The First Mummy

I love ancient Egyptian history.   The pyramids, mummies, Valley of the Kings, Abu Simbel, hieroglyphics, the Book of the Dead, you name it, I find it fascinating.  I’m not sure exactly what triggered my obsession with Egyptian antiquity.   It could have been a combination of things, but I remember two things specifically.

When I was quite young my parents went with a group of college students for a summer-long study abroad program.   My parents were two of the instructors on the trip.   It is probably to this day the most memorable trip I’ve ever been on.   Everything seemed so different in England, where we spent the majority of the summer.

I remember how ice cream tasted different and there were licorice AllSorts, a candy I developed a lifelong love of.   The bacon and eggs tasted different but somehow the same.   The churches were huge and old.   Everything seemed old in comparison to where I lived.  Hundreds of years old and carved out of stone.

That summer we went to a lot of museums.   We saw a lot of exhibits, mostly forgotten by me.   One thing I remember clearly was a mummy, or rather a naturally mummified body of a pre-dynastic Egyptian man.   He was curled up in the fetal position, lying in sand with pottery around him.  He was over five-thousand years old and yet you cold still see wispy hair on his head.

I was in awe as I looked at the naturally mummified body.   When we returned home my parents found a book on ancient Egypt and gave it to me.   The section on mummies wasn’t long, but I read it over and over, referring back to it many times over the following years.

When I went to college I went on my own study abroad program, this time to Egypt.   I saw many mummies, went in the Great Pyramid of Giza, descended the steps into Tutankhamen’s tomb, explored the temples at Abu Simbel, walked up the grand incline into Hatshepsut’s temple, rode on a boat down the Nile, and that’s just the highlights.   It was truly a trip to remember.

I still love to watch documentaries on ancient Egypt.  I found several series on Amazon Prime a few weeks ago and have been watching them at night.  In one show the other night, the host (an archaeologist I’ve seen in many shows and feel I know her well) went to London, to look at an exhibit of a pre-dynastic mummy, saying what I’ve heard many times before: that perhaps that by seeing bodies desiccated and preserved naturally by the sands in Egypt, the Egyptians got the notion to try and replicate the process, ultimately culminating in the mummification process that preserved so many Egyptians over the millennia.

As I watched the show, I looked at the mummy I had seen forty years before, looking just as it had when I was in England as a child.  The thing that may have started my lifelong obsession with Egypt.

The Big Boy Update:  My daughter has a friend over for a sleepover today.  My son desperately wants to be with them and do everything they’re doing—including putting his sleeping bag and pillow in the bonus room so he can camp out with them.   The girls don’t want anything to do with him.   He is sad.   He told me, “I just want to be included.”

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  My daughter and her VI friend, Aditi, have coordinated their own sleepover, unbeknownst to her mother and me.   Fortunately we were able to have today work out.   Aditi goes to India for a month on Tuesday and then we’re gone for a good while when they return.   The next time they’ll have to get together won’t be until August.