Poor King Tut! He died unexpectedly, and was buried with a number of recycled objects, hastily made over for him. There is even some speculation that his father's mummy was pushed aside and replaced with the boy king's. It all seemed so tawdry, until I remembered that many Western societies actually consolidate graves, and bones, and other remains on a fairly regular and ongoing basis.
So, maybe the whole recycling thing isn't so bad...just think about it, those jewel-encrusted, solid gold organ chests wouldn't be cheap today, but they would have been worth a lot more all those years ago. And lest we forget, the ancient Egyptians had a propensity for striking off the names of people they stopped liking and replacing them with other names of people they still liked. And King Tut would have been a prime candidate for such name replacement because the Pharaoh who might have been his father was, in fact, pretty pesky to the ancient Egyptian psyche. For one thing, he got rid of all the old gods, and replaced them with a single god. He also moved the capital city.
People don't like to have their religion taken away and their cities moved. They find that it, generally, sucks. And in ancient Egypt, when they decided that you sucked, your name got taken off of expensive stuff (like temples) and replaced with another name.
So next time you decide to gut a whole religious culture and move all the cities, think again.
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