Thursday, October 25, 2018

Writing on the Wall

The Egyptian tombs are all about the wall art. It can be dizzying!
There's pictures, stories, and instructions, mainly about gods.There are also explanations on how to mummify properly, as detailed before.
This one is the original holy cow!
Even with a guide, you can't even begin to understand what's going on.
Doesn't matter! Still amazing!
Something uncomfortable happened to the middle-guy's face...
Here, some Romans tried to adapt the temple into a church, but their apostles mostly fell off.
The best tombs still have great colour!
And there are some bad-ass deities!
Here is Barry with an incense lamp
This one is surely the motivation for the Starbucks logo, with her merlegs in the air.

Saturday, October 20, 2018

Mummies, a DIY Guide

In the beginning, they put the mummies inside small pyramids, but these started to look lame so they made bigger ones. All that glam called for looting, so mummies got hidden in desert valleys where hundreds of workers somehow kept the locations secret. Nowadays, any good desert location should work your DIY mummy.
The desert can be harsh, so ensure you have good transportation, like this Advanced Vehicle System.
Inside the tomb, you need some instructions for the gods. These involve a) pictures of many offerings, b) a secret code for the afterlife, c) pictures of the required afterlife servants and d) the occasional Roman or modern grafiti.
Then, you need an inner and outer sarcophagus, ideally with inlay artistic detail. This takes some time, so get carving. These should be embedded, in several golden coffins, Russian-doll style, not shown.
Now you gotta get some afterlife furniture. Here is a camping chair for roasting marshmallows in the bonfires of hell. The furniture was strewn about suprisingly messily in the tombs. Not like the careful human packaging.
These tubular vesicles seem important, but I can't remember what they help with in the afterlife, so keep these on hand.
Now, mummification. First, you suck the organs, ideally out of the nose, and put them into this intriguing organ box. Set aside. This part might be messy, so take precautions.
Next, you have to do a lot of not-well-understood embalming things with special kinds of oils. Wait 40 days, and consult with your local taxidermist if necessary. Now, wrap the body up, put all those sarcophagi together, and you're done!
We found that these essential oils still play a role in modern Egypt, where they're used for perfumes, and potentially modern mummification.
There were also offerings to the gods.
Here's Barry, learning how to make an offering goblet, and somehow the man behind him looks plastic, maybe because of the oils.
Optional add-on: afterlife pets!
There were a lot of animals in modern Egypt as well. We fed this one our lunch leftovers.
Barry is clearly a city boy.

Friday, October 12, 2018

Really Old Egyptians

There is a bewildering amount of ancient Egyptian sites and paroahs. Some have mini-mes, which represent their children.
It turns out the discoveries are not nearly complete. Above, only the feet have been found, below, no feet.
Pretty fabulous for 2000-5000 years old!
All of the statues have their left left foward, and we heard conflicting theories as to why.
This prompted us to start developing our own theories. For example, the statue below is clearly the founder of modern Japanese horror movies!
Some signs encouraged this rebellious thinking.
The lower pile of dirt allegedly demosntrates that the workers used ramps, and not aliens, to build the structures. Hmm, seems like that would have washed away by now..
We learned that the ancient Egyptian bigwigs wore big wigs. We figured with all the inbreeding, they may have had bad hair, otherwise.
We also learned that the Egyptians revered dwarfism, including this guy, Seneb!

Nowadays, Egyptians like global fashions, as we saw in this model photo shoot.
It was located in the Luxor template, where the lonely remaining obelisk misses its twin in Paris.
This is the workers' housing, for the "they weren't slaves or aliens" commoners who built the big tombs. 
And here are some fabulous pillars at Karnak.
The problem with antiquities is their heads fall off. You can see parts on the ground.

Sphinxes struggle with millenia of aging as well.
For rams, a small deity helps to secure their big heads over time.
Here's Barry trying his hand at archeology without success.