{ "item_title" : "The Pharaoh and the Invention of Immortality", "item_author" : [" Peter Kriger "], "item_description" : "Egypt was not obsessed with death. We are obsessed with the part of Egypt that happened to be made of stone.Ninety-nine percent of Egyptians got a pit in the sand at the edge of the desert, a reed mat, and a clay pot. They died exactly as quietly as everyone else who has ever lived. The village of the living was built of mud brick and dissolved back into the floodplain. The house of the dead was built of granite and is still standing. We did not discover a civilization fixated on the afterlife. We discovered a filter, and then we wrote a personality profile based on what got through it.This book takes the pyramids apart and reassembles them as something stranger and far more useful than a monument to fear: a machine. The tomb was a legal person before anyone had invented the idea of a legal person. It held land, employed staff, and could not die, which made it the first perpetual endowment in human history, engineered around 2600 BCE by a civilization with no money, no market, and no way to write a contract that outlived the man who signed it. The mortuary complex was not what Egyptians did about death. It was what they did with a surplus they had no other way to move through time.Along the way, a great deal of what everyone knows turns out to be wrong. No pharaoh's body has ever been found inside an Old Kingdom pyramid - not one, not ever. The Great Pyramid is a precisely dated building with a genuinely unknown purpose, and the evidence that dates it is a foreman's shipping log. The Sphinx was already a mystery to the Egyptians themselves, who dug it out of the sand and invented a story about it because they had forgotten who made it. The oldest monuments on Earth were built before farming, by people who then had to invent agriculture to feed the construction site, which means the monument caused the surplus rather than the other way around. And the mound city of Cahokia, in what is now Illinois, was larger than contemporary London - it just had the misfortune to be made of dirt.Egypt backed a single human being up five separate ways: the body, the name, the image, the offering, and the text. Five independent channels, which is more redundancy than most modern data centers bother with. Four of them failed. The tombs were robbed, usually within a generation, sometimes by the men who built them. The offerings stopped. The priests defaulted on eternity. What survived was the cheapest line item on the entire invoice - the name, scratched into stone by a scribe who was paid by the day.And then the final turn, which is the reason any of this still stings. We are the second civilization in history to take immortality on as an engineering problem. Cryonics, life extension, uploaded minds, the server farm humming in a cooled room, the foundation established in a donor's name and funded in perpetuity. We are running the same program on better hardware, and we have not yet noticed that the Egyptians already ran the experiment and published the results.Eternity, it turns out, is not built by the people most afraid of dying. It is built by the people who have run out of other things to be afraid of.Keywords: ancient Egypt, pyramids, archaeology, immortality, civilization, complex systems, human nature", "item_img_path" : "https://covers1.booksamillion.com/covers/bam/9/79/819/149/9798191498416_b.jpg", "price_data" : { "retail_price" : "24.00", "online_price" : "24.00", "our_price" : "24.00", "club_price" : "24.00", "savings_pct" : "0", "savings_amt" : "0.00", "club_savings_pct" : "0", "club_savings_amt" : "0.00", "discount_pct" : "10", "store_price" : "" } }

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