CSI: Ancient Egypt

External. Day. Desert: the hot sun beats down in the Egyptian desert. A forensics team circles around a crime scene dropping numbered placards in random order, brushing sand away in the desert for no apparent reason and posing dramatically for a non-existent camera crew. <CAMEL tramples through scene and is gone.> Cut to two of the team uncovering a sarcophagus with strange markings.

Forensic Team Member #1: If I’m not mistaken these markings state: “Here lies King Tutankhamun – please don’t disturb my remains because that will royally (Insert from the priest who mummified the body stating: Ha! I made a funny!) screw up my afterlife!”
Forensic Team Member #2 : Uh oh, it looks like we’ve ruined his after life. (taking off sun glasses and revealing he’s David Caruso) Tut tut tut.”

Cue a song by The Guess Who (you pick one you like).

***

Circling around the world today, as if anyone uber cared, is the news that they may have discovered the reason for King Tut’s death. He was a boy king they say, and he was weak they add. He was frail, they elucidate. The final diagnosis:? He’s dead Jim.

Me, I don’t care. Do you know why I don’t care? Because he lived 2350 odd years ago. If whatever killed him hadn’t killed him, something else would have – and if that something else didn’t get him, something else would have – and do you know what that would have been? Old age!

Unless King Tut was one of the race of Immortals (you know, the guys that own the 7-11s (come on, you can’t conceive of an idea of staying up those hours without being super bored – the level of boredom that only comes about from having lived forever)) he would long since have died. The manner of his death might have been important to his parents but at this particular juncture its really only worth knowing if you have a penchant for adding footnotes to Wikipedia pages or as a subset of that useless knowledge you need to have to be successful on Jeopardy.

I’m all for studying history. As the saying goes those who fail to learn from the mistakes of the past are doomed to repeat them. However, I don’t see how knowing that a tree branch fell on King Tut and put him in a coma (that’s not what happened) is going to add a lot to the sum of human knowledge. The effect of the death of a leader on a culture – that’s worth knowing, how he died isn’t important (unless through political unrest indicating socio-political forces at play).

But with the news floating out there at least we can be sure of one good thing: at least there’ll be something new on the Discovery Channel.