Mummies and Zombies

The Mummy is a curious addition to monster lore. Unlike vampires of werewolves, mummies are not a piece of organic folk traditions, at least truly indigenous. The idea mummies rising from the tomb to terrorize the living is an invention of Victorian literature, and more importantly, Hollywood. However, it quickly become just as iconic, because the Egyptian locale allowed it to distinguish itself from the usual gothic or Transylvanian settings. The bandaged look was a also very simple yet recognizable, and artists in the new Middle Ages are quite adapt at depicting them no matter what tools are at their disposal.

Perhaps the second most well known mummies, after the Egyptian ones, are those found in Peru, where places like the Tacoma, similarly arid, allowed a an efficient form of mummifications, and which were the subject of veneration in the Incan empire. They did not use the sophisticated embalming methods of Ancient Egypt, and were not bandaged, but interestingly enough, drawings of South American mummies, by Medieval American, depict them as such. In fact, in many illustrations and stories, Mummies in Peru are treated as indistinguishable from those of the Pharaohs.

This is for several reasons. One is it's quite simply hard to have precise geographical knowledge to your medieval denizens--one end of the world is as good as another. A huge contributing factor can also be found with the kingdom of New Mexico--there are definitely echoes of Neo Egtyptianism in God King of the American desert, and in the New Age religion they follow. Many have in fact, deliberately sought to combine the aesthetics and customs of both Mesoamerica, and Ancient Egypt, and the rulers often build pyramids to house their tombs in fashions that have made it very blurry for much of more Anglo-American types, and they figure everything south of New Mexico also strongly resembles it. Also as a result, they think South America is often plagued by Mummies in the Karloffian mode.

Or at least the drier. Zombies have strongly been reinvented since the Romero days, and are treated effectively like a metaphor for widespread epidemics, but have their roots in Voodoo, and were not widespread hordes that spread their infection through biting, but a more intimate form of sorcery, where the walking dead are not walking viruses, but thralls. The way Voodoo has flowered in the Caribbean and Gulf Coast of Medieval America, and that the culture of the 30th century is something like a "back to basics", or peeling off a newer layer of paint, means that Zombies have in some respects, returned to their Haitian roots, and sort of serve as the shambling, mystically imbued, but not endless, tropical counterpart to the desert dwelling mummies.