Egypt - Beer

Here is another post related to Rosicrucian Egyptian Museum. Egypt's people got their drinking water from the river Nile. Nile carried a lot of waterborne diseases. To prevent them, the people drank beer instead of water! 

In some shops/bars, the beers were served in a cylindrical goblet made of clay. This goblet had a pointed bottom. This was to ensure that the customer could not put the goblet down and hence had to gulp down the entire beer.  And once the beer got over, he would want more! Nice business trick eh? :)

Pillow?

Did I not tell you that I will  be back with more posts on Rosicrucian Egyptian Museum???


So here I am with a picture of one of the exhibits in the museum...
 
Can you guess what these are?

 

They are the head-rests used by the Egyptians while sleeping. They are supposed to be very comfortable. There are made of wood or ivory. Weird, ain't it?

Rosicrucian Egyptian Museum

I have always been fascinated by the Egyptian culture. The trip to the Rosicrucian Egyptian Museum in San Jose was enough to bring back my old enthusiasm for reading and finding out more about Egyptian culture.

The most fascinating thing of all is the embalming of dead bodies into mummies and placing them in ornate tombs with so much treasures in them.

The way the mummies hands are placed signify whether it is a mummy of a royal person on not. If the arms are crossed and/or holding symbols/weapons of power then it's sure to be a mummy of a king/Pharaoh!

This picture on the right is of cover of the coffin in which Tutankhamun's body was placed. It is a replica of the actual coffin.

The inside of the coffins were also full of paintings of sacred symbols or Gods or of After Life. We were totally lost in the mysteries of Egypt.

Below is a picture of a mummy from an Upper Class Egyptian family. Even though this body is thousands of years old, it has not disintegrated much. Curiously, when this body was scanned, the X-ray showed a metal pin at the knee cap. It is believed that while  embalming the body, some accident caused the knee cap to get crushed and the embalmers performed a surgery on the body to hold the knee joint with a metal rod/pin. Even thousands of years ago, these Egyptians had such skills! Amazing!

Before Greeks invaded Egypt, the Egyptian women (on coffins) were painted with yellow/golden faces to symbolize their cow Goddess, Hathor. However after invasion of Greeks, the queens had pinkish faces and hence, from then on the faces on the coffins were painted pink. Below is one such pinkish face.

This is just the beginning. There is so much more to discuss. A separate post on Egyptian culture will be posted soon! :)