Moon Knight is going to be airing soon, so that got us thinking about ancient Egypt. We looked back at 1999's The Mummy, as well as the original Egyptian myths, which left ancient Egyptians engaging in drunken orgies (or, just solemn and environmental orgies). We learned about the pyramids, which survived attempts to tear them down, and which today are home to their own Pizza Hut outlet. The pyramids were not made by aliens, but they did contain extraterrestrial artifacts, it turns out.
Ancient Egypt spanned a long period of time, and those long ago people were surprisingly industrialized and could have crossed the oceans. So have some respect the next time you eat a mummy.
Here's a look back at some of the facts we learned. The links all lead to full articles with much more info, so click every one that interests you, lest you suffer a lingering curse.
While human mummies got turned into medicine or paint, these 180,000 cat mummies were auctioned off by the ton and sprinkled on crops.
This ensured the afterlife would be free from the poor, so the rich could escape overcrowding.
In an attempt to honor a myth about how the world began, the Pharaoh would publicly spill seed into the river … and we're not talking about cotton seed.
According to mythology, a god who wanted to destroy mankind mistook a cask of beer for blood, drank it, and mellowed out.
It was an iron dagger made from a meteorite—"iron from the sky," as the Egyptians called it.
Voyage two succeeded, supporting his theory that the old societies might have had contact.
You might appreciate The Mummy as a goofy $80 million thirst trap, but it'd likely enrage the same media outlets now vocally saluting the nostalgic favorite.
You can still see a weird gash in one of the Pyramids at Giza from an 800-year-old attempt.
America’s touring Tut exhibit was a huge deal at the end of the ’70s, but it was part of Nixon’s plan to build support for his agenda.
It linked the Red Sea to the Nile, ran 100 miles, and had individual sections that they moved up and down mechanically.
But don't think that ruins the site—it may well be in line with how people treated the complex in its heyday.
Want to get more roundups like this? Subscribe to the weekly Saturday Morning Cracked newsletter:
[newsletter]