Wow. This was really something, and food for thought on Easter weekend.
A procession of 22 mummies made its way through Cairo on Saturday in a multi-million dollar event intended to draw attention to Egypt’s ancient heritage.
The procession included the preserved remains of 18 kings and four queens moving in order of the eldest first on climate-controlled floats decorated with wings and pharaonic design in an ancient Egyptian style.
Well-known ancient rulers including kings Ramses II and III, Queen Hatshepsut, King Seti I and kings Thutmose III and IV were accompanied by horses, carriages, Egyptian film stars and celebrities.
“This parade is a unique global event that will not be repeated,” said Tourism and Antiquities Minister Khaled El Anany.
Lights and banners lined the route, which passed through Cairo’s upmarket Garden City district and the Nile Corniche.
It is hoped that the event will be a showcase for Egypt’s world-leading tourist potential to a global audience, after the coronavirus pandemic caused losses to the industry of about $1 billion a month.
The mummies were relocated from Cairo’s Egyptian Museum to a site in the capital at Fustat, an ancient city built after the Muslim conquest of Egypt in AD 641.
A new museum, the National Egyptian Museum of Civilisation, will be their resting place.
It’s crazy. Sorry.
I mean….it’s good to see a nation give props to its heritage, I suppose – sort of the opposite of what everyone else in the world is doing these days, but good heavens.
But, as the article says forthrightly – it’s really for the sake of tourism. WE’RE STILL HERE!
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As I said, I was struck by many aspects of this event (how do Islamic forces within Egypt view this? I guess Covid’s over in Egypt?) , but mostly that it occurred on Easter weekend. Here we are, celebrating Jesus, the One who conquered death, the One who lives and gives us life – real eternal life, not wrapped-in-shrouds-paraded-through-the-streets “life” – and there go those lifeless old bones in their golden arks.
I am a skeptic and a cynic when it comes to the powers of this world, and shed no tears when statues and plaques are razed, taken down and changed up. No human being, no matter what they’ve accomplished, merits a pedestal . And remember, before you throw the saints up at me, that the saints themselves would be the first to wave away honors sent their way. Which is not an argument against the Catholic cult of the saints , but simply for realism and humility, even as (especially as) we honor any human being.
On the other hand, this does speak to the importance of ritual and ceremony in human life, doesn’t it?
I have noticed that the girls at the local college adore to have ceremonies in which they light candles or hold lighted candles. Any excuse will do….
Crafts & Vintage
And on the other hand, the secular world finds relics odd and peculiar and even icky . . . but the Mars Ingenuity helicopter has a scrap of linen from the 1903 Wright Flyer attached to the underside of the uppermost solar panel array. Why? For good fortune? How does that excess weight on such a distant fragile assembly make any practical, scientific sense at all? Unless there’s a power to meaning and connections and contact which transcends . . . oh well, I’ll get a post-Easter column out of it, anyhow, with a quick nod to the parade of mummies getting what they spent their (citizens’s) money for, which is simply to be remembered for millennia.