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Mummies and pyramids
The Egyptians had a very smooth-running society (unless you were a slave) but they were obsessed by death and providing for the future life after death by building very elaborate tombs and encasing their preserved bodies in catacombs equipped with all the necessities and treasures for life in the afterworld -- stupid in a way, because one
of the oldest criminal pursuits, grave-robbing, started up at the same time. The Egyptian economy must have been a wreck by the time the Romans came around and
conquered them -- too much spent on grave goods, too little on defense.
The Egyptian gods tended to be quasi-humans with animal aspects -- bird heads or cat bodies, for example. Seems to have worked for three thousand years or so, longer
than Christianity, so why knock it? Osiris was the judge of the underworld, so he seems to have been the most important god. They also had very advanced medical techniques, based on the theories of Hermes (Greek name, I forget the Egyptian one at the moment), who must have been a real person though later deified.
