The Mummy

Forget for once the stupid mummy’s curse,

that lame-brain bane of Egyptology,

for mummies have to deal with something worse:

our ignorance of their chronology.

I know you know in abstract that Egypt

was long ago and went on for a while

but did you know that Tutankhamun’s crypt

got covered up by flooding from the Nile

a thousand years before the Romans came?

Or that the Sphinx was more removed in time

from Cleopatra’s Ptolemaic reign

than Cleo is from me writing this rhyme?

I’m hoping that these fourteen lines of verse

might go some way to lift the mummy’s curse.