Savannah morning news. [volume] (Savannah) 1868-1887, 1882-08-01
All About EgVDt.
The Fat Contributor in Cincinnati Saturday
NiQht.

The Fat Contributor in Cincinnati Saturday
Night.
Egyptian troubles and complications,
which have eventuated in actual war,
have attracted unusual attention to that
section of the world of late. Egypt is a
wonderful country, wonderful in her an
tiquity, her history, her people, her
rulers, her, monuments, her arts and her
literature. If not the mother of nations,
she seems to have been their school
ma'am to a considerable extent. Her
history reaches back to the remotest pc
riod of time, and is chiefly written on
ancient monuments, so shattered and
fragmentary as to afford little chrome
logical certainty, the most skillful arch@-
ologists differing some thousands of
years in their calculations.
Egypt was an old country when Jacob
sent his sons down there to buy corn.
Spectators had cornered the provision
market in Canaan, it will be remembered,
and run corn up to famine prices, and
Egypt had to be Tesorted to for relief.
Fortunate was it for the brethren that
their brother Joseph was in Egypt in
advance of them.
The Egyptians were skilled in the
arts and sciences, and invented an en-
balming process that has handed their
bodies down to posterity if it has not
their names. the human body was a
sacred thing to the Egyptians. They
believed in the transmigration of souls,
and that after a spirit had wandered
about for some thousands of years, in
habiting the bodies of different animals,
it would finally seek its original taberna-
Gle, and then, as the remarkable fore
sight of Mrs. ToOdles enabled her to re-
mark, chow handy it would be to have
it in the house.
But demand for fertilizing prepare
tions beyond the annual overflow of the
Nile was unknown then, and they, of
course, could not fOresee a day when
their precious mummies would be ground
I'D to enrich foreign soil Now, when
a poor tired Egyptian soul, having ac-
complished transmigratory career of
five or ten thousand years, during which
it has made the round of the entire
menagerie, would fain re-enter the old
familiar casket in which it had so much
fun. 10! it is not to be found, and writ
of habeas corpus issued by the Supreme
Court would be unable to turn up so
much as its toes. The utilitarian senti-
ment of the nineteenth century reduces
to naught theory of existence evolved
thousands of years agol
Those Egyptian emb4lmers were men
of great importance in their day. They
put on as many airs as a fashionable
undertaken does now, and their charges
were nearly as heavy. though not quite.
They graded Their price according to the
wealth, of the subject. If it was King
or a mighty warrior who was to be
packed away for futurity, they worked
over him for months and months, in
iecting essential oils through the arteries
and veins, filling the skin with camphor,
baIsams and various salts, and loading
the entire system with enough to start
newly graduated pharmaceutist in
business. Sometimes the body
was nicely painted, striped and var
nished, and among the aristocracy gold
leaf ornaments in fancy scroll work were
added. Wrapped in linen cloths of the
finest texture and placed in a nicely fit
ting coffin, for which it had been care
full measured, the mummy became an
ornament of which any household might
well be proud. Indeed, they were
brought up from the cellar on festive oc-
casions and stood at the head of the ia
BILE, where they helped to excite the ap-
petite. If the mummies responded to
any of the toasts, however, there must
hava been lack of spontaneity, every
thing about them was so cut and dried.
Embalmers didn't take much Pains
with the poor; they picked them in the
simplest kind of way, wrapping them in
common brown paper and packed them
like sardines in a box. What a satire it
is upon human vanity that prince and
pauper, the lofty and obscure, are now
ground up in the same mill to fertilize
like so much guano the impoverished
soil.
One of the chief industries of the
Egyptians seems to have been the con-
struction of pyramids. They evidently
embarked in the business with the idea
of supplying the world with those re-
marka5le structures, thinking, no doubt,
that they would command ready sale,
But there was apparently no demand for
them, so there they stand, monuments of
the errors that are frequently made in
the manufacturing business. 1t might
have looked feasible to the man who
projected it, however. Labor was cheap
in Egypt, and there were abundant stone
uuarTies up the Nile. An entire desert
could be rented for little or nothing on
which to do the work and exhibit them.
But, strangely enough, no other nation
seemed to care about having pyramids.
Strangers would go and look at them,
climb to their SUBMITS, explore their in
teriors and chip off pieces to carry away
as relics, same as they do now, but no
one offered to buy one. Some said they
came too high, others made an excuse
that they hadn't any desert to stand one
on, and others inquired if they hadn't
some little pyramids for ten cents. Fail
ing in the pyramid business, they en-
barked cautiously in the manufacture of