Afterlives of Ancient Egypt with Kara Cooney

Not everyone gets to become effective. Not everyone gets to matter after they’re gone. Not everyone becomes a saint. Your Ka, your Ba, your Ren — those showed up the moment you were born, automatic, no work required, the way your name did. The Akh is different. You had to earn it, build it.Amber and I have been in this journey about the different parts of the human personality for weeks now. This is the fourth episode in our series on the anatomy of the Egyptian soul, and definitely the hardest one so far. The Ka and the Ba you can make a go at describing. The Akh doesn’t allow that. It’s not really even a noun. It’s closer to a verb, the same energy as the Egyptian word kheper, “becoming,” transformation-in-progress. This podcast convo ended up going places I didn’t expect: gender, hubris, ecological grief even, and a king who tried to grab the most fleeting, liminal power in the whole Egyptian cosmos and hold it in his own two hands like in that Guardians of the Galaxy movie except without the happy ending. Akh as PhotosynthesisIn his dictionary of Middle Egyptian words, Faulkner tells us that akh means to be effective, glorious, useful, profitable. An Akh is what happens when something works or grows or becomes. This is not metaphorical but actual, like sunlight hitting a seed, the seed becomes a plant. That’s akh. If a person dies and manages to keep acting in the world of the living, that’s akh too, assuming the person passed the scales and saw his heart come out on top, assuming the funerary rituals did their job. The akh has the same kind of power as the plural bau of the word ba, for the soul of mobility. Bau is raw strength. Akh is strength that connects, that intervenes, that changes something.Florence Friedman spent her dissertation and a large part of her career on this topic, and her argument is that calling the Akh a “spirit” tells you nothing. She reads the word as something closer to sunlight. But what does that even mean? Friedman focuses on sunlight specifically, because it is effectiveness par excellence, the mechanism by which the divine reaches across into this world and makes something happen. Sun light is the tree growing, the fruit emerging, the people happily eating that fruit. If you think photosynthesis, you would come close, I think, to what the Egyptians had in mind with the notion of the akh. This effectiveness of spirit can be used for good or ill. The word survives into Coptic language where it means demon. That’s not later Christian problematizing of pagan things but sheer respect for power that cannot be contained. An Akh could bless you or smite you, same as any god could. The force that grows your wheat is the same one that can destroy it in a blight of grasshoppers.The bird that stopped migrating to Egypt :(The hieroglyph for Akh is a real bird—the northern bald ibis, common in Egypt through the Old Kingdom, and then, after that, poof, just gone. The bird’s habitat dried out, Egypt’s climate shifted, and the bird that had given its shape to effective transformation disappeared from the Nile Valley within living memory of the people who used its picture every day in their texts. I did not know this. I am still stunned to have learned it. The Egyptians kept drawing the bird glyph, of course. For thousands of years after its disappearance from their Nile waters, they drew it. A bird nobody living had ever actually seen, got more abstract and stylized the further it got from anyone’s lived experience, until by the New Kingdom it’s sporting something that looks suspiciously like a nemes headdress. The feathers Old Kingdom scribes had faithfully and realistically drawn to identify the bird were reimagined as a kind of linen headcloth or a nod at royal regalia.As far as I know, nobody’s done the actual philological legwork of tracing exactly when the faithfully drawn Akh starts dropping out of the textual record, and I wonder whether it clusters around the sixth through tenth dynasties, right when Egypt is drying up into famine and subsequent civil war. Let me know if there is work out there on this. Somebody go write that dissertation and tell me what you find. Ancient/Now is always free for all! Consider becoming a paid subscriber. All your $$ goes directly to paying Amber and Jordan, which means more of this, more often.Insemination, wombs, and who gets to make things happenNow it’s gonna get sexual, because… Egypt. The Akh is masculine. Akhet the horizon, the place where the sun is born and dies, the zone between worlds, is feminine. The akhet was a container, a womb, the hills cradling the sun like you would hold a newborn. There’s a strange archaic ritual Egyptologists called the Vogellauf, the “bird run,” where the king sprints toward a goddess with a live ibis in his hand and hands it over. This ritual helps us understand the akh’s purpose. The king is positioning himself as the one who delivers the divine spark, the inseminating force, while the goddess receives it, holds it, does the actual work of turning potential into life.That’s a patriarchal way of imagining creation, but also a very ancient Egyptian one that may have preceded patriarchal regional state pharaonic Egypt. The divine masculine principle initiates, the feminine principle receives what’s handed to her and transforms it within herself. Christianity arguably reinvented this same masculine creation theology millennia later in the Immaculate Conception; the Annunciation; when light entered the Virgin Mary’s womb by means of the Holy Spirit, credit going to the God who sent the light, while all the gestating, nurturing, protecting, and grieving belonged to the woman’s body. She does all the caretaking. The king who tried to own the lightAnd this is where Akhenaten comes in! Because of course he does! He changed his name from Amenhotep to Akhenaten—the one who is effective for the Aten, or the light of the Aten. He built a city, named it Akhetaten, “horizon of the Aten,” and covered it with offering tables and altars, as if he could physically catch every sunbeam, to transform his own person, his Great royal wife Nefertiti, his daughters, and Egypt, however he named it and understood it. His hymn to the sun describes the Aten as the force that makes the baby grow in the mother’s womb. Akhenaten’s theology really helps us to understand the akh better. He was worshipping the sun, yes, but he was also trying to become the only intermediary for transformation itself. The sunlight came to him. He wanted to own the Akh outright. Of course it all failed, because of flying to close to the sun on waxen wings and all that, but let’s not mix mythologies. The Akh is also time! It’s a spark an instant, that liminal, in-between space, present for a handful of minutes (seconds?) at dusk and dawn and then gone. Akhenaten tried to drag it out permanently into the material world, into his own body, his own city, and claim ownership over something whose entire nature is that it doesn’t stay put. You cannot pin down a migratory bird. Trying to materialize and hoard something that’s ephemeral, that’s always on the move, that’s always in flight is what guaranteed the collapse of his new theology. After he died, the Akh went back to being the purview of the gods and the superhero ancestors who had made it past the scales and beyond. I don’t think any Egyptian king ever tried to claim it as personal property again. (One could do a whole discussion of the ancient Egyptian Akh theology influencing the emerging Jesus cult inserting ideas of ephemeral existence, sacrifice death and rebirth, but I’ll not do that here…)It’s an interesting story to hear right now as strong men and techbros rule the world. There are too many men convinced they have found the shortcut to fate and effectiveness, doling it out or withholding it as they see fit. The Egyptians watched in real time exactly how such hubris ends.What you do with a thing that doesn’t stayEvery person who’s ever lived has wanted some edge on the uncontrollable in this material world, some way to fix their fate, some way to touch God and know the future, to bend the future in your favor. These are old human worries. The Egyptians tried to control their fates too, and one of the best ways to do that was to reach out to the akhu spirits (plural for akh!) and ask for their intercession. They wrote letters to dead relatives they thought had become akh. They mummified animals, then killed them (!), to carry messages into the next world. They stood in the temple portico at Esna temple and had their astrological charts read. You do the same thing checking your horoscope, or asking a dead grandmother for help in prayer, or telling yourself that if you just work hard enough you can outrun whatever’s arbitrary about your life, or wearing your baseball hat upside down and inside out at the key moments in the World Series. We reach out for hope wherever we can find it. But remember the akh is ephemeral. You touch it, and it’s already gone. You can spend your whole life trying to contain it and hold it, and you’ll never get there. That’s what living an earthly life is all about. That’s probably the right way to hold this strange ancient Egyptian conception of the soul—not as religious doctrine, but as an ongoing race that you will never finish. It’s a verb, not a noun!Good luck out there. Reach for your ancestors, your gods, whatever gets you through the dark part of the day—because it’s squirrelly out there. Just don’t try to own the whole horizon. It didn’t work out for the last guy who tried it.This episode, the fourth in our series on the ancient Egyptian soul, following the Ka, the Ba, and the Ren, is up now up on the Afterlives of Ancient Egypt podcast, available wherever podcasts are heard. If this newsletter is useful to you, consider becoming a paid subscriber to Ancient/Now. All your $$ goes directly to paying Amber and Jordan, which means more of this, more often. We have to carve this out of our busy working lives, after all!Show Notes & Further Reading* Janák, Jiří. 2013. “Akh.” In UCLA Encyclopedia of Egyptology, edited by Jacco Dieleman and Willeke Wendrich. Los Angeles. digital2.library.ucla.edu/viewItem.do?ark=21198/zz002gc1pn* Janák, Jiří. 2013. “Northern Bald Ibis (Akh-Bird).” In UCLA Encyclopedia of Egyptology, edited by Willeke Wendrich. Los Angeles. digital2.library.ucla.edu/viewItem.do?ark=21198/zz002dwqt8* Janák, Jiří. 2011. “Spotting the Akh: The Presence of the Northern Bald Ibis in Ancient Egypt and Its Early Decline.” Journal of the American Research Center in Egypt 46: 17–31.* Friedman, Florence Dunn. 1981. “On the Meaning of Akh (ȝḫ) in Egyptian Mortuary Texts.” PhD dissertation, Brandeis University.* Friedman, Florence Dunn. 1985. “The Root Meaning of ȝḫ: Effectiveness or Luminosity?” Studien zur Altägyptischen Kultur 11: 25–29.* Allen, James P. 1989. “The Cosmology of the Pyramid Texts.” In Religion and Philosophy in Ancient Egypt, Yale Egyptological Studies 3, edited by William Kelly Simpson, 1–28. New Haven: Yale University Press.* Allen, James P. 1994. “Reading a Pyramid.” In Hommages à Jean Leclant, vol. 1: Études pharaoniques, edited by Catherine Berger, Gisèle Clerc, and Nicolas Grimal, 5–28. Cairo: Institut Français d’Archéologie Orientale.* Jansen-Winkeln, Karl. 1996. “’Horizont’ und ‘Verklärtheit’: Zur Bedeutung der Wurzel Ax.” Studien zur Altägyptischen Kultur 23: 201–215.* El Shazly, Yasmin. 2015. Royal Ancestor Worship in Deir el-Medina during the New Kingdom. Oxford: Abercromby Press.* Kemp, Barry. 2012. The City of Akhenaten and Nefertiti: Amarna and Its People. London: Thames & Hudson. Get full access to Ancient/Now at ancientnow.substack.com/subscribe

Part three of our ongoing series on the anatomy of the ancient Egyptian soul. Previously: the Ba and the Ka. Next up: the Akh, the Ib, the Shut, and the Khat.In turbulent times, let Egyptology be your resistance. That’s the spirit in which we (Kara and Amber) sat down for this episode — and if that sounds like an unusual rallying cry, well, you’ve come to the right place.Today’s topic is the Ren: the name. And before you go, I know what a name is, you don’t. Because the ancient Egyptians understood something about names that we’ve spent the last several thousand years forgetting (and that the modern American government is actively exploiting right now; yes, I know, we make everything political and history is now and all that…).What Is the Ren?In Faulkner’s Concise Dictionary of Middle Egyptian, the entry for rn (ren as we would say it in an Egyptian reading class) is almost insultingly short. Two phonetic characters, the mouth hieroglyph (r) and a single water sign (n). No dramatic determinative. No elaborate sign to illustrate it. Compare this to the Ba — the human-headed bird that flutters, moves and exists visually in the world — or the Ka, with its famous outstretched arms, intimate and embodied, ready to embrace. The Ren just sits there with no explanatory symbolism whatsoever. The writing of the word betrays the secrecy surrounding the name itself.But that spareness is the point. The Ren’s power is its abstraction. It is not a thing you can see or touch. It is a sound, an utterance, a vibration shaped by lips and tongue and the specific quality of a human mind. And this is where things get interesting: the hieroglyphic word rn begins with the mouth sign, because of course it does. The name lives in speech. It is born from the human body in the most literal sense possible. The name is utterance incarnate, which takes us to the Egyptian understanding of creation.In the Beginning Was the NameThe Memphite Theology is an inscription said to be copied from an ancient, worm-eaten papyrus, even though this particular version comes to us as the so-called Shabaka Stone of the 25th Dynasty Kushite kings, and it describes the god Ptah creating the world through utterance. Ptah conceives (sia, abstract thought) of things with his heart (ib) and then brings them into material existence through his mouth (r) using the force of heka (magic). He speaks the name of something, and it becomes real by passing through the lips, tongue, and teeth.In the beginning was the word, as we know from the Bible. The idea that spoken language is a creative force, that naming something is a form of making it, runs through ancient Egyptian creation theology, including the Memphite Theology, through the Hebrew Bible, through Neoplatonic philosophy, and straight into the digital age, where the naming of things (brands, identities) still confers power. The ancient Egyptians were not doing something primitive or naive when they enshrined this idea. They were identifying something true. A name captures the essence of something.And crucially, in this theology, the name is not just descriptive. It doesn’t label something that already exists. It creates the thing. Which means that whoever speaks the name first, whoever utters it properly, with the right cadence and pronunciation, has a claim on the essence of the thing named. They hold a piece of it. And this is where the Ren gets genuinely dangerous.Isis and the Secret Name of the Sun GodThe most famous story about the power of the Ren comes from Papyrus Turin 1993, a 20th Dynasty text currently in the Egyptian Museum in Turin. It tells the story of Isis and Re.Re, the sun god, is old. He is aging and drooling—both poignant and humanizing for the head of the Egyptian pantheon—and Isis, the Mistress of Magic, decides to use the moment to her advantage. She collects his spittle and uses it to fashion a clay snake, which she places in his path. Re is bitten by this snake made from his own essence. He cannot heal himself: you cannot cure a wound that comes from within your own body, apparently. And so he has to call upon Isis.She shows up, calm and helpful, and says: I can heal you. But first, I need to know your secret name. She doesn’t want the name that priests chant in temples, or the name carved onto obelisks. She wants his other name, the real name, the one that encapsulates his true essence, the name that, if you knew it, would give you power over the sun god himself.Re, who is dying, tells it to her. She heals him. And the text informs us he passes the name to her with the stipulation that she share it only with her son Horus, who can use it only for healing.There is so much to unpack here. Isis is conniving—she engineers the crisis herself, lest we forget—and yet she is also the indispensable linchpin of the entire solar cycle, the one who heals the sun and ensures that he can rise again. She is the mother of god. She has to be duplicitous to get what she needs, because that’s what women in patriarchal systems have to do: they work around the system, not through it. And her workaround gives her—and by extension Horus—genuine, permanent power over the most important force in the cosmos. (Just note that she has to use her son as the formal mechanism to take that power. She can’t wield that power herself within patriarchy.)It’s also worth noting that this story has a very familiar ring. Isis creates a crisis so that a god can be healed and reborn, and that power is then passed to her son. The pattern is ancient. Judas. Jesus. Mary knowing her son was doomed to die for the sins of all humankind. It did not begin in Galilee.The Name Is a Tool of Power (And Someone Else Usually Wields It)Here’s what the ancient Egyptians knew, and what we mostly pretend not to know: we do not name ourselves.We are named by others. By parents, by institutions, by the state. And when someone in society decides to choose their own name—through transition, through divorce, through reclaiming ancestry—it is, as I put it, “rather an F you to society at large, and people don’t take it well.”Enslaved people in America were stripped of their names and given the names of their enslavers. This is not a metaphor. It was a deliberate act of erasure—an understanding, conscious or not, that to take someone’s name is to take their identity, their lineage, their claim on their own essence, to make them legible in the system of power. Formerly enslaved people who took new names after emancipation were not just making an administrative change. They were performing an act of profound self-creation.Women who change their names at marriage, and then change them back, sometimes can’t produce the right documents to satisfy a bureaucracy. This is also not a metaphor. The SAVE Act (Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act), just recently killed by Congress, would have required voters to produce documentary proof of citizenship that matches their current legal name. Since approximately 69 million American women have changed their surnames at marriage—with their birth certificates unchanged, of course—this provision creates an enormous paperwork burden that falls almost entirely on women. The name you were given, the name you choose, the name on your passport, the name on your birth certificate: suddenly, these mismatches become mechanisms of legal disenfranchisement.The ancient Egyptians would have recognized this—the name as a tool of ownership—immediately. My own name is a good illustration of the principle: my formal given name is Kathlyn Mary Cooney. That’s on my passport and driver’s license. My mother preemptively nicknamed me Kara to prevent anyone from calling me Kathy (!), and it’s been Kara ever since — appearing on no official document anywhere. When someone calls and asks for Kathleen (because who knows how to pronounce the Anglican Irish Kathlyn?), I know immediately: they don’t know me. They don’t have my secret name.(My publisher, American University Press, later asked me to use Kara Cooney on my Recycling for Death book cover — which crossed the streams rather dramatically and left my actual secret name thoroughly scrambled. Very Isis. Very Re.)Names in the Pyramid Texts: 45 Ways to Protect, Weaponize, and TransformFor this podcast, I did a search of the Pyramid Texts of Unas—the oldest religious corpus in the world, inscribed on the walls of his burial chamber at Saqqara—and found 45 mentions of rn, for “name.” And, of course, a quick glance at the text shows Unas’ name in cartouche visible everywhere on the walls. The magical spells had to name him repeatedly to have any effect.In Utterance 137, there is a curse against anyone who “shall speak evil against the name of Unas.” Slander. Gossip. Misusing a name in speech. The ancient Egyptians understood that once a name is out in the world—written on a wall, spoken aloud—it can be turned against you. You can be libeled. You can be slandered. You can have your reputation destroyed through the same medium that keeps you alive. The name is vulnerability as much as it is power.Utterance 143 is wild. Unas takes on the name of Horus: “You are born, O Horus, as the one whose name is he before whom the earth quakes,“ and then we read Seth’s epithet: he before whom the sky shakes. These are primeval names, Ur-names, that predate even the physical world. By speaking them, by claiming them, Unas is not just identifying himself as divine. He is reshaping the form of that divinity. The name does that: it transforms. It is not merely descriptive. It is constitutive.Utterance 147 goes further still: lift yourself up, so said they, in your name: God. The king is given a new name in the afterlife. He is addressed as God—netjer—and this address is not flattery. It is installation. The name confers the identity it declares.A Brief Taxonomy: Name vs. Title vs. EpithetBefore we go further, it’s worth distinguishing between three things that are often lumped together:The name (rn) is your personal, individual designation. It belongs to you alone; or rather, it is you alone. Other people share your title. No one else has your specific name in full, with the monikers of your parents.The titulary is a rank. It tells you where someone sits in the social and cosmic hierarchy. Scribe of the mat is different from king’s scribe. Every woman could be a nebet per (Mistress of the House) in theory — but no two people had the same personal name attached to it. The titulary situates you. The name individualizes you.The epithet is affiliation and protection. Beloved of Amun. Daughter of Thutmose. Epithets connect you to your tribe, your protectors, your people. They are the shields that surround a name. When Nefertiti receives the epithet meret Nefer-kheperu-Re—beloved of Akhenaten—it does not describe her. It marks her as his protected wife.Put them all together on a coffin, as Egyptians regularly did: Osiris-Scribe-Amenemhat-beloved of his father, and you become ranked. You are loved. You are protected. You can even be divinized. Your name sits at the center of all of it.Akhenaten and the Obsessive Naming of GodNo discussion of names in ancient Egypt can avoid Akhenaten’s relationship with the name of the Aten. It is, in many ways, the theological center of his entire religious experiment.The early name of the Aten—Ra-Horakhty who rejoices in the horizon, in his name Shu who is Aten—is complex, syncretic, a nest of allusions and connections to older solar traditions. Akhenaten, characteristically, found this unsatisfying. He revised the name later in his reign. He excised the Horakhty element because it was connected to an actual god. He created something cleaner, more abstract, more fully intellectualized.For Akhenaten, the name was his theology, and he was the one who formulated the name. The way you named the god determined what kind of god you had. And a sun that is pure light, pure warmth, pure creative energy, without the old hawk-headed body, without the accumulated mythology, required a name that held none of those ancillary things. The Aten’s name was Akhenaten’s project. It was also, as scholar James Hoffmeier has argued, the most concise expression of Atenist philosophy available to us.What’s equally interesting is what Akhenaten withheld. KV35’s so-called Younger Lady mummy has been genetically confirmed as a sister of Akhenaten, but in the texts of his reign, no woman is ever called king’s sister. That title disappears during his reign. Daughters were named because that title controlled, keeping them hierarchically below the king, their father. A sister implies a peer. A peer implies a claim. So the title was simply removed from the monumental record. Royal women were present. Their bodies were needed for procreation and succession. But their names and titles were selectively granted, withheld, or redefined according to what was politically useful.Book of the Dead: The Name as Passport, Password, and PrayerThe Book of the Dead is, in many ways, was a manual for navigating the afterlife using names.Chapter 43 is a spell to retain your head—a real concern, apparently, for the recently deceased. The declarant announces: I am the great one, son of the great one, the fiery one, son of the fiery one, to whom his head was given after having been cut off. I am Osiris. No one is calling themselves by their birth name here. They are claiming divine names as armor, as transformation, as protection. If your name is now Osiris, your head cannot be taken. The name is not a label; it is a force field.The Litany of Ra, a New Kingdom royal funerary text, lists 75 names of the sun god, 75 attempts by initiated priests to map the full complexity of solar divinity, some of the names masculine, some feminine, all of them strange, many of them untranslatable. It is one of the most extraordinary intellectual exercises in the ancient world: an effort to comprehend infinity by cataloguing its identities.And then there is the Declaration to the 42 Gods, the negative confession of Chapter 125, which we’ve discussed in a previous episode. What I point out this time around is something slightly different: it’s not just that you declare your innocence before these gods. You name them first. Oh, Wide-of-Stride, who comes from Iunu, I have not done evil. Oh Flame-Grasper, who comes from Kheraha, I have not robbed. You have to know who you’re talking to first. And knowing their names gives you a form of power over them; you can face them without flinching. The anxiety of ancient Egyptians about this moment was so real that they wrote the whole thing down and put it into papyrus form, so the dead could, essentially, cheat by reading off their notes. The magic still works. The name spoken is the name spoken, regardless of whether you memorized it or looked it up.There is also a wonderful interrogation sequence in the Book of the Dead in which the deceased is asked: Who are you? What is your name? And the answer is not a name as we’d recognize it. It is something like: I am the stock of the papyrus. He who is in the moringa tree is my name. A mythological riddle. Your secret name in the afterlife is not Amenhotep or Nefertari, but rather a description of your place in the universe, something that encodes your essence in a way that only the initiated can decode.The Dead Can Forget Their Own NamesAt the Getty Villa, there is a mummy from the late Roman period—Heraclides, son of Thermuthis—wrapped in a red shroud and dated to around the 2nd century CE. His name is written on his linen wrappings, near his feet, in Greek. If you imagine Heraclides standing upright, the inscription is oriented correctly for him to read. It is written so that the dead man can look down and see his own name, because the dead might forget.Death scrambles the circuits, apparently, and the Egyptians, even in the Roman period, even with Greek names on their mummies, retained this deep anxiety: what if you get to the other side and can’t remember who you are? The name written on the body is a reminder, a tether to identity across the most disorienting transition imaginable. It is, as Amber put it, like a phone number to yourself.And if the name is written on the linen, and you bring it with you through death, and the coffin text spells reunite you with your family members whose names you’ve memorized and included with your burial goods, then the name is how you find the people you love in whatever comes next.That’s not primitive belief but profound human connection.What We Know, What We Don’tThe Ren is the most human of the soul’s components. A bull has a Ka. A sacred bull has a Ba. But only a named being—named by language, by society, by the specific human act of utterance—truly has a Ren. It is what separates us from the rest of the created world: not consciousness, not feeling, but the ability to speak names and be spoken of. To be called into existence by a word, and to persist in existence as long as that word is uttered.Which is why erasing a name is so devastating and why the damnatio memoriae of the ancient world—chiseling out names, defacing inscriptions, removing someone from every monument—was understood as a kind of killing. This is why enslaved people were renamed. This is why women are still expected to give up their surnames in patriarchy, why their children carry their father’s name only. This is why transgender people choosing their own names are met with such hostility.The Ren, the ancient Egyptians believed, lives as long as it is spoken. Causing his name to live — sankh rn.f — was the highest act of memorial, the deepest form of love. It shows us to whom we belong. Next time on the Anatomy of the Ancient Egyptian Soul: the Akh — the transfigured, luminous dead, the superhero ancestor spirit, and how the living called on them for help.Show Notes & Further ReadingPrimary Texts & Online Resources* Pyramid Texts Online — searchable translations of the Pyramid Texts of Unas and others. Highly recommended for the curious.* The Isis and Re story: Papyrus Turin 1993 (Museo Egizio, Turin), 20th Dynasty.* The Great Hymn to the Aten: Tomb of Ay, Amarna. Translation discussed in this episode from Miriam Lichtheim, Ancient Egyptian Literature, Vol. II: The New Kingdom (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), p. 93.* Book of the Dead Chapter 43 (retaining one’s head), Chapter 125 (Declaration to the 42 Gods) — standard translations in R.O. Faulkner, The Ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead, revised edition (British Museum Press).* The Litany of Ra — see Erik Hornung, The Ancient Egyptian Books of the Afterlife, trans. David Lorton (Cornell University Press, 1999).The Shabaka Stone / Memphite Theology* British Museum, EA 498. 25th Dynasty copy of a text claiming to derive from an Old Kingdom original. The standard scholarly discussion is in Miriam Lichtheim, Ancient Egyptian Literature, Vol. I: The Old and Middle Kingdoms (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973).On the Egyptian Soul and the Concept of the Person* Jan Assmann, Death and Salvation in Ancient Egypt, trans. David Lorton (Cornell University Press, 2005). Essential reading on the Ba, Ka, Ren, and Akh.The Herakleides Mummy* Getty Villa, Malibu, California. Accession no. 83.AP.42. Roman period, Egypt, c. 100–150 CE.The SAVE Act* The Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act (H.R. 22), currently being debated in the U.S. Senate. For a nonpartisan overview of its provisions and their impact on women who have changed their names, see the Brennan Center for Justice and Vote.org’s SAVE Act explainer.Kara’s Work* For more on sex, economics, and social organization in ancient Egypt, see Kara Cooney, Ancient Egyptian Society: Challenging Assumptions, Exploring Approaches (Routledge, 2021).* The Woman Who Would Be King: Hatshepsut’s Rise to Power in Ancient Egypt (Crown, 2014).* When Women Ruled the World: Six Queens of Egypt (National Geographic, 2018).* The Good Kings: Absolute Power in Ancient Egypt and the Modern World (National Geographic, 2021).* Nefertiti — forthcoming, National Geographic. Get full access to Ancient/Now at ancientnow.substack.com/subscribe

Summary:Kara and Jordan welcome Griffith Institute staff Daniela Rosenow and Lara Bampfield to discuss the new Tutankhamun Spatial Archive, a searchable, metadata-driven platform that reconnects Carter’s excavation records to the tomb spaces, seasons, people, and objects. We learn about the trials and tribulations behind such an endevour, future plans for the project, and some of the fabulous stories behind lesser-known pieces in Tut’s tomb. Tutankhamun Spatial Archive Guest Bios:Lara Bampfield has recently submitted her DPhil in Assyriology at the University of Oxford. Her research investigates change and continuity in the motifs of Old Babylonian and Kassite cylinder seals, applying advanced digital methods such as 2D and 3D modelling, image-annotation software, and machine learning to analyse these transformations. In 2025 Lara joined the Griffith team as research assistant for the Tutankhamun Spatial Archive project focusing on the digital and metadata components.Daniela Rosenow studied Egyptology and Classics at the Humboldt University Berlin where she obtained her PhD on Late Period sacred architecture. She has worked at UCL’s Institute of Archaeology, the British Museum, the University of Munich and the German Archaeological Institute Cairo. In February 2021 Daniela joined the Griffith Institute, University of Oxford, where she co-curated the exhibition “Tutankhamun – Excavating the Archive“, and she is now the Manager of the Griffith Institute.Show Notes:Griffith Institute Main WebsiteTutankhamun Spatial Archive The latest story on the Egyptian WorkforceCast of Characters* Francis Llewellyn Griffith* Kate Bradbury * Nora MacDonald* Howard Carter* Harry Burton* Phyllis CarterOEB- Online Egyptological BibliographyTOB- Topographical Bibliography Middle Coffin (Compare)* Tutankhamun’s Floral Wreath* Hamza, N. M. (2020) Study and Investigations of Archaeobotanical Remains From Tutankhamun Tomb. ProQuest Dissertations & Theses.* For more information about the Egyptian workers – Quirke, S. (2010) Hidden hands : Egyptian workforces in Petrie excavation archives 1880-1924 / Stephen Quirke. London: Duckworth.* Smithsonian Magazine, “Remembering the Unsung Egyptians Who Helped Discover King Tut’s Tomb”* 1939 BBC Radio: playing of Tut’s trumpet with modern mouthpiece* Minnie Burton’s Diary Ancient/Now is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Get full access to Ancient/Now at ancientnow.substack.com/subscribe

Thank you paid subscribers, KinchStalker, Phoenix, Tomas Johansson, and many others for tuning into this live video with Jordan Galczynski and Amber Myers! You filled the chat with such sharp and interesting questions. This is exactly the kind of conversation we love — primary sources, spirited disagreement, duck genitalia, and the occasional new moon. We’ll be back soon. CW— mature themes; sex; sexuality; sexual assaultWhat does it mean to look for queer lives in the ancient world? We don’t want to impose today’s freedoms onto a patriarchal past, but we also don’t want to erase the biological reality that queer people have always existed in the world. That tension—generative, unresolved, and genuinely fun to argue about—animated our latest live conversation, and we’re thrilled so many of you joined us for it.Two Women, Arms EntwinedWe kicked things off with a pair statue currently held at the Museo Egizio in Turin. Amber had shared it earlier in the week and it immediately sparked debate among the three of us. Dating to the Thutmosid period and likely from a tomb in the Theban necropolis, it shows two women — Idu and Rui — seated side by side in white linen shifts and elegant bipartite wigs, arms wrapped around each other in precisely the embrace you’d expect to see between a husband and wife. The museum’s own description calls the relationship between them “unclear.”Which is, of course, the perennial problem.Are they friends? Sisters? Mother and daughter? Could they be something more? Kara was the self-described cynical voice in the room, skeptical that ancient Egyptian society would have allowed a formally commemorated queer female relationship — while also being completely open to the possibility that a very real relationship could have existed behind the scenes, just one that could and would never be named outright. Jordan pointed out something quietly fascinating: Idu holds the title nebet per — Mistress of the House — while Rui carries no title at all, no indication of kinship or any named social role. That asymmetry suggests a dependent relationship, but of what kind, we simply can’t say. They seem to have wanted to show themselves as the core of their household.What we can say is that someone commissioned this statue, paid for it, and had it placed in a tomb context so that both women would receive offerings in the afterlife. That’s not nothing. Whatever Idu and Rui were to each other, there was care—plus money, and intention—and a desire to keep this person in one’s eternal company.The group also floated an intriguing hypothesis: what if Idu had outlived her husband, inherited his property, and then got to live exactly as she chose? Two women, a shared household, just friends, obviously. Roommates even. The ancient world’s version of companions traveling down the Nile together — who, as Jordan noted, everyone quietly understood were probably lovers, but who would never in a thousand years have said so in a formal inscription.The Notorious Tomb of Niankhkhnum and KhnumhotepFrom there we moved to the far more famous case of the two manicurists of the Old Kingdom royal court: Niankhkhnum and Khnumhotep, buried together at Saqqara in a shared tomb decorated with images of the two men nose-to-nose, embracing in ways typically reserved for married couples. Scholars have argued they were brothers, conjoined twins, or colleagues — with Kara noting, drily, that “conjoined twins” seems like a remarkable amount of effort just to avoid the word gay. But who knows? This scene is unique and perplexing. We should not try to flatten the complexity of the image: we can acknowledge that queer people existed in the ancient world without pretending they enjoyed anything like modern queer freedom or visibility in society.What the Texts Actually Say (or Don’t)So what does the written record give us? Rather less than you might hope, and rather more ambiguous than anyone would like.Jordan pulled up Book of the Dead 125—the famous Negative Confession—the list of sins the deceased declares they have not committed before the scales of Ma’at. One entry reads something like: I have not copulated with a catamite — or, depending on your translation, I have not copulated with a boy, or I have not laid with a man. The Egyptian word in question, Kara noted, is a hapax legomenon: it appears nowhere else in the corpus, which makes translation genuinely treacherous. The word catamite, the group agreed, implies pederasty — a prohibition against the sexual exploitation of a prepubescent boy — which is something categorically different from a prohibition against adult same-sex desire. The distinction matters. More investigation (after the podcast!) revealed the phrase to translate into something like “I did not fuck a fucker of fuckers,” which implies a refusal to have slept with someone who is already sleeping with others. But who knows? You decide; see the Egyptian below!* “I have not penetrated the penetrater of a penetrater (Variant: “I have not copulated with a boy”); I have not masturbated” (n nk.i nkk nkk n dAdA.i) * nkk [nkk] = 𓈖𓎡𓎡𓂺𓀀 (Thesaurus Linguae Aegyptiae); lit. the one who fucks; male sex worker; homosexual?* We presume they are attaching the male gender to this noun because of the presence of a penis in the word, but Book of the Dead 125 is the only use of this word!* Also see Betwixt the Sheets, “History of Homophobia”Contending of Horus and Seth gave us rather more vivid primary source material. The story is, to put it mildly, a lot: Seth attempts to assault Horus in their sleep; Horus outsmarts him by catching the semen in his hand; his mother Isis disposes of the evidence—by cutting Horus’s hand off and growing him a new one as one does—and fashions a trap, placing Horus’s semen into the lettuce Seth habitually eats; and when Seth boasts of his conquest before the gods, the divine tribunal calls the semen forth — whereupon it emerges from Seth’s own head like a crown, to the hilarity of everyone assembled. The story is funny, and also pointed: what makes Seth’s act monstrous is not same-sex desire per se, but domination, humiliation, and the horror of being placed in the feminized, receptive position. As Kara observed, the ancient Egyptian antipathy here is not really about queerness. It’s about misogyny. To be penetrated is to be made a woman, and being made a woman is, within this patriarchal framework, a degradation. The female body’s hiddenness, Jordan added, made female queerness simultaneously the most subversive and the most invisible form of desire—something that likely happened constantly and simply never showed up in the legal or mortuary record because it threatened no man’s property and produced no illegitimate heirs.A brief and gleeful tangent addressed the so-called “Hatshepsut graffito” at Deir el-Bahri — a piece of erotic wall art that scholars persistently attribute to the female pharaoh on no stronger grounds than that it’s located in a cliff above her mortuary temple at Deir el Bahari, a space that, Kara pointed out, was built up by approximately everyone. The figure is wearing something that might be a wig, might be a nemes headdress, but the group voted: no, It’s a wig. Moving on.On Morality, Property, and Free LoveOne of the conversation’s richest threads concerned why ancient Egyptian society seems, comparatively speaking, to have been rather relaxed about sexual transgression. No stoning for adultery. No virginity tests. Premarital sex left relatively unpoliced. Kara connected this to land ownership — or rather, the lack of it. In a society where the Nile flood periodically erased field boundaries and where the great institutions (the Temple of Amun, the royal palace) were the primary landowners, the tight relationship between sexual morality and property inheritance that drove so much ancient Mediterranean legislation simply didn’t apply in the same way. You couldn’t easily lose heritable land over a sexual scandal when most people didn’t own heritable land to begin with.This also explains why female queerness, in particular, would have been almost entirely invisible to official record-keeping: no property changed hands, no paternity was threatened, no inheritance could be disputed. The patriarchal system cared deeply about women’s bodies as reproductive resources — but only insofar as those bodies produced legitimate heirs. What happened otherwise, behind closed doors or in a shared household, was simply not the law’s business.The picture shifts, the group agreed, with the arrival of the Greeks. Ptolemaic Egypt imported stricter social structures around female bodies: veiling, endogamous marriage to keep property within families, the concept of illegitimacy as a barrier to succession. These were new ideas, and not Egyptian ones.Priests, Priestesses, and the Gods’ Wives of AmunA subscriber question about priestly celibacy sent us down another rewarding path. The short answer is: Egyptian priests were, for most of the pharaonic period, married members of elite society who served on a rotating schedule, and the prescriptions around ritual purity—no sex, no fish, no leather—applied only during their active service, much like a young man in Thailand entering a temple for a period of education and contemplation before returning to ordinary life. The longer and thornier answer involves the Divine Adoratrices of the Late Period, the so-called God’s Wives of Amun, who held extraordinary political and religious power, adopted their successors rather than bearing biological children, and named no husbands in their records. Were they celibate? Almost certainly not in any enforced sense. They were the most powerful women in Egypt. Whatever they did, they did as they chose. Lovers were not memorialized on stone monuments, after all, and we should not expect them to have been.Closing with Psychedelics (As One Does)We ended, naturally, on psychedelics. Kara had recently received word of a study on a Bes jar—those delightful vessels bearing the face of the apotropaic dwarf deity—owned by the Tampa Museum of Art, in which residue analysis revealed a cocktail of the blue lotus (Nymphaea caerulea), Syrian rue, and other psychoactive substances. The blue lotus, long associated with sensuality and altered states in Egyptian iconography, turns out to have been rather more than decorative. Whether mushrooms or other psychedelics made their way into the Egyptian ritual pharmacopeia remains an open question, one we’d love to dig into further.Show Notes & Further Reading* Homosexuality in Ancient Egypt — Wikipedia* Pair statue of two women seated against a back slab — Museo Egizio* Tomb of the Two Brothers Niankhkhnum and Khnumhotep — Egyptian Monuments* Evans & Woods 2016. Further evidence that Niankhkhnum and Khnumhotep were twins. Journal of Egyptian Archaeology 102, 55–72.* Reeder 2000. Same-sex desire, conjugal constructs, and the tomb of Niankhkhnum and Khnumhotep. World Archaeology 32(2), 193–208.* Reeder 2008. Queer Egyptologies of Niankhkhnum and Khnumhotep. In Graves-Brown (ed.), Sex and Gender in Ancient Egypt.* Vasiljević 2008. Embracing his double. Studien zur Altägyptischen Kultur 37, 363–372.* Baines 1985. Egyptian twins. Orientalia 54(4), 461–482.* The Contending of Horus and Seth — Wikipedia* Book of the Dead 125, Negative Confession — UCL Digital Egypt* Betwixt the Sheets: “A History of Homophobia”* Tanasi et al. 2024. Multianalytical investigation reveals psychotropic substances in a Ptolemaic Egyptian vase. Scientific Reports 14. DOI: 10.1038/s41598-024-78721-8* Greco, van Oppen, Samorini, Tanasi & Tykot 2024. A Bes mug in Tampa. In van Oppen de Ruiter & Bianchi (eds.), Under the Spell of Bes, 105–116. Abercromby Press.* Tanasi, Davide, Branko F. van Oppen de Ruiter, Fiorella Florian, Radmila Pavlovic, Luca Maria Chiesa, Igor Fochi, Chiaramaria Stani, Lisa Vaccari, Dale Chaput, Giorgio Samorini, Alberto Pallavicini, Sabrina Semerano, Anastasia Serena Gaetano, Sabina Licen, Pierluigi Barbieri, and Enrico Greco 2024. Multianalytical investigation reveals psychotropic substances in a Ptolemaic Egyptian vase. Scientific Reports 14 (article no. 27891). DOI: 10.1038/s41598-024-78721-8.* Greco, Enrico, Branko van Oppen, Giorgio Samorini, Davide Tanasi, and Robert H. Tykot 2024. A Bes mug in Tampa. In Oppen de Ruiter, Branko F. van and Robert Steven Bianchi (eds), Under the spell of Bes, 105-116. Wallasey: Abercromby Press.Ancient/Now is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Get full access to Ancient/Now at ancientnow.substack.com/subscribe

In this episode Kara and Amber continue their series on the ancient Egyptian anatomy of the self by exploring the ka—often translated as a “life force,” but an element far more complex than that simple phrase suggests. Drawing on textual evidence like the Pyramid Texts and Coffin Texts, art, architecture, and funerary practices, Kara and Amber examine how the ka functioned as a sustaining power tied to food offerings, lineage, divine capabilities, and the material world. Their discussion reveals how the ancient Egyptians understood the survival of the ka as something deeply materialistic: a system of bodies, images, offerings, and rituals designed to sustain the ka for eternity.Show NotesAllen, James P. 1988. Genesis in Egypt : The Philosophy of Ancient Egyptian Creation Accounts. Yale Egyptological Seminar, Dept. of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, Graduate School, Yale University.Goebs, Katja. 2008. Crowns in Egyptian funerary literature: royalty, rebirth, and destruction. Griffith Institute Monographs. Oxford: Griffith Institute, Ashmolean Museum.Lobban, Richard, “A Solution to the Mystery of Was Scepter of Ancient Egypt and Nubia,” KMT: A Modern Journal of Ancient Egypt (10/3), 1999, 68–77.Lobban, R. A. and M. Sprague, “Bulls and the W3s Sceptre in Ancient Egypt and Sudan,” Anthrozoös 10, 1997, 14-22.Schwabe, Calvin W., Joyce Adams, and Carleton T. Hodge, “Egyptian Beliefs about the Bull’s Spine: An Anatomical Origin for Ankh,” Anthropological Linguistics 24, no. 4 (1982): 445–79. http://www.jstor.org/stable/30027646. Get full access to Ancient/Now at ancientnow.substack.com/subscribe

What, exactly, makes a person a person? In this episode, Kara and Amber launch a new series exploring the anatomy of the ancient Egyptian soul. They begin with the ba—often translated as “soul,” but far stranger and more powerful than that simple word suggests. The ba is the part of you that moves, that transforms, that survives death. Drawing from art, funerary texts, and literary works like The Dialogue of a Man with His Ba, the Egyptians unpack how the ba functioned as a mobile, solar, and deeply dynamic aspect of the individual.What emerges is an understanding that the ancient Egyptians did not view the self as singular. They saw it as layered and multifaceted—existing everywhere all at once: still and enduring, yet constantly in motion.This episode begins a multipart exploration of the ancient Egyptian individual—from the ba to the ka, the name, the heart, and beyond—asking how this ancient civilization imagined identity, survival, and how the Egyptians sought eternal existence in a world where death is inevitable.NotesAllen, James P. 2011. The debate between a man and his soul: a masterpiece of ancient Egyptian literature. Culture and History of the Ancient Near East 44. Leiden: Brill. Janák, Jiří. 2016. Ba. In Jacco Dieleman, Willeke Wendrich (eds.), UCLA Encyclopedia of Egyptology, Los Angeles. http://digital2.library.ucla.edu/viewItem.do?ark=21198/zz002k7g85Lichtheim, Miriam. 1973. Ancient Egyptian literature. A book of readings, volume I: The Old and Middle Kingdoms. Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press. Get full access to Ancient/Now at ancientnow.substack.com/subscribe

**Content and trigger warning: This episode contains images of sex and discussion of sexual themes, sexual abuse and exploitation, incest, and other related topics that might be inappropriate or upsetting to some listeners. Kara and Amber discuss one of the most debated objects from ancient Egypt: the so-called Turin Erotic Papyrus (Turin P. 55001). Often viewed as an example of ancient Egyptian pornography or crass entertainment, this papyrus reveals far more about elite anxiety, dynastic survival, and the ideological machinery of patriarchy. Through close visual analysis and discussion, they explore what is behind the exaggerated and sexualized depictions of bodies and scenes of sexual dominance and performance—not simply as humor, but as expressions of a system of power struggling to reproduce itself and maintain dominance. These images expose an obsession with regeneration, haunted by aging and mortality, and shaped by fear of failing masculinity, in which an aging sun god—and an aging king—must be sexually reborn to keep the cosmos intact.This episode connects sex, death, pornography, religion, ancient harems, and power structures both ancient and modern, asking why patriarchal societies so often turn to sexual control as ideology—and why these ancient images still feel disturbingly familiar today.Show notesMore about the Turin Erotic Papyrus (Museo Egizio)Selected BibliographyBabcock, Jennifer Miyuki , Ancient Egyptian animal fables: tree climbing hippos and ennobled mice (Culture and History of the Ancient Near East 128), Leiden; Boston 2022, p. 49–54, 107 e passim.Bresciani, Edda, Sulle rive del Nilo : l’Egitto al tempo dei faraoni(Grandi Opere), Roma 2000, pp. 122–127, 139–141, fig. 13 p. 124-5; fig. 5-6 p. 140.Flores Diane, “The topsy-turvy world”, in Egypt, Israel, and the ancient Mediterranean world. Studies in Honor of Donald B.Redford., 2004, pp. 234–235, 239, 246, 249, fig. pp. [21], [27], [37], [42].Houlihan, Patrick F., Wit & humour in ancient Egypt, London 2001, pp. 67–72, 132–136, fig.. 57, 66, 67, 68, 136, 141-6.Janák, J. And H. Navrátilová, 2008, “People v. P. Turin 55001,” in C. Graves-Brown (ed.) Sex and Gender in Ancient Egypt, ‘Don your wig for a joyful hour,’ The Classical Press of Wales.Manniche, Lise, Sexual life in Ancient Egypt, in -, London 1997, pp. 106–115.Omlin, Joseph A., Der Papyrus 55001 und seine satirisch-erotischen Zeichnungen und Inschriften (Catalogo del Museo Eg. di Torino - Serie I. - Monumenti e testi 3), Torino 1973.Skumsnes, Reinert. 2025. A case study of the Turin Satirical-Erotic papyrus: historical bodies, mundane resistance, and alternative body worlds. In Pedersen, Unn, Marianne Moen, and Lisbeth Skogstrand (eds), Gendering the Nordic past: dialogues between perspectives, 235-250. Turnhout: Brepols. DOI: 10.1484/M.WOP-EB.5.144367.Toivari-Viitala, Jaana-Toivari-Viitala, Jaana, Women at Deir el-Medina : a study of the status and roles of the female inhabitants in the workmen’s community during the Ramesside Period(Egyptologische Uitgaven 15), Leiden 2001, pp. 146–7. Get full access to Ancient/Now at ancientnow.substack.com/subscribe

In this episode of Afterlives of Ancient Egypt, Kara, Jordan, and guest Jason Silvestri delve into the enigmatic history of the Libyans during Egypt’s Third Intermediate Period. Jason shares his academic journey into Egyptology, discusses the discovery of ancient Libyan words in the Qeheq papyrus, and highlights his exciting archeological work at El Hibeh.About our Guest: Jason SilvestriJason Silvestri (BA ’19, Univ. of Toronto; MA ’21 UC Berkeley) is the Lady Wallis Budge Junior Research Fellow at Christ’s College, Cambridge and PhD Candidate in Egyptian Archaeology at UC Berkeley’s Dept. of Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures (MELC), where he is writing a dissertation on the social and political history of the Libyan Period (Dyns. XXI-XXIV). He has also worked extensively on Libyan-Egyptian interconnections, and has published the earliest known evidence of an Ancient Libyan language, the Qeheq Papyrus. In addition to his textual work, he is also an archaeologist, and has worked for several projects in Italy, Greece, and Egypt.Academiahttps://elhibehproject.org/Show Notes* Check out Jason’s article on oldest extant text that possibly preserve the Berber language * Third Intermediate Period * Libyan Period* Egyptian glyph rendering of the term “Libyans”- 𓍿𓅓𓎛𓌙𓀀 or 𓍿𓎛𓈖𓏌𓇋𓇋𓅱* Candelora, Danielle 2019. The eastern Delta as a middle ground for Hyksos identity negotiation. Mitteilungen des Deutschen Archäologischen Instituts, Abteilung Kairo 75, 77-94.* Hubschmann, C., (2010) “Who Inhabited Dakhleh Oasis? Searching for an Oasis Identity in Pharaonic Egypt”, Papers from the Institute of Archaeology 20(1), 51-66. doi: https://doi.org/10.5334/pia.341* Code Shifting * Use of the term “tribe” within anthropological studies * Banishment Stela * The Amazigh Language Family * Afroasiatic Language Family * Cooper, Julien Charles 2021. Beja and Cushitic languages in Middle Egyptian texts: the etymologies of queen Aashayet and her retainers. Lingua Aegyptia 29, 13-36. DOI: 10.37011/lingaeg.29.02.* Cooper, J. (2020). Egyptian Among Neighboring African Languages. UCLA Encyclopedia of Egyptology, 1(1). Retrieved from https://escholarship.org/uc/item/2fb8t2pz* El HibehWant to learn more about the Libyan Period? Suggested Readings:* Ritner, R. K. (2009) The Libyan anarchy : inscriptions from Egypt’s Third Intermediate Period / translated with an introduction and notes by Robert K. Ritner ; edited by Edward Wente. Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature.* Moreno García, J. C. (2014) Invaders or just herders? Libyans in Egypt in the third and second millennia bce. World archaeology. [Online] 46 (4), 610–623.* Broekman, G. (2011) Theban Priestly and Governmental Offices and Titles in the Libyan Period. Zeitschrift für ägyptische sprache und altertumskunde. [Online] 138 (2), 93–115.Ancient/Now is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Get full access to Ancient/Now at ancientnow.substack.com/subscribe

In our latest live Q&A with podcast supporters, we discuss Kara’s progress on her latest book (about Nefertiti!!!!), the opening of the Grand Egyptian Museum, the challenges of pronouncing ancient Egyptian words (vocalization is hard and a task we try to avoid), whether or not Cleopatra really committed suicide (short answer: NO), our top-three favorite tombs (Sennefer, Ramose, etc etc and why is Osirisnet down!?), and more. Read more about Kara’s perspective on the death of Cleopatra in her book, When Women Ruled the World: Six Queens of Egypt. Explore tombs in the Valley of the Kings via the Theban Mapping Project website!Learn more about the Grand Egyptian Museum here. Someday we will visit, but not this day…. Get full access to Ancient/Now at ancientnow.substack.com/subscribe

Kara and Amber return to the royal caches for Part II of their deep dive into the coffins reused for the re-Osirification (!!) of Thutmose III and Ramses II. Building on her new open-access article in Arts, Kara lays out how 20th–21st Dynasty priests “withdrew” value from royal burials during crisis and then ritually “paid it back,” stripping sheet gold but restoring a solar substitute (thin gilding or even just yellow washes of paint), covering coffin interiors with Osirian black resins, adding protective iconography and red paint as apotropaic force fields, and re-adding elements of kingship and human agency. Along the way, Kara and Amber map the politics of reuse within the royal caches of KV35 (the tomb of Amenhotep II in the Valley of the Kings) and TT320 (a reused 18th Dynasty queens tomb at Deir el Bahari used to rebury “preferred” kings and queens and the final resting place of many of the Amen Priesthood). They discuss whether or not the coffin reused for Thutmose III was originally made for him, and consider the material record through feminist and new-materialist lenses, looking at how ritual tries to reconcile scarcity, power, and piety. It’s a practical guide to what Egyptians thought were the essential ritual elements for a king to transform—gold/solar, earth/Osiris, iconography/protection, kingship, and human agency—and why they were significant.Show notesFor a discussion of the ritual repair of mummies from the Deir el Bahri 320 cache, check out Afterlives of Ancient Egypt, Episode #88.For more about Thutmose III and the veneration of royal ancestors, check out Afterlives of Ancient Egypt, Episode #83.SourcesBrown, Nicholas. 2020. “Raise Me Up and Repel My Weariness! A study of the coffin of Thutmose III (CG 61014).” MDAIK 76/77: 11-35.Cooney, Kathlyn. “Surviving New Kingdom Kings’ Coffins: Restoring the Art That Was.” Arts 2025, 14(3), 57; https://doi.org/10.3390/arts14030057.Cooney, Kara. 2024. Recycling for Death: Coffin Reuse in Ancient Egypt and the Theban Royal Caches. Cairo and New York: The American University in Cairo Press. [Buy it on Amazon or on the AUCP website.] Get full access to Ancient/Now at ancientnow.substack.com/subscribe

CW// self-harm and suicideKara and Amber take on the most famous death in all of antiquity—Cleopatra VII’s—and ask what “honor” really means when the sources are Roman, i.e. biased AF, and the stakes are imperial, that is Octavian is using Cleopatra’s fall to condense all power into the hands of one person, his own. Starting with a timeline of events, Kara and Amber unpack Octavian’s propaganda about Cleopatra’s death by suicide, and Kara argues that the suicide story serves Rome far more than it serves Egypt’s last queen. Using David Graeber’s Debt as a lens, they consider the ways in which honor, debt, and violence travel together in patriarchal systems—and how those rules are gendered. Antony’s suicide reads as “honorable,” while Cleopatra’s is framed as hysterical and selfish and maternal abandonment—all the worst things a woman within patriarchy could do. They probe the politics of narratives about “honor” that trap women who rule (with nods to Hatshepsut, Nefertiti, and Zenobia). The result is a sharp, feminist read of Cleopatra’s end.Or, as Kara likes to say: Suicide my ass… he straight up killed her and lied about it.Fight me. :)Show notesDavid Graeber’s DebtCheck out our other episodes on Cleopatra:Episode #57 – Reception, Ownership, and Race: Netflix’s “Queen Cleopatra”Episode #60 – Part II: Reception, Ownership, and Race: Netflix’s “Queen Cleopatra”Episode #82 – The Death of Cleopatra: Murder or Suicide? Get full access to Ancient/Now at ancientnow.substack.com/subscribe

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Kara and Amber unpack what Kara has described as perhaps the most consequential object of her career: the coffin used to (re)bury Thutmose III. The story behind this king’s coffin spans centuries—running from the height of the 18th Dynasty—when it was first made—through the Late Ramesside turmoil—when it was first exhumed—and into the 20th–21st Dynasties—when the coffin was opened, closed, and reopened to source gold and use the body of the king as a kind of talisman for power. This coffin provides an excellent case study to help us understand how royal burials—and royal corpses—were manipulated, remade, and redeployed as tools that manufactured social power. Kara walks us through the forensic clues on the object itself—two uraeus holes (think vulture and cobra on the mask of Tutankhamun!), layers of plaster (that means redecoration!) tool marks (scraping away all that gilding!), traces of gilding (regilding a thin layer after taking a thick layer), and multiple sets of mortise-and-tenons (as the case and lid sides get thinner and thinner!)—to show at least two major interventions before the coffin was finally cached in Deir el-Bahri 320, stripped of just about all its precious materials. During this discussion, Kara and Amber explore some of the reasons Thutmose III was resurrected as a divine ancestor by later generations of warlords (like Payankh and Herihor!), how “caretaking” and commodification coexisted, and what these acts can tell us about civil conflict, migration, and elite replacement in the late Bronze Age. This is a forensic case study that reveals object stratigraphy as power politics. Show notesFor a discussion of the ritual repair of mummies from the Deir el Bahri 320 cache, check out Afterlives of Ancient Egypt, Episode #88.For more about Thutmose III and the veneration of royal ancestors, check out Afterlives of Ancient Egypt, Episode #83.SourcesBrown, Nicholas. 2020. “Raise Me Up and Repel My Weariness! A study of the coffin of Thutmose III (CG 61014).” MDAIK 76/77: 11-35.Cooney, Kathlyn. “Surviving New Kingdom Kings’ Coffins: Restoring the Art That Was.” Arts 2025, 14(3), 57; https://doi.org/10.3390/arts14030057.Cooney, Kara. 2024. Recycling for Death: Coffin Reuse in Ancient Egypt and the Theban Royal Caches. Cairo and New York: The American University in Cairo Press. [Buy it on Amazon or on the AUCP website.] Get full access to Ancient/Now at ancientnow.substack.com/subscribe

Akhenaten physically manifested his cult to the sun, building a capital city at a break in the cliffs that created the perfect sunrise hieroglyph on the east bank, a city filled with open air temples into which the sun’s rays could reach directly. He created no statues to represent divine solar power, no intercessor between god and king; the sun’s warmth and light could not be contained in a cult statue. To honor the sun god, Akhenaten created a simple and literal system of giving back what the sun god had given to his people: his Aten temples contained thousands of altars filled to overflowing with the bounty of his people’s produce—joints of beef, oxen heads, ducks and geese, bread loaves in all shapes and sizes, onions, garlic, beer and wine. In this episode, Kara Cooney and Amber Myers Wells dive into the overwhelming scale of the offering tables from Akhenaten’s reign and what they reveal about ritual, power, and ideology in the Amarna period. Why did Akhenaten commission thousands of offering tables for the Aten, who filled them, where did the food come from, and what does this short-lived practice tell us about the king’s vision of divine connection versus the economic and social realities of life at the new capital city of Akhetaten?This is a confusing topic with many outstanding questions; please communicate your confusion, quandaries, and ideas in the comments!Show notesFor more on the Great Aten Temple and Offering Tables, see the Amarna Project website, a treasure trove of information. Check out this image of Akhenaten offering in his great Aten Temple, as pictured in the tomb of one of his courtiers and the temple’s Chief Servant, Panehsy. For a statue fragment of Akhenaten holding his own personal offering table, see this piece at the Met! Ancient/Now is always free for everyone. If you want to help me pay Amber and Jordan what they are worth, consider becoming a paid subscriber. And thank you!SourcesCooney, Kathlyn M. 2007. The cost of death: the social and economic value of ancient Egyptian funerary art in the Ramesside period. Egyptologische Uitgaven 22. Leiden: Nederlands Instituut voor het Nabije Oosten.Janssen, Jac J. 1975. Commodity prices from the Ramessid period: an economic study of the village of necropolis workmen at Thebes. Leiden: E. J. Brill.Kemp, Barry. 2013. The city of Akhenaten and Nefertiti: Amarna and its people. London: Thames & Hudson.McClain, J. Brett and Kathlyn Cooney. 2005. “The daily offering meal in the ritual of Amenhotep I: an instance of the local adaptation of cult liturgy.” Journal of Ancient Near Eastern Religions 5, 41-78. DOI: 10.1163/156921205776137963. Get full access to Ancient/Now at ancientnow.substack.com/subscribe

CW: This episode includes discussion of sexual themes, including incest and child sexual abuse. Listener discretion advised.In this episode, Kara and Amber take on one of Amarna’s most famous images—the so-called “house altar” showing Akhenaten, Nefertiti, and their three daughters beneath the Aten (Ägyptisches Museum/Neues Museum, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Inv. no ÄM 14145). At a glance, this relief seems to show a sweet private scene of domesticity and familial affection, but taking the time to do some close-looking reveals how the scene might covey so much more. Kara unpacks how—to initiated elite eyes, at least—the piece encodes theology, court politics, sexual and reproductive power. What might Nefertiti’s unique blue crown signal about containment of solar power? Why are the girls’ bodies shown the way they are, like tiny women but with the heads of infants? And how might a palace loyalist use such an altar to telegraph succession hopes—and anxieties—without writing a word? It’s all here, encoded in the stone. Along the way Kara and Amber also explore ancient Egyptian ideas of divine conception, the harem as a political machine, why Amarna “realism” isn’t exactly realism, but an idealized magical end goal, and how royal bodies carried the burden of sustaining royal legitimacy and succession. Show notesObject entry on Google Arts & CultureFor more on the commodification of women’s and girl’s bodies, see:Episode #69 - Bodies and Power in the Ancient WorldCooney, Kathlyn M. 2025. Body power in the ancient world: patriarchal power and the commodification of women. In Thompson, Shane M. and Jessica Tomkins (eds), Understanding power in ancient Egypt and the Near East, volume I: Approaches, 104-135. Leiden; Boston: Brill. DOI: 10.1163/9789004712485_006.For more on harems in ancient Egypt, see:Episode #41 - Power and Politics in the Egyptian HaremCooney, Kathlyn M., Chloe Landis, and Turandot Shayegan 2023. The body of Egypt: how harem women connected a king with his elites. In Candelora, Danielle, Nadia Ben-Marzouk, and Kathlyn M. Cooney (eds),Ancient Egyptian society: challenging assumptions, exploring approaches, 336-348. London; New York: Routledge. DOI: 10.4324/9781003003403-31.For the Amenhotep III conception scene discussed in the episode, see:Krauss, Rolf. “Die Amarnazeitliche Familienstele Berlin 14145 Unter Besonderer Berücksichtigung von Maßordnung Und Komposition.” Jahrbuch Der Berliner Museen 33 (1991): 7–36. https://doi.org/10.2307/4125873. Get full access to Ancient/Now at ancientnow.substack.com/subscribe

Egyptian priests didn’t just waft incense and mutter incantations; they had to run the cosmic machine, make sure the sun rose and set, the Nile rose and receded as appropriate. From feeding the gods to managing temple estates, priesthood sat where divinity, money, and monarchy intersected. It’s not that the Egyptian priests were so simple-minded as to believe humans were needed for grand actions of cosmic continuance, but rather they realized pleasing the gods would bring the best version of divine power into the human world—whether that best version was copper (Hathor), wheat and barley (Osiris), inundation (Sobek), healthy children (Isis), or miraculous craft (Ptah). The Egyptians thus knew they had to create a perfect habitat to pull the gods into their human spaces. First the god needed a body, a sacred statue made of precious things like gold, silver, electrum, precious stones, glass. Then that body needed a grand house, the temple. And the divinity would have to be carefully cleaned and anointed, fed the best bread and beer, wine and beef, duck and lettuce. The gods had to be dressed in fine linens, entertained with dancing and music. Without such magnificent bribery, they wouldn’t be pulled into the realm of the human, we are told, and they wouldn’t bestow their gifts. This was a give and take world, after all. Divine-human quid pro quo. When you tug on the priestly thread of religion in ancient Egypt, the garment unravels into issues of restricted knowledge, kingship, patriarchy, money, land, and power. Let’s start with the basics: what was a priest in ancient Egypt? When you think of an Egyptian priest, think of a specialist, someone set apart and equipped with bespoke and unusual knowledge of how to connect with the divine. He could read and write; he had thousands of incantations memorized. He knew the movements to make in front of the shrine, how loudly or quietly to speak, when to raise or lower his eyes. He held restricted knowledge that few had—spells that woke the god, calmed them, provided the conditions for their transformations—because in the end every god was representative of a life and death cycle that had to be renewed. Osiris had to be transformed seasonally, the sun god daily, the goddess yearly. Never forget that his knowledge of texts and spells made him privileged. It gave him power and access to those with political, economic and military power. And in ancient Egypt, these worldly powers were combined with religious powers such that the pharaoh was the highest of high priests atop a hierarchy descending down to his chief priests, lector priests, and on to the lowest wab priest, all of them helping to run the whole sacred-human game. But alongside the rituals that sustained the gods and the cosmos came bureaucracy, taxes, the constant search for income to keep the temple open. Priests didn’t just chant incantations and carry out their religious duties—they managed vast estates, redistributed offerings, and, in many cases, enriched themselves. They also needed to pay / feed their employees, other priests. When the state pulled their financial support, they invented a number of income creating schemes, including animal mummies and votives available for purchase. Selling a couple thousand of those a year would set a Late Period temple up well. So, were the Egyptians devout? Absolutely. But not in the way we think of “belief.” They didn’t sit around wondering if the gods were real. Divinity was everywhere—the sun on your skin, the river rising or not, the fate of your harvest. You got up in the morning and did your rituals because if you didn’t, the whole system might collapse. It wasn’t a question of faith. It was survival—pull the gods into your man-made temples or suffer the consequences. So go hug a tree, light a candle, pull a tarot card—make your own connection to the spirit world. The Egyptians would tell you it’s not about belief. It’s about participation.Show Notes* Forshaw, Roger. The Role of the Lector in Ancient Egyptian Society. Archaeopress, 2014. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctvqc6jxb. Accessed 1 Sept. 2025.* Sauneron, Serge. 1960. The priests of ancient Egypt. Translated by Ann Morrissett. Evergreen Profile Book 12. New York: Grove.* Wilkinson. 2000. The Complete Temples of Ancient Egypt. * Lazaridis, Nikolaos. 2010. Education and apprenticeship. Edited by Elizabeth Frood and Willeke Wendrich. UCLA Encyclopedia of Egyptology 2010 (October), 14 p., 2 figs [ills].* Haring, Ben. 2007. Ramesside temples and the economic interests of the state: crossroads of the sacred and the profane. In Fitzenreiter, Martin (ed.), Das Heilige und die Ware: Eigentum, Austausch und Kapitalisierung im Spannungsfeld von Ökonomie und Religion, 165-170. London: Golden House.* Haring, B. J. J. 1997. Divine households: administrative and economic aspects of the New Kingdom royal memorial temples in western Thebes. Egyptologische Uitgaven 12. Leiden: Nederlands Instituut voor het Nabije Oosten.* Gillam, Robyn. 2016 “The Priestesses of Hathor: Their Function, Decline and Disappearance.”* God’s Wife of Amun* Ayad, Mariam F. (2009). God's Wife, God's Servant: The God's Wife of Amun (c. 740–525 BC). Routledge. ISBN 9780415411707.* See also Kara’s monograph on Hatshepsut, “The Women Who Would Be King” * Personal Piety* Baines, John. 2021. Was the king of Egypt the sole qualified priest of the gods? In Collombert, Philippe, Laurent Coulon, Ivan Guermeur, and Christophe Thiers (eds), Questionner le sphinx: mélanges offerts à Christiane Zivie-Coche 1, 73-97. Le Caire: Institut français d'archéologie orientale.* Kemp, Barry J. 1995. How religious were the ancient Egyptians? Cambridge Archaeological Journal 5 (1), 25-54. DOI: 10.1017/S0959774300001177* Sola Busca TarotAncient/Now is a reader-supported publication. All is free and available, but Jordan and Amber cannot work for free! To receive new posts and support our work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Get full access to Ancient/Now at ancientnow.substack.com/subscribe

[Content Warning: This episode includes discussions of sexual themes(!), power(!!), and the exploitation of bodies(!!!).]Join Kara and Amber for a deep dive into one of the most peculiar and beautiful objects from the tomb of Tutankhamun (we think!)—a painted wooden head emerging from a blue lotus. Was it meant to show the child god Nefertem? A cosmic birth scene? A sensual drug trip? Or all of the above? In this episode, we explore the sculpture’s religious symbolism, Amarna influences, sketchy findspot, and what it tells us about birth, rebirth, and the power of divine femininity. One object, endless meanings.Don’t miss Kara’s companion post to this episode on Ancient/Now!Show notesTutankhamun Head of Nefertem, New Kingdom, 18th Dynasty, reign of Tutankhamun, ca. 1332-1323 BC. Found at the entrance of his tomb (KV62). Valley of the Kings, West Thebes. Now in the Egyptian Museum, Cairo. JE 60723Howard Carter’s object card (Griffith Institute)WikipediaBlue lotus flowerReferencesHawass, Zahi. 2007. The Head of Nefertem. In King Tutankhamun. The Treasures of The Tomb. Thames & Hudson, London 2007, p. 16.Hoving, Thomas. 1980. Tutankhamun: The Untold Story. Rowman & Littlefield (reprint, 2002). James, T. G. H. 2000. Tutankhamun. White Star: Metro Books.Munro, Peter. 1980. "Tutanchamun als Sonnengott." In the exhibition catalogue Tutanchamun in Köln. von Zabern, Mainz, p. 140–141.Schlögl, Hermann 1977. Der Sonnengott auf der Blüte: eine ägyptische Kosmogonie des Neuen Reiches. Aegyptiaca Helvetica 5. Genève: Éditions de Belles-Lettres.Seton-Williams, M. V. 1980. Tutanchamun. Der Pharao. Das Grab. Der Goldschatz. Ebeling, Luxembourg, p. 120. Get full access to Ancient/Now at ancientnow.substack.com/subscribe

Content Warning: Adult themes of sex and sexuality; death and traumaIn this podcast episode, we take a deep dive into pregnancy and giving birth in ancient Egypt. How were fertility issues dealt with? How was conception conceptualized? What was the childbirth process like? What role did magical rituals and belief in the gods play? What role did midwives, doctors, wet nurses, and others play in the process? And what can we gain from the experiences of these ancient people today? We ultimately come to understand that ancient Egyptian birth was a private matter that took place in the home, that the baby and mother received the support of intimate and extended family, that the new mother was welcomed back into society with celebrations of her beauty and fecundity, a rite of passage in which community was integral. Indeed, all of this is exactly what pregnant individuals and new parents are missing and seeking out in 2025. We might assume that it is better to be pregnant now than in the ancient world. And in some ways it is— antibiotics, anesthesia, and sonograms save lives everyday. But we also know healthcare access is not equal across race and socio-economic status, governments are defunding care facilities, and a woman’s right to choose are all under threat. To make matters worse, as of a 2023 JAMA study, U.S. pregnancy-related deaths are on a steep uptake since 1999, especially amongst Indigenous and Black communities. The defunding of pregnancy and childbirth-related services, like Planned Parenthood, is one contributing factor. Given that cuts to abortion access are meant to push women back into traditional, shut-in, patriarchal roles, please don’t expect a glorification of the ancient world here. But we can’t laud the modern situation either. Let’s just say that we can learn useful lessons from both sides of our human selves. It’s complicated.All of our current medical possibilities have created their own unintended overmedicalized consequences that no one in the ancient world had to suffer. Today’s drug-induced births, often chosen for the convenience of medical staff, create contractions that are ten times more painful than normal contractions. The high number of chemically induced births demands that modern American mothers labor for hours under epidural spinal pain blocking, accompanied by heavy opioids. The inability to feel anything during the birth process takes agency away from the mother entirely. She cannot move; she pushes from her back. No squatting and birth bricks for her. No gravity to assist the descent of the baby in the birth canal. Instead, very long labor can result in traumatized mothers with ripped tissue, babies squeezed and pulled out of the birth canal. Many modern births result in overmedicalized interventions, thus the high rate of cesarean sections, which are 5x more likely to cause complications than vaginal births. The COVID-19 pandemic hit pregnant and post-childbirth individuals particularly hard. Even celebrities— people we would assume would have the best medical treatment available— have had near-death experiences (Read about Serena Williams’ ordeal). In many ways, the modern (American) birth process is a system perfected to create trauma and loneliness. I think if we had the choice presented to us with clarity, most of us would want to give birth the ancient way—with community and agency—but with modern aids like surgical ways of dealing with a cord wrapped around the baby’s neck, or a stuck shoulder, or a placenta blocking the birth canal, or means of stopping hemorrhaging, or antibiotics to stop infection. Somehow our discussions about childbirth have become very black and white, such that anyone demanding a midwife is putting their baby in mortal danger to the level of Oh-You-Would-Have-Wanted-The-Nazis-to-Win-World-War-II kind of rhetoric. But the ancient world can provide some much-needed nuance in our perspective of maternal agency, healthy outcomes, and community involvement.One of the most shocking findings of a recent study was the prevalence of mental health-related death in the 4th trimester (the time between birth and 12-week post-partum). Modern childbirth usually places the mother in charge of her baby alone. New parents are not getting the support and care they need. Instead of the embrace of the community in the ancient world, women today experience loneliness, anxiety, and isolation. But we are still those same people, in many ways, with the same desires, emotions, and bodies. And we don’t like being cut off from care. We want human connection during this essential rite of passage. It is no surprise that we are seeing a rise in midwifery and doulas as a way for pregnant individuals to take back the process. A doula is like a claim of emotional support, direct from the ancient world. Midwives are not just women taking care of women in the old ways, but a rejection of the formal doctor-knows-all over patient relationship. TikTok and other social media apps are also comparing how divergent countries deal with pregnancy and childbirth—making many Americans curious about more non-hyper-medicalized options.The modern world is so disassociated from community care that we have outsourced it, paying a postpartum nanny if you can afford it, to help support the parent during the precarious 4th trimester, for example. The ancient (patriarchal) world would have placed the new mother and baby in the arms of other mothers, aunts, and grandmothers. The ancient pre-patriarchal world would have allowed more caregiving from the father, uncles, and grandfathers, too.We don’t mean to romanticize the old ways. Indeed, in the ancient world, pregnancy and childbirth carried extraordinary risks and complications. One study on ancient Greece argued for a childbirth mortality rate as high as 30%. Though some recent studies of pre-modern Europe have pushed back against the idea that pregnancy and childbirth were always über dangerous— pregnancy complications, birth obstructions, hemorrhage, and infection were all too common.Prof. Anne Austin’s bioarchaeological work (2024) at Deir el-Medina found a high rate of female deceased in young adulthood, which could be linked to childbirth complications. Experts have even identified mummified individuals who died during childbirth with the fetus still in the birth canal (though one is debated…). Babies who died as a result of miscarriage, stillbirth, or early childhood deaths received special burial treatment, often within the confines of the home or in pots. The ancient Egyptians didn’t place their youngest and most vulnerable into the necropolis; they were kept in the home, usually under the floor.Yes, childbearing was and is hard, but it wasn’t all doom and gloom…. There was magic and a hippo goddess!!Ancient/Now is a reader-supported publication. All our content is free and open to the public. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Show NotesFertility Treatments & Issues* Votive figurines* Waraksa, E. Female Figurines from the Mut Precinct: Context and Ritual Function. Orbis Biblicus et Orientalis 240. Fribourg; Göttingen: Academic Press; Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2009.* Teeter, E. Baked Clay Figurines and Votive Beds from Medinet Habu. OIP 133. Chicago: Oriental Institute, 2010* Plant aphrodisiacs – Blue lotus & mandrake* Ibrahim, Venice and Shehatta Attia. 2022. Some sedative plants in ancient Egypt: Egyptian blue lotus, hemp, mandrake & opium poppy. In Győry, Hedvig (ed.), Aegyptus et Pannonia VIII: Acta symposii anno 2021, volume 2, 259-297. Budapest: MEBT-ÓEB* Counsell, D. J. 2010. Blue lotus: ancient Egyptian narcotic and aphrodisiac? In Cockitt, Jenefer and Rosalie David (eds), Pharmacy and medicine in ancient Egypt: proceedings of the conferences held in Cairo (2007) and Manchester (2008), 51-55. Oxford: Archaeopress.* Comestic Spoons* Peter Lacovara – The Meaning and Symbolism of Swimming-Girl Spoons from EgyptConceptualizing Conception* Roth, Ann Macy. 2000. Father earth, mother sky: ancient Egyptian beliefs about conception and fertility. In Rautman, Alison E. (ed.), Reading the body: representations and remains in the archaeological record, 187-201. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. * Ancient Egyptian creation mythsGender Preferences and Infanticide* Mahi, Ali Tigani El. 2000. Prehistoric population controls in the Sudanese Nile Valley: a consideration of infanticide. Beiträge zur Sudanforschung 7, 103-118.* Schneider, Thomas. 2015. God's infanticide in the night of Passover: Exodus 12 in the light of ancient Egyptian rituals. In Arbel, Vita Daphna, Paul C. Burns, J. R. C. Cousland, Richard Menkis, and Dietmar Neufeld (eds), Not sparing the child: human sacrifice in the ancient world and beyond: studies in honor of Professor Paul G. Mosca, 52-76. London; New York: Bloomsbury T&T Clark. DOI: 10.5040/9780567659170.ch-003.Depictions of Pregnancy in Egyptian ArtChildbirth Practices and Rituals* Samir, Nermeen. 2023. Childbirth postures within the Egyptian mammisis. In Abdelhalim Ali, Ali and Dagmar Budde (eds), Mammisis of Egypt: proceedings of the first international colloquium, held in Cairo, 27-28 March 2019, 279-290. Le Caire: Institut français d'archéologie orientale. * Andreeva, Anna, Erica Couto-Ferreira, and Susanne Töpfer. 2014. Childbirth and women’s healthcare in pre-modern societies: an assessment. Dynamis 34 (2), 279-287. DOI: 10.4321/S0211-95362014000200001.* Ladinig-Morawetz, Franz-Stephan. 2023. Defining "magic" using the example of Egyptian gynaecology. In Aguizy, Ola el- and Burt Kasparian (eds), ICE XII: proceedings of the Twelfth International Congress of Egyptologists, 3rd-8th November 2019, Cairo, Egypt 2, 1109-1115. [Cairo]: Institut français d'archéologie orientale.* The Role of Birth Wands and Bricks* Roth, Ann Macy and Catharine H. Roehrig. 2002. Magical bricks and the bricks of birth. Journal of Egyptian Archaeology 88, 121-139.* Miller, Jordan. 2021. Emblematic representation on ancient Egyptian apotropaic wands. Archaeological Review from Cambridge 36 (2), 119-141. DOI: 10.17863/CAM.86209* Involvement of the gods – Bes, Tawaret, Hathor, and Isis Midwives, Doulas, and Village Support* Austin, Anne. 2024. Healthmaking in ancient Egypt: the social determinants of health at Deir el-Medina. Culture and History of the Ancient Near East 138. Leiden; Boston: Brill. DOI: 10.1163/9789004700871.* O. Cairo J 72452, where the workmen’s crew got off for a childbirth* Amulets for childbirth that most likely originated from Deir el-Medina suggest that childbirth could have been within the purview of a zA.w or xrp-Srq.t (Austin 2024).* Geraldine Pinch, “Childbirth and Female Figurines at Deir El-Medina and El-‛Amarna,” Orientalia 52, no. 3 (1983): 405–14.* Arnette, “Purification Du Post-Partum et Rites Des Relevailles Dans l’Égypte Ancienne.”Thanks for reading Ancient/Now! This post is public and free, so feel free to share it. Get full access to Ancient/Now at ancientnow.substack.com/subscribe

How was magic/ritual practice used in the lives of ancient Egyptians to resist and gain a sense of agency? In this episode of Afterlives of Ancient Egypt, Kara, Jordan, and extra special guest Dr. Jonathan Winnerman delve into the concept of 'magical resistance,' exploring how ancient Egyptians and people today use magic and rituals to gain a sense of power and agency. They discuss broad definitions of magic, because yeah scholars really fight about what magic is and what it isn’t, its role in the assassination of Ramses III, and the fine line between state–sanctioned and subversive magical practices. The inspiration for this episode was a Substack article from Ancient Rome, Modern Witch which looked at how ancient Romans used magic as a form of resistance. And also please remember HBO’s Rome when Servilla curses Attia with all the elite witchcraft in her ancient Roman toolkit.With everything that is going on in the world—wild gesture—people are seeking different methods of resistance, including modern forms of magic. Now we aren’t telling you to go out and curse anybody, because that shit always comes back at you (!), but please use this podcast and the plentiful show notes below as inspiration to create some some good, magical, ancient defensive tactics for the days to come….Show Notes* FREE DOWNLOAD – Robert Ritner, SAOC 54. The Mechanics of Ancient Egyptian Magical Practice. (Fourth Printing, 2008).* Frazer’s Golden Bough (1890) – a seminal (read masculine AF) work on comparative mythology and religion* Magic → religion → science and rational materialism (!!)Harem Conspiracy * Papyrus Rollins“It happened because writings were made for enchanting, for banishing, for confusing, because some gods were made into wax and some men also– and furthermore for enfeebling the limbs of men and which writing were placed in the hand of Pay-bak-kamen…” (P. Rollins)* Goedicke, Hans (December 1963). "Was Magic Used in the Harem Conspiracy against Ramesses III? (P.Rollin and P.Lee)". The Journal of Egyptian Archaeology. 49: 71–92. doi:10.2307/3855702. JSTOR 3855702.Protection* Isis Knot and other amulets“Spell for a knot amulet of red jasper. “You have your blood, O Isis; you have your power, O Isis; you have your magic, O Isis.” As for him for whom this is done, the power of Isis will be the protection of his body, and Horus son of Isis will rejoice over him when he sees him; no path will be hidden from him, and one side of him will be towards the sky and the other towards the earth. A true matter; you shall not let anyone see it in your hand, for there is nothing equal to it.” (Formula 156, Book of Coming Forth by Day)* Killed Captives at boundary markers* Mut Precinct (unpublished)* Mirgissa Deposit CursesSpell against an Enemy - “You will stop, whoever comes! I am the one who enters the sleeping place and comes from upon the ground. A man who fights. You will stop! Where are you with regard to me? I will enter your belly as a fly, and I will see your belly from the inside. I will turn your face into the back of your head; the front of your foot into your heel. Your speech is no use; it will not be heard. Your body will be weak and your knee will be feeble. You will stop! I am Horus, the son of Isis, I will leave on my feet.” (McDowell, 117)Tomb Fragment (National Museum of Scotland)“It is to you that I speak; all people who will find this tomb passage! Watch out not to take (even) a pebble from within it outside. If you find this stone you shall transgress against it. Indeed, the gods since (the time of) Pre, those who rest in [the midst] of the mountains gain strength every day (even though) their pebbles are dragged away. ’Look for a place worthy of yourselves and rest in it, and do not constrict gods in their own houses, as every man is happy in his place and every man is glad in his house. As for he who will be sound, beware of forcefully removing this stone from its place. As for he who covers it in its place, great lords of the west will reproach him very very very very very very very very much.”Execration Ritual(s) “Every rebel of this land, all people, all patricians, all commoners, all males, all eunuchs, all women, every chieftain, every Nubian, ever Strongman, every messenger, every confederate, every ally of every land who will revel in Wawat, Zatju, Yam, Ianeh, Masit, and Kauw, who will rebel or who will plot by saying plots, or speaking anything evil against Upper or Lower Egypt forever.”“spit on him four times . . . trample on him with the left foot . . . smite him with a spear . . . slaughter him with a knife . . . place him on the fire . . . spit on him in the fire many times”* Breaking of the Red Pots RitualLetters to the DeadCairo Bowl (CG 25375)“Given by Dedi to the priest Antef, born of Iwnakht. As for this serving-maid Imiu who is sick, you do not fight for her night and day with every man who is doing her harm and every woman who is doing her harm. Do you wish your threshold to be desolated? Fight for her today as though it were something new, so that her household may be established… Save her from all the men and women who are doing her harm! Then your house and your children will be established! Thanks for listening!”Specialists* Priesthoods & Corruption- can we see the increase in votive animal mummies in the Late Period as evidence of increasing corruption in the priesthood á la the Catholic buying of indulgences?* Divination * Wise women* Austin, Anne and Cédric Gobeil 2016. Embodying the divine: a tattooed female mummy from Deir el-Medina. Bulletin de l'Institut Français d'Archéologie Orientale 116, 23-46. DOI: 10.4000/bifao.296. Get full access to Ancient/Now at ancientnow.substack.com/subscribe

What happens when an ancient Egyptian king recycles a statue—and then an empire steals it more than 3,000 years later? In this episode of Afterlives of Ancient Egypt, Kara Cooney and Amber Myers Wells take you on a deep dive into the life, reuse, and relocation of the colossal statue fragment known as the “Younger Memnon” (British Museum, EA 19). Once a towering monument to Amenhotep III, then reused by Ramses II, and finally carted off to London as a result of 19th-century colonialism, this statue has lived many lives—and it still looms large in the British Museum. It’s the first thing you see when you turn the corner to the Egyptian galleries…Tune into learn how a two-toned block of granite became a symbol of solar kingship, modern colonial power, and the politics of museum display. From Shelley’s Ozymandias to the ethics of repatriation, it’s a conversation about ownership, ideology, and the stories we choose to tell. What a magnificently complicated piece.Don’t miss Kara’s written companion post to this episode, “The ‘Younger Memnon’: A Colossal Lesson in Power, Reuse, and Colonial Trophy Hunting,” on the Ancient/Now Substack.Ozymandias by Percy Bysshe ShelleyThe Younger Memnon, British Museum EA 19 Get full access to Ancient/Now at ancientnow.substack.com/subscribe

Anya and I had so much fun in our recent Substack Live with Classical Wisdom. Anya was in Greece, I in California, and the topic was ancient Egypt. One of our main points of discussion was the newly conserved hypostyle hall at Karnak, which Anya had just seen in person. Enthusiastic as I am about this extraordinary space, I expressed a teeny tiny bit of concern about fresh paint colors being newly revealed. Don’t get me wrong: the newly conserved hypostyle hall looks bright and fresh, but we must remember that these colors are now exposed to air and light, and that means degradation. I have to assume the columns have been convered in some modern material to avoid decay, but one worries nonetheless. I am very much torn about all this conservation, and a large part of me is happy to have them more safely preserved under layers of soot and dirt. But that’s problematic protectionism, perhaps. In addition, I mentioned to Anya how the cracks between the column drums are now covered with modern conservation materials—which indeed better reconstructs how they would have looked in the Ramesside period. But, it limits our study: the joins between column drums are now invisible, and given many of them were put back in the wrong places after collapse, there is no way to further study the individual parts and construction methods of the hypostyle hall. We must be very grateful to Peter Brandt for his team’s published documentation of the hypostyle hall before this extensive conservation. Indeed, in my own work with coffin reuse I find myself apoplectic when a coffin has been so conserved that I cannot see where painted plaster has fallen away from the wood. Making the object perfectly beautiful almost always destroys further research possibilities; indeed, it also makes the object more modern than it is ancient…but this is a topic all on its own, and I’ll leave it there! Anya and I also discussed the extraordinary geology underneath the Giza Plateau—because that is what was recently discovered with ground penetrating radar: rock formations. It is our own human minds that are making this geology into human / alien constructions. The Giza pyramids were built on this plateau for a reason; this is and was a dynamic and awe-inspiring place. There was a rock formation on this plateau in the shape of a crouching lion! Because that leonine outcropping was shaped into a human headed Sphinx with nemes headdress and beard by the ancient Egyptians, we humans have cognitively transformed this entire space into a humanly constructed one. I would urge caution: this is an earthly plain perceived as magical and empowered, thus chosen by 4th Dynasty kings for their mountains of stone. If we put this into a Chicken and Egg dynamic, the plateau came first; it is the Egg. But the Chickens—those three pyramids— are so overwhelming to our senses that they have somehow transformed our view of the Egg. To really understand the power of this space, and these recent discoveries, I urge us all to imagine a Giza Plateau in the millennia before human claims and transformations.And then Anya’s internet connection died (!), at which point I strangely and abruptly ended the live feed! Ah well, but we at Ancient/Now have learned a few things about live Substacks and will attempt a few of our own. So be on the lookout. Thank you Kimber S Prewit, Isabelle Plante, Jim Sanders, Tee Ree, Ama Diya aka Alaya Dannu, and many others for tuning into my live video with Classical Wisdom! Join me for my next live video in the app. :) Get full access to Ancient/Now at ancientnow.substack.com/subscribe

In this episode, Kara and Jordan tackle supporter questions from the month of April, ranging from tomb decoration, Egyptian concepts of fate and destiny, religious texts, and our craziest theories—as well as some rabbit holes. If you would like to submit a question, consider becoming a paid subscriber. Paid subscribers join our live Q&A and get all their questions answered!The show notes below support our conversation, and there is some wacky stuff. We hope you enjoy diving down some of these rabbit holes yourself!Show Notes:Cannibal Hymn & Eating the Gods* Daily Cult Ritual* Lacovara - The Meaning and Symbolism of Swimming-Girl Spoons from Egypt* Mandrakes & Lilies as Aphrodiasiacs* Swapping Sex for Drugs: Mandrake Mythology and Fertility in Genesis 30* Kate Bosse-Griffiths, “The Fruit of the Mandrake in Egypt and Israel,” in Amarna Studies and Other Selected Papers (ed. by J. Gwyn Griffiths), pp. 82-96, Orbis Biblicus et Orientalis 182 (Fribourg, Switzerland and Göttingen, 2001).“In love poems and in contexts where rejuvenation is the theme, such as in the festival city of Amenhotep III, we find many images and representations of this beautiful but toxic little fruit.”* Ducks in Ancient Egypt* Rozenn Bailleul - LeSeur - Between Heaven and Earth - Birds in Ancient Egypt “…he [the tomb owner] is also guranteed renewed sexual vigor and thus rebirth, which is implied by the presence of the waterfowl, inhabited in the marshes, the quintessential place for creation and domain of the goddess Hathor” (162).Keeping the Joy in EgyptologyHow do we engage with the “truth” without being killjoys!? “The authenticity of the ancient world is always cooler than any made up shit that Hollywood can come up with.” What ya’ll think!?Tomb Decoration* Tomb Decoration and lamps* Stocks, Denys A. 2020. The materials, tools, and work of carving and painting. In Davies, Vanessa and Dimitri Laboury (eds), The Oxford handbook of Egyptian epigraphy and palaeography, 115-128. New York: Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190604653.013.8. * Ostraca UC39608* "Year 29, month 2 of spring, day 9; on this day, distribution of the linen fibre to the crew to make into lamp(wick)s…”* Textile-pattern ceilings* Elizabeth Barber - Reconstructing The Ancient Aegean/Egyptian Textile TradeFate & Destiny* Dream Interpretation* Kasia Szpakowska- Dream of Early Ancient Egypt * Szpakowska, Kasia 2011. Dream interpretation in the Ramesside age. In Collier, Mark and Steven Snape (eds), Ramesside studies in honour of K. A. Kitchen, 509-517. Bolton: Rutherford. * ‘King in the Egg’Divine flesh's holy egg, of noble mien; Come from the womb he wore the crown; Conquered the earth while yet in the egg (THE GREAT SPHINX STELA OF AMENHOTEP II AT GIZA)* Tale of the Doomed Prince* Seven HathorsThen came the Hathors to determine a fate for him. They said,,"He will die through the crocodile, or the snake, or the dog.”* Westcar Papyrus * The god ShaiThanks for reading Ancient/Now! This post is public so feel free to share it. Get full access to Ancient/Now at ancientnow.substack.com/subscribe

There is this strange and confusing text about a pissed off goddess sent off to destroy the world and gobble up all of humanity. The sun god Re sends her out on a mission of destruction. She’s called the Eye of Re, meaning she’s a part of her father, the god, but also somehow separate, a goddess in her own right named Hathor. The Egyptians seem to be telling us that when you have a problem that needs immediate solving, you send a woman, a really angry woman. Re’s problem is nothing short of rebellion against his rule. He’s become old and worn out, and no one is listening to his orders anymore. Time for a clean slate, Re thinks. Let’s annihilate the humans! (I mean, who hasn’t had such thoughts lately, right?) My daughter Hathor can do the deed! Except, Re second-guesses himself after seeing the carnage. Creator gods always feel bad when they witness the deep-sixing of their creation, after all, thinking well maybe I want these pesky humans around after all. They do give me offerings… They’re not bad all the time… But once unleashed, the goddess will not be calmed, enraged in her thirst for blood. Can Re pull the Eye of Re back in time? What will he do?The Destruction of Mankind is not a tale exactly, but it’s not a religious text either. The first version was inscribed on one of the gilded wooden shrines surrounding Tutankhamun’s burial ensemble, meaning its creation must predate that time. Some think it finds its origins in the confusing post-Amarna period when people were extra traumatized by Akhenaten’s solar obsessions. Other scholars believe it predates Tutankhamun’s reign and finds its origins in deep questioning about the place of humanity in the world: Why are we here? Do we matter at all?In this episode Kara and Amber dive deep into the myth of the “Destruction of Mankind,” a confusing blend of religious text and fairy tale. The discussion explores the themes of divine judgment, the power dynamics between masculine and feminine deities, and the emotional versus rational dichotomy within patriarchal systems. The narrative returns to how the sun god Re considers obliterating humanity but then chooses to keep his creation, ultimately using trickery to mitigate the destruction. The brutal lioness version of the goddess must be turned into a soft and pliable version of herself using humanity’s favorite elixir—beer, died red to resemble human blood. Kara and Amber delve into Ancient Egyptian mythology, the roles of gods and goddesses, and the social and emotional implications this mythology holds for contemporary patriarchal structures. The crux of it all is: if the Eye of Re is an offshoot of her father Re, can her violent power be considered resistance, or is she just a tool? There’s lots going on here, so check out the links:Theban Mapping Project: Photo of the Heavenly Cow in the tomb of Seti I (KV 17)Theban Mapping Project: Line drawing of the Book of the Heavenly Cow I the tomb of Seti I (KV 17) (copy reversed from orientation of the original)SourcesGuilhou, Nadine. 2010. “Myth of the Heavenly Cow.” In Jacco Dieleman and Willeke Wendrich (eds.), UCLA Encyclopedia of Egyptology. Los Angeles. http://digital2.library.ucla.edu/viewItem.do?ark=21198/zz002311pm.Hornung, Erik. 1982. Der Ägyptische Mythos von der Himmelskuh. Eine Ätiologie des Unvollkommenen. Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht; Auflage. Lichtheim, Miriam. 2006. Ancient Egyptian Literature: Volume II: The New Kingdom. 2nd ed. University of California Press. http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/j.ctt1ppr00.Spalinger, Anthony. 2000. “The Destruction of Mankind: A Transitional Literary Text.” Studien Zur Altägyptischen Kultur 28, 257–82. http://www.jstor.org/stable/25152827. Get full access to Ancient/Now at ancientnow.substack.com/subscribe

SummaryJoin Kara and Jordan on a thrilling, hair-tingling journey through ancient Egypt's wild dynastic power shifts! From the dramatic reign of Tutankhamun to the strategic brilliance of Hatshepsut, explore how these rulers navigated assassinations, epic battles, and family drama to seize the throne. Discover the parallels between ancient power struggles and today’s political landscape, and dive into the ultimate royal showdowns featuring invaders like the Hyksos, Libyans, and Nubians. Buckle up for tales of epic reigns, royal intrigue, and the cunning ways rulers took their crowns in a world where the only constant was change. Show NotesToo Short of Reign* Djet → Merneith (as queen regent, at least, and to her son Den, should he live)* Cooney, When Women Ruled the World— see Chapter 1 on Merneith!In the end, what was Merneith’s legacy? Do we remember her? Or, more important, did the Egyptians? The answer may be the expected and deflating no. Memory of her would be short-lived, as patriarchy demanded, even if it was her cautious, feminine rule that saved Egypt’s kingship. She does appear on a king list found in the tomb of her son—but just a few reigns later, on inscriptions from the last part of Dynasty 1 from the tomb of Qa’a, one of Den’s successors, there is no longer any mention of Merneith* Recent discoveries of wine from the tomb of Merneith * Amenemhat III → Sobekneferu (the last ruler of Dynasty XII)* Cooney, When Women Ruled the World— see Chapter XX on Sobekneferu!* Newberry, P. E. 1943. Co-regencies of Ammenemes III, IV and Sebknofru. Journal of Egyptian Archaeology 29, 74-75* Callender, V. G. 1998. Materials for the reign of Sebekneferu. In Eyre, C. J. (ed.), Proceedings of the Seventh International Congress of Egyptologists, Cambridge, 3-9 September 1995, 227-236. Leuven: Peeters.* Pignattari, Stefania 2018. Amenemhat IV and the end of the Twelfth Dynasty: between the end and the beginning. BAR International Series 2906. Oxford: BAR Publishing* Tutankhamun → Smenkhare/Neferneferuaten/NefertitiTo the historian familiar with Egypt’s patterns of succession, the most compelling thing about Tutankhamun’s youthful kingship is the fact that he had no female regent that we can identify as the decision-maker (Cooney, When Women Ruled the World).* Dodson, Aidan 2022. Tutankhamun: king of Egypt. His life and afterlife. Cairo: American University in Cairo Press.* Dodson, Aidan 2009. Amarna sunset: Nefertiti, Tutankhamun, Ay, Horemheb, and the Egyptian counter-reformation. Cairo, New York: American University in Cairo Press.* Reeves, Nicholas 2019. The decorated north wall in the tomb of Tutankhamun (KV 62) (The burial of Nefertiti? II). Amarna Royal Tombs Project - Valley of the Kings, Occasional Paper 3. [n.p.]: ARTP* Reeves, Nicholas 2020. The tomb of Tutankhamun (KV 62): supplementary notes (The burial of Nefertiti? III). Graphics and animations by Peter Gremse. Amarna Royal Tombs Project - Valley of the Kings, Occasional Paper 5. [n.p.]: ARTP.* Reeves, Nicholas 2016. Tutankhamun's mask reconsidered. In Elleithy, Hisham (ed.), Valley of the Kings since Howard Carter: proceedings of the Luxor Symposium November 4, 2009, 117-134. Cairo: Ministry of Antiquities.* Reeves, Nicholas 2015. Tutankhamun's mask reconsidered. Bulletin of the Egyptological Seminar 19, 511-526.* Reeves, Nicholas 2015. The tomb of Tutankhamun: a double burial? British Archaeology 145, 36-39.A Reign too long* Pepi II—> discord and a series of short-lived rulers* Kanawati, Naguib. Conspiracies in the Egyptian Palace, Unis to Pepy I (London: Routledge, 2003), 4.170.* Ramses II—>Merneptah, the 13th son* Kitchen, Kenneth (1982). Pharaoh Triumphant: The Life and Times of Ramesses II, King of Egypt. London: Aris & Phillips. ISBN 978-0-85668-215-5.* Brand, Peter J. (2023). Ramesses II, Egypt's Ultimate Pharaoh. Lockwood Press. ISBN 978-1-948488-49-5.Lack of Heir or a Sudden Change of Heir* Mentuhotep IV → Amenhotep I* Callender, Gae (2003). "The Middle Kingdom Renaissance (c. 2055–1650 BC)". In Shaw, Ian (ed.). The Oxford History of Ancient Egypt. Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 137–171. ISBN 978-0-19-815034-3.* Translation of Wadi Hammmat Graffito* HatshepsutBut Hatshepsut wasn’t the sole king. And she wasn’t a man. There was a king still living, Thutmose III, who would rule another 30 years after the death of his aunt, making those sons of Nefrure, if they existed, very old—40 or 50 or dead—by the time Thutmose III himself passed on: older and established men who did not need a queen-regent mother to guide them. For Hatshepsut and Nefrure, the timing was actually a catastrophe (Cooney, When Women Ruled the World).* The Women Who Would be King* Ay/Horemheb → Ramses* “The New Kingdom of Egypt under the Ramesside Dynasty,” in: Oxford History of the Ancient Near East, Karen Radner, Nadine Moeller, and D.T. Potts, eds., Oxford: Oxford University Press (2022).Assassination or Asassination Attempts* Possibly usurpation by Userkaf (Teti murdered)* Kanawati, Naguib. Conspiracies in the Egyptian Palace, Unis to Pepy I (London: Routledge, 2003), 4.170.* The murder of Ramses III* Turin Judicial PapyrusInternal Threat/ Usurpation* Pepi I (lots of damnatio memoriae of Teti/Userkaf officials)* Mentuhotep IV → Amenemhat I* Amenmesse/Seti II/ Siptah/ Tausret/ SetnakhteTawosret would have no legacy, no children. If she was still of childbearing age when she took the kingship (very likely) and hoped to bear a son, then that plan hadn’t worked. Any sexual- romantic partner of King Tawosret would have been looked upon with great suspicion anyway, and there is no record of such a man. The next king would not be her son. Instead, we see a continuation of the power of that mighty and overly large extended family of Ramses the Great (Cooney, When Women Ruled the World). * the Third Intermediate Period!External Threat* Second Intermediate Period— Hyksos and Nubia* Third Intermediate Libyan Dynasties* 25th Dynasty Get full access to Ancient/Now at ancientnow.substack.com/subscribe

This episode’s conversation delves into the role of music and rituals in ancient Egypt, the mysterious artifacts held by Egyptian statues, and the evidence for ancient Egyptian coups compared to modern political tensions.Awakening of the Gods - Mythvison* Galczynski & Price (2023). “Fashioning Sensescapes through Ancient Egyptian Dress” in Textiles in Motion. Dress for Dance in the Ancient World* Harper’s Songs* Dance in ancient Egypt* “The Daily Offering Meal in the Ritual of Amenhotep I: An Instance of the Local Adaptation of Cult Liturgy,” co-authored with J. Brett McClain, Journal of Ancient Near Eastern Religions 5, 41-79 (2005).What are the things the statues hold?!* Fischer, Henry G. 1975. An elusive shape within the fisted hands of Egyptian statues. Metropolitan Museum Journal 10, 9-21.Political Turmoil in Ancient Egypt* Good Kings: Absolute Power in Ancient Egypt and the Modern World* Conspiracies in ancient Egypt* Teti “assassination” mentioned in Manetho * Pepi I Harem issues mentioned in the Autobiography of Weni* Amenemhat I's “assassination” mentioned in the Tale of Sinuhe and The Instructions of Amenemhat * Ramses III Harem Conspiracy In year 30, third month of Inundation, day 7, the god attained his horizon, the King of Upper and Lower Egypt Sehetepebre. He flew to heaven and was united with the sun's disk [i.e. he died]; the flesh of the god was merged in him, who made him. Then was the Residence hushed; hearts were filled with mourning; the Great Portals were closed; the courtiers crouched head on lap; the people grieved.Now His Majesty had dispatched an army to the land of the Temhi, and his eldest son [Senwosret I] was the captain thereof, the good god Sesostris. Even now he was returning, having carried away captives of the Tehenu and cattle of all kinds beyond number. And the Companions of the Royal Palace sent to the western border to acquaint the king's son with the matters that had come to pass at the Court. And the messengers met him on the road, they reached him at time of night. Not a moment did he wait; the Falcon flew away with his henchmen, not suffering it to be known to his army. Howbeit, message had been sent to the Royal Children who were with him in this army, and one of them had been summoned. And lo, I stood and heard his voice as he was speaking, being a little distance aloof; and my heart became distraught, my arms spread apart, trembling having fallen on all my limbs. Leaping I betook myself thence to seek me a hiding-place, and placed me between two brambles so as to sunder the road from its traveller.(Excerpt from the Tale of Sinuhe)Tell us what you think!! Get full access to Ancient/Now at ancientnow.substack.com/subscribe

What does sun worship mean? The sun is the giant ball of fire in the sky. It warms us, embraces us. It lights up the air all around us, and its absence creates coldness, an implicit threat of non-return, something we must placate with entreaties, offerings, brave deeds. The sun is the most powerful element in our sky, heroically returning to us every morning, helping us start our daily labors of farming or carpentry or war, and as such, the sun usually takes on the guise of a masculine ruler. Indeed, solar worship is permeated with elements of kingship—thrones, crowns, scepters, sovereignty. This is masculinity incarnate. Ancient cultures did not feminize the sun; its fiery abilities are associated with masculinized omnipotence, omniscience, omnipresence. The ruler, he is always watching; he knows all. He is wealth unparalleled, like pure yellow gold that seems to give off its own light from the depths of the mine. In ancient Egypt, people created solarism in tandem with the formation of their state, perfecting it as they marched through the millennia. They built straight sided pyramids, their angles personifying solar rays hitting the earth, essentially creating mountains of miraculous sunlight. The obelisk was a monolith of red granite, meant to be a shaft of light hitting the earth in perfect symmetry and purpose, its placement in temples like Heliopolis charging it with the sun god’s intimate presence. Amenhotep III of the 18th Dynasty transformed himself into Egypt’s “Dazzling Sun,” the epitome of transformative kingship. His son, also named Amenhotep, would change his name to Akhenaten—The One Who Is Effective for the Aten—showing his intimate, and unique, connection to that physical ball of fire in the sky. His new solar theology was one focused on the physicality of the sun—its warmth, its ability to make things grow, its light that allows people to see. For Akhenaten, everything was about this precious light. He built temples with no covering so that the sun’s rays could touch every part. His radical, new theology was about the sun’s creation of everything, everywhere. In this episode Kara and Amber discuss solarism in ancient Egyptian religion and how it coincided with the rise of divine kingship, solar hymns, the Great Hymn to the Aten, and the theological universalism that emerged in the late New Kingdom from the contemplation of the divine centered on the sun and light. And we contemplate how the sun doesn’t just create things, but also destroys them.SourcesSuty & Hor stelaRead more about the Great Hymn to the Aten Great Hymn to the Aten – Original text Baines, John. 1998. The dawn of the Amarna age. In O'Connor, David B. and Eric H. Cline (eds.), Amenhotep III: perspectives on his reign. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press p. 271–312.Lichtheim, Miriam. 2006. Ancient Egyptian literature. A book of readings, volume II: The New Kingdom. Berkeley, CA; London: University of California Press. Get full access to Ancient/Now at ancientnow.substack.com/subscribe

The concept of monotheism often hijacks the history of ancient Egyptian king Akhenaten because he funneled all his attention to one, previously little-known god, the Aten, the visible sun in the sky. Many scholars ask: Was Akhenaten, ancient Egypt’s so-called “heretic king,” the world’s first known monotheist? Did he say that other gods did not exist? Did he impose the belief that the Aten was superior to all other gods? In this episode, Kara and Amber discuss Atenism, the exclusionary and dogmatic religion at the center of Akhenaten’s regime. What is our understanding of it, and why have some people been so eager to connect his religious revolution with monotheism? Or, should one even follow the monotheistic angle? In many ways, our monotheistic obsessions say more about us that they do about the ancient Egyptians. Because monotheism is such a modern concept of European theology, it might not even be appropriate to apply it to ancient Egypt. Listen and find out what we think!Further readingHoffmeier, James K. 2016. The Great Hymn of the Aten: the ultimate expression of Atenism? Journal of the Society for the Study of Egyptian Antiquities 42 (2015-2016), 43-55.Hoffmeier, James K. 2015. Akhenaten and the origins of monotheism. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press.Lichtheim, Miriam 2006. Ancient Egyptian literature. A book of readings, volume II: The New Kingdom. Berkeley, CA; London: University of California Press.Lipson, C. (2013). Comparative Rhetoric, Egyptology, and the Case of Akhenaten. Rhetoric Society Quarterly, 43(3), 270–284. https://doi.org/10.1080/02773945.2013.792696Reeves, Nicholas 2001. Akhenaten: Egypt's false prophet. London: Thames & Hudson.Redford, Donald, “The Monotheism of the Heretic Pharaoh: Precursor of Mosaic monotheism or Egyptian anomaly?,” Biblical Archaeology Review 13:3, May/June 1987.Redford, Donald B. 1984. Akhenaten: the heretic king. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.If you haven’t yet, don’t forget to join our online community and sign up for a free subscription to Kara’s Substack Ancient/Now! Get full access to Ancient/Now at ancientnow.substack.com/subscribe

This episode is a recording from our quarterly live event series where supporters are invited to chat with us live over Zoom and ask all their burning questions—if you would like to support our work, consider becoming a paid subscriber:Show NotesThutmose II (?) Tomb Discovered?!* Live Science: Thutmose II tomb discovery raises new mysteries: Where is his mummy, and why wasn't he buried in the Valley of the Kings?* * Thutmose II Biography* MET Catalogue, “Hatshepsut: from Queen to Pharaoh”* Theban Mapping Project* And his body ends up in the Royal Cache…What are your thoughts on the new “discovery?Child Burials* Arbuckle MacLeod, Caroline 2023. The value of children in ancient Egypt. In Candelora, Danielle, Nadia Ben-Marzouk, and Kathlyn M. Cooney (eds), Ancient Egyptian society: challenging assumptions, exploring approaches, 140-151. London; New York: Routledge. DOI: 10.4324/9781003003403-16.* Barba, Pablo 2024. Studying age identities through funerary dimensions: a discussion of child and adult burials from Lower Egypt (4th mil. BCE). Cildhood in the Past: an International Journal 17 (2), 68-92. DOI: 10.1080/17585716.2024.2380134.* Kaiser, Jessica 2023. When death comes, he steals the infant: child burials at the Wall of the Crow cemetery, Giza. In Kiser-Go, Deanna and Carol A. Redmount (eds), Weseretkau "mighty of kas": papers in memory of Cathleen A. Keller, 347-369. Columbus, GA: Lockwood Press. DOI: 10.5913/2023853.22.The Beginnings of Boat Burials & Significance of Boat in Egyptian Religion* Vanhulle, Dorian 2024. Boat burials and boat-shaped pits from their origins to the Old Kingdom: tradition, continuity and change in early Egypt. International Journal of Nautical Archaeology 53 (1), 1-19. DOI: 10.1080/10572414.2023.2264551.* Wegner, Josef 2017. A royal boat burial and watercraft tableau of Egypt's 12th Dynasty (c.1850 BCE) at South Abydos. International Journal of Nautical Archaeology 46 (1), 5-30. DOI: 10.1111/1095-9270.12203.* Ward, Cheryl 2006. Boat-building and its social context in early Egypt: interpretations from the First Dynasty boat-grave cemetery at Abydos. Antiquity 80 (307), 118-129. DOI: 10.1017/S0003598X00093303* O'Connor, David 1995. The earliest royal boat graves. Egyptian Archaeology 6, 3-7.* Cooney, Kathlyn M. 2023. People of Nile and sun, wheat and barley: ancient Egyptian society and the agency of place. In Candelora, Danielle, Nadia Ben-Marzouk, and Kathlyn M. Cooney (eds), Ancient Egyptian society: challenging assumptions, exploring approaches, 225-234. London; New York: Routledge. DOI: 10.4324/9781003003403-23. Mummified Remains Smell Nice?!* BBC Report: Ancient Egyptian mummies still smell nice, study findsCelebration and Commemoration of the Ancestors* Draycott, Catherine M. and Maria Stamatopoulou (eds) 2016. Dining and death: interdisciplinary perspectives on the 'funerary banquet' in ancient art, burial and belief. Colloquia antiqua 16. Leuven: Peeters.* Beautiful Festival of the Valley or the Wag Festival* Festivals of the Dead around the World* Deified Ancestors: Heqaib* Letters to the DeadHuman Sacrifice in Ancient Egypt* Listen to Part I and II of our Human Sacrifice in Early Dynastic Egypt with Dr. Rose Campbell!* Campbell, Roselyn A. 2024. The social context of human sacrifice in ancient Egypt. In Walsh, Matthew J., Sean O'Neill, Marianne Moen, and Svein H. Gullbekk (eds), Human sacrifice and value: revisiting the limits of sacred violence from an archaeological and anthropological perspective* Morris, Ellen F. 2014. (Un)dying loyalty: meditations on retainer sacrifice in ancient Egypt and elsewhere. In Campbell, Roderick (ed.), Violence and civilization: studies of social violence in history and prehistory, 61-93. Oxford; Oakville, CT: Oxbow.* Morris, Ellen F. 2007. Sacrifice for the state: First Dynasty royal funerals and the rites at Macramallah's rectangle. In Laneri, Nicola (ed.), Performing death: social analyses of funerary traditions in the ancient Near East and Mediterranean, 15-37. Chicago: Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago. DOI: 10.7916/D8H14JF0.Disability in Ancient Egypt * Morris, A. F. & Vogel, H. (2024) Disability in Ancient Egypt and Egyptology : All Our Yesterdays. 1st ed. Oxford: Taylor & Francis Group.* BM Exhibit- Eight histories of disabled people in ancient Egypt* Siptah * Karen Kobylarz, “A TALE OF TWO BOY KINGS: HOW THE MUMMIFIED REMAINS OF AN OBSCURE PHARAOH MIGHT SHED LIGHT ON THE LIFE OF KING TUT”* Morris, Alexandra F. 2020. Let that be your last battlefield: Tutankhamun and disability. Athens Journal of History 6 (1), 53-72. DOI: 10.30958/ajhis.6-1-3.Thanks for reading Ancient/Now! This post is public so feel free to share it. Get full access to Ancient/Now at ancientnow.substack.com/subscribe

Who should inherit the throne when the ancient Egyptian king is killed? The strong brother of the king or the younger son who needs serious time to mature? This was a vital question that the Egyptians solved through mythology. Egypt found itself in a power vacuum; it was the first political crisis the land had ever experienced. The primary god-king was dead, killed by his own brother. Who should become king next? Should Seth, the murderer of Osiris, inherit the throne of Egypt over Osiris’ son, Horus? It was ann age-old question of succession, property, violence, power, and, yes, legal suits. If you think Americans love litigation, well the ancient Egyptians can beat that. This myth about the contendings between Horus and Seth is essentially a big legal proceeding in front of a tribunal of divinities, some emotionally stable, some not so much. It’s a rip-roaring time of litigation and counter-suits!Join us in the podcast episode as Kara and Amber continue their discussion of Seth, god of chaos and violence, by diving into a text known as “The Judgement of Horus and Seth,” that vital mythological account about the interminable conflict—stone boat races! Spear fishing! Rape, but only kind of!—between Horus and Seth over who is the rightful heir to Osiris. It is the story about how the young and rightful heir Horus triumphs over the violent intercession, and it offers insights into ancient Egyptians perceptions of kingship and its troubled relationship to masculinity and violence. Kara and Amber wrap the podcast up with a look at how Seth fell from favor in Egypt’s Late Period and was ultimately demonized as a force for evil.Get ready for the most bawdy tale from Pharaonic Egypt…SourcesCruz-Uribe, Eugene. 2009. Stx aA pHty “Seth, god of power and might.” Journal of the American Research Center in Egypt 45, 201-226.Lichtheim, Miriam 2006. Ancient Egyptian literature. A book of readings, volume II: The New Kingdom. Berkeley, CA; London: University of California Press.Morris, E. F. 2007. Sacred and obscene laughter in The Contendings of Horus and Seth, in Egyptian inversions of everyday life, and in the context of cultic competition. In Schneider, Thomas and Kasia Szpakowska (eds), Egyptian stories: a British Egyptological tribute to Alan B. Lloyd on the occasion of his retirement, 197-224. Münster: Ugarit-Verlag. Schott, Siegfried 1929-1939. Urkunden mythologischen Inhalts [VI, 1-144], 2 vols. Urkunden des Ägyptischen Altertums VI (1-2). Leipzig: Hinrichs.te Velde, H. 1967. Seth, god of confusion: a study of his role in Egyptian mythology and religion. Translated by G. E. van Baaren-Pape. Probleme der Ägyptologie 6. Leiden: E. J. Brill. Get full access to Ancient/Now at ancientnow.substack.com/subscribe

What, exactly, is the was scepter? Essentially, it’s a stick with the head of a long-snouted, big eared animal, held by divinities in their hands to demonstrate their power. This familiar symbol of power and dominion held by kings and deities, usually masculine, in artistic representations throughout ancient Egyptian history appears often in art motifs. Images of was scepters are even pictured holding up the sky in Book of the Dead imagery. But where did this strange fetishized scepter come from and what was it made of? In this episode Kara and Amber discuss Seth, the ancient Egyptian god of chaos and violence, and how the origin of the was scepter is linked to the strange representation of Seth in animal form known as the Set animal and how it might find an even deeper and more esoteric origin in African bull cults. Show notesThis blog post has several photos of was scepters, including the faience was scepter discovered by Petrie and Quibell (now in the Victoria and Albert Museum), as well as an example of the combination ankh/was/djed scepter described by Kara.Ancient Roman winged phallusFlight into Egypt: Black Artists and Ancient Egypt, 1876–Now (The Met)Kara’s online course on ancient Egyptian creation mythology: Secrets of the Primordial WatersSourcesRichard Lobban, “A Solution to the Mystery of Was Scepter of Ancient Egypt and Nubia,” KMT: A Modern Journal of Ancient Egypt (10/3), 1999, 68–77.R. A. Lobban and M. Sprague, “Bulls and the W3s Sceptre in Ancient Egypt and Sudan,” Anthrozoös 10, 1997, 14-22.Schwabe, Calvin W., Joyce Adams, and Carleton T. Hodge. “Egyptian Beliefs about the Bull’s Spine: An Anatomical Origin for Ankh.” Anthropological Linguistics 24, no. 4 (1982): 445–79. http://www.jstor.org/stable/30027646.Te Velde, H., 1967, Seth, God of Confusion: A Study of His Role in Egyptian Mythology and Religion, Volume 6, Probleme der Ägyptologie (Brill).W. M. F. Petrie and J. E. Quibell, Naqada and Bellas, 1895. London.Lobban and Sprague’s Anthrozoös article is paywalled and Lobban’s KMT article with photos of the was scepter experiment is not available online, so we include here two of Lobban’s photos from the experiment, which were published in the KMT article cited above (p. 76–77). [If you are reading these show notes on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, you can see these photos in the post for this episode (#105) at ancientnow.substack.com.] Get full access to Ancient/Now at ancientnow.substack.com/subscribe

In this episode of 'Afterlives of Ancient Egypt,' we answer this month’s supporter questions about the Old Kingdom, debating the logistical and artefactual impacts of Egypt's unification on surrounding regions, the linguistic continuity from the Old to the New Kingdom, and much more.Los Angeles Fire Relief * California Fire Foundation* Los Angeles Fire Foundation* American Red Cross* Wildfire Recovery Fund* United Way of Greater Los Angeles* The Dream Center* California Community Fund* Canine Rescue FundShow NotesFighting Fire at the Getty VillaImhotep* ARCE Post: Imhotep: A Sage between Fiction and RealityTales of Unification * Wengrow, David, The Archaeology of Early Egypt: Social transformations in North-East Africa, 10,000 to 2650 B.C., Cambridge University Press, 2006.Old Egyptian* Khaemwaset, the “first archaeologist”The Mystery of the SphinxFor more on the Sphinx debate and Khufu’s ivory statuette, check out Amber’s post and our earlier podcast episodes on this topic, “Khufu’s itty, bitty ivory statuette” and “Top 5 Debates in Egyptology (Part 1)”! Get full access to Ancient/Now at ancientnow.substack.com/subscribe

For a limited time Kara’s online course, “Ancient Egyptian Cosmogony and Cosmology: Secrets of the Primordial Waters” is on sale—don’t miss it! Scroll down to the bottom of the page, tick the “Have a coupon?” box in the bottom left corner and enter the coupon code CREATION10 (valid through January 29th) to save $10 at checkout.Time is of the essence so you can join Kara in a live Q&A Zoom event for course participants at 5pm PST on January 29th so sign up now! Get full access to Ancient/Now at ancientnow.substack.com/subscribe

Journey into the Duat with Kara and Amber as they explore the collection of funerary spells known to Egyptologists as the Coffin Texts. They discuss their historical context, conception of the landscape of the underworld, and the religious-magical spells of transformation and protection that were meant to aid the deceased on their afterlife journey. Kara provides a Coffin Girl’s Guide to the Coffin Texts, focusing on spells that mention coffins.Sources and Further ReadingFaulkner, R. O. 2004. The ancient Egyptian Coffin Texts. Oxford: Aris & Phillips.Ritner, Robert K. 1993. The mechanics of ancient Egyptian magical practice. Studies in Ancient Oriental Civilization 54. Chicago: The Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago. Tomb of Yuya and ThuyaArchaeologists discover 1st astronomical observatory from ancient Egypt Get full access to Ancient/Now at ancientnow.substack.com/subscribe

In this episode of Afterlives of Ancient Egypt, we discuss the ongoing humanitarian crisis in Sudan, and its impact on cultural heritage with our guest, Dr. Rennan Lemos. Dr. Lemos shares his personal experiences of being trapped in Khartoum during the conflict, witnessing destruction, and eventually being rescued. We delve into the historical context of colonialism in Sudan and Egypt, emphasizing the importance of preserving cultural heritage amidst crises. This episode underscores the need for greater awareness and support for the Sudanese people and their heritage, while also highlighting the role of Nubian and Sudanese archaeology within the broader community.About our Guest Dr. Rennan Lemos, Teaching Associate in Egyptian Archaeology, University of Cambridge.Rennan Lemos teaches Egyptian and Sudanese archaeology in the Department of Archaeology at the University of Cambridge, where he is a fellow of the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research. With over a decade of experience excavating in Egypt and Sudan, Rennan currently directs the Djehutyhotep Project in collaboration with the National Corporation for Antiquities and Museums of Sudan. He also serves as the Assistant Director of the Sanam Temple Project. His research, funded by institutions such as the British Academy and the Schiff Giorgini Foundation, is deeply rooted in social justice and decolonization. In 2024, Rennan was awarded the Schiff Giorgini Foundation's Annual Prize à la mémoire de Jean Leclant.Professional WebsiteAcademiaShow Notes* Rennan’s account of his experience — “Where do angels live? In hell. My escape from the war in Sudan”* Djehutyhotep* Looting at the National Museum in Khartoum* Lemos, R. et al. 2024. Bronze age supply chains between ancient Egypt and Nubia revealed by lead isotope analysis of kohl samplesWays to Get InvolvedSpread the Word* Share what is happening on your social media; tell your friends and family * Write to your state and federal representatives to request immediate action * Stay informed!Donations* UNHCR* Doctors without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF)* Save the Children* UNICEF* World Food Programme* The International Committee of the Red Cross/Sudanese Red Crescent Society Get full access to Ancient/Now at ancientnow.substack.com/subscribe

Kara and Jordan answer supporters’ questions on the theme of “How do we study what we study?”Show NotesHow do you study coffins?* Recycling for Death: Coffin Reuse in Ancient Egypt and the Egyptian Royal CachesHow do we understand historicity in a literary text, like The Tale of Setne?* Great overview article by The Past* Golverdingen, Joost 2009. Khaemwaset: Demotic legend or the world's first Egyptologist? Saqqara Newsletter 7, 25-29.* Jay, Jacqueline E. 2016. Orality and literacy in the Demotic tales. Culture and History of the Ancient Near East 81. Leiden; Boston: Brill.* Rutherford, Ian 1997. Kalasiris and Setne Khamwas: a Greek novel and some Egyptian models. Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik 117, 203-209.* Snape (2011) ‘Khaemwaset and the present past: history and the individual in Ramesside Egypt’, in M Collier and S Snape (eds), Ramesside Studies in Honour of K A Kitchen (Bolton: Rutherford Press), pp.465-473.* Vinson, Steve 2018. The craft of a good scribe: history, narrative and meaning in the First tale of Setne Khaemwas. Harvard Egyptological Studies 3. Leiden; Boston: Brill. DOI: 10.1163/9789004353107.How do you teach Egyptology?* UCLA Encyclopedia of Egyptology (UEE)* Online Egyptological Bibliography * Ancient Near East Research Quarantine “Library” * MET Publications* ISAC Publications* Google Scholar* ARCE Library Portal (needs membership)* Academia* Research Gate * Egytptological Open Access Journals * EEF Digital Journals* EEF Digitized Books* Hathi Trust* Internet Archive* Deir el-Medina Database* Deir el-Medina Online* Museo Egizio Papyri Database* Texts in Translation* Lichtheim, Miriam 2006. Ancient Egyptian literature. A book of readings, volume I: The Old and Middle Kingdoms. Berkeley, CA; London: University of California Press.* Lichtheim, Miriam 2006. Ancient Egyptian literature. A book of readings, volume II: The New Kingdom. Berkeley, CA; London: University of California Press.* Lichtheim, Miriam 2006. Ancient Egyptian literature. A book of readings, volume III: The Late Period. Berkeley, CA; London: University of California Press.* Thesaurus Linguae Aegyptiae* Dictionary of Ancient Egypt, British MuseumHow do you study woodworking practice and wooden objects?* Caroline Arbuckle MacCleod’s work* Re, Alessandro, Alessandro Lo Giudice, Marco Nervo, Paola Buscaglia, Peter Luciani, Matilde Borla and Christian Greco. “The importance of tomography studying wooden artefacts: A comparison with radiography in the case of a coffin lid from ancient Egypt.” (2016).* Albertin, Fauzia, Maria Pia Morigi, Matteo Bettuzzi, Rosa Brancaccio, Nicola Macchioni, Roberto Saccuman, Gianluca Quarta, Lucio Calcagnile and Daniela Picchi. “X-ray Tomography Unveils the Construction Technique of Un-Montu’s Egyptian Coffin (Early 26th Dynasty).” Journal of Imaging 8 (2022).* Helen Strudwick’s work Get full access to Ancient/Now at ancientnow.substack.com/subscribe

Kara and Jordan talk with Professor Anne Austin (University of Missouri - St. Louis) about her book Healthmaking in Ancient Egypt: The Social Determinants of Health at Deir el-Medina, how she uses data from ancient Egyptian human remains to understand health care practices, disease, and illness in the past, and her work on tattooing in ancient Egypt. Introducing Prof. Anne AustinDr. Anne Austin is an Assistant Professor of History at the University of Missouri St. Louis (UMSL). She received her B.A. in Anthropology from Harvard University and earned her M.A. and Ph.D. in the Archaeology program at UCLA. She joined UMSL in 2017 after completing a three-year postdoctoral fellowship in the History Department at Stanford University. Her research combines the fields of osteology and Egyptology in order to document medicine and disease in the past. In her book, Healthmaking in Ancient Egypt, Anne uses data from ancient Egyptian human remains and daily life texts to reconstruct ancient Egyptian health networks and identify how ancient Egyptians improved their health and responded to illness. While working at Deir el-Medina, Anne discovered the mummified remains of a woman with 30 different tattoos. Since then, she and her team have identified several other tattooed women, rewriting the history of tattooing in ancient Egypt. Anne’s next book will explore the practice of tattooing in ancient Egypt and its potential connections to gender, religion, and medicine.Healthmaking in Ancient Egypt: The Social Determinants of Health at Deir el-MedinaShow NotesT/W- Human Remains* Deir el-Medina* Social Determinants of Health* Working in Tomb Spaces* Butehamon* Naunakhte* Archeology Ink Get full access to Ancient/Now at ancientnow.substack.com/subscribe

Kara and Amber take a deep dive into the so-called “Cannibal Hymn” (Utterances 273–274) of the Pyramid Texts, which date to the late Old Kingdom and First Intermediate Period (ca. 2375–2055 BCE) and are the oldest funerary texts from ancient Egypt. They do some reading, some interpreting, and talk about the great power the ancient Egyptians believed these texts held, and how they're a part of the restricted knowledge and magical power that the Egyptians kept for their god–kings.SourcesEyre, Christopher. 2002. The Cannibal Hymn: a cultural and literary study. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press.Faulkner, R. O. 1969. The ancient Egyptian Pyramid Texts: translated into English, 2 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press.Goebs, Katja. 2004. “The Cannibal Spell: continuity and change in the Pyramid Text and Coffin Text versions.” In: Bickel, Susanne and Bernard Mathieu (eds), D'un monde à l'autre: Textes des Pyramides & Textes des Sarcophages. Actes de la table ronde internationale, "Textes des Pyramides versus Textes des Sarcophages", IFAO - 24-26 Septembre 2001, 143-173. Le Caire: Institut français d'archéologie orientale.Hornung, Erik. 1992. Idea into image: essays on ancient Egyptian thought. Translated by Elizabeth Bredeck. New York: Timken.Sethe, Kurt. 1908-1922. Die altaegyptischen Pyramidentexte: nach den Papierabdrücken und Photographien des Berliner Museums, 4 vols. Leipzig: J. C. Hinrichs. Get full access to Ancient/Now at ancientnow.substack.com/subscribe

In month’s Q&A we have questions concerning kingship & the gods, turtles (!!), and the Book of the Dead. Kara also answers some frequently asked questions about her new online course on ancient Egyptian cosmogony and cosmology.Ancient Egyptian Cosmogony and Cosmology: Secrets of the Primordial WatersAn eight-part lecture series by Dr. Kara CooneySHOW NOTESKingship & Religion* Overview of the King’s role in state religion* Dunand, Françoise and Christiane Zivie-Coche. 2004. Gods and men in Egypt: 3000 BCE to 395 CE. Translated by David Lorton. Ithaca, NY; London: Cornell University Press.* Baines, Lesko, and Silverman. 1991. Religion in Ancient Egypt. Gods, Myth, and Personal Practice. Cornell University Press. * Maat vs. Isfet* Third Intermediate Period & the High Priests of Amun * Herihor* Piankhy* Royal Ka- Bell, Lanny 1985. Luxor temple and the cult of the royal Ka. Journal of Near Eastern Studies 44 (4), 251-294.* Abydos King List Book of the Dead and Ideological Textual Knowledge* Gloss* Book of the Dead, Chapter 17 Turtles vs. Tortoise in Ancient Egypt * Fischer 1968. Ancient Egyptian Representations of Turtles. The Metropolitan Museum of Art Papers 13. New York* El-Kady. 2011. The Religious Concept of the Dual Character of the Turtle in Graeco-roman Egypt* Ritner, Robert K. 2000. The "Breathing-permit of Hôr": thirty-four years later. Dialogue: a journal of Mormon thought 33 (4), 97-119Retainer Sacrifice* Review our episode with Dr. Rose Campbell- Part I & II* Animal Sacrifice/Butcher sceneRecycling for Death: Coffin Reuse in Ancient Egypt and the Theban Royal CachesIf you are a paid subscriber on Substack or Patreon and would like a signed bookplate, you can reply to this post or email us at [email protected]. Get full access to Ancient/Now at ancientnow.substack.com/subscribe

Kara’s latest book, Recycling for Death: Coffin Reuse in Ancient Egypt and the Theban Royal Caches, is now available! In this episode UCLA PhD candidate Kylie Thomsen joins the Afterlives crew to talk about the years of research and preparation behind the publication of this meticulous study of the social, economic, and religious significance of coffin reuse and development during the Ramesside and early Third Intermediate periods.Get your copy of Recycling for Death Get full access to Ancient/Now at ancientnow.substack.com/subscribe

In this episode Kara and Jordan talk to Egyptologist Melinda Nelson-Hurst about her online Egyptology platform, Voices of Ancient Egypt, which teaches you how to read the ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs that you’ll see in museums, online, and on your next trip to Egypt – in less time and without the overwhelm.About our Guest:Melinda Nelson-Hurst is an Egyptologist (Ph.D., University of Pennsylvania), specializing in the social history and archaeology of ancient Egypt, especially during the Middle Kingdom. In particular, Dr. Nelson-Hurst's research has focused on families and their influence within the state administration, office acquisition, inheritance, and family members' obligations to deceased relatives, as well as on Third Intermediate Period burial assemblages and the history of modern collections.Since 2018, Melinda has run the online Egyptology platform, Voices of Ancient Egypt. Through online courses and YouTube videos with over a million views, Voices of Ancient Egypt brings the study of ancient Egypt out from behind the classroom and library walls, so you can experience it in the real world. Voices of Ancient Egypt’s programs specialize in teaching you to read the ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs that you’ll see in museums, on Instagram, and on your next trip to Egypt – in less time and without the overwhelm.Youtube- Voices of Ancient Egypt IG- Voices of Ancient EgyptVoices of Ancient EgyptYouTube Video on how to write your name in hieroglyphsResources for the EpisodeScripts:Hieratic and DemoticHieroglyphsStages:Old EgyptianMiddle EgyptianLate Egyptian Example 1Example 2Example 3Example 4View the Rest of the Examples Mentioned in the EpisodeSIGN UP FOR SCRIBAL SCHOOL!Want to learn more? Get all the details about Scribal School and how Melinda's students learn to read hieroglyphs by signing up for Melinda's free class:"3 Steps to Fast-Track Your Journey from Student to Scribe" Get full access to Ancient/Now at ancientnow.substack.com/subscribe

Many of you asked for it, and it’s finally here—an new online course from Kara is now available. Kara and Amber take a behind-the-scenes look at how her new course on ancient Egyptian cosmogony and cosmology came together and what is covered in this eight-part lecture series. Get full access to Ancient/Now at ancientnow.substack.com/subscribe

Journey into the afterlife with Kara and Amber as they take a look at the Book of the Dead (more properly known as The Book of Going Forth by Day), a well-known collection of spells from ancient Egypt meant to aid the dead in their transition into the afterlife. Kara provides a Coffin Girl’s Guide to the Book of the Dead, focusing on spells that are most associated with New Kingdom sarcophagi, coffins, and burial chambers.More on the Book of the Dead:Book of the Dead on Google Arts & CultureExplore the Book of the Dead (The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge)The Ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead (World History Encyclopedia) Get full access to Ancient/Now at ancientnow.substack.com/subscribe

Show NotesReligion of the Masses* Kemp BJ. How Religious were the Ancient Egyptians? Cambridge Archaeological Journal. 1995;5(1):25-54. doi:10.1017/S0959774300001177* UEE Encyclopedia- Votive Practice/Personal Religion Continuity of Ancient Egyptian Religion * Abu el-Haggag Festival: The Modern-Day Opet* Moulid Festival of Abu'l HajjajEntertainment in the Egyptian Court * Autobiography of Harkhuf [the king saying] “Come north to the residence at once! Hurry and bring with you the pygmy (sic) whom you brought from the land of the horizon-dwellers life, hale, and healthy, for the dances of the gods, to gladden the heart, to delight the heart of King Neferkare who lives forever! When he goes down with you into the ship, get worthy men to be around him on deck, lest he fall into the water! When he lies down at night, et worthy men to lie around him in his tent. Inspect ten times at night! My majesty desires to see his pygmy (sic) more than the gift of the mine-lands of Punt” (Lichtheim 1973, 27).* Little People in ancient Egypt * Blind Harper motif * Westcar Papyrus and the Magician DjediHis majesty said: “Is it true , what they say, that you can join a severed head?” Said Djedi: “Yes, I can, O King, my lord.” Said his majesty: “Have brought me a prisoner from the prison, that be be executed.” Said Djedi: “But not to a human being, O king, my lord! Surely, it is not permitted to do such a thing to the noble cattle [i.e. the populace].” (Lichtheim 1973, 219)* Female Dancers* SenebKing’s Ancestors* Royal titulary * Divine Birth * Oppenheimer, Adela. The Early Life of Pharaoh: Divine Birth and Adolescence Scenes in the Causeway of Senwosret III at Dahshur," in M. Bârta, F. Coppens, and J. Krejci, eds., Abusir and Saqqara in the Year 2010 (Prague, 2011), 171-88* Alexander Romance Get full access to Ancient/Now at ancientnow.substack.com/subscribe

In this episode Kara and Amber discuss the builders and destroyers of Karnak. Who could create and who could destroy? If we look at the ancient living temple space of Karnak as social document, what can it tell us?Evolution of a Temple (Elizabeth Blyth)More info on KarnakUniversity of Santa Cruz Digital KarnakUCSC Maps of Karnak Get full access to Ancient/Now at ancientnow.substack.com/subscribe

In this episode Kara and Jordan sit down with Prof. Solange Ashby (Assistant Professor, Near Eastern Languages and Cultures, UCLA) to discuss her academic journey and her research on Nubian women. Solange Ashby received her Ph.D. in Egyptology from the University of Chicago. Dr. Ashby’s expertise in ancient languages, including Egyptian hieroglyphs, Demotic, and Meroitic, underpins her research into the history of religious transformation in Northeast Africa. Her book, Calling Out to Isis: The Enduring Nubian Presence at Philae, explores the Egyptian temple of Philae as a Nubian sacred site. Her second book explores the lives of five Nubian women from history including queens, priestesses, and mothers. Dr. Ashby is an Assistant Professor in the department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures at UCLA where she teaches Egyptology and Nubian StudiesAcademia WebsiteSHOW NOTES* Download the full article here- Ashby, Solange. 2018. “Dancing for Hathor: Nubian Women in Egyptian Cultic Life.” Dotawo 5. https://doi.org/10.5070/D65110046.* Meroitic Language* C-Group Culture * Hathor* Dance in ancient Egypt & Nubia* Inner panel of the sarcophagus of Aashyt* Tattoo practice in Nubia and Egypt * Philae Temple* William Leo Hansberry Society * The Hansberry Society panel on Early Christianity, commemorating Rev. Dr. Gay L. Byron will be on Saturday August 17th at 1 p.m. ET/10 a.m. PT on their YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC0HcD4L9_k0YFz8L_vH-jzw Get full access to Ancient/Now at ancientnow.substack.com/subscribe

Episode Notes Parasites and other diseases* Mitchell, Piers D. 2024. Chapter two - parasites in ancient Egypt and Nubia: malaria, schistosomiasis and the pharaohs. Advances in Parasitology 123, 23-49. DOI: 10.1016/bs.apar.2023.12.003* Metwaly AM, Ghoneim MM, Eissa IH, Elsehemy IA, Mostafa AE, Hegazy MM, Afifi WM, Dou D. Traditional ancient Egyptian medicine: A review. Saudi J Biol Sci. 2021 Oct;28(10):5823-5832. doi: 10.1016/j.sjbs.2021.06.044. Epub 2021 Jun 19. PMID: 34588897; PMCID: PMC8459052.* The Art of Medicine in Ancient EgyptReligion, Cult and Morality* Kemp, B. J. (1995) How Religious were the Ancient Egyptians? Cambridge archaeological journal. [Online] 5 (1), 25–54.* Van Blerk, N. (2019) The ancient Egyptians’ “Religious World” : the foundation of Egyptian law. Journal for Semitics. [Online] 28 (1), 1–20.* Crime and punishment* Law in Ancient Egypt“New” Nile Branch* The Egyptian pyramid chain was built along the now abandoned Ahramat Nile BranchCultural Memory in ancient Egypt and Nubia* Prehistoric Egypt* Newman, J. & Wendrich, W. (2022) ‘Neolithic and Predynastic Egypt’, in Reference Module in Social Sciences. [Online]. Elsevier Inc. p.* British Museum- Egyptian rock art* EES- Drawings along the Nile * Wadi Hammamat Project Valley of the Queens* AMAZING website charting all the tombs- Valley of the Queens and Western Wadis Get full access to Ancient/Now at ancientnow.substack.com/subscribe

Show NotesEvolution of Temple Architecture * Digital Karnak* Blyth, E. (2006) Karnak : evolution of a temple  / Elizabeth Blyth. New York, NY: Routledge.* Wilkinson, R. H. (2000) The complete temples of ancient Egypt. Thames & Hudson.* For Pre-formal → Formal temples see, Kemp, B. J. (2018) Ancient Egypt : anatomy of a civilization : pbk. 3rd ed. Routledge.Rekhyt Bird Meaning* Griffin, Kenneth 2018. All the rxyt-people adore: the role of the rekhyt-people in Egyptian religion. GHP Egyptology 29. London: Golden House Publications. * Griffin, Kenneth 2007. A reinterpretation of the use and function of the Rekhyt rebus in New Kingdom temples. In Cannata, Maria and Christina Adams (eds), Current research in Egyptology 2006: proceedings of the seventh annual symposium which took place at the University of Oxford, April 2006, 66-84. Oxford: Oxbow.* Niwiński, Andrzej 2014. Did the Pat-people and the Rekhyt-people have different burial ceremonies? In Jucha, Mariusz A., Joanna Dębowska-Ludwin, and Piotr Kołodziejczyk (eds), Aegyptus est imago caeli: studies presented to Krzysztof M. Ciałowicz on his 60th birthday, 253-260. Kraków: Institute of Archaeology, Jagiellonian University in Kraków; Archaeologica Foundation.Sex & Aphrodisiacs* Norris, Pauline 2020. Lettuce as an offering to Mnw (Min). In Maravelia, Alicia and Nadine Guilhou (eds), Environment and religion in ancient and Coptic Egypt: sensing the cosmos through the eyes of the divine. Proceedings of the 1st Egyptological conference of the Hellenic Institute of Egyptology, co-organized with the Writing & Scripts Centre of the Bibliotheca Alexandrina and the Institute of Coptic Studies (University of Alexandria), at the People's University of Athens, under the high auspices of his Eminence Mgr Damianos, archbishop of Sinai; Athens: Wednesday 1st, Thursday 2nd Friday 3rd February 2017, 317-329. Oxford: Archaeopress. * Leitz, Christian 1999. Magical and medical papyri of the New Kingdom. Hieratic Papyri in the British Museum 7. London: The British Museum Press. * The Contendings of Horus and Seth* Guiter, Jacques 2001. Contraception en Égypte ancienne. Bulletin de l'Institut Français d'Archéologie Orientale 101, 221-236* Ladinig-Morawetz, Franz-Stephan 2023. Defining "magic" using the example of Egyptian gynaecology. In Aguizy, Ola el- and Burt Kasparian (eds), ICE XII: proceedings of the Twelfth International Congress of Egyptologists, 3rd-8th November 2019, Cairo, Egypt 2, 1109-1115. [Cairo]: Institut français d'archéologie orientale.* Casini, Emanuele 2018. Rethinking the mutifaceted aspects of mandrake in ancient Egypt. Egitto e Vicino Oriente 41, 101-115. DOI: 10.12871/97888333918616.* Mathieu, Bernard 1999. L'univers végétal dans les chants d'amour égyptiens. In Aufrère, Sydney H. (ed.), Encyclopédie religieuse de l'univers végétal: croyances phytoreligieuses de l'Égypte ancienne 1, 99-106. Montpellier: Université Paul Valéry-Montpellier III. Get full access to Ancient/Now at ancientnow.substack.com/subscribe

In this episode Kara and Jordan discuss animals in ancient Egyptian society. What does the archaeological evidence tell us about the ancient Egyptians’ attitudes and practices towards non-human members of their society? Show notesHerodotus Book II, 65-66There are many household animals; and there would be many more, were it not for what happens to the cats. When the females have kittened they will not consort with the males; and these seek them but cannot get their will of them; so their device is to steal and carry off and kill the kittens (but they do not eat what they have killed). The mothers, deprived of their young and desiring to have more will then consort with the males; for they are creatures that love offspring. And when a fire breaks out very strange things happen to the cats. The Egyptians stand round in a broken line, thinking more of the cats than of quenching the burning; but the cats slip through or leap over the men and spring into the fire. When this happens, there is great mourning in Egypt. Dwellers in a house where a cat has died a natural death shave their eyebrows and no more; where a dog has so died, the head and the whole body are shaven.Oracular amuletic decree (ISAC, Chicago, Illinois)Veterinary Papyrus Janssen, “Commodity Prices from the Ramesside Period” including animals The Temple Cats of Philae Island Organization Facebook and Instagram Get full access to Ancient/Now at ancientnow.substack.com/subscribe

During the process of recommodification and reburial by 21st Dynasty elites, several royal mummies in the Deir el Bahri 320 (also known as TT 320) burial cache were badly damaged. In this episode, Kara and Amber discuss the evidence we have for the ritual repair of these mummies carried out during their reburial, including the term rdit Wsir, “to make an Osiris.” Ritner, Robert, 2009, The Libyan Anarchy: Inscriptions from Egypt’s Third Intermediate Period.Ritner, Robert, 1993, The Mechanics of Ancient Egyptian Magical Practice.Read more about the DeB 320 royal cache Get full access to Ancient/Now at ancientnow.substack.com/subscribe

In this episode Kara and Jordan answer listener questions from April. To submit a question for the monthly Q&A podcast, become a paid subscriber on Substack or join our Patreon!A few photos from Kara’s Egypt tripShow Notes:Female Genitalia Lexicography* Bednarski, Andrew 2000. Hysteria revisited. Women's public health in ancient Egypt. In McDonald, Angela and Christina Riggs (eds), Current research in Egyptology 2000, 11-17. Oxford: Archaeopress.* Ghalioungui, P. 1977. The persistence and spread of some obstetric concepts held in ancient Egypt. Annales du Service des Antiquités de l'Égypte 62, 141-154.* Westendorf, Wolfhart 1999. Handbuch der altägyptischen Medizin, 2 vols. Handbuch der Orientalistik, erste Abteilung 36 (1-2). Leiden: Brill.Burial of Children * Barba, Pablo 2021. Power, personhood and changing emotional engagement with children's burial during the Egyptian Predynastic. Cambridge Archaeological Journal 31 (2), 211-228. DOI: 10.1017/S0959774320000402.  * Kaiser, Jessica 2023. When death comes, he steals the infant: child burials at the Wall of the Crow cemetery, Giza. In Kiser-Go, Deanna and Carol A. Redmount (eds), Weseretkau "mighty of kas": papers in memory of Cathleen A. Keller, 347-369. Columbus, GA: Lockwood Press. DOI: 10.5913/2023853.22.  Export >>* Marshall, Amandine 2022. Childhood in ancient Egypt. Translated by Colin Clement. Cairo; New York: American University in Cairo Press. * Saleem, Sahar N., Sabah Abd el-Razek Seddik, and Mahmoud el Halwagy 2020. A child mummy in a pot: computed tomography study and insights on child burials in ancient Egypt. In Kamrin, Janice, Miroslav Bárta, Salima Ikram, Mark Lehner, and Mohamed Megahed (eds), Guardian of ancient Egypt: studies in honor of Zahi Hawass 3, 1393-1403. Prague: Charles University, Faculty of Arts.Skin Color and Gender* Shelley Halley, Prof. Emerita of Classics and Africana Studies, Hamilton College* Tutankhamun out of the lotus blossom with ‘naturalistic’ skin * Roth, Ann Macy 2000. Father earth, mother sky: ancient Egyptian beliefs about conception and fertility. In Rautman, Alison E. (ed.), Reading the body: representations and remains in the archaeological record, 187-201. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.* Tan Men/Pale Women: Color and Gender in Archaic Greece and Egypt, a Comparative Approach by Mary Ann Eaverly Kara’s ARCE Talk- “Elites Relying on Cultural Memory for Regime Building”Abstract: Theban elites of the late 20th and 21st Dynasties relied on veneration of 17th and 18th Dynasty kings to support their regimes ideologically. The cults of Ahmose-Nefertari and Amenhotep I were vibrant in the west Theban region, and their oracles were essential to solving many disputes. Herihor connected his militarily-achieved kingship to his position in the Karnak priesthood using the ancestor kings as touchstones. Twenty-first Dynasty Theban elites named their children after 18th Dynasty monarchs; Theban High Priest and king Panedjem named a daughter Maatkare, ostensibly after Hatshepsut of the 18th Dynasty, and a son Menkheperre after Thutmose III. Examination of the 20th and 21st Dynasty interventions of the royal mummies from Dra Abu el Naga and the Valley of the Kings indicates these royal corpses were used as sacred effigies of a sort, rewrapped and placed into regilded containers even after they had been stripped of their treasures and golden embellishments. This paper will examine how immigrants and mercenaries were able to move into Theban elite circles by marshaling ancestral connections to power. Men like Herihor and Panedjem, one of them at least of Meshwesh origins, worked within an Upper Egyptian cultural system that put its temple communities of practice before its military and veiled its politics with pious rituals and oracular pronouncements. Such elites had to negotiate their identities and power grabs through the cultural memory of the region’s royal ancestors.* Episode 83- Thutmose III and the Veneration of the Royal Ancestors * Cooney, Kathlyn M. 2022. The New Kingdom of Egypt under the Ramesside dynasty. In Radner, Karen, Nadine Moeller, and D. T. Potts (eds), The Oxford history of the ancient Near East, volume III: from the Hyksos to the late second millennium BC, 251-366. New York: Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190687601.003.0027. * Cooney, Kara. 2024. Recycling for Death AUC Press. * The Khonsu Temple at Karnak Get full access to Ancient/Now at ancientnow.substack.com/subscribe