Heroic Female Roles in The Mummy, The Mummy Returns, and The Scorpion King
See, I have a (friendslocked) post from a few days ago about gaming stuff, and given that I'm playing Evie Carnahan (post-The Mummy, pre-The Mummy Returns), I started pondering not just Evie, but also the world she's from. Mostly "the world she's from means "Egypt." That's where we first see her, and where most of her story takes place.
I also started thinking about Ardeth Bey and the Medjai, and the women of the Medjai, whom we never got to see. With Evie, there's the character of Nefertiri, and the reincarnation issue of the second movie. (I don't actually go into the gaping plot holes in the second movie. There were a lot some, though.) As it turns out, I also get into some stuff about Cassandra from The Scorpion King. (I get long-winded.)
The reason I've been thinking about this a lot, because, let's face it, without Ardeth and the Medjai, Evie, Rick, Jonathan, and Alex would have been toast. I wish I could cite the source, but I read somewhere that in The Mummy, Ardeth was supposed to die heroically, allowing Rick to Get The Girl. However, test audiences rooted for Ardeth's survival. In this case, test audiences win.
All of that, naturally, triggered a whole host of other speculations that I've made on the movie.
I didn't deal much with Anck-Su-Namun or her reincarnation, Meela. I figure I might do that another time. Also, thanks to medie and cat_latin, who looked this over for me, and gave me awesome commentary.
This also partly kicked off by my checking a character's name spelling in the IMDB entry for The Mummy. Yes, I did have to check IMDB to get the proper spelling of Anck-Su-Namun, not that I'd have spelled it that way, because "Amun" should be a name in and of itself. Hello? Sun god? Though I seem to remember the male pharaohs reserving the Ra and Amun/Amon name references for themselves, which might explain the spelling. But what really piqued my interest was Erick Avari's character's name.
How did I never realize Erick Avari's character's name is Dr. Terrence Bey? Which means Erick Avari probably was playing Ardeth Bey's father. Dude. There are whole realms of ficcish possibilities in Ardeth watching his father sacrifice himself to a horde of plague-ridden, Imhotep-controlled zombies so his son could go and save the world. That's just awesome. I'm feeling a need to rewatch The Mummy tonight. Possibly also The Mummy Returns.
Evie is, of course, my favorite character. And I love Evie/Rick so very much. But Ardeth Bey rocks beyond the telling of it. If I had any urge at all to write fanfic in that 'verse (which, okay, I kind of do), he'd so be Cassandra's descendant. (Cassandra from The Scorpion King, whom I had expected to be annoying, and instead, adored.) Though I would've liked her to have had a Chinese name. Surely there are Chinese seers in myth and legend, and we wouldn't have had to adopt the name of a Greek seer for her? Chinese mythology isn't my strong point.) Yes, I know, in the movie, Cassandra was the wife of the Scorpion King, who, in history and myth, is the first pharaoh of Egypt. But given that we go from the liberating Mathayus of The Scorpion King to the conquering Mathayus of The Mummy Returns, I think something must have happened to her.
In my view of The Scorpion King, Cassandra worked from behind the scenes and used her visions to bring Memnon down, either by telling him visions interpreted how he wanted to hear them, or not telling him some of the things she saw. She doesn't fight all that hard when Mathayus kidnaps her (when she's nekkid in the bath, which, omg, makes me roll my eyes so hard), and her foresight is clearly a very powerful gift. She and her ancestors have also had the wisdom to lie like hell that their power only works when they're maidens. That keeps them from being raped and forcibly married to anyone who wants to abuse their powers; however, it doesn't keep them from being kidnapped, as we see in Cassandra's case. Also, Memnon believes that once he has no use for Cassandra's powers, he'll be able to take her into his bed and forcibly deprive her of her gifts. (I might have cheered when Memnon died. JUST A LITTLE.)
But we're never truly clear on how much Cassandra sees, or how far ahead her prophecies go. It's stated that Mathayus wants to conquer the entire known world, and holy hell, that's a lot, given that he's an Akkadian, which means he's from Mesopotamia, and I'm guessing Cassandra's from China. (I base my statement on Cassandra's ancestry on the fact that the actress, Kelly Hu, is of Chinese-Filipino-Hawaiian and English ancestry, and the most reasonable country for Cassandra to be from out of that mix is China.)
My personal, somewhat snarky vision of their dialogue -
Cassandra: I have seen the future, and if you continue down this path, there will be unending torment for you.
Mathayus: Yeah, but I want to conquer Thebes. Thebes. Also the entire known world.
Cassandra: Do the words 'unending torment' mean nothing to you? Idiot.
Mathayus: *goes off and gets his ass trounced, then makes a bad deal with Anubis*
Cassandra: *eyerolls*
When Cassandra realizes this, it may be that she stays on as queen in Egypt. Or it might be that she saw Mathayus turning into a conqueror, and ran like hell when she warned him and he didn't listen.
My personal idea (not canon!) of how this whole thing went, not to mention how she could be Ardeth Bey's ancestor, is that Mathayus went off to do his Great Conqueror routine, and left Cassandra at home and in charge.
Probably the personal guard of Cassandra and Mathayus, the precursor of the Medjai, were also left to guard her and that city, as you can't leave your home completely undefended when you're off to conquer the known world. That just screams "attack me and hold those I love hostage so I stop conquering the world and come home to deal with the problems there." Cassandra, being a seer and knowing the future, knows this is going to end with Mathayus never coming home. She takes a lover, conceives a child with him, and eventually, Ardeth Bey is descended from her. Given that there are many, many dynastic changes in Egypt, and shifts in power, I don't think it's entirely too unrealistic to think that the descendant of a Pharaoh could have ended up a Medjai. (Also, my personal vision of her lover is the head of the guards left at home. There's this whole thing about chaos and the child and Cassandra going into hiding after Mathayus is taken by Anubis. I'll probably never fic it, which is a shame.)
(I have absolutely no point for this paragraph, which is why the whole thing is parenthetical. But I felt the need to state that Sherri Howard's Queen Isis in The Scorpion King is pretty fucking awesome. Even though I have issues with the women in sword & sorcery films being in leather bikinis instead of decent, period-correct armor. Character-wise, she was great. I'll just, y'know. Glare at the costuming department. But she seems to harken back to Grace Jones' character of Zula from Conan the Destroyer, who's another strong female warrior. And, watching Conan the Destroyer as many times as I did, trust me when I say that I loved Zula best out of all those characters. She was active. Olivia D'Abo's Princess Jehnna had her moments, but she was far more passive, I always felt, than Zula.)
So. I've been thinking about the Medjai. Or the women of the Medjai. And wondering WTF they're doing while they're men are off being warriors. Or what they could possibly be doing that would be cool and also world-savey. That way lies some serious OFC-ing, really. But I've got this idea that the women aren't just sitting in some home camp, passively awaiting the return of their Menfolk What Are Off Saving The World Once Again. Though I think they're all Islamic (I recall Ardeth referring to Allah at several points during the movies), so I wonder how I'd work that into what the women would be doing.
My knowledge of women's roles in Egyptian, Islamic and Bedouin cultures is, ah. Certainly colored by Western (American, mostly) media, and also by what I've found out while researching belly dance. However, I certainly don't think that, in the movie, they're inactive, or oppressed, or blah, blah, waiting for Evie to come in and Show Them What Things Are Like In The "Real" (i.e., Western) World. (Because, really. Um, no.) Also, Evie was half-Egyptian and raised as English, so I think that while she was very British, she may well have been enough in touch with Egyptian culture and history, and have experienced some form of prejudice herself to know that's just wrong. That may well have informed her actions in the movies. Certainly she was confident enough (and foolhardy, because, um, this is Evie we're talking about) to walk into a prison accompanied only by her brother. And let's face it, Jonathan is clearly not an individual whom one can trust to protect one's personage during a visit to a prison.
I think that a 1920's-era woman who's half-Egyptian would have experienced bias. When we start the movie, she's working as a librarian in Egypt, trying desperately to make a name for herself in a traditionally male field ("Take that, Bainbridge scholars!"), and studying her heritage to the point where she's fluent in various forms of ancient Egyptian languages. She's doing it in Egypt, which, yes, is the place to be, archaeologically-speaking. So why isn't she in England? (Please note: I'm aware that my knowledge of British issues derived from colonialism isn't as thorough as my understanding of American issues derived from colonialism. So I might be inaccurate here, but if I am, please accept my apologies, and understand that I'm doing my best with the knowledge I have. Corrections are also perfectly acceptable. Because, duh.)
I know that Egypt first got conditional independence from Great Britain in 1922, but I think that British occupation didn't end until the 1950s. ( This is a tourist site, yes, but it also has good timeline info. Also, Wikipedia remains good for resource info.) Since The Mummy takes place in 1923 (or 1926, because apparently the timeline is in error, but that still doesn't make much of a difference, culture-wise), I presume that there's still a British presence in Egypt. Though, given that Captain Winston Havlock, the RAF officer stationed in Egypt, was lamenting that he wasn't really able to die gloriously, and so on, and so forth, etc., I think we can also presume that presence was declining.
I have a point to my Evie-related digression. I swear. Mostly in that I think Evie and Jonathan, when they grew up, were in England at least part of the time, given how very British they acted. But that their mother, the unnamed Egyptian adventuress, seems to have given them a healthy appreciation for her native culture, and not just in an exploitative way. Yes, I do think they exploited Egypt somewhat, as I don't think all the artifacts in the Carnahan estate in The Mummy Returns were likely from Evie and Jonathan's parents. But Evie's attitude toward Ardeth seems rather like she treats him as an equal. Believe me when I say I've read plenty of books written during British Colonial periods, and not all of them are exactly up with the treating of people from other cultures as equals, but rather, some of them have incredibly paternalistic and patronizing attitudes. (I would like to cite books to you beyond examples that can be pulled from well-known classics of Victorian literature, but a large number of them were read when I was a child and then passed along to other relatives, or returned to the library. If you're truly curious, I can call my mom and see if we can come up with some titles and/or authors.) There's also her attitude toward Dr. Bey. It seems to me that he's become a rather irascible substitute father figure.
She's defensive during her first encounter with Dr. Bey (because, um, she knocked down all the bookshelves, and that's a serious screw-up), cites her talents when he asks why she's employed there, and he basically lets her know that it's more because her parents were their museum's finest patrons. So I think that, from that, we can read that while Evie and Jonathan's parents did remove archaeological artifacts from Egypt, they also supported Egyptian archaeologists and the establishment of institutions designed to keep Egyptian history as a part of Egypt. I think that fits in with the time period and also shows an attitude that is congruent with modern sensibilities, i.e., colonialism tends to be bad in many aspects.
Though it also shows that Evie wasn't hired on the basis of her severely impressive qualifications (or not just that), and that she was, at the start of the movie, enmeshed in a traditionally female role (librarian, being taken care of by a man who gives her a job because of who her parents are) that she later escapes from (adventuress/librarian/archaeologist, and equal partners with a man who values her for herself and all her talents and skills).
(I'm sure Jonathan was also a victim of some forms of bias, being half-Egyptian, but not in addition to the sexism that Evie was likely subject to. I always got the feeling that Evie coped with it by overachieving massively, and Jonathan went the other route. We hear it stated by Evie at the start of The Mummy that he's often in tavern brawls, and he's quite an accomplished pickpocket. Interestingly, I'd thought he was going to die tragically, but instead, he survives and is even somewhat heroic. That's muchbetter than the wastrel, comedic sidekick fate I'd thought he was going to suffer.)
Evie is the reincarnation of Nefertiri. My suspicion is that Nefertiri (Pharaoh Seti's daughter) took over after her father's death and ordered the abandonment of Hamunaptra. Personally, I think it would be awesome if Nefertiri ruled Egypt for a while, and ordered Imohtep to be mummified alive with the curse of the Hom Dai, then set the Medjai to watching Hamunaptra and being prison guards as their duty as they basically fucked up but good in letting Imhotep and Acnk-Su-Namun kill Seti I. Yes, I know, Imhotep was his most trusted advisor, and Anck-Su-Namun was his concubine and bodyguard, and therefore Seti clearly trusted them above almost all others. And still. He died at their hands, and the Medjai were too late to stop them.
I have two reasons that I like the idea of Nefertiri being behind all of this: First, she'd be a vengeful bitch after seeing her father slain, which is cool, and makes her not a softie at all. Second, that karmically comes back and smacks her multiple times over as Evie, when Imhotep threatens her family and her entire world, as well as when he attempts to sacrifice her in order to bring Anck-Su-Namun back to life. (Sometimes I wonder if the Hom Dai has given Imhotep the ability to see the reincarnated souls within people, and he chose Evie to sacrifice because of what Nefertiri did to him. That's totally spec, but it would be awesome if that were the case.)
The Pharaoh who ruled after Seti I, who was Nefertiri's father, was Ramesses II, aka Ramesses the Great, who was reportedly the Ramses of the Book of Exodus in the Bible (and the Torah, and probably in other religious writings which I know not of). According to the Wikipedia entry on him, his most famous wife was Nefertari. Given that Nefertari was given a great deal of responsibility by her father (guardian of the bracelet of Anubis, for example), it's entirely possible that Nefertari was the principal wife of Ramesses II. She was also apparently deified in her lifetime. (Yes, I'm aware that in history, Nefertari wasn't one of the daughters of Seti I, and Ramesses II was the son of Seti II, but given that The Mummy and The Mummy Returns fudges the hell out of history, I think we kind of have to fudge history a little bit too. Also, we don't know who Nefertari's parents are, not to the best of my knowledge, at least. This is my best extrapolation based on genuine Egyptian history and the history given in the films.)
So, back to the women of the Medjai. I think it does make sense for the women of the Medjai to have their own thing to do that's just as effective and useful at saving the world. It just didn't make it on screen, because the Medjai that was focused on was Ardeth. I just...don't know enough to extrapolate what their own thing would be. Oh, darn. I have to do more research. SO SAD. But there's certainly a strong component of mysticism in the films, and I'm wondering if maybe the women are the mystics and keepers of wisdom. I like this idea, because it gives them something to do that's not just staying home and taking care of the little Medjai babies, and also allows them to keep themselves separate from men who aren't related to them, which is, I believe, a traditionally Egyptian practice.
The Medjai are the descendants of the Pharaoh's royal guard (in the flashbacks, Nefertiri calls for the Medjai to guard her father). They've managed to spend several thousand years keeping Hamunaptra (Imhotep's prison) safe, while also maintaining a connection to the world and adapting to it. That's one of the reasons I think the women have to be active. How do you maintain an adaptive connection to the modern world if you're a bunch of guys running around the desert doing nothing but guarding Hamnunaptra? You have to be a vibrant, growing culture, and that includes having families teaching their children their traditions.
It may well be that only some of the Medjai actually deal with guarding Hamunaptra, and that the rest are engaged in, oh, say, the normal activity of living their lives. I don't know. But they're a lot more than we ever saw in the movies, and I would love to see more of what they are.
Other References:
Ancient Egyptian Art and Culture Timeline
Wikipedia List of Pharaohs
The Mummy Timeline
The Mummy Returns Timeline
I also started thinking about Ardeth Bey and the Medjai, and the women of the Medjai, whom we never got to see. With Evie, there's the character of Nefertiri, and the reincarnation issue of the second movie. (I don't actually go into the gaping plot holes in the second movie. There were a lot some, though.) As it turns out, I also get into some stuff about Cassandra from The Scorpion King. (I get long-winded.)
The reason I've been thinking about this a lot, because, let's face it, without Ardeth and the Medjai, Evie, Rick, Jonathan, and Alex would have been toast. I wish I could cite the source, but I read somewhere that in The Mummy, Ardeth was supposed to die heroically, allowing Rick to Get The Girl. However, test audiences rooted for Ardeth's survival. In this case, test audiences win.
All of that, naturally, triggered a whole host of other speculations that I've made on the movie.
I didn't deal much with Anck-Su-Namun or her reincarnation, Meela. I figure I might do that another time. Also, thanks to medie and cat_latin, who looked this over for me, and gave me awesome commentary.
This also partly kicked off by my checking a character's name spelling in the IMDB entry for The Mummy. Yes, I did have to check IMDB to get the proper spelling of Anck-Su-Namun, not that I'd have spelled it that way, because "Amun" should be a name in and of itself. Hello? Sun god? Though I seem to remember the male pharaohs reserving the Ra and Amun/Amon name references for themselves, which might explain the spelling. But what really piqued my interest was Erick Avari's character's name.
How did I never realize Erick Avari's character's name is Dr. Terrence Bey? Which means Erick Avari probably was playing Ardeth Bey's father. Dude. There are whole realms of ficcish possibilities in Ardeth watching his father sacrifice himself to a horde of plague-ridden, Imhotep-controlled zombies so his son could go and save the world. That's just awesome. I'm feeling a need to rewatch The Mummy tonight. Possibly also The Mummy Returns.
Evie is, of course, my favorite character. And I love Evie/Rick so very much. But Ardeth Bey rocks beyond the telling of it. If I had any urge at all to write fanfic in that 'verse (which, okay, I kind of do), he'd so be Cassandra's descendant. (Cassandra from The Scorpion King, whom I had expected to be annoying, and instead, adored.) Though I would've liked her to have had a Chinese name. Surely there are Chinese seers in myth and legend, and we wouldn't have had to adopt the name of a Greek seer for her? Chinese mythology isn't my strong point.) Yes, I know, in the movie, Cassandra was the wife of the Scorpion King, who, in history and myth, is the first pharaoh of Egypt. But given that we go from the liberating Mathayus of The Scorpion King to the conquering Mathayus of The Mummy Returns, I think something must have happened to her.
In my view of The Scorpion King, Cassandra worked from behind the scenes and used her visions to bring Memnon down, either by telling him visions interpreted how he wanted to hear them, or not telling him some of the things she saw. She doesn't fight all that hard when Mathayus kidnaps her (when she's nekkid in the bath, which, omg, makes me roll my eyes so hard), and her foresight is clearly a very powerful gift. She and her ancestors have also had the wisdom to lie like hell that their power only works when they're maidens. That keeps them from being raped and forcibly married to anyone who wants to abuse their powers; however, it doesn't keep them from being kidnapped, as we see in Cassandra's case. Also, Memnon believes that once he has no use for Cassandra's powers, he'll be able to take her into his bed and forcibly deprive her of her gifts. (I might have cheered when Memnon died. JUST A LITTLE.)
But we're never truly clear on how much Cassandra sees, or how far ahead her prophecies go. It's stated that Mathayus wants to conquer the entire known world, and holy hell, that's a lot, given that he's an Akkadian, which means he's from Mesopotamia, and I'm guessing Cassandra's from China. (I base my statement on Cassandra's ancestry on the fact that the actress, Kelly Hu, is of Chinese-Filipino-Hawaiian and English ancestry, and the most reasonable country for Cassandra to be from out of that mix is China.)
My personal, somewhat snarky vision of their dialogue -
Cassandra: I have seen the future, and if you continue down this path, there will be unending torment for you.
Mathayus: Yeah, but I want to conquer Thebes. Thebes. Also the entire known world.
Cassandra: Do the words 'unending torment' mean nothing to you? Idiot.
Mathayus: *goes off and gets his ass trounced, then makes a bad deal with Anubis*
Cassandra: *eyerolls*
When Cassandra realizes this, it may be that she stays on as queen in Egypt. Or it might be that she saw Mathayus turning into a conqueror, and ran like hell when she warned him and he didn't listen.
My personal idea (not canon!) of how this whole thing went, not to mention how she could be Ardeth Bey's ancestor, is that Mathayus went off to do his Great Conqueror routine, and left Cassandra at home and in charge.
Probably the personal guard of Cassandra and Mathayus, the precursor of the Medjai, were also left to guard her and that city, as you can't leave your home completely undefended when you're off to conquer the known world. That just screams "attack me and hold those I love hostage so I stop conquering the world and come home to deal with the problems there." Cassandra, being a seer and knowing the future, knows this is going to end with Mathayus never coming home. She takes a lover, conceives a child with him, and eventually, Ardeth Bey is descended from her. Given that there are many, many dynastic changes in Egypt, and shifts in power, I don't think it's entirely too unrealistic to think that the descendant of a Pharaoh could have ended up a Medjai. (Also, my personal vision of her lover is the head of the guards left at home. There's this whole thing about chaos and the child and Cassandra going into hiding after Mathayus is taken by Anubis. I'll probably never fic it, which is a shame.)
(I have absolutely no point for this paragraph, which is why the whole thing is parenthetical. But I felt the need to state that Sherri Howard's Queen Isis in The Scorpion King is pretty fucking awesome. Even though I have issues with the women in sword & sorcery films being in leather bikinis instead of decent, period-correct armor. Character-wise, she was great. I'll just, y'know. Glare at the costuming department. But she seems to harken back to Grace Jones' character of Zula from Conan the Destroyer, who's another strong female warrior. And, watching Conan the Destroyer as many times as I did, trust me when I say that I loved Zula best out of all those characters. She was active. Olivia D'Abo's Princess Jehnna had her moments, but she was far more passive, I always felt, than Zula.)
So. I've been thinking about the Medjai. Or the women of the Medjai. And wondering WTF they're doing while they're men are off being warriors. Or what they could possibly be doing that would be cool and also world-savey. That way lies some serious OFC-ing, really. But I've got this idea that the women aren't just sitting in some home camp, passively awaiting the return of their Menfolk What Are Off Saving The World Once Again. Though I think they're all Islamic (I recall Ardeth referring to Allah at several points during the movies), so I wonder how I'd work that into what the women would be doing.
My knowledge of women's roles in Egyptian, Islamic and Bedouin cultures is, ah. Certainly colored by Western (American, mostly) media, and also by what I've found out while researching belly dance. However, I certainly don't think that, in the movie, they're inactive, or oppressed, or blah, blah, waiting for Evie to come in and Show Them What Things Are Like In The "Real" (i.e., Western) World. (Because, really. Um, no.) Also, Evie was half-Egyptian and raised as English, so I think that while she was very British, she may well have been enough in touch with Egyptian culture and history, and have experienced some form of prejudice herself to know that's just wrong. That may well have informed her actions in the movies. Certainly she was confident enough (and foolhardy, because, um, this is Evie we're talking about) to walk into a prison accompanied only by her brother. And let's face it, Jonathan is clearly not an individual whom one can trust to protect one's personage during a visit to a prison.
I think that a 1920's-era woman who's half-Egyptian would have experienced bias. When we start the movie, she's working as a librarian in Egypt, trying desperately to make a name for herself in a traditionally male field ("Take that, Bainbridge scholars!"), and studying her heritage to the point where she's fluent in various forms of ancient Egyptian languages. She's doing it in Egypt, which, yes, is the place to be, archaeologically-speaking. So why isn't she in England? (Please note: I'm aware that my knowledge of British issues derived from colonialism isn't as thorough as my understanding of American issues derived from colonialism. So I might be inaccurate here, but if I am, please accept my apologies, and understand that I'm doing my best with the knowledge I have. Corrections are also perfectly acceptable. Because, duh.)
I know that Egypt first got conditional independence from Great Britain in 1922, but I think that British occupation didn't end until the 1950s. ( This is a tourist site, yes, but it also has good timeline info. Also, Wikipedia remains good for resource info.) Since The Mummy takes place in 1923 (or 1926, because apparently the timeline is in error, but that still doesn't make much of a difference, culture-wise), I presume that there's still a British presence in Egypt. Though, given that Captain Winston Havlock, the RAF officer stationed in Egypt, was lamenting that he wasn't really able to die gloriously, and so on, and so forth, etc., I think we can also presume that presence was declining.
I have a point to my Evie-related digression. I swear. Mostly in that I think Evie and Jonathan, when they grew up, were in England at least part of the time, given how very British they acted. But that their mother, the unnamed Egyptian adventuress, seems to have given them a healthy appreciation for her native culture, and not just in an exploitative way. Yes, I do think they exploited Egypt somewhat, as I don't think all the artifacts in the Carnahan estate in The Mummy Returns were likely from Evie and Jonathan's parents. But Evie's attitude toward Ardeth seems rather like she treats him as an equal. Believe me when I say I've read plenty of books written during British Colonial periods, and not all of them are exactly up with the treating of people from other cultures as equals, but rather, some of them have incredibly paternalistic and patronizing attitudes. (I would like to cite books to you beyond examples that can be pulled from well-known classics of Victorian literature, but a large number of them were read when I was a child and then passed along to other relatives, or returned to the library. If you're truly curious, I can call my mom and see if we can come up with some titles and/or authors.) There's also her attitude toward Dr. Bey. It seems to me that he's become a rather irascible substitute father figure.
She's defensive during her first encounter with Dr. Bey (because, um, she knocked down all the bookshelves, and that's a serious screw-up), cites her talents when he asks why she's employed there, and he basically lets her know that it's more because her parents were their museum's finest patrons. So I think that, from that, we can read that while Evie and Jonathan's parents did remove archaeological artifacts from Egypt, they also supported Egyptian archaeologists and the establishment of institutions designed to keep Egyptian history as a part of Egypt. I think that fits in with the time period and also shows an attitude that is congruent with modern sensibilities, i.e., colonialism tends to be bad in many aspects.
Though it also shows that Evie wasn't hired on the basis of her severely impressive qualifications (or not just that), and that she was, at the start of the movie, enmeshed in a traditionally female role (librarian, being taken care of by a man who gives her a job because of who her parents are) that she later escapes from (adventuress/librarian/archaeologist, and equal partners with a man who values her for herself and all her talents and skills).
(I'm sure Jonathan was also a victim of some forms of bias, being half-Egyptian, but not in addition to the sexism that Evie was likely subject to. I always got the feeling that Evie coped with it by overachieving massively, and Jonathan went the other route. We hear it stated by Evie at the start of The Mummy that he's often in tavern brawls, and he's quite an accomplished pickpocket. Interestingly, I'd thought he was going to die tragically, but instead, he survives and is even somewhat heroic. That's muchbetter than the wastrel, comedic sidekick fate I'd thought he was going to suffer.)
Evie is the reincarnation of Nefertiri. My suspicion is that Nefertiri (Pharaoh Seti's daughter) took over after her father's death and ordered the abandonment of Hamunaptra. Personally, I think it would be awesome if Nefertiri ruled Egypt for a while, and ordered Imohtep to be mummified alive with the curse of the Hom Dai, then set the Medjai to watching Hamunaptra and being prison guards as their duty as they basically fucked up but good in letting Imhotep and Acnk-Su-Namun kill Seti I. Yes, I know, Imhotep was his most trusted advisor, and Anck-Su-Namun was his concubine and bodyguard, and therefore Seti clearly trusted them above almost all others. And still. He died at their hands, and the Medjai were too late to stop them.
I have two reasons that I like the idea of Nefertiri being behind all of this: First, she'd be a vengeful bitch after seeing her father slain, which is cool, and makes her not a softie at all. Second, that karmically comes back and smacks her multiple times over as Evie, when Imhotep threatens her family and her entire world, as well as when he attempts to sacrifice her in order to bring Anck-Su-Namun back to life. (Sometimes I wonder if the Hom Dai has given Imhotep the ability to see the reincarnated souls within people, and he chose Evie to sacrifice because of what Nefertiri did to him. That's totally spec, but it would be awesome if that were the case.)
The Pharaoh who ruled after Seti I, who was Nefertiri's father, was Ramesses II, aka Ramesses the Great, who was reportedly the Ramses of the Book of Exodus in the Bible (and the Torah, and probably in other religious writings which I know not of). According to the Wikipedia entry on him, his most famous wife was Nefertari. Given that Nefertari was given a great deal of responsibility by her father (guardian of the bracelet of Anubis, for example), it's entirely possible that Nefertari was the principal wife of Ramesses II. She was also apparently deified in her lifetime. (Yes, I'm aware that in history, Nefertari wasn't one of the daughters of Seti I, and Ramesses II was the son of Seti II, but given that The Mummy and The Mummy Returns fudges the hell out of history, I think we kind of have to fudge history a little bit too. Also, we don't know who Nefertari's parents are, not to the best of my knowledge, at least. This is my best extrapolation based on genuine Egyptian history and the history given in the films.)
So, back to the women of the Medjai. I think it does make sense for the women of the Medjai to have their own thing to do that's just as effective and useful at saving the world. It just didn't make it on screen, because the Medjai that was focused on was Ardeth. I just...don't know enough to extrapolate what their own thing would be. Oh, darn. I have to do more research. SO SAD. But there's certainly a strong component of mysticism in the films, and I'm wondering if maybe the women are the mystics and keepers of wisdom. I like this idea, because it gives them something to do that's not just staying home and taking care of the little Medjai babies, and also allows them to keep themselves separate from men who aren't related to them, which is, I believe, a traditionally Egyptian practice.
The Medjai are the descendants of the Pharaoh's royal guard (in the flashbacks, Nefertiri calls for the Medjai to guard her father). They've managed to spend several thousand years keeping Hamunaptra (Imhotep's prison) safe, while also maintaining a connection to the world and adapting to it. That's one of the reasons I think the women have to be active. How do you maintain an adaptive connection to the modern world if you're a bunch of guys running around the desert doing nothing but guarding Hamnunaptra? You have to be a vibrant, growing culture, and that includes having families teaching their children their traditions.
It may well be that only some of the Medjai actually deal with guarding Hamunaptra, and that the rest are engaged in, oh, say, the normal activity of living their lives. I don't know. But they're a lot more than we ever saw in the movies, and I would love to see more of what they are.
Other References:
Ancient Egyptian Art and Culture Timeline
Wikipedia List of Pharaohs
The Mummy Timeline
The Mummy Returns Timeline