The Curious Tale of King Seqenenre Tao
The mummy is doing what mummies do best: lying there motionless in its glass coffin, like Snow White waiting for a kiss.
Standing in the corner of the Egyptian Museum's Royal Mummy room, I watch throngs of tourists filing past me, ooo-ing and aah-ing at the collection of corpses laid out before them.
Each rigid royal is protected in his own private, environmentally controlled cocoon - islands of calm in a lively sea of loud shorts, baseball caps, and fluorescent bikinis barely hidden beneath transparent spaghetti-strap tops.
Rawi: Egypt's Heritage Review
July 2013
The smell of cheap sunscreen and burnt skin is palpable, it wafts behind bodies as they rush from case to case; the mummies, on the other hand, have all the time in the world, they aren't going anywhere.
To my surprise, the tourists are unmoved by the grim faces of death surrounding them. Perhaps it's the mummies' antiquity that makes the difference, or perhaps people just aren't as squeamish as I think. Would they be just as calm standing in a morgue? I wonder, or would they be slightly more freaked out? A young girl in a flowery dress sticks her tongue out in disgust while her parents read aloud a nearby label, proclaiming the name of the king lying below them.
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