#great pyramids

[kyotoprotocols]

[amateurarthistorian]

i made a video on tiktok about tutenkhamun and it’s going viral which is cool because that video basically paid my rent for 2 months but the main drawback is having a bunch of people commenting to say that the pyramids werent actually tombs 😭 get that ancient aliens shit away from me

[blackcrowing]

Ok... real talk... why is Stonehenge held up as the measuring stick for old things when Newgrange predates it by 1,000 years?

Newgrange also predates the Great Pyramids by 500 years...

just saying...

[coolthingsguyslike]

[eagle-longing-for-rostau]

Approaching the Pyramids

Credit 1 Credit 2

[l-egypte]

January 14, 2021 | The Mummy (1999)

I rewatched The Mummy (1999; directed by Stephen Sommers) because it was on Netflix and I find the characters’ banter entertaining.

Evelyn: [preparing to open the sarcophagus] Oh, I’ve dreamt about this since I was a little girl.

Rick: You dream about dead guys?

And

Rick: The Book of the Dead? Are you sure you want to be playing around with this thing?

Evelyn: It’s just a book. No harm ever came from... reading a book.

Of course, much harm has from reading a book—and writing a book. And I am not just saying this because of what happened in the film. History has a multitude examples of this, I’m sure.

It’s interesting to see how filmmakers imagine what the past looked like, as in the above screenshots. Fortunately in Giza and its surrounding area, quite a few monuments still stand (e.g., the Great Pyramids, the Great Sphinx), so one doesn’t have to deduce and/or imagine too hard.

Here’s the view of the Giza Plateau from above from Google Maps:

I rotated the map 90° clockwise (north is now on the right), so that the bottom of the map would be where the camera “was” when “filming.”

The red pin (bottom-left) indicates where the Great Sphinx is. Below and to the left of it (grey pin) is the Valley Temple of Khafre. And above these two are the pyramids (two of the three are present in the screenshot). 

What threw me off while watching the opening scene in The Mummy is that when the “camera” pans from left to right, first you see the Great Sphinx and then the Valley Temple of Khafre, as if the temple is to the right of the sphinx. If you stand in-person before these two monuments, the temple is to the left of the sphinx. (And the sphinx’s tail is on the lefthand side—not the righthand side, as can be glimpsed in third film screenshot.) Something something cameras reverse things? Opposite view?

[Screenshots of The Mummy (1999) on Netflix]

[data-node2]

Source:  sebastien nagy

[trashcanalienist]

YES it is time to post the soft mummies again! They are so beautiful, in deаth and eternity gruesome and peaceful, reduced to the bare structure of our being, and they are so soft a leather and so fragile a bоne. They smell like old books and old fruit and their exact quality is unknowable for to know it would defy the heavens in brilliance and bring about total cosmic understanding...it is all I can do to wonder in awe and to wander in reverence.

Once I saw some in person and throughout my being they cast a fear both careful and deep - terror, and one I delight in, for to confront deаth and grotesque flesh and find it so is reassuring of mortality and of humanity, and the still beauty I find in it all the same is sure of my undying love for - all things and everything. I shuddered and murmured for days after that…

Oh, now here is a fine and noble fellow. See his skull, how shallow his skin stretches? The angularity of his arms? The surrender and simple contentedness on his lifeless face? He has weathered tens of thousands of years within his tomb and they have given him softness, and rest.

My flesh is savage - it howls the prickling knowledge of every single bolt of sensory information I experience, and I drown in the constant awareness. Yet I know this: that nothing is insignificant, and that everything is without intended purpose upon creation. It is beautiful to be meaningless and loving, and to see, and to know, and to feel. I wish only that when I am deаd my bones find the same softness in the earth as these darling creatures have in their tombs and endless sandheat and dry darkness.

Alas, those two are still my only soft mummies. It is hard to find good beautiful mummies these days.

Many of the others are twisted and agonized in their forms, and often torn or rotted, their empty eyes staring wildly across the abyss to find purchase in my soul, clawed hands shaking and desperate, their jaws wrenched open in mad wailing despair...fear, and sympathy, for that is as we all are.

And it isn't merely this world I adore, as I turn my hopes up to the sky, in reverent memory and wild delight thinking well of such infinite possibility...I shake now more often with tearful emotion and happiness than with fear. There are worlds fantastic and free, and this can very easily be one of them.

And that is why Time Walker (1982) is the single most incredible movie ever made.