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Ancient Tombs
Monday, May 29th, 2006 by joelSo I was watching educational television, as I often do for the specific reason that you don’t miss much if you don’t actually look at the screen while it is on, because I watch television mostly while I am inking my comic strip… did you know I did a comic strip? Anyway, a commercial came on the TV, as commercials often do on television because apparently television shows have to make money and the only way to do that is to entice the viewing audience to purchase the products of their financial backers. This particular commercial wasn’t about buying anything, it was about another show on educational television.
It seems that Egyptologists (because the ancient culture of Egypt is SO ancient and cultural, that it deserves its very own category of scientists) have discovered another ancient tomb in Egypt. With, you know, mummies.
Watching this, it occurred to me that we seem to dig up an awful lot of mummies in the last couple of centuries. I mean, sure, we can only assume that plenty of people died in ancient Egypt, but they put those suckers in the ground for a reason, and it’s doubtful that that reason was to be dug up a few thousand years later. Pretty soon, I reasoned, we are going to run out of tombs to raid. Tragedy for the video game industry.
It wasn’t long after that first thought that another one struck me. The ancient Egyptians believed in a bodily resurrection from the grave, that the dead would live again in another world, the land of the dead. Maybe that was a prophesy of our time. Here we are, a world where religious beliefs are floundering, and those bodies are being dug up and subjected to X-rays and graphical reconstruction in computer programs. Maybe this is a sort of resurrection for these people. Meaning that we are, in fact, the land of the dead. Insert meaningful and chilling cultural observation here.
