Susan Hated Literature

Author: Arthur Phillips
DDC: 813.6
Read with Historical Favorites

Journal: Arrival in Cairo via rail from Alexandria. Set to work immediately. Have scheduled five days in Cairo for logistics and background wailting prior to heading south to site

The Egyptologist didn’t really grab me when I started to read it, I’m never a huge fan of first-person narrators, and stories told by a mix of letter and journal can often put me off. But I stayed with it, and was pleasantly surprised.

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I knew there was something I wanted to post about. Last weekend I was home and de mudder was watching a Time Watch programme on the BBC called The Bog Man. Which, incidently was narrated by Robin of Sherwood. Anyways twas quite interesting, in a creepifying way. All about these two bodies found in bogs in Ireland in 2003. And because of being in the bog these two bodies were very well preserved. So well in fact that they could figure out that the one with a head actually used imported resin as hair gel. I think it came from Spain, or maybe France^[1] .

But the reason I am posting about it is because of the way a lot of the news peoples reported on these bodies. A week or so before the programme aired the news was full of stories about how these two fellas were sacrificed in order to ensure the land remained fertile. Now this was not reported as a theory, but as a fact.

So I was a little interested in how exactly they knew this. Afterall, unless they can go back in time over 2000 years and ask someone then they can’t very well discover the reasons behind their motivations now can they?

But it turns out that the show never stated “these men were killed as human sacrifices”, instead that was one of an number of options. My favourite was the theory that they had committed some sort of crime, and part of their punishment was the manner of their death, torture and then after death rendition to the bog for burial. The reason being that a bog isn’t really land. And it isn’t water either. So it is an in between place. The historian/archeologist who suggested this theory said that he believed it was a method of ensuring that the souls of the dead^[2] never got to go to the next life. The crimes they had committed were so heinous that death wasn’t enough, these people deserved to be punished for all eternity and by placing the bodies in the bog they were ensuring that they wouldn’t decay, wouldn’t let the spirit free.

And, unrelated to that stuff I’ve just written, I was following some fish earlier in the week, when Carroll’s Beware the Jabberwocky was mentioned, which in turn reminded me of that advert that was on a few years^[3] back, anyays, found an online version, so does anyone else remember the Judder Man?

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according to the BBC anyways:

“Professor Wileke Wendrich, of the University of California, told BBC News Online that the discovery was incredibly impressive.
Alexandria was a major seat of learning in ancient times and regarded by some as the birthplace of western science.”

Current track: Under Your Spell by Tara (Amber Benson) from Buffy’s OMWF

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