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ramses the first When I was growing up, I had this poster on my bedroom wall of the Egyptian god Anubis. Yes, I was not an ordinary child when it came to pop culture, but even then I found it to be very fascinating. The color photo was of something completely out of my everyday realm of existence. It was probably the most exotic thing that I knew at the time. Now if I remember correctly, the poster came from a National Geographic magazine and the accompanying text said something about the jackal god guarding a spirit through the underworld. Maybe in my mind I equated death with sleeping and thought that having it near my bed would be a good thing. Perhaps that is my adult mind giving more credit than I should to a younger version of me, but I suspect that I made some kind of connection to what that god represented. Plus I do vaguely remember the text saying something about it being used to protect children and that the god had been carved on the headboard of some kind of bed and or cradle. I could be wrong of course. Whatever the truth might be about the poster, I just wanted to point out that my interest in things Egyptian is not something new. So when tonight's episode of Nova was about finding the mummy of Ramses the first, I knew that I had to watch and I am glad that I did. Before seeing the episode I had no idea that Europeans had been digging up tombs for centuries. I had thought that it was merely a nineteenth or eighteenth century practice. The fact that it had started back in the Middle Ages was unknown to me. It seems that they saw the mummified remains as having medicinal purposes. Naturally as we moved closer and closer to modern times, there were less and less mummies to be found and the ones that had been unearthed intact were scattered around the globe. This explains how a German tourist discovered the mummy of Ramses the first in a Canadian museum near Niagara Falls. Once the identity of the mummy had been confirmed, the owners of the mummy graciously returned him to Egypt where modern day Egyptians could gaze at the pharaoh just as their ancestors had done. |