Sarah Parcak: evaluation

Transcript context

…Do we think people back then actually believed that? You could find a lot of textual evidence that today’s burial practices are for the next world, but in most societies, especially men — they’re not so religious. They’re fairly skeptical. They might just think when you die, you die, and there’s a societal puffery surrounding death rituals, but what people actually believe is something different. Is there a more cynical way to think about grave goods? For the ancient Egyptians, this is what they believed. It’s really hard, and I teach this in a lot of my archaeology classes and talk about this when I give lectures. We’re all so biased, and we’re all in such modern mindsets about religion. Even really religious people — you roll your eyes sometimes. You’re like, “Really? Because you’re not acting like that.” But for the ancient Egyptians, their religion was their entire worldview. It’s how they interacted with their world. The wind wasn’t the wind. It was the god Shu touching them. The Nile wasn’t the Nile. It was the god Hapi. So, if we think of their religion, in some ways, as their science and how they understood the changes in the world around them, I think that’s how we can better understand why they did what they did and why they believed what they believed. They believed this stuff, and so for them, they genuinely believed that when they died, these things, or the spirits within these things, would accompany them to the afterlife. It wasn’t just about building a tomb and putting goods in it. That was just one step. You needed to make sure that during your life, you married and you had children so that, in particular, your sons could carry on rituals. They could carry on making offerings to your spirit in the afterlife. That was really important, so for a lot of these tombs, especially at sites like Lisht, we find shrines so people could come. Think of it like a Mexican Day of the Dead. Your family could come and picnic and make offerings. That was just as important as the grave goods. What is the least crazy version of the Atlantis myth I might plausibly believe in?…

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