"An archaeologist's dream and biggest challenge"

A comprehensive article by Will Hobson about the significance of having the rightful place to preserve and exhibit Egypt’s vast archaeological legacy. I especially like the following paragraphs for his views on ancient Egyptian’s obsession with life (not death as many suppose) and three good reasons why Egypt has so much archaeological wealth.

The Ancient Egyptians were obsessed by life rather than death. They were determined in every way they knew how to prolong the sheer sweetness and sensuousness and physicality of being alive – alive as perhaps you could only be when living on the plentiful banks of Nile in the midst of what, originally at least, you thought to be unending desert. They wished their dead “bread, beer, and prosperity”; hard to think of anything further removed from the Judaeo-Christian tradition of an immortal self shedding its corporeal form, its “prison”, at death. The body was a crucial part of their individual existence, hence the necessity of mummification, and their entire theology was designed not to justify death – for instance as God’s revenge on us for our original sin – but to defeat it with the help of any one of their thousands of gods.

At first only the Pharaoh was thought to be able to enjoy the pleasures of this world in paradise, but as time passed, huge swathes of society became eligible. Everything, depending of course on whether it was war or peacetime, became more elaborate and manifold: mummification techniques, spells, rituals, blithely contradictory myths, offerings, temples, pyramids, jewellery, literature. And because they were such good craftsmen and the desert is so good at preserving things and their civilisation lasted so long, Egypt is both an archaeologist’s dream and biggest challenge. Some simply give up. Around two million mummified ibis are thought to be stored in the catacombs of Saqqara, but no one is prepared to spend any more time working out exactly how many. But, even more pressing, once you do find something, what on earth are you supposed to do with it?

www.guardian.co.uk

Related posts:

1. Archaeologists rebuild Egypt's 3,000-year-old glass furnace
2. Archaeologists go in the Nile
3. Archaeologists discover mummies from Greco Roman period in Egypt
4. Alexander the Great's "Crown," Shield Discovered?

Tags: ancient egyptian religion, Archaeology

This entry was posted on Saturday, May 31st, 2008 at 8:24 am and is filed under Egyptology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.