In Eternals, the presence of Egyptian civilisation is very subtle, even mute, as it is never explicitly mentioned. It is the past in Mesopotamia that is evoked in the film as the moment of the arrival of the Eternals’ spaceship on Earth and, therefore, the beginning of the intervention of these supernatural beings in human history. This question has to do with considering Mesopotamia as a civilisation of origins, one of the earliest examples of everything that has happened in our world, as evidenced in Samuel Noah Kramer's classic monography History Begins at Sumer: Thirty-Nine Firsts in Recorded History (1956). Egypt is also often regarded as the first of civilisations and thus placed as the beginning of multiple narratives, as we see in X-Men Apocalypse (2016) or Anne Rice's novel The Queen of the Damned (1988).

In the Dome, the Eternals’ spaceship, they accumulate some of the objects they have collected throughout history in different parts of the planet. This informs us of those cultures and those historical moments in which they have intervened to allow the evolutionary development of the human species. Among these objects are two that show their presence in ancient Egypt: first, a sculpture of a golden cat that we can clearly identify as the goddess Bastet and, second, the jackal god Anubis on a high pedestal holding the sceptre-wȝs in one hand and a cross-ʿnḫ in the other. No other information is offered about this intervention of the Eternals, shown discreetly on the screen. More information can be gleaned from various comics in the Eternals universe at Marvel, such as Neil Gaiman and John Romita Jr.’s work, in which we see how the Eternals give the Egyptians the knowledge of hieroglyphic script (Eternals #1, 1 August 2006).

Author: Abraham I. Fernández Pichel