What are your thoughts on the idea of heroic mummies?

In real life, pretty much all mummies were members of royalty, nobility, or some other high ranking position in ancient Egyptian society, people that others look up to for one reason or another.

But most media just treat mummies as an ancient undead monster who is also happens to be a foreigner. In the case of the Universal movies, it particularly egregious that criminals were the ones who became the titular mummies. In the 1932 film, it was theft and sacrilege. In the 1999 film, it was adultery followed by regicide. In the spin-off to the 1999 film, it was attempted theft. In the 2017 film, it was conspiracy to commit regicide via acts of heresy most foul.

If those movies were more aligned with reality, any individual who committed such deeds, or attempted to do so, would most likely be fed to crocodiles or some other expedient and resource efficient method of execution (or eternal damnation if the criminals are apparently immortal).

Also, the concept has been executed in the past as shown in Mummies Alive. In that show, the mummy characters were all bodyguards of the royal family. The villain, Scarab, was condemned to suffer in isolation for all eternity for his crime of murdering the prince.

Finally, I think having a story about a resurrected mummy that takes into account that it used to be a member of royalty would be quite interesting. An individual who was respected and venerated as a living god is now reduced to an shambling corpse, an abomination against nature itself. How will the former king or queen cope with the fact that all that remains of his or her kingdom are tombs and artifacts? Will he or she exact justice on those who forced him or her back into this world? Such drama, I love it.

edited 11th Jan '18 11:17:33 PM by Worlder

I have a mummy character that was basically that, though they use to be a hand maiden that served a Egyptian prince. She ended being sealed into a coffin by two criminals for being the eye witness of the prince 's murder. Now she has since resurrected by use of a cat statue but the criminals have long since been dead. Also, she's more like a revenant zombie.

edited 12th Jan '18 7:45:30 PM by ewolf2015

Well, taking that to its logical conclusion, an undead mummy should act more like a revenent, rising to protect the realm of Egypt from exploitation from foriegners.

The fascinating thing is that the classic stories could easily be rewritten from the mummies perspective.

edited 12th Jan '18 2:44:33 PM by DeMarquis

Of course a source of conflic can be the fact those mummies are protecting THEIR kingdom and empire, not this weird egypt nation-state nonsense people have turn on in the 21 century.

they will be kinda knight templar in many ways.

Funny thing, that is pretty much how the Tomb king in warhammer used to be before.

I've had this idea running around my head about The Mummy bu instead of Imhotep the Historically Inaccurate, it's freaking Ramesses the Great

On a side note, if you ever want to befriend a mummy give him beer.

Yeah, it sounds stupid but the Egyptians were nuts about beer and some of the most prolific brewers of their age. Now, modern beer kicks the pants off of anything the bronze age had but I'm willing to bet that it's similar enough an ancient egyptian would still recognize it as beer.

I dont know about you, but having a drunk mummy around isnt necessarily my idea of fun.

Oh, that would be a bit of angst for the king or queen.

They can't enjoy earthly pleasures while in walking-corpse form.

Well that explains why they are so angry! "This is my afterlife? I'm supposed to be in paradise, and I can't drink beer? My organs are supposed to be in jars to prevent this!"

Also, not sure if this is helpful, but when I hear "heroic mummies" I think of Mummies Alive and shudder (I remember it being very bad).

And So the Heroic Mummy goes on a Heroic Quest to retrieve his/(her?) internal organs.

I love that idea! Maybe the mummy gets a bit stronger with each organ retrieved.

Or at least more human.