Sacramento daily record-union. [volume] (Sacramento [Calif.]) 1875-1891, 1886-08-21
MUMMIES OF KINGS.
RULERS OF THREE THOUSAND
YEARS AGO.
Interesting Revelations from Recent
Excavations Among the Egyp-
tian CatacOmbs.

Nothing is more terrible than sudden
reminder of the way in which things sur
vive us. Every one who has had to hunt
through long-unopened escritoires and
desks must have been somewhat panied by
the yestiges of his old self which lie be-
fore him, the old properties hastily thrown
aside and forgotten, which now insist on
asserting themselves, and declaring that
we change, while the lifeless remains. An
example, an almost poetical example, of
this immutability is offered to the moral
ist by the unwinding of the mummies of
Ta-aken and Seti /. at Boulak. These
mummies as we understand, were found in
that general deposit of the royal Egyptian
dead, discovered five wears ago. A mummy
is rather q gruesome thing, and to unwind
it is like opening 4 door that has been
locked for three or four thousand years.
Romance has invented the notion of
magical device by which man might mount
up the stream Of time and see the past in
a mirror, or lake, and project himself
to beings unconditional by time and space,
everything that occurs occurs simultane-
ously, this license of fancy, this notion of
reascending the river of things may be al
lowed to romantic fiction. But what
novelists have imagined as a supernatural
device, we do naturally, so to speak, when
we open mummy. First the case, with
its gilded, craven countenance, is forced
asunder and then we come to corpse
smothered in cerements, corpse with
face of gold. In moment we are in the
presence of that which no man has seen
for many scores of centuries-are with the
dead as he was the night after he went
clown the night wandering way"
Since the golden mask was made for the
features a score of empires have fallen to
ashes. Persia, Assyria, Macedon, Car
thage, Rome, the 1ncas, with a multitude
Of minor powers, came be after these
swathings were sewn and glued together.
and now they are dust, like the fragrant
lust of spice which fills the chamber.
They have gone, and their gods have gone
with them. The ship of Isis goes forth 10
more to sea, the last god-bull has been made
amummy, Osiris no more justifes the dead
who die in Osiris. There is none to offer
loavcs and beer TO the departed, no man
says the brief prayer for the Egyptian
dead, which secured for them food and
drink in the underworld. All the gods
are gone and all the ghosts are starving.
The younger and elder races of divinity
are outcast. "Apollo has no more his
stately roof, no more his Delphic laurel,
the babbling well of laughing water is 81
lent" Somewhere in some Hades I'M
described, are gathered all these ghosts
that were gods when the mummy was
made fragrant and imperishable. Pacha-
camac jostles Zeus, and Huitzilopochtli is
with Indra, and Knoum, and Sch, and Nut.
They have vanished and the dead man re-
mains. You see him as his friends knew
him, as his f6emen beheld him, four
thousand years ago. The centuries are
like "a mist that rolls away" and if man
of ancient Egypt could have lived till row
he would know, when the mummy is I'M
wound the face of his enemy or the face
of the woman he loved.
Perhaps the mummy which appeals the
more to us, of the two which NJ Maspero
has Just opened, is the mummy of Set l.
We have kind of national concern with
Seti, who was King of the nineteenth
dynasty thirty-two centuries ago We
possess his white alabaster sarcophagus in
the Soane Museum. Jt is an astonishing
work of art, in shape like huge bath.
Every inch of it is covered with hero.
glyphs and professions of figures of gods,
and beasts, and men, black against the
white alabaster. In the midst of the null
titudinous wrappings of Sets corpse (fr
it is a corpse after ALI, is an inscription
giving the day and date of the Kings -" re-
clothing" g In the year TX, in the month
Of seed-sowing, and the sixteenth day of
the month"; was the second clothing of the
King, to whom be life, health and
strength" What eyes were expected, by
the man who scrawled this Inscription. to
look on it and read it? He must have ex-.
pected the mummy of Seti to be inyiolate
till Osiris came again, and the dead rose
and regained their ancient tabernacles of
clay. 1t is probable enough that, after the
sun of our system is cold, after earth is a
cinder and life extinct, this chill and emp
ty ball will carry round in its yearly revo-
lutions thousands of the dead men and
women of Egypt, each unchanged from the
thing he was two days after his reclothing
We may fancy the WORKOUT globe split
ting from frost, and passing away as a star
sometimes passes. Then fragments of the
learning of the Egyptians may possibly be
borne on the wandering winds through
cosmic space, and may descend on some
planet of rational beings, bearing witness
TO creed and civilization which has out
lasted human Time.
In Egypt nothing is impossible, except,
perhaps, healthy system Of finance. Seti's
face, after more than hundred genera
tions have melted into the impalpable, is
still the delicate, sweet and smiling face
which his artists designed. His likeness
to his son, Rameses IL, the Roi Soleil and
magnificent braggadocio Louis XIV, OF
Egypt, is still as plain as if father and son
were living men of our date. Seti was old
when he died, and his eyebrows are white
His royal fingers prove that govt was fami-
liar in Egypt But he died in his Red,
and his face is at peace More awful is
the face of Ta-aken, who fell in the mo-
ment of victory, fighting the Hyksos, or
Shepherd Kings. 1t is conjectured that
Ta-aken died victor, because his side
secured the body and hastily embalmed it.
Had they not held more than their own
the Hyksos would have carried it of, as
Achilles bore to his hut the body of Hec-
tor. In those days the great fight was
always for the body of fallen leader, as
we know, not only from Homer, but from
hundreds Of ancient pictures. Ta-aken's
body remained with his own people. The
hasty process of the hurried embalm