Hey folks! This week is Thanksgiving in the United States and I’ve opted to take advantage of the break in teaching to focus down on getting some chapter revisions done, so we’ll be back to hoplites next week.
In the meantime, if you are looking for things to read or watch, I have a few suggestions.
First, as always, there is a new Pasts Imperfect (with mummies!) which always features a great classics roundup.
There’s also another video with Roel Konijnendijk reviewing depictions of ancient Greek warfare in popular culture, in this case taking a crack at some scenes in AC: Odyssey. And I’m glad he is doing that because I assume it is delaying the 57-post long bluesky thread he is inevitably going to write about everything I am getting wrong about hoplites.
Finally, if instead you want a bit of inside higher education grumbling, I ran across this older Angela Collier video on adjuncts and the nature of adjuncting which – while depressing – is accurate and worth watching. We ought to demand that our public higher education be better than this: students deserve teachers who have the time and resources to properly prepare classes and instructors deserve salaries they can live on and finally the public deserves real scholar-researcher-teachers for their money, not overworked, underpaid adjuncts (so the money can go to upper-level administrators or football coaches instead).
In any case, I hope everyone who celebrates had a Happy Thanksgiving and we’ll be back next week with more hoplites!
I dont have anything productive to say on this that is not negative, or just yeah that tracks and only get worse from here so…
I always greatly enjoy your posts about everything, It Really Brightens my day. Thank you.
Somewhat off topic but maybe of interest to some people here… does anyone here watch or play the game Age of Empires 2? It’s a pretty old RTS game from 1999, which has been continuously updated ever since, so it’s an interesting mix of both old and new game features.
Specifically, it has this unit called the “siege tower” which was pretty much a joke in the community for a long time because of how useless it was. It was supposed to let you vault units over walls, but it was just too slow and expensive and generally impractical.
Anyway, the developers decided to lower the cost of siege towers and also make them move faster when they have units inside. Also, unrelated, they added a new unit called the “fire lancer” that’s like an early Chinese gunpowder/spear hybrid. At first it didn’t same very good either. But recently, the players have figured out that when you combine these units with the new changes, you get an absurdly strong combo. It moves at the speed of cavalry, fast enough to outrun else and dodge projectile shots. It’s also almost immune to ranged attacks. The fire lancers can pop out, fire instantly, then duck back inside to reload. It looks absolutely absurd, and it’s horribly broken, but it’s an interesting example of how a game can change over time in ways no one ever expected.
Take a look at this game: https://youtu.be/H_g9ckdTxog?si=j0PsAuEG8DSC4wFZ&t=4317 if you want to see it. It looks like an APC somehow got into a medieval battle.
I love the implication that anyone reading this blog might be unaware of the Age of Empires series.
Bret even covered Age of Empire here, a few years ago:
https://acoup.blog/2019/11/22/collections-why-are-there-no-empires-in-age-of-empires/
Pretty interesting article.
yes but that’s Age of Empires 4, which is clearly inferior to the earlier game, Age of Empires 2. And as for Age of Empires 3… the less said, the better.
I love the implication that EVERYONE reading this blog is unaware of AOE lmao
Watching AOE players invent the APC a few centuries early was quite something. I love the stupid new age strats that the community is cooking up.
More proof (if any were needed) that changes can be cumulative and interact in unintended ways.
And people will find those ways. Or the universe itself.
It’s interesting that AoE and Civilization series has the same misunderstanding of how siege towers work and expect the army to drag them along from home base. Instead you should have an engineering unit that travels as fast as the rest of the army but will take a longish time to build the tower next to the city while you have to protect the unit.
It’s not that AoE series has a misunderstanding of history, but rather that it’s a playground for RTS design decisions (excessively many in the recent years, to the point it’s hard to figure out if some idea is stupid or just got negatively affected by others) with a thin layer of historical paint over it. It never tried to be authentic, just engaging – and any ties to actual history are there precisely for engagement. A popular activity in the aoe2 community is to point out in exactly what (many) ways it’s historically inaccurate. Would be nice to have a series talking about all those differences, but I’m afraid it’d have to be cut short at some point around part CXIVs, there’s just so many.
That also applies to the campaign stories; though, I think they should have made that a bit more clear.
Back when I had been playing Age of Empires 2 as a young kid I had already understood that the scenarios themselves were not accurate. Obviously, such things as the Imjin War being ended with a Korean counter invasion of Japan and the Aztecs stealing horses and gunpowder from the Spanish to produce their own cavalry and artillery had only been added to make those levels more interesting, I understood back then. Likewise, the Franks and Burgundians obviously did not really already had Late Medieval weaponry and architecture during Attila the Hun’s invasion of the Western Roman Empire.
However, being so young I did not have enough of historical knowledge to be aware that, for example, in reality the Scots had lost the Battle of Falkirk instead of winning it; so, I had failed to realise that the campaign stories were as inaccurate as the rest of AoE2.
This had later led to a few moments in the vein of ‘aha, I had already found it suspicious that Holy Roman Emperor Frederick Barbarossa had invaded Poland to conquer more Lebensraum for the German Volk’ when I had later started to look up the historical accuracy of various campaigns.
It is also something on which, as you have already pointed out, others have already written extensively about. For example, I had once encountered this list here: https://www.reddit.com/r/aoe2/comments/dy7hw7/my_list_of_historical_inaccuracies_in_aoe2/
And there also had been a few written on r/badhistory as well, mostly about how inaccurate individual unique units are, from the falchion throwing mamlukes riding Bactrian camels, to the Woad Raiders.
So actually that *is* how it normally works. Most of the siege units move super slowly, so good players will bring workers forward to make the siege workshop that produces siege units close to where the fighting is happening. This is new thing is a weird exception where it can zoom around as fast as a horse.
Also like xellos said, the game doesn’t try to be too realistic. It’s a game where you can send a lone villager marching across the map, punch out a lion, and then singlehandedly build an entire castle. There’s all sorts of goofy little things that make no sense.
Well, I never figured out that you were supposed to do that. Usually my siege units were produced in my base and went with the rest of the invading army.
Sometimes, I did build forward siege workshop close to where the fighting is happening, but that always was part of a general strategy to build forward military buildings, from barracks, to monasteries, so that new troops need not march all the way from my main base to reinforce that army.
Now, I am thinking about it; I actually doubt that strategy would have significantly sped up my armies. Monks also move ‘super slowly’; and if one of my armies was big and advanced enough to contain siege weapons it in most cases would also have contained monks to heal wounded units.
Or are you also supposed to train your monks close to ‘where the fighting is happening’? But then what if you are attacked on the way there and have no monks to heal wounded units?
Heh, there’s a community meme for this where every question is answered “it depends…” But yeah, usually if players want to use siege and monks offensively they build them both in forward buildings, like the classic “Smush” siege-monk push strategy. Or they play more defensively, leaving the monks at home where they can hide behind walls and the town center, they’re pretty vulnerable when moving across the map. For competitive multiplayer matches, the late game is usually too fast-paced and chaotic to allow healing after a battle.
That’s where the concept of “map control” comes in. You need to know what’s up – if your starting scout sees that the enemy has army to intercept, you need to do something about it, otherwise you can build forward. If you’re having trouble with that, consider that it’s just as difficult to prevent you from executing your plan as for you to do the same. If you have a big mobile army (dudes on horses, dudes in chicken cosplay, the Sharkatzor whatever), you’re using that to make your forward possible.
Also timings. You can sneak in before the enemy has much vision and villagers are quite strong early on vs melee units just in case you get spotted.
Those gambits are fun where you bring massive pressure early, put all your economy on gold and buy what you need. You build everything forward (with several villagers), pump out a lot of strong units, keep attacking, don’t leave the enemy a chance to breathe. If it fails, you try again and again in the same game.
@AJ Gyles
Ah, that might explain it. I had always been primarily a ‘campaign’-player, and then a ‘random map versus AI’-player; I have never played enough multiplayer to get back close to 1000 ELO after my initial drop.
I’m thankful for my weekly dose of pedantry. Genuinely. Thanks for
writing all of this.
Your blog is something I am very thankful for!
I am thankful for all the wonderful professors I had at the university, and I don’t know which of them were adjuncts, but for those that were, I am doubly thankful for their hard work for such minimal return.
I have been able to have a career as a professional writer, because I had professors who were willing to take the time to help me turn complex thoughts into comprehensible prose. Speaking of which, this blog is an amazing resource and a great example of complex ideas turned into comprehensible prose. I’ve learned so much from you, Bret, that it’s kind of amazing. Thank you so much!
Not being from the US, I usually don’t do a “this is what I’m thankful for” thing in late November, but since some other people here are doing it:
I’m thankful for the fact that, between all the gloom and doom this year, there were usually at least a few things every now and then that made me laugh. I guess that psychologically, I couldn’t have made it without those things.
Since Bret mentioned mummies, let me say that I really don’t like the way they’re usually treated as baddies in fiction. I mean, vampires, who have to regularly actually kill people to stay alive, are often shown in a positive light. It’s as if mice would write large amounts of fiction about the glories and romance of being a cat. But mummies, who just want to guard their tombs against intruders in peace, are almost always portrayed as evil. There should be more fiction with good guy mummies. As of now, that genre seems to consist of one Spanish CGI animated movie from a few years ago, and one old episode of Chip’n’Dale Rescue Rangers. It’s a shame IMO.
I shall offer battle on this hill:
– Vampires originate from Europe. To the extent any fantasy creatures inhabit the same setting that Anglophone and/or European writers and audiences live in, vampires do, on par with dragons and such (modulo pre-/-/post-industrial era applying to nearly everything). Thus although for several decades they were implacably evil (from Bram Stoker’s Dracula to the classic Hollywood films inspired by this cluster of literature), step by step they turned into antiheroes, to PoV antiheroes, to normal-ish humans with weird side-effect-heavy superpowers.
– Mummies belong in a setting that is “foreign”/”exotic” (museum or “distant land we don’t go to for ‘normal work’ or education, only tourism (or archaeology)”). Consequently, once the main characters resolve the Plot, they will leave the setting and stop having interactions with the mummy/-ies. Furthermore, the audience lacks familiarity/comprehension of, or sympathy toward, their superpowers and (supernatural) goals (what Egyptian mythology?). Both factors fit perfectly with the mummy being a villain (fear of the unfamiliar does half the writer’s work), awkwardly with it being a temporary ally (they expect to e.g. fight how, again?), and remarkably poorly with creating any kind of close and/or lasting collaborative relationship. (The writer would have to work hard to build up enough to earn an emotional farewell scene by the end. Having the horizontal ties continue beyond the end of the return to the normal world would be even harder — a kitchen sink urban fantasy crowds out the mummies, lifting mummies specifically into the present is wtf.)
The obvious way to do it would be… basically Night at the Museum, where the mummy is a decent guy. Though its sequel used a villainous mummy.
A likewise obvious way is The Extraordinary Adventures of Adèle Blanc-Sec (2010). IIRC we don’t learn what ends up happening to the mummies in the modern(-ish) world, they just walk out of the film while the protagonists have an emotional scene.
Optionally, one could even argue the following, but this is not necessary:
Mummy treasure is to be seen as a natural resource, like minerals. The mummies wanting to keep it are morally in the wrong. Defeating them is just as right and proper as solving difficulties of geology in extracting minerals. Likewise, local people complaining about “their” mineral/mummy resources are mostly a nuisance — luckily the state governing the area is oligarchic, highly corrupt, and lacks the technology/capital/organization to extract the resource by themselves (see: oligarchy and corruption), thus our heroes can negotiate a price to buy from the state security against its citizens, which still leaves them with a margin from extracting and exporting the resource.
It’s also worth noting that when Stoker was writing, Slavs would have been considered by many in the Anglophone world as ‘not quite White’, and the rehabilitation of vampires happened after the boundaries of Whiteness expanded.
This is correct, but Wallchians are not Slavs.
According to? Language family sure, but Y-haplogroups show deep connections with others in the central Balkan, notably stronger than with central Italy. Are you saying that Balkan is generally non-Slavic?
The genetic closeness can be explained by interbreeding but if there was an ancient isolated population A that interbred (and had corresponding cultural exchange) with surrounding broad population B, then it’s accurate to say that the descendants of A are a distinct subgroup of B.
Keep in mind that “Slavic” is a very broad people-group and therefore will necessarily have plenty of internal variation depending on external influences. Compare e.g. Bohemia, Novgorod and Macedonia. It’s as broad as “White” (in the original sense not the “Caucassian” sense).
Count Dracula in the original Stoker novel (as distinct from the historical Vlad the Impaler) also self describes as a Szekely, so possibly Hungarian, or possibly not, but in any case neither Romanian nor Slavic.
While Stoker’s vampire is undoubtedly not Slavic, it’s worth mentioning that the original vampires, particularly the word “vampire”, do seem to originate from Slavic folklore 🙂
Stoker describes Dracula living in Borgo pass, which is not in territory where a Szekely or Wlach would have their ancestral home, so the real conclusion to draw from the novel is that Stoker had no idea about the geography of Transsylvania.
According to? Language family sure, but Y-haplogroups show deep connections with others in the central Balkan, notably stronger than with central Italy. Are you saying that Balkan is generally non-Slavic?
@xellos,
Great point, it’s easy to get ethnoracial identity (=ancestry) and ethnolinguistic identity (=language) conflated, but they’re definitely distinct things.
“and the rehabilitation of vampires happened after the boundaries of Whiteness expanded.”
I’m trying to think of when vampires start going from “obvious bad guys” to “might be bad, might be good, depending,” and I think it’s the mid-1960s. I would be more inclined to link said rehabilitation to the beginnings of the Sexual Revolution.
My speculation is that people were just projecting from the general pattern that people would believe that “All members of [ethnic group/religion/nation/region] are [evil/savage/stupid/cruel/deceptive].” and then it would turn out that this was bigoted BS and that the vast majority of the members of any such broad category were just ordinary people with the same general range of morality and capability as anyone else.
So if that was true for all those other groups, maybe it is also true for [vampires/werewolves/orcs/klingons/etc].
Except that for real world categories you can actually check reality for what people in that category are actually like. But for vampires et al there is no way to get real world data because they do not actually exist.
“It’s also worth noting that when Stoker was writing, Slavs would have been considered by many in the Anglophone world as ‘not quite White’”
Not generally, however, by people in the UK, where Stoker was. Late 19th century Brits thought that Russians were white!
Use of the “whiteness” trope is a very misleading way to describe Anglo-American views of southern and eastern European peoples. A Transylvanian would have experienced no obstacle in traveling through the American South, for instance. As another example, Eliza Doolittle’s status was higher as a Hungarian princess than as a cockney match girl. It would be more accurate to say that upper class Anglo-Americans believed in a racial/ethnic/class hierarchy with themselves at the top, southern and eastern European aristocrats next, lower class Europeans of all nationalities next, Asians next, and Africans at the bottom, with the color line occurring in the middle of that hierarchy.
“As another example, Eliza Doolittle’s status was higher as a Hungarian princess than as a cockney match girl.”
A sloppy piece of writing, this: in the late 19th century there was no Hungarian royal family. “King of Hungary” was a title of the Emperor of Austria. Any princess of royal blood in Hungary would have been a Habsburg and would have sounded Austrian, not Hungarian.
Princess as a title in the Holy Roman Empire or the Austro-Hungarian Empire did not imply connection to a royal family.
Prince Metternich’ as far as I know had no royal relatives.
“Princess as a title in the Holy Roman Empire or the Austro-Hungarian Empire did not imply connection to a royal family.”
Very true – the place was teeming with non-royal Fursts, Furstins, Kurfursts, Reichsfursts, Kirchsfursts and Landesfursts.
But the rival linguist, Zoltan Karpathy (really), explicitly says of Eliza that she is “not only Hungarian, but of royal blood. She is a princess!” (In the play his name is Nepommuck but he says much the same thing)
This is more like “reality made to fit the plot” than just sloppyness. It is a bit like Sherlock Holmes interacting with “King of Bohemia”, while that country was, in fact, part of Austria-Hungary. Everyone knew that Central Europe was full of small independent or semi-independent principalities, and you could make one up as the plot demanded. This was a trope until 20th century. The suspension of disbelief could be relied upon so that the audience meber would not pay too much attention to details that deviation from reality.
“Hungary” was then a sensible choice because Hungarian is a Fenno-Ugric language, meaning that it is about as foreign as a person appearing as white Westerner can speak. Most importantly, you could assume that nobody in the audience would have any idea about what a Hungarian English accent would sound like. And of course Hungary is one of the old great realms of Europe, so a Hungarian princess would be much more highly regarded than e.g. a princess of Romania, Greece, Bulgaria or Serbia which were newly founded, not somwell regarded kingdoms. This makes the mistake even more absurd. It is not really sloppy writing but good storytelling.
Simpler and more likely explanation: Vampires tap into the horny. Mummies don’t.
Yes, and probably the correct one. If we put the “rehabilitation of the vampire” in the second half of the 20th century, any “expansion of whiteness” notwithstanding, people from that part of the world (Eastern Europe) were very much NOT the good guys in the eyes of the west in any way.
@draugdur,
I wonder if there was ever any fiction during the Cold War synthesizing those two things (fears of vampires & fears of communism).
@Hector
Hmm, that reminds me of a discussion on the internet I had once encountered about whether Dracula would have joined the secret police of Communist Romania had he been real. Based on the idea that a job in the Securitate would be something for a vampire.
Though, that was not from the Cold War and might also not count as fiction.
In “Love at First Bite” a 1979 American comedy horror film, Count Dracula moves to New York City because the communist government of Romania seizes his castle.
“I wonder if there was ever any fiction during the Cold War synthesizing those two things (fears of vampires & fears of communism).”
Interestingly, I can’t think of any – I suspect the perception of vampires = aristocrats got in the way of it. There was a wave of stories after the Wall came down set in Ceaucescu’s Romania – the confluence of AIDS, Romanian orphanages, and a dictatorship made for a good setting. UK readers will remember “Fiends of the Eastern Front” in which the main characters (moderately sympathetically presented) were German soldiers fighting near Stalingrad who come to realise that their Romanian allies are not entirely human.
And if we take a looser definition of “vampire” you have Tim Powers’ amazing novel “Declare” in which the USSR survives only because it renders continual and huge blood sacrifices to a supernatural entity known as “Machikha Nash” – the purges, famines and so on are deliberate acts of policy to satisfy her hunger.
“people from that part of the world (Eastern Europe) were very much NOT the good guys in the eyes of the west in any way.”
I think, interestingly, that this isn’t actually borne out by the media of the time.
Think about the archetypal Cold War character: James Bond. The first Bond film comes out in 1963. Bond is a Cold War British intelligence officer for 27 years and, in all that time, how many Bond films feature the intelligence services of the USSR or any Soviet ally as an adversary? Zero. Harlem gang lords, freelance terrorists, American arms dealers, IT billionaires, lunatic eugenicists, yes; the KGB, no.
He spent more time literally or figuratively in bed with Soviet intelligence than he did actually fighting them.
And even in Cold War fiction where Soviet intelligence or whoever actually is the adversary – le Carre, Ambler, Maclean and so on – there will virtually always be a sympathetic eastern European character to show that our quarrel isn’t with the people but with their government.
Not to mention that this is also the heyday of popular culture doing WW2 stories, and fictional friendly Red Army troops, Yugoslav partisans, Polish Spitfire pilots etc are very common indeed.
Vampires tap into the horny. Mummies don’t.
I refute this conclusively by pointing to literally all of “The Mummy” (1999).
As counterrefutation, I will point out that all of the thirstposting regarding Imhotep involves stills and gifs from when he is not a mummy.
” I will point out that all of the thirstposting regarding Imhotep involves stills and gifs from when he is not a mummy.”
In fact Imhotep is never at any point in the film a mummy!
“Mummy” is a word with a clear definition; in the context of ancient Egypt it means “a dead body which has had its organs removed, which has been treated with natron, and which has been wrapped in bandages in order to preserve it”. It can also mean more loosely a body that has been preserved by chance because it was left in very dry conditions like a cave in a desert. It emphatically does not mean “any old dead Egyptian in a box”.
Imhotep was shoved into a box with a load of beetles, which ate him. That is not mummification! Several characters in the film actually remark on this – his body is not at all well preserved, and is in fact “juicy”. There are lots of mummies in the film, including Imhotep’s acolytes and Ankh-Su-Namun, who are classic bandage-wrapped mummies. Imhotep is not one. Presumably Ankh-Su-Namun is the title character of the film.
Now that I think about it, one of the friendliest mummies that I’ve ever seen came from a kid’s cartoon, Tutenstein.
Thank you, I didn’t know about that.
Re: your first paragraph: Well, we do live in an age in which people sometimes try to come up with fiction that features characters from different cultures as *protagonists*, rather than just as people with whom the protagonists deal in some way.
And then, often, they get attacked for cultural appropriation and forced to make a public apology while the publisher withdraws the book.
I’d be hard-pressed to name much more than two bad-guy mummy media from recent times, so it feels more like the end of the mummy as part of the horror pantheon in general rather than a specific refusal to turn them good guys.
I’ve tried to order my thoughts and I think in the end it comes down to the overly specific nature of the mummy, in many regards. It’s kind of hard to imagine a mummy plot that isn’t a rehash to The Mummy – even Anne Rice’s novel of the same title, for all its non-horror in the back end, still starts in exactly the same place: An Egyptologist opening a grave and bringing a mummy to the light.
Unlike the vampire, which already started as a free-floating thing (don’t get me started on how it’s an English spin on German ethnologists using a Serbian word to describe a Romanian superstition), the mummy is bound to a specific place and specific culture. It can’t be easily transplanted to a different place and only with difficulty to a different time. To make matters worse, since it’s of course orientalizing nonsense invented by outsiders, any treatment has to grapple with the problem of squaring the existence of the mummy with the incompatible actual beliefs of the culture that interred the dead this way.
There is also the very limited and purely reactive nature of the mummy (grave gets disturbed, it wakes up), which pretty directly leads me to the more broad matter of themes. For a story to be re-told and for an archetype to be explored in more ways, it has to be able to be used to express a concern or anxiety that is (in whatever ichoate way) relatable to the writer. And unlike for example zombies, which have been used as a reflection of racial anxieties, vapid consumerism, spread infections, foreign invasions and the immorality of capitalism and government, the mummy never really managed to grow beyond the original message of “grave-robbing is bad”/”colonialism is bad”, both of which have lost their edge in modern times.
I also think it’s not a strong argument to point to the superhero treatments of classical horror monsters. The vampire is if anything a pretty late addition to that club. The superhero has always been about turning the parable about the danger of unlimited power on its head and imagining someone who uses that great power with great responsibility, in defiance of stories like the one about the Ring of Gyges (the OG invisible man) or “Beware the Superman”.
If there is a “mummy alignment chart”, I would say that the Terminator films are structurally radical but doctrinally pure mummy films (naive but curious investigator awakens mystical power that is defended by a cadre of superhuman implacable automata bodyguards).
The only other obvious Mummy knockoffs I can think of in fiction are the Necrons in W40k, which are interestingly also a cross with the Terminator films. Turned up to thirteen, of course.
Second Edition AD&D had ‘Van Richten’s Guide to the Ancient Dead’ (a Ravenloft product) which alongside ritual mummification mummies also covered mummies who might have origins such as natural mummification in a peat bog. In fact the mummy from the ‘sample mummy hunt’ example given (at least in the Monster Hunter’s Compendium version of the Guide) was a minotaur bandit who had died and been preserved in a bog, rising from its watery grave a number of years later to resume its career of stealing stuff.
That said, I don’t think the ‘Children of the Night’ adventure selections ever got as far as mummies before TSR went bust, so we never got to see TSR trying to come up with a broad selection of fully fleshed out mummy stories. (And the mummy in the ‘Ravenloft Appendix 2’ villains compilation was might be described as a standard Egyptian-style one, I think, albeit one plotting against a different mummy.)
And I think (if I remember right) one of the hallmarks of the Second Edition AD&D Ravenloft mummy is that it is obsessed with something, and that (ones with cults/worshippers aside) it’s inactive when there is nothing which triggers the obsession. Vampires drink blood (or otherwise drain life-force in some way); were-creatures transform under a full moon (or occasionally due to some other periodic natural cycle trigger condition); and mummies are obsessed.
It’s interesting that in Warhammer, the mummies are less evil than the vampires (which are not the most evil guys in the setting).
“But mummies, who just want to guard their tombs against intruders in peace, are almost always portrayed as evil. ”
This is a slightly whitewashed version of the motives of mummies in fiction. In “The Mummy” (1959) the mummy wants to track down and murder everyone involved in excavating the tomb of his girlfriend. In “The Mummy” (1999) the mummy wants to return to life, and resurrect his girlfriend, by murdering not only everyone who opened his tomb but also an innocent woman (Evelyn) who just happens to look a bit like her. I have seen “The Mummy” (2017) but it was so chaotic that I can’t actually remember what the mummy wanted to do, but Wiki informs me that she wanted to murder loads of people and also summon the god of the dead which sounds bad.
So I think it’s safe to say that fictional mummies are generally not just guarding their tombs but are, at the very least, murdering lots of people, and also in some cases doing some other very questionable things.
Not to mention that there is actually no moral basis for mummies defending their tombs by force, even if that’s all they do. If you die and are buried with a load of stuff, that stuff no longer belongs to you, because you are dead and the dead cannot own property, regardless of their ability to lurch around groaning in ancient Egyptian, or lack thereof.
Legally, that property becomes part of the national heritage of the country where the tomb is, or in some cases belongs to whoever owns the land where the tomb is (depending on jurisdiction). In either case, as long as the archaeologists in question are operating with the permission of the relevant parties (which they generally are in these films), and intend to document their finds and transfer them to an appropriate museum or other institution for further study, they are not breaking the law.
Even in the case of a tomb robber (and there’s a colorable case that the activities of some excavators fall into this category), and even if we grant that the undead are alive in the eyes of the law and therefore still possess a claim of ownership of their grave goods, the use of lethal force, far less the pursuit of the robber with murderous intent long after the robbery is completed, goes far beyond the legal limit of reasonable force.
I would definitely watch films in which mummies pursue legal routes towards the recovery of their grave goods. Look at what is happening in Nigeria over the returned Benin Bronzes – you could have a great three-cornered case between a European museum which wants to return some Egyptian artefacts, the Egyptian ministry of antiquities which wants them in a museum in Cairo, and the resurrected pharaoh from whose tomb they were taken.
Ok, so yesterday, I have thought about this amusing conversation.
I new wonder whether if they are dealing with a brought back to live mummy ‘diplomatic’ enough to attempt to get his stuff back by starting court cases instead of killing people, whether they might then not simply offer the mummy his grave goods back in exchange for consenting to being interviewed about his time.
I mean, if I were an archaeologist/Egyptologist/Minster of Antiquities the chance to interview a resurrected mummy with first hand knowledge of Ancient Egypt would to me look certainly much more valuable than his grave goods. Just imagine what we could learn from that.
This is a great idea – I am planning to steal this whole concept for an RPG scenario and I am now wondering whether my players will think of it.
And to be honest the resurrected mummy would presumably be amenable to a deal where he gets a nice house and a Civil List pension or something, in return for allowing his grave goods to be on permanent loan to a museum, and maybe turning up once a month to give a talk to tour groups, through an interpreter if necessary.
[incomprehensible pre-coptic groaning]
“His Majesty says that this next stele has often been misinterpreted. The Sea Peoples did not really exist; they were a long-running joke among Egyptian aristocracy. Blaming the loss of his coastal provinces on the Sea Peoples was like you telling your boss that the gremlins in your computer had eaten the PowerPoint deck you were working on.”
[dry, age-old chuckling]
“His Majesty was very entertained when he learned about the misunderstanding.”
I recall reading that in Scandinavian folklore, problems with draugr (zombies) could sometimes be resolved with legal action.
A great deal would depend on the exact legal position of the mummified pharaoh in question. Let’s call him Ptah for short.
Quaere, as they used to say, is he in the eyes of the law:
a) The living Pharaoh Ptah?
b) Still the person Ptah, and alive, but no longer pharaoh?
c) The person Ptah, not pharaoh, and dead, but still legally a person?
d) The person Ptah, not pharaoh, and dead, and therefore not legally a person?
e) An independent living person who came into existence at the point of the mummy’s awakening but who shares the memories of Pharaoh Ptah?
If a) he’s still Pharaoh then he rules Egypt, he can do what he wants with the grave goods, and someone needs to tell General Sisi that his services are no longer required.
If b) then the court might rule that he silently consented to abdicate at the point of his death (which also resolves the awkward question of what happens when Ptah’s father also resurrects, thus potentially undermining Ptah’s own claim to the double crown under a)).
If c) we are expanding the definition of “legal person” to include natural persons, corporations, and the walking dead.
If d) then he cannot own property – but the court could rule that he still possesses some legal standing and appoint some sort of legal representative for him.
If e) then he is an Egyptian citizen by birth, but he has no more claim on the grave goods than anyone else.
The killer argument, I think, is to say:
“You claim that since you are now alive, you are entitled to possession of the grave goods which were once, the court accepts, yours, and which were taken from your grave by the defendant without your consent some 3000 years after your supposed death.
But this argument implies that no inheritance can ever result in secure legal possession – if a man A inherits an item from his dead father B, the law can only recognise A’s title to it provisionally, because there is always the chance of B rising from the dead and reclaiming it.
And A cannot therefore legally sell, give away or bequeath the item himself, as legally one cannot transfer something to which one does not have secure title.
Furthermore, the existence of any step of transfer through inheritance breaks the chain of legal ownership and all subsequent transfers by whatever means must be held to be uncertain.
Under this argument no item can ever be owned with certainty unless the owner can prove an unbroken chain of transfers of ownership between two living persons, all the way back to its manufacture, to prove that at no point was the item transferred through inheritance!”
There is also a variant of point a) which would make everything else moot: Ptah is a pharaoh and legally the person, but because the ancient Egyptian law made no difference between the private and public property of the pharaoh, the Egyptian state now holds, as the legal sovereign and successor of the ancient Egypt (via numerous rights of conquest and uses of pouvoir constituant, all title to Ptah’s alleged property.
This is a very good point – I think it’s actually a variant of point b, though. If Ptah is actually pharaoh (regardless whether he has always been pharaoh for the last 3000 years since his coronation, or whether he reassumed the title of pharaoh on reanimating) then by definition he rules Egypt and all the property of the Egyptian state, including all museum exhibits, tanks, police cars, stationery and decorative plaques, is his property.
But if Ptah is Ptah the person, but no longer pharaoh, then all his property when he was pharaoh was the property of the Kingdom of Egypt and vice versa, and after his death remained the property of the Kingdom of Egypt and therefore of his successors. And therefore in that case I think your argument holds that all such property not alienated sold or discarded in the intervening 3000 years belongs by law to the present-day successor of the Kingdom of Egypt, viz the Arab Republic of Egypt.
Apologies, I was wrong above – in case e) Ptah is not necessarily an Egyptian citizen. He does not qualify by birth; he doesn’t have a father who is an Egyptian national, nor is he a foundling of unknown parentage. It is highly unlikely that he will qualify for naturalisation because he won’t understand Egyptian customs and traditions, nor will he speak Arabic.
Applicants for naturalisation must also “have good character and conduct; have no criminal convictions; have good mental and physical health; can economically be self-sufficient; and have resided in the country for ten years” and it isn’t clear that he meets all of those. (Good physical health? He is dead!)
One might be able to make a good case for Ptah’s citizenship under the Treaty of Sevres, which states (Art. 102) “Turkish subjects habitually resident in Egypt on 18 December 1914 will acquire Egyptian nationality ipso facto and will lose their Turkish nationality, except that if at that date such persons were temporarily absent from, and have not since returned to, Egypt they will not acquire Egyptian nationality without a special authorisation from the Egyptian Government.”
Ptah was, I would argue, resident in Egypt, lying very, very still, on the date in question, and was presumably a subject of the Ottoman Empire prior to that – he therefore has Egyptian nationality. The counterargument might be that he was, at the date in question, a stiff. Deceased. Bereft of life. Resting in peace. Pining if not for the fjords then for the River of the Duat. An ex-pharaoh. And dead people aren’t residents of anywhere, or subjects of anyone.
a) The living Pharaoh Ptah?
No, he’s dead.
b) Still the person Ptah, and alive, but no longer pharaoh?
Yes. The person is the same. Ptah is not Pharaoh–he no longer can rule–but that doesn’t mean he gives up his property rights. He transcends to godhood, and gods are, in that culture, capable of owning property.
He’d have to give up the rights to the property that belongs the Pharaoh, obviously, but that doesn’t mean ALL property rights. His rights changed. What people are having trouble with is that they changed in a way that our current culture doesn’t include. The nearest would be, would a president have to give up their personal property upon leaving the presidency? But a pharaoh isn’t a president, and the pharaoh didn’t retire he (according to the beliefs of his culture) became divine, and the boundary between “personal” and “non-personal” is a lot different.
c) The person Ptah, not pharaoh, and dead, but still legally a person?
Yes, absolutely, in the relevant legal system. They are not ambiguous about this as I recall.
d) The person Ptah, not pharaoh, and dead, and therefore not legally a person?
Obviously not. The whole point of burial goods is that they are the property of the mummified person, intended to help them in the afterlife.
e) An independent living person who came into existence at the point of the mummy’s awakening but who shares the memories of Pharaoh Ptah?
No, that’s not how they viewed mummification or the afterlife.
You are ignoring F: Would the property transfer to some living entity or organization, and if so, who? My grandfather recently passed, and his shares of an LLC didn’t become community property, free for the taking–they went to the LLC, which has to deal with them according to bylaws and legal standards. Likewise, grave robbing is a crime. The goods a body is buried with are presumed to be the property of the family, the cemetery, the religious institution, or SOMEONE; you can’t just go in with a shovel and start digging. So the presumption that death negates all claims of all entities to property is obviously not tenable. You have to identify who’s property it is and get the appropriate permissions.
This has been a VERY thorny question–still is, I’ve run into more than one situation where this became really complicated. If we’re going to ignore the culture in question and presume that our legal system applies (which is inherently wrong, but whatever): simply having a permit from someone claiming to have authority over this issue is not anywhere NEAR sufficient, legally, to justify collecting artifacts. Even if they DO have authority it can be a thorny issue, and in areas that have experience significant political instability it can be remarkably difficult to determine who has legitimate authority (it’s not easy in areas that are politically table, but instability makes it 100 times worse).
“The goods a body is buried with are presumed to be the property of the family, the cemetery, the religious institution, or SOMEONE; you can’t just go in with a shovel and start digging. So the presumption that death negates all claims of all entities to property is obviously not tenable.”
That argument doesn’t follow, though, because the members of the family are not dead. The cemetery is not dead. The religious institution is not dead. So they can all have claims to property. The body in the grave is dead – it is no longer a person – and therefore it can no longer own property. I’m not arguing that personal property automatically becomes unowned on the death of the owner, just that it no longer belongs to the owner because the person who was the owner no longer exists. Modern Egyptian law, like the law of other countries, will be able to state who is the owner of objects buried in the ground – the person who owns the land, the state, or some other party.
I think the idea that the case should be heard under the laws that applied when Ptah was pharaoh does not hold water. Practically speaking, where are you going to find a lawyer qualified in ancient Egyptian law?
And, more broadly, just because that was the law that was in force when Ptah reigned doesn’t mean that it follows him around in a sort of bubble forever. An ex-monarch involving himself in a lawsuit in his former kingdom, now a republic, must expect to have that suit heard under the laws of the republic – not under the laws that applied when he was king. Ptah, as you say, is notPharaoh of Egypt. There is no Pharaoh of Egypt. There are no Kingdoms of Upper and Lower Egypt for him to be Pharaoh of. There is only the Arab Republic of Egypt, under whose laws all cases brought in the Republic’s territory will be decided.
Also thinking about the revived mummy’s citizenship, I wonder whether the Egyptian government would not simply offer him citizenship for publicity reasons regardless of the legal details*.
I mean a court case about the nationality of a mummy returned to life would naturally attract unprecedented worldwide media attention; and the mummy is but one person and rendering him stateless by refusing him citizenship would not look good. So, I suppose the mummy would be at an advantage compared with much less known and more numerous applicants.
* Which I, to be honest, know nearly nothing of.
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/travel/article/weird-passports-history
There is a precedent here – Rameses II was issued an Egyptian passport in 1974. Under “Occupation” it read “King (deceased)”. This i think clarifies the situation considerably.
@ajay,
The point here is, I think, state succession. I think It is very clear that Ptah, regardless of his legal status, doesn’t rule Egypt de facto. Instead, there is a very different government that rules the country in accordance with a constitution made millenia after Ptah’s death.
The positivist, continental way of interpreting the situation is that at each revolution, there appears the “constituting power” that establishes a new legal system based on popular sovereignty. This power itself is outside the scope of legal study, but it means that there is a point of discontinuity. The former government no longer exists, and the new government continues the existence of any rights, obligations and possessions to the extent the constituing power has decided. This is an extra-legal act that cannot be argued against on grounds internal to the previous legal order. (And for the new order, these acts are sacrosanct expression of the popular will. “Treason never prospers…”)
In practice, this translates to: Ptah is no longer a pharaoh because he doesn’t, in fact, rule. And he has no possessions because the current Egyptian government holds them with a proper legal title.
Naturally, were Ptah to re-etablish his dominion over Upper and Lower Egypt, (by force of arms, magic or some quirk of popular will), this would be a new exercise of “constituting power” that would remove the now-existing government and establish a new legal regime, where Ptah is the supreme ruler and holds eminent domain, which would make little difference to the inquisitive mind of a positivist jurist.
@ajay
The European countries where citizenship and membership of the ruling ethnicity have been traditionally linked, have often somewhat odd definitions of citizenship. For example, the first Finnish nationality act defined that as the primary condition that a Finnish citizen is one who has inherited the citizenship from his father or if born outside of wedlock, mother. There was no idea that all persons present in Finland at some point would be citizens.
Of course, as this law was from 1928, it postulated a pre-independence (pre-1917) Finnish citizenship. This did, in fact, exist. There was a legal concept of “a Finnish subject of his Imperial majesty” which excluded Russians. Only Finnish persons were allowed to hold civil office in Finland, and similarly, if a Finnish person became a public charge in Russia, he was deported back to Finland to be cared by his local parish. And it was possible to get the “Finnish subject” status, although very difficult.
So, for Finland, the definition made some sense, but in practice, it still really only meant that if your forefathers were listed in baptismal registry of some Finnish parish, you were a Finnish citizen. In practice, though, this meant that a rural police chief would write you a Finnish passport without inquiring any further to your parentage if you were an ethnic Finn (or Sami or Roma, for that matter) born to Finnish parents (which you would demonstrate by bringing a copy of your church record to the police). The question of the citizenship of your parents would only arise if there was something peculiarly foreign in your background, like a foreign surname.
In this sense, if you accept this kind of ideology, a semi-mystic bond between citizenship and ethnicity appears. Then, it would be clear that a person who has existed in ancient Egypt is a current citizen, and it seems that the Nasser and Sadat governments, which drew their legitimacy, did use exactly this ideology when issuing a “passport” to Ramses II.
“Not to mention that there is actually no moral basis for mummies defending their tombs by force, even if that’s all they do. If you die and are buried with a load of stuff, that stuff no longer belongs to you, because you are dead and the dead cannot own property, regardless of their ability to lurch around groaning in ancient Egyptian, or lack thereof.”
This is highly dependent upon culture. To the ancient Egyptians, the stuff DID belong to the person it was buried with–just like sacrifices belonged to the gods they were sacrificed to. In which case there absolutely is a moral basis for mummies defending their tombs; the same one which gives me the right to use lethal force to defend my home. And someone actively engaging in self-defense (remember, the stuff is there for a reason, it’s not just a junk heap) should absolutely cause one to re-evaluate one’s moral assumptions. The rationality of believing that mummies are incapable of property rights ends when they assert those rights–for the same reason that the rights of the Hobbiton residents to sell Bilbo’s stuff ended when Bilbo returned alive.
There’s zero reason to believe that English law and practice should trump Egyptian law and practice when the Egyptian in question is in a position to object. Standard practice in archeology is for the culture in question to set the rules. Which often sucks. Many Native American groups have objections to handling dead things, which extends to fossils. I’ve seen paleontologists weep over the loss of significant finds–they got the info they could, but a lot is simply lost to taphonomy. But it’s their right to tell us to go away and leave their stuff alone. And anyone who has the capacity to tell you “Go away and leave my stuff alone” should be granted the moral right to own property. (The issue of disability is one I’m not qualified to answer; once the mummy could speak it’s absolutely clear that it was sentient, capable of reasoning, and thus capable of owning property.)
Further, even if we presuppose that the undead have no property rights (a premise that we absolutely should not grant), there’s the question of those who are alive. Note that in most of the movies you mention, the people breaking into the tombs are not locals. Think the Dunmer in Morrowind. They have a clear right to their burial practices, a part of which is calling on their ancestors to guard their tombs from robbers. While we can say that the ghosts don’t own the property (Tamriel actually has laws about this), it’s absolutely true that the family that maintains the tomb has a moral right to prevent desecration of their sacred tombs.
And the idea that archeologists operated with the permission of the relevant authorities is, frankly, an absurdity. I’ve nothing against archeologists–some of my best friends are archeologists and all that–but the history of the profession is absolutely NOT one of moral saints. Further, determining who has the authority is problematic. For example, in the 1999 movie there were two competing factions, each of which thought they had a right to the tomb–the government (which granted permits and whatnot) and the group defending the tomb (which has been doing so for generations, and has a legitimate claim). What the archeologists in the movie did is no different from someone going to a Native American burial site–one where the tribe is extant and actively objecting to the disturbance–and claiming that since they have a permit from some random government official it’s all good.
Fortunately modern archeology is much more sophisticated. On projects I’ve been on where there’s a possibility of discovering artifacts or remains, a major effort is made to identify all relevant parties and get their approval. If one said “We’ve been guarding this for generations, we do not grant approval” that would more or less be the end of it. The lawyers would get involved, and the legal proceedings would drag out for years (seen a project shut down for 2 years over a much more minor issue).
Your argument is basically the colonial justification for naked pillaging. It’s not morally defensible, and it violates pretty much all standard archeological practices. Which is why I’m responding. This stuff actually matters, today, in the real world, and your arguments are both ignorant of standard archeological practices and actively detrimental to oppressed peoples.
“there absolutely is a moral basis for mummies defending their tombs; the same one which gives me the right to use lethal force to defend my home.”
But you do not generally have a right to use lethal force to defend your home. You have a right to use minimum necessary force to defend yourself and others against physical threat – not to defend your property. Defending your property is not self-defence.
“To the ancient Egyptians, the stuff DID belong to the person it was buried with–just like sacrifices belonged to the gods they were sacrificed to.”
“There’s zero reason to believe that English law and practice should trump Egyptian law and practice when the Egyptian in question is in a position to object.”
Irrelevant – there is no ancient Egyptian polity. The laws that would apply would be the laws of modern Egypt (assuming that’s where the case is being heard), which do not allow dead people to own property. I never suggested that English law should apply to a case being heard in Egypt – my only reference was to international law.
Frankly your entire comment seems to be based on an unexamined, unspoken, and deeply colonialist and offensive assumption that US concepts of rights, ownership and legality should apply across the world, and should supersede local law. You would do well to take a long, hard look at yourself in the mirror, and allow people from other cultures the space to be heard.
“You have a right to use minimum necessary force to defend yourself and others against physical threat – not to defend your property.”
Depends on location and person. In Alabama my wife has a de facto, if not de jury, right to use lethal force to protect the home and all its contents–if you break in and she shoots you in the belly with a deer slug, it’s YOUR fault. And morally the issue is more gray than you are presenting it. If someone is starving and you steal their last loaf of bread it’s perfectly reasonable for them to fight to the death to keep it, for example.
“Irrelevant – there is no ancient Egyptian polity.”
How convenient. Simply assume that the thorny parts of the moral question aren’t relevant.
You’re wrong, of course. If something can move, defend itself, speak, and perform complicated religious rituals it is indistinguishable from being alive. Thus there is at least one ancient Egyptian around. If you want to claim that one is too few, that’s on you–but I assure you, in archeology (and remember, we are fundamentally discussing whether grave robbers disguised as archeologists had a right to loot a tomb) that one is sufficient. Especially since it’s HIS STUFF in question.
Oh, and remember that in at least one movie there’s an extant organization that recognizes the pharaoh’s right to the stuff. Again, maybe you’re comfortable just assuming that away, but I am not.
What you’re saying is the equivalent of arguing that if a man is sick in a cabin by himself, you’re free to take whatever you want from him because a single person is irrelevant. Legally there may be some justification (in a survival situation breaking and entering is allowed in many places, for example). Morally the idea that you can steal from someone if they’re weak enough is….well, I can’t see myself associating with anyone who makes such an argument.
“The laws that would apply would be the laws of modern Egypt (assuming that’s where the case is being heard), which do not allow dead people to own property.”
Please present the law that says so. And by that I mean, please present a case study where a dead person was able to show up to court and claim that someone was invading his home and taking his stuff. I know of a few cases–people declared dead and found to be very much alive–and generally the fact that the dead guy is able to show up to court is sufficient to sway the jury.
At the very least, it will certainly result in a very complicated legal tangle.
Ethically the idea that you have a right to steal things when someone is clearly 1) sentient, and 2) trying to stop you is untenable. At that point it’s theft, pure and simple. Whether the thing is alive or dead is irrelevant.
Further, the views of the culture of the dead guy matter IN ARCHEOLOGY even if the dead guy isn’t up and moving. The view of archeology you are presenting is GENERATIONS out of date. Modern archeology–which would include European and American workers in Egypt–takes into account local cultures, PAST AND PRESENT, and archeologists are required BY LAW to at least make a good faith effort to be respectful. Shooting people defending artifacts is so far into the “disrespectful” end of the spectrum that any archeologist even associated with someone engaged in such behavior would be at risk of losing their careers. From the standpoint of archeology what those people in the movies did was WILDLY illegal, pure and simple.
“Frankly your entire comment seems to be based on an unexamined, unspoken, and deeply colonialist and offensive assumption that US concepts of rights, ownership and legality should apply across the world, and should supersede local law.”
No, you have this reversed. I’m advocating for respect of local customs; YOU are saying that we can run rough-shod over those. I have in fact pointed to Egyptian beliefs to support my position (though, like the sentience of the mummy and other inconvenient facts, you’ve ignored that). I’m also acknowledging the self-evident fact that a sentient being deserves rights AND that the being’s culture deserves respect. You are arguing that sentient beings only deserve respect if you deem them worthy.
You are correct in one aspect: US and European law absolutely does govern the behaviors of archeologists outside our boarders. This is not “unexamined, unspoken, and deeply colonialist”; this is coming directly from NEPA, archeological standards of practice, and other legal considerations. The entire point of these is to be respectful to other cultures and to be aware of the fact that they don’t work the way we do (and I have pointed out at least one example of this). There is not a single thing you’ve stated that is in line with this, or even showing evidence that you are aware of the existence of these laws (not surprising, most people aren’t unless they’ve done archeological work).
I will not continue this discussion; it’s obviously getting too heated. I will just say that for the sake of their careers I pray that any student of archeology that reads these comments is aware of just how deeply flawed your comments are, and just how dangerous following your views would be for them. People go to jail for this stuff.
I’m advocating for respect of local customs; YOU are saying that we can run rough-shod over those.
I don’t take @ajay as saying “we” can do anything of the sort, I interpret him as pointing out (correctly) that it’s often not clear what “local customs” are, since different groups in a geographical region may have entirely different legal and cultural norms, and that only gets more complicated when you add in the temporal dimension. Ancient Egyptian norms regarding property might be very different than modern Egyptiann norms (and even the modern norms might be very different depending on whether you’re talking to a nationalist, a liberal, an Islamist or a socialist). And that’s not even getting into parts of the world where different ethnic or national groups might have competing, and at least partially valid, claims about who’s the legitimate successor of which ancient group.
Any student of archaeology getting her education from reading anonymous blog comments by a lunatic who is discussing whether mummies are covered by the Treaty of Sevres and a semi literate Alabaman pecksniff should probably not be allowed within ten miles of a dig for fear she would eat the finds, so I think you need not worry too much.
“by a lunatic who is discussing whether mummies are covered by the Treaty of Sevres and a semi literate Alabaman pecksniff should probably not be allowed within ten miles of a dig for fear she would eat the finds,”
So, I think it’s pretty obvious who actually won this argument.
And it’s not you.
So, I think it’s pretty obvious who actually won this argument.
Disagree, I think @Ajay won.
Don’t forget, the modern Egyptian state was created by an explicitly “modernizing”, left coded, anti-monarchist revolution, and however that much that has evaporated over the years, I still don’t think they would look kindly on explicit pharaonic property claims.
“And the idea that archeologists operated with the permission of the relevant authorities is, frankly, an absurdity.”
A matter of opinion. Legally, operating with the agreement of the legal authorities is legal. Morally, there is no reason to favour your moral opinions over those of (for example) Howard Carter. Future generations might think that archaeological evidence is the common property of all mankind, and that it is barbarism to allow any small group to veto attempts to gain it.
The system that currently operates in the United States is a consequence of the legal and political system of the current United States. It was different in the past and will presumably be different in the future. There is no rational reason for anointing it the One True Moral System.
I appreciate the extended discussion of the rights of the undead. It as a welcome Pratchett feel, and is also appropriate to the upcoming season.
In H. Beam Piper’s “The Last Enemy” proof of reincarnation sets off a major social change when a reincarnated noble sues to regain his title from the brother who murdered him.
In the “Girl Genius” webcomic and novels, mad scientist style resurrections are common, so the Fifty Families* have a strict policy that your first death voids all your titles, property, et al. If you are resurrected you are a different non-noble person for all legal purposes.
One resurrected nobleman is very upset about this until he realizes it means he is no longer married to his wife, or rather his widow.
* The major noble houses of Europa.
“the Fifty Families* have a strict policy that your first death voids all your titles, property, et al. If you are resurrected you are a different non-noble person for all legal purposes.”
This is a very sensible policy.
What meant by “resurrection”? Is anyone saved by a defibrillator considered to have been resurrected?
In H. Beam Piper’s “The Last Enemy” proof of reincarnation sets off a major social change when a reincarnated noble sues to regain his title from the brother who murdered him.
As far as I know, the religions which feature reincarnation generally teach that reincarnated people do *not* remember their past identities. Although I guess there are partial exceptions for certain religious figures, Tibetan lamas etc., but I think even there they’re only expected to remember certain minor details.
IIRC the specific proof of reincarnation in that story lets you identify who reincarnates as whom, thus the drama that ensues. OTOH the author’s early death may have been related to his belief that if this life was not working he could have a do-over in the next.
There’s also Walter Jon Williams (very funny) Duke Maijstral books, where the annoying father is dead for tax purposes. But still offers unwelcome opinions, so presumably not for other purposes.
CJ Cherryh wrote a short story “The Only Death in the City” about a Paris where reincarnation with full awareness of previous lives is the norm. (The population isn’t growing.) It’s part of her Sunfall collection.
Biological parentage stops being important, people rejoin their original family and friends more or less as soon as they can walk – with full awareness of previous lives they don’t really need much bringing up or education. Relationships, friendships, and feuds can endure for generations; and people are bisexual because you never know what sex your partner might be reborn as.
There’s also one vampire (although not named as such) who’s significance is that if you’re drained by her, you don’t reincarnate.
@scifihughf,
I’m (mostly) from a cultural context where people believe in reincarnation (in general). I’ve definitely heard older relatives, as they reach the age when they’re thinking a lot about death, express hopes that in the next life they get to be with their siblings, other loved ones, etc. again.. Presumably they won’t remember their past identities (both Hinduism and Buddhism are very clear on that, in general) but I think the idea is in spite of not remembering, they can sort of recreate anew the same relationships they had in this life.
I’ve read that in Japan one of the reasons for double suicides as a response to forbidden love is that supposedly it means you will be reborn next door to each other in compatible bodies and with a mystical love bond.