Mummies Are Gross

What got me hooked was my Saturday afternoon viewing of the movie "Stargate"--possibly due to the fact that my brother would not turn the channel. Yup. That's it. Honestly. That terrible, science fiction, historically accurate (ha ha) movie starring James Spader and Kurt Russell is what sparked my obsession. I haven't seen the movie since, but I sure as hell absorbed the whole Egypt thing . . .

From then on I was hooked. I even started a website called "Land of the Pharaohs" that back in 1995 generated a ton of web traffic. This traffic consisted most of junior high kids e-mailing me and asking me to write their reports on Mummies and the pyramids at Giza (I respectfully declined these requests, but helped where I could). When I went away to college, my interest in the website kinda fizzled out and I took it down. However, I still to this day, kick myself because I probably could have made a ton of moola off google ads alone on that site as I had nearly 500 visitors a day (in 1998!). Plus domain names were a dime a dozen back then and I owned www.landofthepharaohs.com.

But ya know what? Egyp-tea-ology.blogspot.com is cooler anyway. :-)

Perhaps the most important step in my budding love affair with the land of the Nile, was during my sophomore year in high school, my class took a trip to the Denver Museum of Natural History. I was stoked because I knew there were mummies there. Not any Kings and Queens, but mummies nonetheless. I remember walking quietly into the room where an unidentified mummy girl lay behind the glass. To my dismay several of my classmates let out groans of disgust at the shriveled face and limbs. Someone even said a very audible, "gross!".

I didn't care. I was enamored. As the rest of the class filtered out of the room, eager to move onto the dinosaur bones, I stayed behind and gazed into the face of this girl--no older than I was when she died. Alone in that small room, I remember feeling an overwhelming sense of awe. This girl had actually walked the banks of the Nile nearly 2,000 years ago. She lived in a time I would never know, a time of great rulers that I could only read about in textbooks. She might have even seen Pharaoh himself at a public procession, or even been a chamber servant to the Queen. This was a real person--not a replica, not a statue or a painting. 

This was the face of history.  

It wasn't gross to me . . . it was amazing and I couldn't wait to learn more.

And that's why I like ancient Egypt.