In November of 2020, in Yorkshire, three shifts of gravediggers worked from six o’clock in the morning until ten o’clock at night over a period of at least ten days to prepare the cemetery for the burials of people who have died in the second wave of coronavirus.
Undertakers in the UK came out of retirement to help attend to the dead and their families – before the second wave hit. One of them is a friend who told me that funeral workers are the unnoticed exhausted. In May of 2020, at least one funeral home chain doubled the number of funeral services in one week. Most of the deceased are being cremated, yet there are long waits for burials.
The media ridicule and criticize Funeral Directors in normal times, and there is a whispered surprise among the industry that they’ve not yet been accused of enjoying a financial field day. It is quite the opposite. I’m told most families have the simplest service possible; there is no embalming, there are no flowers, no order of service, no limousines, etc. Due to limited finances of the bereaved, and in adherence to strict Covid guidelines, a grim ritual is made grimmer.
While this untold misery of death blankets the globe, there is a sprawling necropolis 20 miles south of Cairo, Egypt where the ancient dead are being dug up by the hundreds. The vast underground burial site of Saqqara has been trampled upon by teams of archaeologists and researchers, and those who do their bidding. There have been looters in this spot for centuries digging for treasures, but the big news is that they didn’t dig deep enough. Since September of 2020, a treasure trove has been unearthed. In a string of finds, sealed, 2,500-year-old coffins and their mummies have been hoisted up 12-meter shafts to the light of the arid day. In a matter of a few months, it was the biggest cache of ancient coffins discovered in over 100 years. The digging continues.
I first visited Saqqara over thirty years ago. It was not the bustling, busy archaeological site that now exists. There was, literally, no one there. I was traveling with a small group of adult students of Egyptology and their university professor on my first ever trip abroad. Exotic, intoxicating, it was a time before cheap and easy travel. The professor and his wife were friends of my fiancé. It should have been an exciting adventure, yet it was tainted by my ever-growing suspicion that the professor’s wife and my fiancé were slowly but surely falling in love. I tried to settle this nagging, gut wrenching feeling in Old Cairo, in Luxor, in Aswan, on the Nile, at dinner, on the bus, on a camel, on a horse, in the souks, bazaars, and museums. But that feeling didn’t settle until I sought comfort in the atmosphere that pervades all of Egypt and its assiduousness with death and the afterlife – the atmosphere in which my childhood was seeped – cemeteries, tombs, and everything funereal.
I was the youngest, less worldly, less educated of the group of New Yorkers. And though I had lived in New York for six years by then, the fact that I grew up in a funeral home in the South presented my travel companions with unlimited fodder. I was a sitting duck in the sand that surrounded the Sphinx. A steady stream of jokes flew at me like the Egyptian spears painted on tomb walls, delivered with an underlying, thinly veiled snobbism. I would never forget the faux pas of saying hieroglyphics instead of hieroglyphs, which was the acceptable noun amongst these scholars; nor would I make peace with their attempts to grossly exaggerate a Southern accent, which seemed to both fascinate and repel them.
I was trying to give up smoking, but I sought the little kiosks that sold a five pack of Marlboros, (not my regular brand) and traipsed up and down Egypt where it seemed the same man at the same kiosk waited my arrival in each town, each village. Never were cigarettes smoked so passionately.
The Giza complex and the Great Pyramid are, of course, impressive. The Great Pyramid is well lit inside, the stairs are modern and have banisters, there’s even a kind of tourist smell that overwhelms the odour of old. But the 4,700-year-old Step Pyramid of King Djoser at Saqqara is older than the Great Pyramid by two hundred years. Not as refined, nor as elegant, but a humongous crumbling structure that was closed to the public when I was there, and is almost always closed due to its dangerously unstable condition. However, the professor, who had cultivated connections with local authorities over many years, made it possible for us to gain entrance inside the ancient tomb.
The approach to the Step Pyramid was breathtaking. It sat desolate; a bleak structure of mastaba squares, stacked progressively in smaller squares one on top of the other, 62 meters high. Compared to Giza and its busy paths and roads near the Great Pyramid, Saqqara and the Step Pyramid held a grand, old, lonesome aura. We walked on sand that hid a necropolis like no other, so revered that it was said to have a divine energy that would aid one into the afterlife. It was more than a buried cemetery, it had been a pilgrimage site for not only the whole of Egypt, but all over the eastern Mediterranean.
The day began badly. The fiancé and the professor’s wife announced that they were considering a side trip the next day to Saint Catherine’s Monastery, a six to seven hour journey each way from Cairo. It is one of the oldest Christian working monasteries in the world and contains the oldest continuously operating library in the world. I wanted to go too. But the fiancé made nonsensical excuses about how I wouldn’t enjoy it, that it was a long journey, that it probably held no interest for me. (Library at the foot of Mount Sinai? Oldest working library in the WORLD?) They were so intent on going alone, that they scrapped the idea when I insisted that I join them. They were in utter denial of their feelings and the inappropriateness of their wish to run off to a monastery, and it took a few years and two divorces, theirs and ours, before they finally attempted a relationship. For years they insisted they were just friends, as did our friends and even his family. But I knew that day.
So I had a chest full of anger and confusion when our group entered the Step Pyramid. It was everything the Great Pyramid wasn’t. Utter darkness enveloped us, it was cold, and I had a palpable sense of walking a tomb path that was thousands of years old. This, I thought, is the smell and air of an ancient thing. Quite suddenly, all my despair and angst fell off me. The knots in my stomach eased, my senses sharpened. I remember the light of my small torch falling on pieces of blue faience scattered sparingly on the dusty floor. I pocketed one, unaware I was breaking the law. Years later, the ‘blue faience rooms’ would be restored, and the shafts and burial chambers brought back to life.
When I read a few weeks ago of the archaeological discovery of evidence of a vast mummy workshop underneath the Saqqara necropolis, I must admit a little tingle went up my spine. I had unknowingly come full circle those years ago, and had stood atop ancient Egypt’s first known funeral home and Mortuary Temple buried deep below my feet.
But as the global death rate from Covid-19 climbs, and climbs, and climbs, I think how, simultaneously, hundreds of bodies, the mummies, that had been put to rest using many highly sacred rituals, are being disturbed.
I understand all the educational and cultural benefits of such painstaking and arduous series of digs– the fiancé studied archaeology at university. I understand that Egypt’s tourist trade has been devastated and these digs provide desperately needed jobs. But I’m finding it hard to reconcile that this, of all years, is the best time to unearth the dead.
2021 will bring ‘never-before-seen-footage’, dramatic unwrappings, the big reveals of not only opening the coffins, but live enactments of x-raying the mummies. At press conferences this year they have already begun doing just that. It has been insinuated that many, many more bodies will be exhumed.
For social history purposes, how valuable is it to continue to unearth hordes of mummies, considering the bodies of ancient Egyptians have been studied for years.
When is enough, enough?
Almost 6,000 miles away from Saqqara in Lake George, New York, the full skeletons and fragments of bones of British soldiers and colonial militia who died during the French and Indian War were unearthed over 70 years ago on the shores of the lake during the reconstruction of Fort William Henry. More than 260 years after the soldiers’ deaths, many of their remains have still not been repatriated, nor buried. A portion sit in a box in a storage area, and others are still being studied at a university in Arizona. Even if the handling of the dead has been respectful, should there be a limit to how long human remains can be studied?
I think so.
My empathy muscle has been overworked this year. Yet, as it continues to power tirelessly on in this cruel climate, I cannot stop thinking about the thousand-year-old painted coffins being opened, the mummies’ linens studded with amulets, their written spells unwound, intricate work unravelled, dropping off. A box of British skeletons weighs on my mind. And while it may be ignoble of me to worry about the disturbance of the long dead while numbers of the recent dead rise, I beg the excuse of my late father’s profession that has left its indelible mark in my life. I think of all those women and men who are working so hard to care for the dead, shoveling earth not to raise the dead, but to prepare the dead for cremation and burial, day after day, doing so quietly, respectfully, without recognition, out of our own thoughts unless it is tragically forced upon us. The death worker’s light is always on. I think about the relentless toll on our women and men, our unnoticed exhausted, and I want to scream.
I want to scream, ‘Stop digging up the bodies. Allow the dead, all of them, ancient and new, to rest in peace.’
The Blue Faience Chambers of King Djoser