, a mere century before the Islamic conquest of Egypt.
The spoken language, with a substituted Greek-based script, survived rather longer as the language of the Coptic Christian. Another legacy of pharaonic civilisation was the kingdom of Nubia, in Sudan, which outlived classical Egyptian civilisation by many centuries, and where rulers continued to build temples to the gods, and to be buried in pyramids (albeit on a more modest scale).
Anyway, thought this was a suitable enough subject to touch upon when I'm bringing this blog back from the dead.
More of a fan of the 90's version of 'The Mummy'. That sort of film seems to work better with a period setting (1900s-1930s) rather than being set in the prosaic present. The idea of Ancient Egyptian mummies coming back to life and terrorising the living began as a sub-genre of gothic horror, with its origins in late 19th and early 20th century fiction. The idea of cursed tombs was present in the culture well before the discovery of Tutankhamun's tomb, and the subsequent death of Lord Carnarvon, a century ago.
Regarding atmospheric literature in the genre, one could do worse than the following:
The Jewel of Seven Stars (Bram Stoker)
Under the Pyramids/Imprisoned with the Pharaohs (HP Lovecraft)
Romance of a Mummy, and The Mummy's Foot, (Theophile Gautier).
The Ring of Thoth (Arthur Conan Doyle).
Crocodile on the Sandbank (Elizabeth Peters).
