Tomb Raiding

Corrie and I were watching a program about the excavations of ancient tombs in Egypt. It was a very good and interesting series of episodes, and they showed the wide variety of women involved in running dig sites in Egypt.

As something that makes sense, each and every site has an official of the Egyptian government on site. They are there to hear the news of whatever finds there are, and they make sure that the tight schedules are kept. And they are serious.

But the main theme of nearly every single site is the near total desecration and destruction of every tomb. Mummies broken and strewn everywhere in tiny sand- and rubble-filled dugouts fill most sites. It's quite remarkable, really. So many corpses, and so much desecration. And many of the corpses show the vast amounts of care that went into preserving them.

And something I didn't know was that mummification wasn't just for the ultra elites. Many affluent ancient Egyptians had themselves preserved through a pared down mummification process. If the tombs hadn't been destroyed, their preservation may not have been exactly as good as the pharaohs, but it would have likely done the trick, at least as far as some sense of "preservation" is concerned.

The tomb raiding aspect I couldn't help theorize about. Some of the site managers had their own ideas. Some didn't pass the sniff test, like one idea that was posited that tombs were raided by the next pharaoh or their vizier in an attempt to recoup some of the cost of burying their former boss/king.

I would never say this never happened, but it seemed unlikely that each vizier or pharaoh would go to lengths of destroying the newly embalmed and mummified occasional relative's corpse. Also, much of time the evidence showed that the raiding happened sometimes a thousand years after the burial.

When the seventh destroyed tomb out of seven showed up on the screen, I was like, "Well, that makes sense doesn't it? Bronze Age collapse right there." 

These rulers buried themselves in the ground with all of their wealth, and after the collapse of society at large (Egypt didn't fall as hard as most everywhere else, but still) that wealth needed to be flushed back into society somehow. So...makes sense that they fully wrecked the bodies, right?

And about those bodies...one of the, eh, pieces of a corpse was a remarkable find. It was also shown in close up in all its grisly details. In fact, here it is:

The only vagina on Disney+

This is, in fact, the closeup of a vagina, with the labia faintly visible near the center of the frame. What's remarkable is that the vagina is still in the unresolved gape of having just given birth. The new mom hadn't recovered yet before she died, which implies that she died somewhere in childbirth, possibly from hemorrhaging and blood loss.

Jeeze! This woman was pregnant, gave birth, died very quickly thereafter, was wealthy enough to have been mummified, had her tomb raided and remains shredded, and eventually had her vagina held up on camera for closeup. Oof. Respect and privacy in the age of ancient forensics and pathology, I guess, right?

This entire intellectual exercise (besides the presentation of the mummified vagina) seemed to me like an appendix to my thoughts on The Bronze Age Collapse and the bigger concept of Systems Collapse in general. It makes me a little curious about what may happen when/if we experience our own system collapse: since our own 'pharaohs' (see: obscenely wealthy individuals) won't be burying their wealth, because it is not physical items like gold, jewels, and ivory, it mostly gets represented as ones and zeroes. Sure there plenty jewels possessed by billionaires, especially in their mansions, and again, think about post-collapse: would those mansions be safe from looters?

And how would looters feel if they had access to, say, the Sacler's corpses, or the corpses of Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk?