You can really use a cold one in Cairo and Luxor. Where can you use one even more?

[No Elephants]

Why, in the pit of hell. Duh!

CAIRO - Egypt's minister of antiquities says Japanese archeologists have unearthed the tomb of an ancient beer brewer in the city of Luxor that is more than 3,000 years old.


The head of the Japanese team, Jiro Kondo, says the tomb was discovered during work near another tomb belonging to a statesmen under Amenhotep III, grandfather of the famed boy-pharaoh Tutankhamun.

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/tomb-of-ancient-egyptian-beer-brewer-cracked-open/


People sometimes wonder where the tombs of all the workers who built the pyramids are. Tombs were built for people of means and status; i.e., the plutocrats. However, the beermaker to the priests gods got a tomb where the tombs of all the pharohs were, in the place in Luxor called the Valley of the Kings. Way to go, brewer!


By the way, I could not get the photo to appear in this post, so you need to use the link to the story to see the tomb. Whatever you see in that photo that looks like imperfection is due to the flash or some other problem with the photography.

I have see those tombs, and even with all the people in there who, for centuries, have breathed on the walls and lit candles and matches to see them better, etc. they look as though they were painted yesterday. Sigh. I wish I could say the same of the walls in my home.

And, in Aswan, statutes were placed outside temples so that the sun shone directly on the statue on the birthday of the person represented by the statue. When the Aswan Dam was being built, the temples and statues had to be moved. The UN dispatched people to figureA out where to place them to duplicate the effects achieved by the ancient Egyptians. At that time, computers filled entire rooms, but there were still computers. The people sent by the UN were able to approximate the genius of ancient Egyptians, but not duplicate it.

This is made all the more amazing when you consider that even paper was hard to come by in ancient Egypt, let alone computers. And, when I was in Cairo, I attended the sound and light show at the pyramids. That informed me that, for example, the ancient Egyptian symbol for 10 was a lotus flower. I don't recall the others mentioned in the sound and light show, but imagine trying to place a temple so precisely by math that requires you to divide a lotus flower by a frog.

[No Elephants]

1. P.S. It's pretty amazing that they are still discovering ancient tombs in Luxor.

It's not exactly a bustling metropolis, though, 3000 years ago, it may have been considered one, what with all those good tomb-making jobs. Probably beat trying to farm the Sahara desert.

(BTW, Sahara is an attempt to spell the Arabic word for desert phonetically, using the English alphabet. So, Sahara Desert means desert desert. And, sorry, sorry, Starbucks and others, but "chai tea" means tea tea. While I'm at it, "pita bread" means bread bread.)

In Egypt, India and Armenia, when these words first came into being, there were not 57 varieties of every type of food, beverage or known geographic phenomenon. For a Luxorite 4000 years ago, "the Egyptian desert," or just "the desert," probably sufficed.

[Enthusiast]

2. There were so many tombs

that some were bound to escape detection. The entire ancient Egyptian population aspired to have an afterlife. Burial preparation and embalming were major industries throughout the Hellenistic period. I believe the biblical belief in an afterlife comes directly from this Egyptian tradition.

Are you aware that mummies actually became an important pharmacological agent? Ground up "mummy" might have been a good source of calcium in calcium deprived middle age Europe. After a while, when mummies started to run out, a fake mummy industry sprung up to meet the demand. Yuk. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2101801/

[No Elephants]

3. Nope, did not know that. Poor mummies. They took so much trouble to

get preserved for the afterlife, only to wind up in someone else's bones, or worse.

As far as afterlife, I always thought the New Testament language of being born again sounded as though it had been borrowed from a belief in reincarnation. But, anything is possible.