All we have to do to see this is to take a good geographical look at the location of Egypt, and have a little background on the culture, as well as a bit of common sense. First and foremost, Egypt is 90% desert and most of the burial sites, pyramids, and temples were built in this non-corrosive environment. Sure enough, most of the archeological finds are found in this same environment. When most of your findings are tombs because of this simple fact, we have no other choice but to decipher information from there. And as usual in a tomb, your going to get information mostly about death and the after life. Unfortunately for modern scholars this setting is like someone 3000 years from now, only finding our societies churches, temples, mosques, and cemeteries.
However, we also know that the Ancient Egyptians lived as close to the Nile as the flood waters would let them, because not everything is totally lost there either. Small and tiny fragments pop up every now and again, you just need to look for them. We've found the teachings of Ptah-Hotep, medical and magical papyri, models of slaughter yards, breweries, weavers, houses, etc. And Just recently, a university at Alexandria was found, That's far from being death-obsessed!
On a closer look at these burial sites, not even mentioning temples, you'll get an awesome amount of tiny details of daily life, but most of all you'll see how happy the Ancient Egyptians were with the state of their lives, and how they wished for it to carry over into the next. So a more apt label would be life-obsessed! These are the ancient people whose culture made beer, and we all know how useful beer is when you're dead! ::grins::
So the next time you feel that the Ancient Egyptians were death-obsessed take a trip to the Ancient Egypt exhibit at your local museum, and educate yourself.
