Keeping Up With the Cadavers

It all started, as most terrible ideas do, with a man named Neb-ankh-menu feeling professionally underappreciated. Neb was, by all accounts, the Michelangelo of mummification. His viscera removal was clean, his natron packing was immaculate, and his linen wrapping was so tight you could bounce a denarius off the finished product. The problem? Nobody *saw* it. The work was sacred, sure, but it was also secret, performed in the dusty, incense-choked confines of the *wabet*, the House of Purification. And Neb, a man whose ego was considerably larger than the pharaoh’s barge, was sick of it.

His solution, detailed in the (probably forged) “Papyrus of Theban Civic Complaints,” was to document the process for public consumption. Not with boring-ass tomb reliefs, oh no. Neb hired a fleet of scribes and artists to create a sequential narrative on enormous papyrus scrolls. He’d stage the embalming of some mid-level courtier, then unveil the corresponding “scenes” in the public square, complete with a dramatic narrator, sound effects guys rattling gourds, and professional mourners on standby to whip up the crowd. He called it *Mer-Mut*, or “Behold the Dead.” It was a goddamn sensation.

Within a year, “Beholding the Dead” was the hottest ticket in Thebes. Neb was the star, a tyrannical perfectionist who would berate his apprentices for uneven brain-hooking technique in pre-recorded “confessionals” chiseled onto ostraca. The show had it all: drama, tension, and a surprising amount of workplace backstabbing. “That little shit Ipuwer,” one limestone confessional reads, “he used the cheap Nubian linen on the Vizier’s left leg after I *specifically* told him to use the finest royal flax. The man’s soul is probably walking with a limp in the afterlife because of that talentless hack.” Rival guilds launched their own terrible spin-offs, like *Pimp My Sarcophagus* and *The Real Housewives of Deir el-Bahri*, which mostly involved rich women complaining about the thread count of their burial shrouds.

The whole glorious, sacrilegious enterprise came crashing down during the live finale of Pharaoh’s third-favorite wife. In a moment of high drama, as Neb was about to place the ceremonial heart scarab, his chief rival from the “Memphis Embalmers Local 151” burst in, claiming Neb’s natron was illegally sourced from a salt pan sacred to Set. A full-blown brawl erupted on the embalming slab. Priests, horrified by the desecration (and the abysmal ratings of their own temple’s snoozefest, *Chanting with the Dawn*) declared the whole format blasphemous. The papyrus reels were burned, the production stages were torn down, and Neb-ankh-menu was exiled to some shitty oasis, presumably to teach mummification techniques to lizards. A few oddly narrative tomb paintings are all that remain, baffling Egyptologists for millennia.