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The Ancient Egyptians mummified bodies for over 2000 years, surely they must have inspected ancient mummified bodies, even if religiously taboo, maybe when grav
by teruakohatu 6y ago
The Ancient Egyptians mummified bodies for over 2000 years, surely they must have inspected ancient mummified bodies, even if religiously taboo, maybe when grave robbers broke into a tomb, and adapted their practices accordingly.
- abellerose 6y agoHow do people know it was taboo for them?
- Jon_Lowtek 6y agoWhy is it not taboo any more?
- abellerose 6y agoI'm confused here. I asked the question of how people know it was taboo for ancient Egyptians. I didn't expect a question instead of an answer because I'm not proposing any side. Maybe people are just going off assumptions and commenting on that basis but I'm generally curious what proof people have. Specifically, when it comes to such a culture finding the energy of attempting at storing the body and for their view on the afterlife requiring it as a necessity. I have no reason to assume such a culture wouldn't find inspecting graves to some degree as taboo and for any benefits of continuing the process they seemed to care about.
- Cthulhu_ 6y agoI don't doubt that there's been scientific research into the best way to mummify a body; they wouldn't have done all of the steps on a whim / guess. But we're talking about a tradition spanning hundreds, if not thousands of years here. Mummification or otherwise preserving a body goes back a long time - the oldest form of intentional mummification goes back to 5000 BC, or 7000 years ago (according to wikipedia), so even then they had developed a tradition and the knowledge of preserving a body already.
- throwaway2048 6y agoTo put things in perspective we are closer time-wise to Alexander the Great's conquest of Egypt than he was to the building of the Great Pyramids. Ancient Egyptian culture was immensely old, even at that time, and was basically continuous for the whole period.
- lqet 6y agoI remember reading somewhere that Alexander the Great was so impressed by the (by then already ruinous) Tower of Babel, that he ordered it to be demolished and re-built. He died before the construction was completed, though. Edit: here is a source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etemenanki https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etemenanki
- phonypc 6y agoThe figure I usually see used for that comparison is Julius Caesar or Cleopatra. I think Alexander is a little too old for it to be quite true.
- jbay808 6y agoI remember feeling surprised (although I shouldn't have been!) when I learned that ancient Rome had their own historians studying ancient history, but who didn't consider themselves to be ancient history.
- tragomaskhalos 6y agoTo a modern person that would make sense yes, but the Egyptians were extraordinarily conservative, as the duration of their culture attests, and ancient people in general were, by our standards, shockingly incurious scientifically.