Anyone talking about 'curses' and 'letting curses out if you open things' on the Pyramid post, but also y'know Ancient Egypt in general?
Thanks for perpetuating Orientalist othering! That's pretty racist of you!
The only time I felt that was an appropriate joke was when they were gonna open the black sarcophagus they found flooded with sewer water. There's no way THAT wasn't cursed and should never be opened.
Otherwise, she's right.
It wasn't an appropriate joke then, either, tbh. That was genuinely one of the worst times to be an Egyptologist, because everyone was caught up in 'oooooh spoooooooky cuuuuuurse of the sarcophagus' that they didn't listen to any explanation of why what they were seeing was nothing out of the ordinary.
- Many sarcophagi in Egypt are made from black granite. This is a normal building material for statuary, stele, and sarcophagi for most of Egyptian history. There's nothing strange or unusual about it. In fact, fellow Egyptologists and I made posts back in 2018 (this one from Rudjedet) about how granite sarcophagi are nothing unusual or scary. People just saw the word 'black' and associated it with bad things, and they probably need to consider why it is they do that.
- That being said, it is clearly a reused sarcophagus. The burial is Ptolemaic, but the coffin is Late Period. Judging by its size I'd wager a guess that it might have been for an Apis Bull at one point. Or at least a large animal burial. Sarcophagi like this would have been extremely expensive, so the reuse of one isn't at all surprising.
- To no one's surprise, it was filled with sewer water because it was found near to a leaking sewer
- Inside were two men (one in his 30s and one in his 40s) and one woman (in her 20s), and they appear to have been purposefully buried there as there are some small gold items that represent rebirth. I can't remember if we found out if they were all related, but it wouldn't surprise me if this was a family burial. One of the males was initially thought to have suffered an arrow to the head, and thus they were thought to be soldiers, but it turns out it was a trepanning hole that had healed long before their death.
- It was discovered in an area of Alexandria where Ptolemaic royal buildings would have once been, and probably still are they're just under the modern city. So we tend to find these things piecemeal, and lacking context.
If this sarcophagus had been found anywhere else, people would have laughed about poop skeletons and never mentioned curses. I think people need to ask themselves just why that is.
How much of it do you take as Orientalism versus generic "it's bad to disturb the dead/places of the dead" that we find in most cultures?
I understand there's the whole association with "curses" and Egypt because of our erstwhile 1920s/1930s graverobbers and journalists, but wondering where that intersects with discussion about, say, finding a "spooky" Roman or Celtic burial in the UK.
(Interesting to learn that stuff about the sarcophagus! Thanks for sharing it!)
Most of it. There's a specific 'flavour' of this behaviour that comes alongside dealing with finding anything in Ancient Egypt. It's never just with tombs when it comes to Egypt. It's with every single artefact we dig up from pots and cookery stuff, to papyri and statues, has multiple comments or articles about how it should be put back because it's cursed. Meanwhile, a giant mosaic is uncovered in Rutland and no one bats an eye. Uncover Roman burials in York and everyone says 'oh wow I wonder what these people were like?' Discover two skeletons entwined in a burial in Rome and everyone romanticises them as lovers. There's an effort to show what these things actually are, and how they functioned, which you don't get with discoveries from Egypt.
There is also significantly less push back and pantomime for the discovery Roman and Celtic burials in the UK than there is for literally anything coming out of Egypt. The Roman little girl who was found when archaeologists surveyed a building site of what would eventually be the Gherkin in London? I've posted about that, and the responses I got were all about how sad they were that she was found all alone. If you google her, you get lots of sites telling you about her and what happened to her after she was discovered. Contrast that with the two bits of information I've posted about discoveries in Egypt in the last week. The new intact Book of the Dead? More than half the comments/tags were 'put it back it's cursed'. The new tunnel discovered in the Pyramid? Many tags are 'don't go in there it's cursed' or 'don't unleash the curse on this world' Even going back to the sarcophagus mentioned above; if you google that then your results are overwhelmingly 'look at this spooky black coffin' or 'mysterious coffin that might curse us all has been found'
The occasional 'spooky celtic burial' comment is absolutely nothing compared to the overwhelming amount of bullshit I have dealt with regarding any archaeological find from Ancient Egypt.
