Cairo to Kisumu : $b Egypt—The Sudan—Kenya ColonyCarpenter, Frank G. (Frank George)
History
Cairo to Kisumu : $b Egypt—The Sudan—Kenya Colony
Carpenter, Frank G. (Frank George)
Egypt -- Description and travel; Kenya -- Description and travel; Sudan -- Description and travel
The dead past became marvellously real when I looked at another box in
which lay a mummied princess with the body of her tiny baby, not many
days old, in the coffin beside her, and when I saw gold bracelets of the
same patterns that our belles wear to-day and earrings quite as beautiful
as those made by Tiffany, I felt that human nature was the same six
thousand years ago as it is now, and that these people of the past had
the loves and hates, the cares and the vanities of the world of to-day.
I wondered what Rameses took for the colic and whether Queen Akhotupu,
who lived before Moses, and who now lies here, had hysterics. I noted the
flowers which were put in another mummy case beside a king and I could
not reconcile the beautiful teeth and the fine intellectual face of King
Seti, whose daughter is supposed to have found Moses in the bulrushes,
with the fat, bloated fingers, showing that he had the gout. There was as
good living in the days of the Israelites as there is in Egypt to-day,
but then as now, only the rich had fancy cooks and the poor ate scraps.
In the tomb of Ti near Memphis I saw in chambers of granite down under
the sands of the desert, wall after wall covered with painted pictures
of the life of the time when the tomb was made thousands of years before
Christ.
I saw the body of a princess standing upright against the side of the
wall. Her face was plated with gold, and the mummy cloths which wrapped
her round and round were embroidered. One might make a similar bundle of
any modern girl. Another of these ladies had hair which appeared to have
been done up in curl papers, and its colour was as red as my own.
Many of the mummy caskets are splendid. They are made of fine woods,
painted inside and out with pictures describing the life of the
occupants. Some are covered with carvings and some with heads which may
have been likenesses of those who lay within.
It costs much to die now. It must have cost more then. The expense of
making a first-class mummy was twelve hundred dollars, and the money of
that day was worth ten times what it is now. The caskets, which were
more expensive than any of the coffins we have to-day, were incased in
great sarcophagi of stone or wood, a single one of which must have cost a
fortune.
I have asked the archæologists why the Egyptians made their mummies.
Their reply is that the desire for mummification came from the religion
of the ancient Egyptians, who believed in the transmigration of souls.
They thought that the spirit wandered about for several thousand years
after death and then came back to the home it had upon earth. For this
reason it was desirable to keep the body intact, for every one looked to
his mummihood as his only chance of re-creation hereafter.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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