Egypt has just turned a mummy move into a state event. Twenty-two mummies — 18 pharaohs and four queens — each in its own motorized capsule, and moving from their old museum to a new one that had just opened, were driven through the streets of Cairo, and the international media captured the event for broadcasts around the world. They were being taken to a new museum, the National Museum of Egyptian Civilization in Fustat, where they will now be displayed. A report on the move is here: “Ancient Egyptian mummies paraded through Cairo on way to new museum,” Reuters, April 4, 2021:
A grand parade conveyed 22 ancient Egyptian royal mummies in special capsules across the capital Cairo on Saturday to a new museum home where they can be displayed in greater splendor.
The convoy transported 18 kings and four queens, mostly from the New Kingdom, from the Egyptian Museum in central Cairo’s Tahrir Square to the National Museum of Egyptian Civilization in Fustat, about 5km (3 miles) to the south-east.
Authorities shut down roads along the Nile for the elaborate ceremony, designed to drum up interest in Egypt’s rich collections of antiquities when tourism has almost entirely stalled because of COVID-19 related restrictions.
The elaborate move, covered by the foreign media, was a way to promote Egypt’s pharaonic past to the world, and especially to those who might be enticed by such a spectacle to visit Egypt as tourists. Tourism has collapsed because of COVID-19, which has so greatly restricted international travel, and this has taken a terrific toll on Egypt’s economy. The mummy parade constitutes the opening salvo in a campaign to win back tourists now that the pandemic seems to be receding.
As the royal mummies arrived at the museum, which was officially inaugurated on Saturday, cannons fired a 21-gun salute. President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi stood by as the mummies filed past on vehicles bedecked with golden pharaonic motifs….
“We chose the Civilization Museum because we want, for the first time, to display the mummies in a civilized manner, an educated manner, and not for amusement as they were in the Egyptian Museum,” Hawass said.
Archaeologists discovered the mummies in two batches at the complex of mortuary temples of Deir Al Bahari in Luxor and at the nearby Valley of the Kings from 1871….
Who were those archeologists who unearthed the temples and the tombs? They were not Egyptians, but Europeans, English, French and German. The most famous one was Howard Carter, the Englishman who discovered and excavated the Tomb of Tutankhamen. Egyptians themselves, as Muslims, had little interest in the tombs, except insofar as they could, as grave-robbers, loot them of whatever of value they contained. For the tombs were pre-Islamic, from the Jahiliyya, or Time of Ignorance, and thus, for devout Muslims, unworthy of respect or study. For those devout Muslims, the pyramids and the pharaohs were of little intrinsic interest. But in the 20th century, impoverished Egyptians, hoping to improve their economic wellbeing, realized that the pyramids and pharaohs were what drew the free-spending foreign tourists to Egypt, and that made them worth preserving, exhibiting in museums, and advertising worldwide as tourist attractions.
“By doing it like this, with great pomp and circumstance, the mummies are getting their due,” said Salima Ikram, an Egyptologist at the American University in Cairo.
“These are the kings of Egypt, these are the pharaohs. And so, it is a way of showing respect.”
The “mummies are getting their due,” the “kings of Egypt are being shown respect” by the government not only to swell the state coffers with tourist dollars, but to promote the narrative of an Egypt that honors and studies and is proud of its long history prior to the arrival of the Arabs bearing Islam. Among the crowds in Cairo, whether allowed to be onlookers or watching the parade of mummies on television, there were unlikely to be many members of the Muslim Brotherhood. Why should they care about those non-Muslim rulers from the Time of Ignorance? Everything, for the MB, as for most devout Muslims, begins with the appearance of Muhammad in the 7th century. That is when history starts. Egypt’s cultural memory can be seen as an endless mental tug of war between Islam, as represented by Al-Azhar University, and Egyptian nationalism, as represented by the Museum of Egyptian Civilization. The very name of the new museum conveys the message that the pharaohs and their pyramids are an integral part of “Egyptian civilization,” and not merely an episode in the pre-Islamic past to be made available to foreign tourists for the money they bring in, but otherwise to be ignored.
The El-Sisi regime in Cairo understands that promoting an interest, and national pride, in Ancient Egypt, helps to undermine the centrality of Islam in the Egyptian narrative; the history of Ancient Egypt is a weapon in the war against the Islam-besotted members of the Muslim Brotherhood. It would be fascinating to see whether, and if so how, Egyptian schoolbooks could be rewritten to give respectful attention to the pre-Islamic period of the nation’s existence.
And it would also be interesting to know if Egyptian students will be taught about Taha Hussein, Egypt’s leading intellectual and writer in the 20th century. It was in the 1920s that Hussein, a leader in the literary movement called the Egyptian Renaissance, wrote on Pre-Islamic Poetry, in which he argued that parts of the Qur’an were inauthentic. This caused a great outcry, and aroused the intense anger and hostility of the religious scholars at Al Azhar and many other traditionalists; Hussein was accused of having insulted Islam. However, the public prosecutor stated that what Taha Hussein had said was the opinion of an academic researcher and no legal action was taken against him, although he lost his post at Cairo University in 1931. His book was banned but was republished the next year with slight modifications under the title On Pre-Islamic Literature (1927).
Taha Hussein was an intellectual of the Egyptian Renaissance and a proponent of the ideology of Egyptian nationalism along with what he called Pharaonism, believing that Egyptian civilization was diametrically opposed to Arab civilization, and that Egypt would only progress by reclaiming its ancient pre-Islamic roots. He was thus more than simply a secularist; he saw Egypt as being held back as long as it remained wedded to Islam, instead of returning to its own true, non-Arab sources in the pre-Islamic period of its existence.
Pharaonism is the name Taha Hussein gave to his belief that Egypt had taken a wrong turn when the Arabs arrived, bearing Islam, and Egyptians began to think of themselves as part of the Arab people, which Taha Hussein claimed was untrue. Egyptians might speak Arabic, and many were Muslim (Hussein was careful to include the Copts as part of the “Egyptian people”) but in his view, this did not make them Arabs.
Many Egyptians in the 1920s and 1930s, following Taha Hussein, did not accept the notion that Egypt was a part of the Arab lands, nor would they acknowledge that the Egyptian people were part of the Arab nation.
As one of the most prominent Egyptian nationalists and anti-Arabists , as well as Egypt’s most notable writer of the 20th century, Taha Hussein had a great influence among Egyptian intellectuals. In 1931 he wrote:
Pharaonism is deeply rooted in the spirits of the Egyptians. It will remain so, and it must continue and become stronger. The Egyptian is Pharaonic before being Arab. Egypt must not be asked to deny its Pharaonism because that would mean: Egypt, destroy your Sphinx and your pyramids, forget who you are and follow us! Do not ask of Egypt more than it can offer. Egypt will never become part of some Arab unity, whether the capital [of this unity] were to be Cairo, Damascus, or Baghdad.
Taha Hussein thought of Egypt as belonging not to the Arab culture but to the culture of the Mediterranean, sharing it with France, Italy, and Greece. He thought Egyptians should look back to ancient Egypt for the pre-Islamic sources of their country’s culture, and to Europeans, not Arabs, to guide their future development. Egypt had been turned aside from its proper cultural path by the arrival of the Arabs and Islam; it needed now to turn to the “Mediterranean civilization,” to which it by right belonged, a civilization antithetical to that of the Muslim Arab states, for its openness to the world of the Mediterranean, its absence of supremacism, its refusal to submit blindly to the demands of authority.
The recent solemn parade of the mummies through the streets of Cairo has been described purely as a tourist advertisement. It was much more than that. It could only have been undertaken, with such pomp, by a regime hostile to the Muslim Brotherhood and their exclusively Arab and Muslim interpretation of Egyptian identity. It would never have been mounted during the brief presidency of Mohamed Morsi. It was not only a spectacular show to attract the world’s tourists, but a religious, political, and cultural statement as well. In Egypt, what the Muslims dismiss as belonging to the Time of Ignorance, the Jahiliyya, General El-Sisi, Zahi Hawass, and other secularists were determined to celebrate Ancient Egypt, and that pre-Islamic period of High Egyptian Civilization that gave rise to some of the ancient world’s most important wonders.
None of the world’s media mentioned the symbolic significance of this parade, of how the attention paid to Ancient Egypt by the Egyptians themselves is an expression of Egyptian nationalism, as distinct from an “Arab and Islamic identity” that in Egypt reached its high point during the brief reign of Mohamed Morsi. No one mentioned Taha Hussein, or Pharaonism, or how he would have teased out the greater meaning of the Moving of the Mummies for his readers. Hussein would have been pleased with the parade, a sign that Egypt had survived both the disastrous pan-Arabism of Gamal Abdel Nasser and the similar disaster of Mohamed Morsi’s Muslim Brotherhood, and was now taking pride in the pre-Islamic past that Muslims have been taught not to revere but to despise.
It would be good if the study of Ancient Egypt were now to be given greater attention in the country’s schools. There is so much to add to the pupils’ store of knowledge, that would deepen their interest in Egypt Before Islam: the architectural achievement of the pyramids; the mysterious Sphinx that could only have been created before the arrival of Islam, for the faith prohibits statues — that prohibition explains why Ottoman Turkish troops felt justified in shooting off the Sphinx’s nose; the Old, Middle, and New Kingdoms, with their mummified pharaohs and their queens; the cosmogony of the ancient Egyptians; the roles of the Nile and the Mediterranean in Egyptian life; the decipherment of the Rosetta Stone by Champollion; and so much more which, if introduced into the state curriculum, will alarm the theologians at Al-Azhar, for knowledge of ancient Egypt will help to foster national pride in the pre-Islamic period that Islam dismisses.
The Egyptian government could do more than revise its schoolbooks to put more emphasis on the history of pre-Islamic Egypt. Having moved those mummies to the Museum of Egyptian Civilization, the government could proclaim that from now on there will be an annual celebration of a National History Month, beginning with a Day of Egyptian Civilization, in which the same mummies would again be moved in those motorized capsules, this time from the new museum to the old, and then back again. And that month would be devoted in the state schools to the study of Egypt right up to the year before the Arab conquerors came, bearing their “gift” of Islam. The ghost of Taha Hussein would be pleased.
Clive Delmonte says
It is a great joy to celebrate the evolution of Egyptian civilization which dates from thousands of years prior to the barbarities of Islam.
THX 1138 says
Shall we fight barbarism with barbarism? Mysticism with mysticism? Faith with faith? Irrationality with another irrationality? A Muslim tyranny of theocracy with the Ancient Egyptian tyranny of theocracy? Slavery with slavery?
Ancient Egypt was barbarism too. It was no better than Islam. Ancient Egypt was a theocratic, irrational, faith-based, tyranny. Just like ISIS or any Muslim Caliphate. Or the one thousand years of the Christian Dark Ages in Europe.
“I have said that faith and force are corollaries, and that mysticism will always lead to the rule of brutality. The cause of it is contained in the very nature of mysticism. Reason is the only objective means of communication and of understanding among men; when men deal with one another by means of reason, reality is their objective standard and frame of reference. But when men claim to possess supernatural means of knowledge, no persuasion, communication or understanding are possible. Why do we kill wild animals in the jungle? Because no other way of dealing with them is open to us. And that is the state to which mysticism reduces mankind—a state where, in case of disagreement, men have no recourse except to physical violence. And more: no man or mystical elite can hold a whole society subjugated to their arbitrary assertions, edicts and whims, without the use of force. Anyone who resorts to the formula: “It’s so, because I say so,” will have to reach for a gun, sooner or later. Communists, like all materialists, are neo-mystics: it does not matter whether one rejects the mind in favor of revelations or in favor of conditioned reflexes. The basic premise and the results are the same….
The Middle Ages were an era of mysticism, ruled by blind faith and blind obedience to the dogma that faith is superior to reason….
The supernatural doctrines of the Middle Ages, . . . kept men huddling on the mud floors of their hovels, in terror that the devil might steal the soup they had worked eighteen hours to earn.” – Ayn Rand
Wellington says
There is some merit to what you and Ayn Rand stated, but there is also merit in what another skeptic, one Benjamin Franklin, stated, to wit, that if man is bad with religion, imagine what he’d be without it. The existence of such secular monstrosities like Marxism and Nazism bitterly proves Franklin’s point. Of course, the exception to Franklin’s rule, to the extent it has merit (and I for one think it does) is Islam. Better no religion than Islam.
There is also the related perspective that man is pathetic both with and without religion and thus choose your poison. Reason can often lead to tremendous error and oppression just as religion can and thus the way reason is used or the way religion is used could be key.
Lavéritétriomphera says
@THX 1138
Salut,
“Shall we fight barbarism with barbarism?…” (?)
Compare like with like.
As far as I know, jihadism didn’t exist in ancient Egypt.
À bientôt
gravenimage says
THX 1138, your idea that anyone who studies ancient Egypt worships ancient Egyptian gods and champrions slavery is mistaken.
It is quite possible to study history without applauding all of its events.
Lavéritétriomphera says
Bonjour,
The challenges which mankind must respond in the twenty-first century are not the same as they were at the time of pharaohs and pyramids.
À bientôt
gravenimage says
Yes, Lavéritétriomphera.
mortimer says
I see Clive’s point, but there are also Egyptian Muslims who want to destroy the Sphynx and the great pyramids as well. Muslims in Egypt have an ambiguous love/hate of Egyptian antiquities. The parade of mummies is also a parade of the kings, queens and aristocracy of ancient Egypt.
Fitzgerald makes an excellent point that Muslims who celebrate ancient Egyptian civilization are celebrating SHIRK … the greatest sin in Egypt … namely, ‘wrong worship’. So by celebrating this event, Egyptians are digressing from strict Islam. They are ‘hypocrites’ according to Islam.
It would be funny, if it weren’t so tragically sad.
gravenimage says
+1
Infidel says
Assuming that more Egyptians did embrace their non-Arab past (although what percentage of Egyprians are Arabs? I’d think 90+%), would they then explore and embrace the Pasedjet faith, which was the religion of the Pharaonic Egyptians? Or would they just declare themselves a post-religious society? (Even ‘Coptic’ was a post Cleopatra religion brought in by the Byzantines)
Either would be an improvement
Mark Spahn (West Seneca, NY) says
It ought to be possible to answer this question by DNA analysis to determine what proportion of Egyptians descend from the Pharaonic past rather than from the Arab invasion.
LB says
Pretty sure Egypt is somewhere in the realm of 99% muslim. I’d wager to guess that the only reason they haven’t taken the pyramids down is because they rake in TONS of money. And it’s not like they haven’t tried, this is how the Sphinx “lost” its nose.
As Hugh points out, not a single muslim Egyptian has shown any interest in actually excavating and preserving the pyramids until the Europeans showed up. My money is on the fact that this is all just a publicity stunt to boost tourism since the Chinese flu shut everything down. Sisi and MB couldn’t care less for pre-islamic Egypt, but they DO in fact care about the massive jizya they collect from infidel tourists.
gravenimage says
Egypt is about 90% Muslim. Ther are still some surviving Coptic Christians there.
Yohannes says
News from moderate Indonesia again:
https://makassar.terkini.id/tuduh-musyrik-ormas-islam-bubarkan-pertunjukan-seni-dan-ludahi-warga/
(In Indonesian, you can use google translate)
Beneath the Veil of Consciousness says
The Europeans were fascinated with Ancient Egyptian Culture, in part, because it represented the promise of human ingenuity and knowledge yet to be discovered. They understood that by looking back, humanity could gain inspiration and insight from the past towards a brighter more promising future.
gravenimage says
Hear, hear!
Local Muslims never showed any interest in this heritage–unless it was to loot or destroy it.
David says
The only interest that Muslims have in this world is creating more muslims and spreading their awful faith.
Singh T. Junior says
Make sure all 22 mummies arrive at the destination. Any missing mummy will be bad news for locals. Watch the Mummy movies and you will know. These things come out at night.
mortimer says
Ho, ho. Well, those mummies are actually more like money in the bank for Egyptian tourism. The new Grand Museum will be one of them most-visited institutes on earth.
Wellington says
Inversely proportional relationship here, i.e., to the extent ancient Egypt is studied, admired and cherished, the less Islam can be the “all everything” the Islamic world since the 7th century AD has claimed Islam to be. The entire Jahiliyya rot disallows any appreciation of the “other.” To the degree the Islamic world has appreciated man’s achievements before the advent of Islam (e.g., the thought of Avicenna and Averroes) it has been by way of ignoring the mind-closing concept of Jahiliyya.
Islam is excellent, you know, at mind-closing concepts. Simply superb in this regard.
Fine article by Hugh Fitzgerald. Very much on target as usual.
gregbeetham says
Zackery so, I think you could sum up Islam by saying it equals cultural stagnation unless it can practise its business model which is invasion and plunder and slave taking based on its heredity of banditry so one can have someone else do any actual work that needs to be done while you attend to servicing the multiple baby making machines, which causes the over production of more Muslims.
There doesn’t seem to be much else fundamentally to its philosophy other than total commitment to their second hand Moon god ‘Allah’ they borrowed from pre Islamic times, and it would appear that anywhere Islam has dominated the population is psychotic with outbursts of homicidal psychopathic behaviour.
somehistory says
The “Time of Ignorance” is now…and has been since the arabs arrived with their islam domination of all thought and intent.
Many scientists have been fascinated by the preservation of these bodies of the kings, queens, and their slaves, their animals, etc. since when they were first discovered. The process of mummifying has been of significant interest…and reading of the ancient Egyptian language found in the tombs; the “why” of the things those ancient people did.
One thing the mozlums have done is make the country very unsafe for any non-mozlum to visit.
Another thing they do is to deny that the Jews were ever captive there or had anything to do with the building of the Great Pyramids or Sphynx. (The Bible describes the Jews as slaves and making bricks for the building projects.)
And, they have attempted to destroy the things that represent the past that did not include their ever-so-wonderful “intellect.”
The government of Egypt couldn’t pay me enough to even consider a trip to that country. As long as mozlums dominate, are in control, won’t allow Christians and others to live as they choose, Egypt is not someplace worthy of my time.
Wellington says
Seconded, somehistory.
Oh yeah, ain’t going there and Islam is the reason why I am not going there.
somehistory says
that’s the best reason I can think of.
E T says
Not going back to England, Ireland, France……..if I am ever allowed to get out of Canadastan, I hope to visit my grandchildren in Florida
James Lincoln says
somehistory says,
“The government of Egypt couldn’t pay me enough to even consider a trip to that country.”
100% agree.
I was in Hurghada, Egypt for several weeks during the mid-90s – awaiting SH-60 Seahawk transportation to a U.S. Navy destroyer.
Never, ever going back…
somehistory says
One of my brothers was in the Navy and for a time, his ship was docked there. He told us of his experiences, and said he was never doing that again.
David says
The Jews did NOT build the Pyramids, which are at least 4,500 years old, and probably much older than that. This is long before Jews were slaves to the Egyptians.
Muslims stripped the limestone covering from the Great Pyramid, and from most of the second Pyramid, to build mosques in Cairo. An act of desecration.
somehistory says
Well, since even the “experts” disagree on just exactly ***when*** the Jews were there, I think it’s safe to say that no one can say for certain what they worked on. It’s impossible to prove a **negative.** One must prove a **positive** that shows the truth of a matter.
Now, the Bible says the Jews went down to Egypt after Joseph was sold into slavery and taken there, where he was imprisoned, and then later given a great deal of power in the government.
Later on, his entire family arrived, and they and their descendants were there for hundreds of years.
The “experts” disagree on just when those years occurred because not all of the Pharaohs are named in the account and it’s difficult to match up with the ones named in Egyptian history logs.
mozlums say the Jews were not slaves, were never there, had no part in the history…of any land, even Israel and that everything has always belonged to them.
Since no human then alive is still alive to give an accurate, eye-witness account, I think I’ll keep an open mind as far as saying what they were forced to help build and what might have happened before they arrived and after they left.
But as I believe the Bible account, I do believe that they were forced to work on Egyptian building projects after Joseph died and the later rulers did not know him, or recognize the Jews as a special people.
gravenimage says
In Moving Mummies, Egypt Celebrates Its Pre-Islamic Heritage
……………..
Not really. Egypt’s ancient past is a cash cow–and between Covid and Jihad terror attacks, they have not been much able to milk that particular cow much of late.
It is notable that almost no native Egyptians visit these museums or care about Egypt’s history–not evern school groups. This is all regarded as worthless “Jahillya”. The only people interested are foreign tourists–and just Infidels, at that.
More:
“We chose the Civilization Museum because we want, for the first time, to display the mummies in a civilized manner, an educated manner, and not for amusement as they were in the Egyptian Museum,” Hawass said.
……………..
This is *very* odd–likely some sort of local political weirdness–not sure what.
Aussie Infidel says
When I visited Egypt in the 1970s, most Egyptians I met seemed to be quite proud of their ancient heritage. But soon afterwards, President Anwar Sadat was assassinated (1981) by the Muslim Brotherhood, and some years later (1997) jihadists shot up a tourist bus at Queen Hatshepsut’s Temple in the Valley of the Queens near Luxor, killing many tourists and security guards. Those attacks put the first big dents in Egypt’s tourism industry.
Although I found Egypt a fascinating country, with the resurgence in Islamic violence around the world, I would not visit the place again – despite their new Civilization Museum. Hugh is right that European archaeologists discovered and excavated the tombs, while Egyptians (at least the pious mullahs at Al-Azhar) regarded them as jahilliyya. Nevertheless, brave and enlightened scholars like Zahi Hawass and his team at the Cairo Museum recognized the value of their ancient history, and wanted to preserve it and educate the Egyptian public. Although Ancient Egypt was a far cry from Western civilization, no country should ignore its past. I can only wish them luck. Long live Pharaonism!
gravenimage says
My mother-in-law was a docent at the Carlos Museum at Emory University which has a large anceint Egyptian collection and visited Egypt in the late 1990s–it was already dangerous then.
Frank Anderson says
I think remembering the profound question asked by Mark Gabriel in The Unfinished Battle should be repeated often: (paraphrased) “If Islam is such a great deal why were 4 million Egyptians murdered bringing it to Egypt?” (page 52). That question and others led Gabriel to leave islam.