The history of Ancient Egypt is full of conspiracy theories: that aliens built the pyramids, that the Egyptians were black, that they invented electricity... and the star topic: the curse of the mummies.
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"The poor women have not cursed anyone! In their conception, people were mummified to go to paradise, not to bother the living," cries Josep Padró. For this Catalan Egyptologist, after half a century studying one of the most fascinating civilizations of Antiquity, these questions are meaningless nonsense.
As a kind of complement to the History of Pharaonic Egypt (Alliance) published a few years ago, the expert, director of the Spanish archaeological mission that works at the Oxyrhynchus site, now presents Secrets of Ancient Egypt (Criticism), a volume in which he collects a series of studies on very specific topics such as assassinations, divine sex, unknown gods or the origin of Egyptian writing. "It is not exactly a history book, they are stories, cases that I have studied first-hand and that I have thought may be new to the general public," he explains.
For example, the figures of two aspirants to the throne who could change the course of Ancient Egypt: that of the generalissimo Nakhtín, who after the death of Tutankhamun, the child pharaoh, and his immediate successor Ay, competed with the future king Horemheb, with whom Curiously, I have shared the highest military rank; or that of Prince Thutmose, are of Amenhotep III, the "pacifist", whose premature death caused a dynastic crisis and made Amenhotep IV/Akhenaten monarch, who would impose a monotheistic religion, disrupting Egyptian society and civilization and altering the international balance. .
Padró also collects the theories that have identified this last pharaoh with Moses, which are based on the appearance of the cult of a single god in Egypt and Israel on similar dates; a debate between biblical scholars and Egyptologists in which Freud even got involved, but in which the Catalan researcher prefers to remain "eclectic": "Akhenaten is an erased historical figure [later pharaohs applied damnatio memoriae to his reign], and only rescued by archeology Moses, on the other hand, is a mere figure of memory, without historical evidence of his real existence.