mummific adventures in modern world

I, Mr. Mummific – life, prosperity and health to me - a pharaoh of ancient Egypt, whose stories you have been given the privilege to read (after my scribe and illustrator Leena wrote and painted them for you), have decided to share my travels in this strange day and age.

Mr Mummific's travel blog

Leena says I should probably use the term “travel blog”.

She wasn’t quite sure that is the proper word for it, as its readers are meant to be the good people in the afterlife of ancient Egypt. She explained that “blogs” are stories in the “internet”. Blogs are magical scrolls anyone can read by opening their strange devices with glass surface. Anyone with such a device can write scrolls to this great library called the Internet and others can read them no matter where they are in the world.

Great magic. Great magic indeed.

No one needs to travel to a temple and ask permission to enter the House of Life to read the scrolls. Everyone writes – in a most peculiar way – into their glass-covered devices and enters this huge library of invisible scrolls and gains whatever knowledge they are after.

Why do I not write my wisdom into good sturdy papyrus scrolls, you ask? I am shocked to say that if you try to get good papyrus here, it costs an arm and a leg. So Leena says. I want to keep my arms and legs.

Also she isn’t quite as fluent in writing with the reed pen as she is in writing into the huge library of invisible scrolls (aka the internet). And as she is my scribe in these stories as well, I let her write them the way she prefers. She pointed out that if we use the internet, I can share my great wisdom with many more people than if these stories were written in papyrus scrolls and then taken to a shelf in a House of Life.

So from now on, you are honoured to read my Travel Blog.

Life in the fields of Iaru is quite comfortable, if I manage to avoid the Mrs. who, like all women, are quite addicted to clothing and such. They are constantly changing their linen wrappings and dresses and jewels and do not give their husbands a moment’s peace, demanding we do the same. It is not strange, therefore, that men in the afterlife tend to gather together to avoid the ladies of their houses. We want to keep our comfortable, if a bit dusty, clothing. This common cause has united us into many secret clubs, as the word for these meetings is here. Kings meet with other kings and princes, the occasional vizier included. Farmers with farmers, soldiers with soldiers. No mixed clubs, that would be against Ma’at, the proper way of things.

Mr. Mummific sneaking away

As you all know, spending the eternity with the same people all the time can become boring. After all there hasn’t been new incomers in thousands of years. After listening to Seqenenre Tao’s ten thousandth description of his death in battle (did he really have to show all those wounds in his head all the time?), Thutmose III’s boastings about his wars, and the explanations by the crazy Ptolemies about how they just had to kill their wives, husbands, children, cousins and the monkey’s uncle for the good of the land, one day I had had enough. I got up and decided to go for a stroll one day and ended up here. In my scribe’s home in what they call “modern times”.

It has been interesting. Things are so strange here. I live in the hope my stories will replace the stale old same-o-same-o discussions in our king’s club at least. Maybe great discussions will be the result. If Akhenaten will once more lecture us about how he was the chosen one of the Aten, I’m sure I will stuff an old sock down his throat, relation or not.

So many interesting things I have seen on my travels to tell about.