Kaaper and Me

 

A photograph has been doing the rounds for a while of a statue from the Museum of Antiquities in Cairo, Egypt; and a number of people contacted me to remark on how familiar it looked. I must say, there is an uncanny likeness. I do get a strange looking-in-the-mirror sensation when I see it. The statue is not of me though. It is of somebody called Kaaper who has been described as an "army priest scribe of the pharaoh" in the Old Kingdom of Egypt, round about 2500 BC; right in the middle of the Pyramid age. The statue is about two thirds life-size and was found in the Saqqara complex in the 1850's. It is made of sycamore wood and archaeologists have been impressed by its naturalism, which is quite rare in ancient Egyptian art. The eyes are made of coloured quartz segments fitted together by copper plates in a remarkable work of craftsmanship. So could I be descended from Kaaper? Quite possibly; but that isn't saying much, considering he lived five and a half thousand years ago. Assuming he had children and that in the succeeding offspring since of every generation contributed one or two individuals, which is average, then Kaaper's descendents increase exponentially via an array of pyramid numbers (aptly for an Egyptian). I don't know the exact figure, but it's likely there are millions of people across the world with Kaaper as an ancestor. If I am one of them then my own resemblance to him cannot be familial. It might be coincidence, and I don't often say that. Nevertheless, could I have been him in a past life? I cannot tell because I have no conscious past life memories. Some psychical researchers claim that an individual can carry physical factors of past lives into a current incarnation, Dr Michael Newton for example; but these tend to be birthmarks rather than facial physiognomy. For instance, somebody who is shot in wartime might come back as somebody with a mole where their bullet wound was. Source: https://www.newtoninstitute.org/dr-michael-newton/. Either way, it's an appropriately light-hearted story for Christmas Eve.