Mummies: How and why were they so popular?

Hello there! (General Kenobi)
Let's have a light hearted conversation about dead people!

I have a question that has been burning in the back of my mind since the dawn of time (or since it came up a few moments ago):
How did we ever get the idea to start preserving our dead?
Did we find some accidentally preserved corpses and think "Hmm... I bet I could do that"?
Why are/were these things such a big part of popular culture?

I get that the concept is that we want to preserve a post death legacy, but it's an interesting concept to think that we'd literally preserve ourselves using preservatives. [also worth mentioning that I don't intend to do a whole historical piece on the subject, just mentioning a couple things I thought were striking(ly grotesque)]

The whole ideamakes my skin crawl a bit, but there's a couple practices in particular that bother me. - If you're squeamish on the subject, you probably want to just nope out of this bit.

According to Herodotus' Histories there's a bunch of methods to mummification, considering both the cost and rank of the person being mummified.

If you want to really splurge on yourself you can opt for the most expensive operation, where you get your brain liquefied and drained out of your skull then everything else removed and preserved -- OOf that's a bit rough to think about.

Course, if you're on a budget, you can just get your post death enema and take an extended lay in some natron.

Tis' a simple man's mummification, but a mummification nonetheless! Least you're not part of the dregs who have to *egads* decompose!

By the way, natron is a mixture of salts that was used for cleaning and as a desiccant/preservative for meat/fish - apparently they just dragged it out of dry lake beds in Egypt and used this stuff in everything

We had been doing this for thousands of years before we decided that maybe it was just a fad. Eh, who knows, maybe we're mummifying people today and I just don't know about it.

I'm okay with that though. I'm VERY okay with that. I'll be blissfully ignorant on this subject unless somebody barges in to tell me otherwise.

Anyways, with how far back it goes there's really no information about how the practice got started. There's only a bit of documentation as far as how it was done, and why we did it with certain people (based on their rank).

Perhaps someone more learned than I could say, but again, it doesn't seem there's any information on how we discovered we could mummify people, so I'm just going to make up some hypothesis':

1. We'd found naturally preserved animals and started experimenting with the process by copying the conditions we'd found (I feel this is most likely, since many of the early mummies were found in arid regions of the world - Actually, isn't most of the history of mummification originating in arid places - most notably Egypt?)
2. We'd figured out how to make jerky. so we made human jerky.
3. Someone liked oils and wraps and just started doing that for fun and then it preserved them.

I could probably go on, but I'm thinking these would get more and more ridiculous and outlandish to the point of absurdity, so I'm going to stop there.

Honestly though, in my opinion, it doesn't really preserve much. Sure the mummies don't end up as bones/dust as quickly, but essentially they all just look like raisins. Speaking of, I don't think I'll be able to eat any raisins today, not that I normally do.

Moving on.

So what's really interesting to me is how mummies became such a big part of popular culture.

I mean, everyone knows what a mummy is and they they were a big phenomenon in Egypt, so people must be fascinated with them at least in a passing sense. Who was pushing this popularity up? The most closest idea that I can think of is that mass communications coupled with advances in archaeology brought to light a lot of the excavations and studies around Egypt and mummies in general.

That seems pretty plausible to me, I had heard something about how before the field of archaeology was around, when people found fossils they were just sort of like "Huh, neat rock" and moved on with their lives. I guess the same could be true with other things as well, though I imagine people would probably still freak out if they found a mummy on their property. I know I would!

Mummies have also been a staple of the Halloween costume tradition for quite a long time.
There were even several movies about "The Mummy: starring Dane the Jock Ronson"

^{Here's a picture of "The Rock" in case you don't remember him from those movies.}

There doesn't really seem to be an aesthetic reason to be fascinated with them by my reckoning. I mean, as I've said, most of them just look like raisins or prunes. Who'd want to dress up as a raisin for Halloween?

Actually, people probably dressed up as the "The California Raisins" as sung by Buddy Miles, but that's kind of a different thing altogether.

I mean, I guess there's the laziness aspect of having toilet paper be your mummy costume in a pinch could contribute to that, but everyone knows that the ghost is the true Halloween lazy costume of choice.

^{Look, ma! I got my costume picked out! Or another pandemic is happening...}

Two asides on that point,

1. How far back could the TP Mummy go? I mean as late as the 1930's it was still being advertised as "splinter free", so I can't imagine it was the wonderful world of TP as it is now. We've come a long way to not get splinters when we wipe our butts.
2. I have a greater appreciation of the mass appeal of ghosts. There's a lot more to go on there! A ghost could be anywhere, and their powers could be anything (as far as we know). A mummy is just people jerky.

Ok, that and how did we decide that mummies would have some sort of supernatural power in pop culture? and they would go "RAaaaaaaa" or "Urrrrr"?
Hmm... I feel that there is an old cartoon or something that might have set this precedent, but what it could be eludes me. Feels like a bugs bunny thing or something, but I am pretty sure that's wrong.

I know they really tried in the mummy movies to show how powerful and scary the mummy should be, but honestly I was more scared of the dang beetles in that movie than I was of the mummy. The mummy was just a sandy old dead dude. I was pretty ok with him. The bugs, however, were absolutely terrifying! Nasty burrowing flesh beetle things that would swarm you - that's a heck of a lot scarier than a sandy old dead dude who goes "Raaaaaa".

Eh, that was a pretty fun movie. Very dumb, but pretty enjoyable. I miss movies like that where you would just shut your brain off and be caught up in the adventure of it. I haven't seen much come out like that in recent years, but maybe I'm just a more cynical movie viewer at this point.

To [wrap] things up, I don't really think that their popularity has really carried over as much in the past several years. There certainly was a lot of interest in them through out popular culture for a while, but I think as a society we just got bored of them. I'm sure there's still a costume goer rocking the TP out there somewhere though. Good on em.

Thanks for reading

• Guurg
  ^{This was kind of done as a writing exercise, I don't have a whole lot of emotional attachment to the subject. Constructive criticism welcomed}

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