13 Facts About Ancient Egypt

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.

1. England ground ancient cat mummies into fertilizer. 

While human mummies got turned into medicine or paint, these 180,000 cat mummies were auctioned off by the ton and sprinkled on crops.

2. Egyptian morticians deliberately botched the job when mummifying the poor. 

This ensured the afterlife would be free from the poor, so the rich could escape overcrowding. 

3. Pharaohs had the grossest ritual to keep the Nile running. 

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.

4. Egyptians got drunk to celebrate beer defeating the gods. 

According to mythology, a god who wanted to destroy mankind mistook a cask of beer for blood, drank it, and mellowed out. 

5. Cleopatra lived closer to the creation of MySpace than to the building of the Pyramids of Giza. 

6. King Tut's tomb contained a real extraterrestrial artifact. 

It was an iron dagger made from a meteorite—"iron from the sky," as the Egyptians called it. 

7. Someone tried to sail from Africa to America using ancient Egyptian sailing methods.

Voyage two succeeded, supporting his theory that the old societies might have had contact.

8. 1999's The Mummy would come across much differently if it came out today. 

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.

9. Moon Knight's the son of an Egyptian god. 

10. A couple different Egyptian leaders tried to rip the pyramids apart and repurpose their stone. 

You can still see a weird gash in one of the Pyramids at Giza from an 800-year-old attempt. 

11. King Tut mania was (in part) a Nixon political ploy.

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. 

12. Egypt built a proto-Suez Canal thousands of years ago.

It linked the Red Sea to the Nile, ran 100 miles, and had individual sections that they moved up and down mechanically. 

13. There's a Pizza Hut that looks straight at the Sphinx and the Pyramids. 

But don't think that ruins the site—it may well be in line with how people treated the complex in its heyday. 

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