The Mummy

 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 tomb also featured a well of liquid mercury into which the sarcophagus was sunk. Apparently mercury was known in ancient Egypt and has been found in tombs. I doubt there was anything like this (although the tombs of Chinese emperors were said to contain rivers of mercury, and mercury has also been found in a pre-Aztec pyramid at Teotihuacan, Mexico.). 

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).

Moses and Ancient Egypt

It has been speculated (that the biblical prophet Moses could have had links to Atenism, the monotheistic solar cult introduced to (and imposed upon) the Ancient Egyptians by the maverick Pharaoh Akhenaten (died c. 1336 BC). One famous individual to advance this theory was psycho-analyst Sigmund Freud, in an essay of 1939. This theory makes Atenism the precusrosr of Jewish and ultimately Christian monotheis. Sometimes Moses' God is called Adonai, which, as it was claimed, may be a related word to Aten/Aton. This linguisitc association does not seem wuthstand scrutiny, but other connections have been made besides. There are, for example, similarities between the Biblical Psalm 104 and the so-called 'great hymn to Aten' This hymn, attributed to the heretic king, was inscribed in a tomb near Akhenaten's short lived capital Akhetaten (modern Tel-El Amarna).
The tomb in question was the original tomb of Ay, the Grand Visier, who ultimately succeeded as Pharaoh and who turned his back on Atenism (after the brief reigns of Semkhare and Tutankhamen). Ay was succeeded as king by Horemhab, the general of the army. Horemhab totally erased the cult of Aten. If there was a pharaoh who expelled the Hebrews he is a likely candidate. (This expulsion may have coincided with the Thera eruption, fall out from which could explain the plagues of Egypt- it's a compelling theory anyway and one explored well by Graham Phillips among others). Some have even supported the claim that Moses and Akhenaten were one and the same. This hypothesis seems highly unlikely. Surely if a former king became a prophet it would have been recorded somewhere. Moses could, however, have been a priest of Aten fleeing Horemhab's persecution.

The idea of the Ark of the Covenant, which Moses introduced, does not seem to me to be reconcilable with what we know of Atenism or any form of solar worship. It is more like a shrine for an ancient Egyptian idol, with poles for carrying in procession. This seems to tap into an older Egyptian tradition- although in the Ark's case the conventional statue was replaced by the stone tablets of the law. Moses does not seem to have completely practiced the monotheism he supposedly preached. The 'cherubim' on the Ark have their precedents in the winged Egyptian goddesses Isis and Nepthys, and another part of the Bible Moses (Numbers 21: 4-9) seems to instruct his followers to venerate a brazen statue of a serpent, as a protection against snake bites. This is hard to reconcile with the commandments against idolatry or the making of graven images; or the outrage with which Moses reacted to the worship of the golden calf! Maybe, in the latter case, he was not so concerned with idolatry in itself, but in the people engaging in religious practices which he himself did not control.

This is largely speculation, and there is no definitive archaeological evidence for the Biblical exodus from Egypt. The first known mention of the tribe of Israel occurs on the Merneptah Stele. This is a stone inscribed in heiroglyphs during the reign of the Egyptian Pharaoh Merneptah in the early 1200s BC, commemorating the Pharaoh's victories in the Levant. Merneptah was the fourth king of the 19th dynasty, which succeeded after Horemhab (the last of the 18th). Mermeptah's inscription mentions Israel in the following context:

'Canaan is captive with all woe. Ashkelon is conquered, Gezer (Gaza) seized, Yanoam made nonexistent; Israel is wasted, bare of seed.'

If Israel's exodus from Egypt was a relatively recent happening then the tribe might well be expected to be found in the border region of Ashkelon and Gaza. (It is also apparent from the language that 'Israel' here refers to a people rather than a territory). If this is to be squared with the Bible, however, then the tribe can't have been quite as wasted as the Egyptians made out. It may be noted that there is no Egyptian mention of the Israelites as escaped slaves, and at any rate this impression is difficult to square with other parts of scripture. (The received 'Ten Commandments', for example, seem to be addressing slave-owners as much as escaped slaves.)