MJ Thomas Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Hello Ronald,
>
> You write, 'Well, the advantage of a mummified
> body is that it can be stored for a long time,
> till an appropriate burial chamber was available.
> What would have happened to the part-built pyramid
> ? I wouldn't be surprised that it would have been
> finished by the deceased king's successor.
> Furthermore, I am convinced that the worship of a
> deceased king was maintained for years by the
> priests of his successor(s).'
>
> If, as you suggest, a mummified body could be
> stored for a long time, then the need for
> 'contingency' burial chambers is presumably
> negated.
> All that had to be done was for the king's mummy
> to be stored somewhere safe and out of the way
> until his burial chamber was ready, and then
> transferred into it.


Ah, but that would not have happened. It would have been unthinkable to keep it around any longer than absolutely necessary to get it in the ground and revivified. Waiting one day too long would have apparently caused the spirit and body to be permanently separated, and lost to oblivion.

This is made obvious by the state of hundreds of tombs from all times in Egyptian history. It is most graphic in the VotK tombs, where we can see all levels of completion of the text engraving on the walls, as if the workers were suddenly called away and left everything exactly as they finished it the moment the king died. If, indeed, they could take whatever time they needed to complete the project, then we would have seen all the texts finished, and we wouldn't see, as we do with the pyramid temple of Menkaure at Giza, things hurriedly finished in mudbrick.

I think the only people who responded to a new king faster than the Egyptians are the Brits. "The king is dead. Long live the king". They only give a slight pause in the sentence! LOL. The Egyptians, however, needed to move things forward to the new king. So, when we add this new king factor to the "can't keep the old king waiting to be reborn", we have a set of cultural factors that prohibit the concept as presented here.



> Here's a thought; this could explain the absence
> of mummys in pyramids.
> The priests kept forgetting where they had stored
> the mummy whilst the burial chamber was being
> prepared



Okay, that was SERIOUSLY funny!

Thanks!


>
> Seriously, my understanding is that there was a
> short (?) time-table of events from the death of
> the king to the placement of his mummified remains
> in his tomb, so I think its doubtful that any
> mummified king would have been "put in storage".


We don't know the exact number of days, but some have suggested it is 70. Some were much faster, though, apparently. Some might have been much longer. Hard to peg.


> But, having said that, this does pose the
> question: then what happened if the king died
> before any work on his tomb had started...

Ah, this would only present a problem for a child king. Khafre, for example, has what is probably a large mastaba at Giza that he had in the works for himself. An early demise of the nature you are describing probably would have been seen as a bad omen, and




> A tomb fit for a king is not exactly something you
> knock together in a couple of weeks.

Truer words were never spoken. However, as I said above, it was normal for any member of the royal family to have started a tomb in their late teens, I think. It would have sufficed if they died early.


> What doesn't help, either, is the fact (?) that a
> king rarely finished the building of his
> predecessor's pyramid, and when they did it was
> done in a rather perfunctory manner.
> Some say this is what happened to Menkare's
> pyramid.


Not his job. He had his OWN immortality to look out for, for the exact same reasons. Natural cycle, just like the rise and fall of the Nile.


>
> I'm not at all sure what the situation was with
> worshipping a king's immediate predecessor.
> But I do recall reading that there was a cult of
> Khufu running a couple of thousand (er, might have
> been hundred) years after his death.
>
> It's all horribly complicated, isn't it


Yes, it is complicated. One must remember that although the king "joined the gods", metaphorically speaking, they weren't always deified at death. To put it in very mundane modern terms, it was almost like somebody was going from being a local politician to whom you would turn for help with local zoning laws, to becoming an ambassador to another nation, looking out for your interests on a much bigger scale.

Death was not an end, though. Not for the king, anyway, in Dynasty IV. That is also one of the things that changed over time. With the rise of Osiris in Dynasty VI and later, everybody could finally become immortal. As such, everybody could help from the other side, and the central role of the king as "ambassador" to the gods carried much less weight. No doubt this factor, as much as anything else, led to the "shrinkage" we see in royal tombs after Dynasty IV.

Anthony

You can lead a horse to water but you can't make him think.