A time line of the evidence is necessary to identify the ways one group of past people might have differed from another to avoid homogenizing the past, as in the static, dull perception of an unchanging ancient Egypt. However, this necessary introductory filter can offer only a simplified narrative, where regional geography and social mapping add more strands to the story. However many strands, the single line fails to capture the complexity and variety of any period, for which a more archaeological presentation of greater length would be required (as in Grajetzki 2003). According to the standard Egyptological history, between 3000
And 525 Bc, increasing numbers of people at more and more places adopted practices, writings, and imagery originally developed for the body of the king as son of Ra. The strength of this narrative and its frequent repetition, as in the preceding text, recalls the linguistic dominance which Bakhtin called monoglossia - a single epic story (Chapter 1). Such force can be resisted by displacing the minority practice of the specific preservation techniques, which we call mummification, and searching instead for the majority practice at any time. Predynastic and Nubian studies lead in this area, and the principle is being extended more often now to Bronze Age and early Iron Age Egypt (e. g., Goulding 2013). Nevertheless, the trajectory of increasing Dsirification extends beyond the theme of burial across the second and first millennia BC, entering the wider concept of the sacred; by the late first millennium BC, mainly after the period studied here, each temple precinct has separate cemeteries for Osiris figures, with prominent Osiris festivals (Raven 1978-1979). As a major phenomenon affecting a range of social settings and institutions, the attraction of mummification deserves analysis, rather than rejection, in order to understand not only its ancient significance but also its power of attraction today (Day 2006, Pringle). Besides monoglossia from Bakhtin, we might deploy the Gramscian concepts of hegemony and prestige to analyze how a particular technology of embalming practice, including the rites and materials surrounding it, achieved such overwhelming dominance that it becomes difficult to see ancient Egypt without it.
Future study may turn from the embalmed body, burial equipment, tomb chamber and chapel, and their images and words to seek explanatory contexts in the full archaeological record of all social classes of each period. The preservation of the body as an integer with sun, stars, earth, and Nile resonated with particular social groups in each period, in ways that will require careful definition and description, particularly at moments of change - the decreases in use, as well as the tide of increase. The most detailed archaeological recording across multiple types of site can provide our access to the variable patterns of attraction to, and resistance against, that persuasive millennial offer to preserve an individual body for eternity.
World History
