| One does not have to be a king to understand the inherent poignancy in Keat’s lament: ‘Mortality weighs heavily on me like unwilling sleep.’ Man’s fear of sickness and death have been of continuing concern to him, an universal primordial fear which transcended age, creed, class and location. |
| The ancient Egyptians though they had adequate insurance against it. While they learned how to cure sickness and recognized that they could not prevent death, they made their ruling pharaohs incarnate deities, the vital link between the temporal and the spiritual, between this life and the next. He became, according to John Romer, a very readable modern Egyptologist, ‘a powerful part of the endless cycle of birth and rebirth, the cosmic and agricultural rhythms of Egypt.’ |
Published in THE NATION 5 Nov. 1992, and reprinted in THE ARMLESS QUEEN (1994). |
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