Hey, how are you Come on in and have a chair. I hope
you're doing well. I have to talk a little bit about podcasting today.
We started, I should say, I started this podcast in twenty fourteen and
we are celebrating our tenth anniversary. Just finished celebrating. It was in May.
But I started podcasting in its infancy. I was working with clients.
Podcasting kind of showed up around two thousand and five as an experiment. Internet
radio is what they used to call it. It's still kind of focused on
providing, you know, those who are on the Internet access to all kinds
of topics. I mean, the sky's the limit. There's apparently there's worldwide
like five million different podcasts. Can you believe it? But I was in
it in the very beginning, and I had clients that wanted me to research
and help them launch their own podcasts. And this is really how I learned
about the effectiveness of podcasting and through the success that I had with various clients.
I was a marketing consultant for a number of different people here in the
San Francisco Bay area, a couple who were outside of the state of California,
and I learned of the way to create a quality podcast and really discovered
the ins and outs of programming success programming for a number of topics including psychology,
wellness, personal growth. These are clients, including a former client who
I worked with. I think I mentioned Whole Life Expo, which morphed into
New Living Expo when that name was taken by a German company, Whole Life
Expo that is. And so I learned a great deal about working with people,
working with guests who were either authors or had interesting topics for my clients.
And in twenty fourteen I launched Earth Ancients, a name based on my
interest in ancient cultures, ancient civilizations, how they lived, how they survived,
and so much about history that we didn't know about. And so Earth
Ancients has been going for ten years, has been growing and expanding its lip,
and just recently the National Podcast Association awarded Earth Ancients for excellence and programming
and also it's continual growth since twenty fourteen, a tenure and a verse.
We were just sent a trophy, which was nice to get, you know,
and it makes you feel good because you know, you put a lot
of hours. We put a lot of hours into creating Earth Ancients, and
it was nice to receive a trophy. You can see me holding this trophy
on my Facebook page. I'm also going to post it on the Facebook Earth
Ancients International and group page. But you know, over the years, I've
made a lot of friends. I've really enjoyed interviewing the top names, the
best. I call them the best of the best. You know, in
every December we kind of close out the year with a month of the best
of the best in a variety of topics. And you know who I'm talking
about, Graham Hancock, Randall Carlson, Robert Shaw. I mean, the
list goes on and on. I was looking at our archives. We have
over six hundred and fifty different podcasts that we've produced in that ten year span
and it's been fantastic. I want to thank the following people for helping me
with Earth Ancients. I want to thank Jen Dao, who's a regular,
Bruce Fenton, Ruth Thomas, our former consultant, Gail Tour, our producer,
Mark Foster, Ammy Domestico from iHeartRadio. iHeart picked us up back in
twenty eighteen and we're on iHeart podcast. We're also on iTunes pretty much anywhere
you can get your podcast or where you listen to podcasts, you can download
Earth Ancient, which is part of being with iHeart. And of course now
the heavy hitter is sp Spotify supports podcasts worldwide, but they're really been picking
it up with Earth Ancients and getting it out and we're going to be doing
more with Spotify, specifically in our video presentations. By the way, you
can see all of our not all of them, I would say a select
few. It's about fifty now of video capture of some of the better podcasts
Graham Hancock, Randall, Carlson and so on. On YouTube. You can
go to YouTube and go to Earth Ancients and find our page. It's called
Earth Ancients Official. So that's another way we're getting the word out about podcasting.
So hey, thank you to National Podcast Association. The award is appreciated.
And you know, I am a mentor to new and upcoming podcasts,
and so I know the consistency, the amount of hours, the dedication it
takes to put together a podcast. You know, it's funny. It's a
real fluid and I use this term fluid medium, and I really I mean
I'm an artist by training. I don't pain or draw or do any of
that anymore. I do write so as a form of creativity, but I've
really taken to podcasting and I really enjoy it. And Earth Ancient's little sister,
Destiny is also a great joy. And for those of you listening to
Destiny, I hope you enjoy that. So also I want to thank Destiny.
Destiny has also propelled into the forefront of podcasting, and Destiny is a
very big part of Earth Ancient. So together they're a great deal fun to
produce and to get out there. So I hope you enjoy Destiny as well
as Earth Ancients. So all right, ten years with the Earth Ancients.
We're hoping for ten more and it's been great fun and we will continue to
have good fun and solid programming for both programs. So thank you Today is
a real important podcast. We have a returning guest. It's doctor Karacooney from
UCLA in California. She has written a new book called Recycling for Death,
coffin research in Ancient Egypt and the Thebian Royal Cash and this is really not
necessarily made for the general audience, but she's going to be making it available
in August. We're kind of having this podcast interview a little early. So
this book is a real close look and a discovery of the reuse of coffins,
but not only the coffins, the death masks, the gold and the
trimmings that go into high ranking administrative individuals to the pharaohs, but also the
pharaohs themselves. And what is unusual about this discovery is that we have known
that people like Ramsey's The Second and I've talked about this before, We've had
people on to talk about it. Ramsey's the Second SETI the First and other
noted pharaohs claimed temples, buildings, artifacts, even statuary as their own,
even with the knowledge that they were not from their time period, perhaps much
much earlier. And this is what's really insane about this discovery is that it
leads into the death the funerary that were created for specific pharaohs. You're going
to be blown away today with what she presents on this topic. And what
really makes it fascinating is that all the way down to the jewelry was reused
in a number of major burials. Now what's shocking is what brings out this
behavior. Why would a pharaoh reuse or claim temples, these buildings, objects,
including statuary of their own. This doesn't make any sense. This is
very odd, very almost childish behavior, and today we're going to learn why
they approached these items in such a manner. I believe that it's a lot
of this material is left from previous epoch, previous peeriods of time. And
because there isn't a noted name of a living pharaoh at the time or an
individual, Ramsey's would regularly put his cartouche his signature on statuary of enormous height
and weight. And I think there's a great deal of confusion in doing this,
because why would he do this? And in doing so he confuses historians.
So we have Ramsey's cartouche on statues that are likely thousands of years before
he existed, before he became a pharaoh. And Ramsey's is not the only
one. You're going to hear today some ground breaking discovery on what this whole
Puronic period is about. And it's kind of shocking in many ways because we're
thinking that these pharaohs in their dynasties were very wealthy, and now it appears
that a number of them, especially in the Later Kingdom or the New Kingdom,
were desperate. We're desperate for trinkets of gold, were desperate for the
jewels that these earlier pharaohs were buried with, and they ransacked the tombs.
Oh God. So today's program is Recycling for Death, and my guest is
doctor Kara Cooney. I've just returned from Egypt, and I gotta say,
it's always a pleasure to go to Egypt, but there are so many questions
about the Dynastic period, pre Dynastic so forth and so on. There's thousands
of years mudeled into various temples, various artifacts, and it's now time to
speak with doctor Kara Cooney. We haven't had care on the program probably a
couple of years. And if you don't know who she is, she is
a professor of Egyptology at UCLA. But more to her groundbak breaking work,
she is the author of a number of very important books. My favorite are
The Woman Who Would Be King, When Women Rule the World and The Good
King. She's got a brand new book out now, and this book is
a fascinating study on She's Actually the title of the book is Recycling or Dead,
and I was like, what is this all about? Well, the
book is a monster. It's almost five hundred pages and is her study on
reusing coffins and so Kara Welcome back to Earth Ancients. This is a fascinating
book. It's a monster and I can see it's a passion as well,
isn't it. It's a contribution to the field, Cliff, and thanks for
having me back. I'm thrilled to be here. You know, it's funny.
I read a paragraph somewhere where you were at the British Museum. This
is way way way back before this even happened, and you were with somebody
noted Egyptologis, somebody who was a very focal point in the field of egyptology,
and you made a comment about the coffin and it was like the patina
or the design with such that it was covering something earlier. And you made
like, hey, it looks they're reusing this. And the guy said to
you John, I can't remember his last name, Don Taylor. John,
Yeah, he said, he said, someone needs to look into this.
It's like, yeah, somebody should, really, somebody should really work on
that. That was in two thousand and that's before you, before thy four
years ago when he said that, Okay, twenty four years ago, isn't
how long this shit takes. But more to the point, this book is
like a fifteen year project. Is what I read fifteen years So this has
been in the back of your mind as something you needed to complete. Talk
a little bit about the inception of the idea and where it began to formulate
itself in this book. Well, this will give your listeners a little insight
into the academic world, how slowly it moves, how carefully we have to
traverse its many pitfalls, and how this kind of work really happens. So
I was in the Britain Museum in two thousand working on my dissertation and gathering
data for my dissertation which was called The Cost of Death. This new book
is called Recycling for Death, and that one is the Cost of Death.
And when I was working on that book, I was having the British Museum
pull out coffins in their holdings that were of the nineteenth or twentieth dynasty and
date. Because I was I was cataloging all of these coffins, but I
was also comparing them to price data that we have from Western Thebes and from
the village of Darro Medina for those people who know. So I actually have
collected like hundreds of prices for coffins. Some coffins cost thirty five deban to
decorate, some cost twenty five deben for the whole thing. A deban is
ninety one grams of copper, and you can buy, let's see, a
goat for five deban or a cow a really nice pow for like fifty deban.
And you know, these are the kinds of things that I was looking
at. So I was obsessed with how much everything cost, and I wanted
to look at these coffins and kind of like, I don't know, Cliff,
when was the last wedding you went to, uh, like four years
ago, okay? And so everyone looks at the dress right where they look
at the dress is the focal point. So I want you to think of
the wedding dress as like the coffin of this display, right, Okay.
So you look at the dress and you're like, that dress is like it's
a shitty fabric. It's it's like polyester, it's all just it's not very
nice quality. And you know immediately that the bride is coming from a certain
social milieure and she doesn't understand or doesn't want to understand how to make her
dress into something that would that would place her in a different social category.
And then you go to a different wedding, Say you go to the wedding
of a very rich person who's getting married at a fancy hotel in New York,
and her dress will be more understated, likely attention, and yet will
be made of much more fancy fabric a designer. The designer might even be
there in the wedding to help fit it right before, I mean for that
kind of a wedding, right And and you know immediately where these people fit
within society. Maybe maybe you know the woman with the crappy dresses standing next
to a guy who's got a rental suit on. You know, he's not
even gonna buy his suit, it's a rental. And that gives you an
idea of the way that I that I'm looking at coffins. I'm looking at
them in terms of social competition, cost and how much people were able to
pay, and where they fit in society. And I'm looking at coffins as
social documents. Right, what can these coffins tell us about Man X or
woman Y who was buried in this thing, who commissioned it? In their
lifetime and was like, I wanted to look like this, And then I
try to look at all of the coffins of this time period and talk about
the spending abilities of people but also the choices that they're making based on what's
available. But you actually go beyond just the quality of the coffin decor.
You made a really good analogy in the wedding dress by saying a lot of
women will use their mother's dress or their grandmother's dress, honoring the family's heritage,
tradition, whatever you want to call it, lineage, and in the
coffins region. This is why this is a fascinating subject, by the way,
and we're going to talk more about it, because there's a number of
pharaohs who are reusing temples, but when a woman reuses the wedding dress,
they honor the family the honor and this is the analogy. You're saying that
this became quite and this is an end of the you calling it the end
of the new kingdom that's happening nineteen Bronze Age collapse. For those of you
that are obsessed with collapse, I think we all feel it in our bones,
We feel it in the water. The collapse is coming for us.
So anybody that's interested in collapse, Bronze Age collapse is a big one.
And well, this is very it's fine. I'm studying. Yeah, yeah,
it's amazing. We're going to get into this. But so talk a
bit about that analogy, because you're bringing up the wedding dresses as a focal
point. Talk about the analogy of the you know, something old, something
new, blah blah blah. So I'm looking at these coffins of the nineteenth
and twentieth dynasty because I'm like, oh, this is these are the ones
I can compare the prices to. I didn't look at them because they were
a part of this Bronze Age collapse in this extraordinary crisis. Looking back,
I'm like, damn, I was lucky because I was looking at all of
these pieces and there are like one hundred coffins of this time period, not
very many, and I'm looking at all of them and I'm noticing how much
reuse there is as I'm studying this, and I'm like, well that's a
topic for another day, right, I've seen it, like with John Taylor
and the British Museum, somebody should really work on this, and I put
it away in the back of my head, as you say, and I
don't get to it for another ten years, and then I start this systematic
study and it takes me another fifteen years to actually publish it in a monograph
and a volume with all of the documentation. It's actually going to be two
volumes. I'm working on a second volume of recycling for death like as not
as we speak. But I mean maybe somebody is. I have people working
out it. But so the reason we hadn't thought to look for coffin reuse
is because in our minds, right, the coffin is something that you put
the dead person in, and then the dead person stays in that coffin.
They don't leave it. No one's going to take them out because they're put
into the ground. And that's it. That's what we have in our minds.
And when you find things that are intact in ancient Egypt, ideally you
have the coffin with the dead, like think of the tomb of tunancoalmen.
Right, he's he's there in his triple nesting coffin set and no one's taken
him out of it. It has not been reused, or has it that's
another question we should come back to, because that nesting coffin set of two
common has almost certainly reused itself. But that's a different thing when we find
it as archaeologists. It's not reused. The dead is still in the coffin,
So we think in our archaeology minds, oh, they wouldn't have reused
these things. And the more I looked at these coffins, the more I
could see that what we're finding in the archaeological record is the last instance of
use of many uses of these pieces, particularly in a time of crisis.
So the wedding dress analogy works because in the twentieth dynasty, especially when the
Bronze Age collapse was really getting underway, you have people in a family who
are like, look, we've got this coffin set. That's it. We
don't have any more cash to spend on this stuff, we don't have any
more disposable income to literally put into the ground. We have to use this
coffin set and use it well. And so the coffin is used and then
reused as a transformation device first and foremost, ritual display device first and foremost,
not a permanent ownership of the dead. It's like the wedding dress is
used as a It's not something you keep wearing after you get married. People
would make fun of you. You would be a weirdo to walk around in
your wedding dress. Because you're married. Now you get to wear it all
the time. You wear it for that moment of transformation and public display,
and you take it off and you put it away, and you put it
away carefully. You have a clean You do all these things and keep it
safe. Right. It seems that during times of crisis, the Egyptians were
doing the same with the coffin. They use it as a transformation device.
They transform the dead into a cyrus and ray and all of these things that
an off a spirit that was able to do all kinds of extraordinary things.
And then they seem to have buried the disease with that coffin in their family
sepulcher. And then when they needed it, then they took the deceased out
of the coffin. Probably I know, probably, but it's a wrapped mummy,
right, but probably with all kinds of magical spells in association with it.
But they're going into their own family crypt right, opening up that nesting
set, pulling that body out, saying they're sorry, saying we encircle your
heart. Please don't come after us, don't do the angry dead person thing.
And then they take that coffin set out, they replaster it, they
repaint it, and they reuse it for someone else, in the same way
that that wedding dress would be taken out of the mothball closet and then maybe
updated. Certainly, what would be made to fit the person that it's altered,
That's the word I was looking for in my mind, would be altered
to fit the person who's going to wear it next. And you get this
idea of an object as the devisive transformation in a public space. So I
want you to talk a little bit about I want to give this some context.
Each oftologists have known about repurposing. I call it repurposing or reusing like
pimples artifacts. Now we know we're going to get in a deep more detail
on this coffin reuse, but UH, talk a little bit about what we
know academically. We know that Ramsey was a big one of He would throw
his cartouche on a statue and say, you know, I've seen this at
the in the Cairo Museum. There's a very famous green statue. I think
it's no, it's somebody. It's green in the middle. It's like on
the first floor and I can't think of it. And they and some pharaoh
through his cartoushe at the bottom. This is an immaculate sculpture of a man.
Yeah, and this horrible graffiti cartouche is placed on either side and it
looks like someone took a knife and scratched their name on it. And it's
like and the weird thing about that is Egtal is like, well it must
have been him. We don't know. Well, there's a lot that you
can say about statue reuse. This is a really interesting topic. And I
have a graduate student named Kylie Thompson's working on statue reuse right now. And
Ramsey's the Second was the best statue reuser the world had ever seen, and
he systematically went after the statues of Amenhotep the third in particular, and eighteenth
dynasty king whose son was Akanatin had created that whole weird sun cult religion that
everybody hated by this time. So it is quite possible that when Ramsey's the
Second was reusing all of Amenhotep the Third statues. People are like, fine,
take it, he had it coming, we don't know. But he
systematically goes after this guy's pieces and he moves them. He moves them to
new locations. He even matches new statues with them. So you go to
Looks for a temple looks or Temple, which is a north south temple along
the Nile in modern day looks On named it Resuit, right, that's the
ancient name of the temple, and you go into the first courtyard. You'll
see all of these statues of Ramsey's the second, Yes, around the courtyard.
Half of them are reused from Amenhotep the Third, which you can tell
with a careful examination. It was horrid Serusian who did this careful examination improve
this point. And half of them he made himself to match what he had
reused. So he's even getting a new portrait of his face because he's reusing
so many of these statues. He's like, shit, I can't, you
know, use the portrait that I would actually want that probably looks more like
me. I need to use this portrait that allows me to reuse all these
Amenhotep the Third statues. And that's how much this king was reusing. And
you know he does recarve the faces, he does recarve the chests. Amenhotep
the Third like a fatter face and big lips and a shorter nose. And
Ramsey's the second is like, nope, no longer knows. My lips shouldn't
be as big, my eyes shouldn't be as big. I need more of
a chisel jaw. And he adds all of that. He has his stone
workers go in and do that the chest of a'm in Hotep the third,
he was like the king who didn't mind showing himself more corpulent, right,
Yeah, So Ramsey's the second is like, no, I want to show
myself all cut and hot and chiseled. So he has them go in and
like redo the pectoral muscles, and if you have a careful eye, you
can go in and you can look at where things have been rechiseled. Particularly
because Amenhotep the third was making statuary at the height of artist capabilities in hardstone.
These people knew how to carve ard stone. They knew how to do
it beautifully, brilliantly, beautifully. And then Ramsey's the second is like quantity
over quality, We just need to get it done, and he has it
recarved summarily quickly, and you can tell. So if you're able to note
that difference in quality, then you're able to see how he's reused all of
these statues. Point My point in the statuary though, and I want you
to continue just a little bit on the buildings, is that at Hathor,
at uh Well and Dendara Hathor, I think in Karnak and Looks are some
of these main temples. They're being reused over thousands of years, right,
So are you suggesting that that these pharaohs, these kings are reusing them in
their name and this is kind of the and then the coffin is the fallout
of that use because it becomes comfortable for them to do this. Yeah,
I would think it would be. I think you would think that was the
end game, right, that you would have a statue and you would just
reuse it and reuse it and reuse it. But that's not what they do.
Interestingly, there there is this push and pull between this idea of I
made the statue, that's my statue, don't touch it, and a lot
of kings, most kings don't touch other kings statues. Most kings are quite
happy to place their statue amongst those statues and not touch them. Most kings
don't have the balls, the temerity to go in and take all these other
statues and recarve them. So it is not something that you see on the
regular like over and over and over again. You see it. You see
it with kings who have the political will to do it. So you see
it with Ramsey's the Second. You do see it with Ramsey's the third,
who is not his son, my nept is his son. Ramsey's the third
is of a different dynasty. He just happens to be the third Ramseys in
the line. He does a lot of reuse as well, but nobody reuses
reuses as much as Ramsey is the second, probably because he had the political
will and ability to reuse that much. And if you if you're curious about
this, you can read my book The Good King, for I have a
chapter on Ramsey's the Second. I'll I have the book right up here on
my bookshelf. I'll have to look at after we're done. It's such a
curiousity. I'm using that as a as a pretext for this coffin use,
and obviously if the priesthood is involved, if there's a group who are working
with the bearing and the preparing the body for dead, and coffin reuse for
us, I think it would be a traumatic experience to pull somebody out of
a coffin and then reuse it obviously for them. And this is what's so
weird about it. And I'm really curious to know if you have found writings
where it says, we go ahead, we reuse this coffin. We bless
the departed mummified body that's dumped into a garbage can and no garbage can.
No, there's the whole way of doing this. Okay, So you actually
have found this right kind up kind of so in the same way as the
statue, where you your mind would be like, oh, they reused,
so they're going to reuse these coffins or these statues you know, over thousands
of years. No, because there is still the understanding that they should be
ideally, morally, they should be a one use thing, one king,
one statue, one coffin, one person. It should be that way.
But in moments of crisis or with a king with the political will, who's
just going to do what he wants, then the rules may change, right,
So the there I haven't found any eighteenth dynasty reuse coffins. For instance,
eighteenth dynasty, this would be the time of a king like Toutma's the
third, the warrior king who went to Megiddo and won or aman hood tept
the third, when Egypt was arguably the richest it's ever been. You,
I don't have any documented reuse from these time periods. If I carbon dated
the wood, would some of that would be older than it should be,
probably, But that's not a reuse of the coffin, right, So that's
a reuse of wood. So what I'm saying is that use is not Coffin
reuse is not meant to happen, but it does happen. So people who
are doing it, or there are illegal ways of doing it, and there
are illegal ways of doing it. The illegal ways we have written down.
Those are there. So if you looked at like the tomb robbery papyriy,
which is a group of papyri which you're super interesting, everyone can google the
tomb robbery papyriy and have fun researching and read your Wikipedia page and go to
town. But essentially there are people who are brought in on charges of theft,
and they're like, yeah, you know, we went into this tomb
and we found these coffins, and we took the dead body out, and
in that case they did throw it in the trash, and we took these
coffins and we brought them to the marketplace and they're like, Okay, you're
gonna get punished. Or there's another situation in the tomb robbery papyary where they
say we broke into this, this really fancy tomb, we took the coffins
out, We didn't take the bodies out. We set them on fire,
and we came back the next day and took all of the precious gold and
gems or whatever that were there in the ashes. It was a really fast
way of getting to the gold and probably mostly gold, maybe fiance glass stone
inlay things like that, maybe some lappis, maybe some turquoise whatever, But
they were able to take those things pretty easily. So you do have illegal
reuse, documented intext legal reuse. No, because people aren't going to be
like, it's not as positive as reusing mama's wedding dress. It's not.
It's not something where you're like Oh, my daughter decided to reuse my dress,
and I have to tell everyone it's so special. This is not that,
this is something that you're deeply ashamed of, but you have to do
Wait a minute, are you saying that you are reading that they are ashamed
of this? Now, I'm not. I don't have any evidence that they're
ashamed of it, but I don't have any be talking about it openly.
And I have a whole lot of evidence of them trying to hide it,
of them plastering over areas that would show this kind of reuse, or taking
out a name such that that name is not there anymore in most cases,
not every case, but in most cases, and it's something they don't want
to they don't want to advertise, so they're embarrassed or really worried. This
is a traumatizing thing. These coffins are meant to be one use. This
is why I want to I want to keep on the thought. Yeah,
this is a culture that praises the dead, sanctifies the dead exactly. I
mean, we look at touts his remains in today's market, millions of dollars
in gold items buried with him. His coffin is multi layers, as you
say, does this reuse market change in social or religious traditions. Absolutely,
So let's put all of us in an impossible situation. Let's go a little
mad Max, Let's go a little apocalyptic. Let's say that we deeply believe
that if we didn't provide material containment that was all decorated, naming the deceased
as the god to transform the dead, that if we did not do that,
that our dead would not be thus transformed. And let's also let's take
the religious part out of it and just bring the social in which I think
we can all understand that if you don't have a public funeral, you will
lose face, that your family will lose power. Right, So let's say
that those things are both true. We know those things are both true,
and then an apocalypse descends upon us. And you have a loved one that's
just died. Let's say that your father has just died, and your father
is a super important patriarch in the village. He's you know, been a
power figure in this village. For while everyone is expecting you to do a
big funeral. They're expecting the bread and beer and the feasting of the funeral.
They're expecting everything. You can't get wood. Let's say it's the beginning
of the apocalypse, the beginning of the collapse. You can't get your hands
on any wood. You've sat with the artisan and the Artisan's like, dude,
I would love to make you a coffin. I would love to make
you a whole set. There is no wood, and you're like, where
the hell is the wood? And he's like, well, those trees got
burned by the sea people's when they invaded last time. And these trees are
all being used to fight off the sea peoples. They're making them into weapons.
There are no trees, there's no wood, and you're like, shit,
what do I do? I have no wood. Everyone's expecting me to
bury Dad with all of the state funeral that he demands, that all the
pump and circumstance, and I need to transform him morally. This is something
that I need to do to make sure that he is an off for me.
He becomes this activated dead. Right, So you have this conundrum,
and you can either go steal a neighbor's coffin, which would be highly illegal
and would be a problem, right, and is the moral too? Why
add immorality to immorality. Or you could go into your family sepulcher. You
could go into that tomb, you could move things around, you could look
there, maybe with your own son, and be like, oh my god,
do you know who that person in the corner is. Nope, I
have no memory of that person. Maybe that person is five generations past.
Do you know the people of five generations past? Do you know the people
of three generations passed? Maybe? But four? Right? Once they've left
your known memory and the known memory of everyone in your village, you're like,
okay, let's take out that person. That makes sense, So you
move this stuff. I don't know that this is happening, but there's enough
circumstantial evidence from a tomb like theban tomb one at dear Ol Medina, which
shows twenty two human bodies in it, and only nine of them were still
in coffins when that tomb was found. So taking the bodies out and putting
the mummies next to the coffin, yeah, I've seen that. As Sakara.
Yes, this is happening everywhere. When there's crisis, they're like,
oh my god, we have we need these this coffin materiality, we need
this stuff. So that they take, they move things around, they shift
it. They pull that nested coffin set out, they open that coffin set
up, They pull out I don't know, Old Aunt Bertha, whom nobody
remembers. They pull her to the side. She's mammified, she's wrapped.
Still a scary moment. I guarantee you they would have brought priests in.
I guarantee you they had magical spells ready to go. And though I don't
have anybody with the diary saying dear Diary, we opened up the family sepulcher
and took out old Aunt Bertha. Today, you know I'm not going to
find that people aren't going to write that down. There are texts that talk
about keeping the dead contained, encircling their heart, making sure they don't go
forth and cause harmed rituals, very complicated rituals. I could read you from
from part of one right now if you want it, but really complicated magical
spells that are making sure that the dead are contained and controlled at the same
time that they are divinized and appeased. So this is not just slipshod on
a body out and reuse it. They're they're doing sacred ceremonies. Yeah,
is there a class of priests that are you're reading about who are in charge
of doing this work? No, but it would just be a normal priest
like any other priest. And here's the other thing you mentioned Common, right,
And I said we should talk about this because Tudon Common's tomb was found
intact. It was found intact because no one remembered the nothing king at the
end of a dynasty who was buried quickly in the front foyer of someone else's
tomb, I would argue. And then all of the refuse of the tombs
of other Ramsi kings as they're digging them out, we're just dumped on top
of his tomb and other So you know, no one remembered to on Gommen.
But the high priests of Amen at this time of collapse at the end
of the twentieth dynasty, moving into the twenty first, they have the same
problems with their regime. They're like, oh, we need to do this,
let's get some gold. Oh we have no gold. Why well,
there's a war and the Nubians won't let us in there, and we've lost
this empire and oh crap, we have no gold and They're like, well,
we do have gold in the Valley of the Kings. It told me
right. So the High Priests of Amen at the end of the twentieth and
into the twenty first dynasty, they marshal their own forces and legally reuse all
of the expensive shit that was in the tomb of Ramsay's the second, the
tomb of amenh hoots at the third that they're the tombs looting? Is that
the right word? Clip? Oh? Reusing? Right? Reusing? I
should slap my hand. I mean, I get why people say looting,
But when you're trying to keep a regime running at end times and the sea
people's and the Libyans are invading, and everything is decentralized, and everything is
a shit show, and you know that you're sitting on a gold mine literally,
why would you not go in there? Why would you not go in
there and create magical spells such that your kings and queens from whom you were
taking this material understand that you were there as their ritual caretakers. You are
there to make sure that they are kept safe by you, the priests.
And it's the priests who are running a lot of this because they have the
restricted knowledge to do that. They have the magical spells to pull this shit
off. So it's much more complicated when people do things they know they're not
supposed to do but they have to do, or they tell themselves they have
to do. Because they could have been like, you know what, you
guys, we can't keep this whole religious thing going. Let's there't a whole
new burial system which we don't bury people with really nice stuff. But they
didn't want to do that. They weren't ready for that. They needed that
social display still, so they did. They're like, Okay, we're gonna
we're gonna take what we need to take, but we're gonna do it right.
We're gonna do it in a way so that we appear to be innocent,
we appear to be the ones who are doing it right. It's the
same, it's the same thing as I mean, this is a very loose
analogy, but I think it works. So, say you're bombing a bunch
of people. You're bombing women and children. I don't know in some places
on this earth. But let's say you're bombing the shit out of people and
you say, well, we have to bomb them because they're terrorists, and
so you create an innocence for yourself and then you get you get to bomb
them. In this case, you say, we have to take these coffins
because we don't have any access to this ourselves. This is the only way
we can run the regime. And so and we're going to be caretakers.
We're doing the right thing. Someone else is going to steal it. And
there's the all over the Valley of the Kings, and indeed there was,
it's documented. If we don't do it, someone else will. So they
come up with a way to manufacture their innocence. And that's what all of
this is. It is so mind blowing when you have uncovered. Now one
of the things I want you to talk about, and this really blows me
away, is the fact that you know people who can afford intricate confidence or
administrators, not the common folk. And this is what's really what blows me
away. And also the pharaohs you claim, and this is some kind of
undercurrent of thought that the tux gold funerally funeral mask was possibly reused. Yeah,
when you wrote that, I was like, it blew me out of
the water, because that's one of the most world I mean renowned masks ever
discovered, if that was used from an earlier pharaoh, if they just modified
it or reused it, that's a that's completely out of control. It's so
out of control. So it means that no one is above this. Now
you'll know that when I said that in the book, Cliff, that I
cited someone else who is that? Yeah, you actually said, but you'd
never say they confirmed it. They're speculating based on some odd uh jewelry on
the lower part of it or something. It's a it's a name reuse.
So you can actually see where text has been erased and new text has been
added. And and so it's Nick Reeves who has come up with this,
this brilliant theory, and who has done the examination of the mask as close
up as he is able to do, and done the photography and documented and
shown that there was another inscription underneath this other inscription. And this is not
something that I mean, let me back up and then we'll get back.
Let me back up a bit and get to touch. This whole reuse thing
is not something that people like. They don't like it. And when I
I say people, I mean Egyptologists don't like it. I once presented this
work like ten years ago at a conference, and this old professor was like,
oh, Kara, thank you for such an imaginative discussion. I said,
yeah, right, And I said, which part do you think I
imagine? Because I can go through each piece of evidence bit by bit,
what would you like to talk about? Or I remember standing on a stage
giving this talk in London and someone accusing me of being racist against the Egyptians
and saying that you know that I was claiming that they were reusing things and
doing these immoral activities. This reuse is not something that serves the what is
the current reuse of antiquity? Very well, we're all reusing antiquity in our
way. You do it, I do it. But Nation states reuse antiquity
with glee. Right. They reuse antiquity and say we are like the ancient
people. Their glories are our glories. Right. It may be an ideological
reuse or a patriotic reuse, but they're still saying that Egypt that was,
that still exists and we have all of that ability and know how for some
idiot liked me to come in and say, oh, and they reused all
their coffins and Tunn Gommen's mask is reused, it makes people's heads explode.
They're like, don't you dare? Don't you dare? If that's why the
good kings that caused so much trouble right, I'm like, Oh, you're
just reusing all of these ancient pharaohs to make yourselves feel powerful and to support
your own authoritarianism. People's heads exploded, they lost their minds. They're like,
how dare you speak this uneffable truth? But so when people talk about
the mask of tut' common, they don't want to see the reuse. It's
not like Molder and the X Files, you know, I want to believe
people don't want to seek this. It ruins everything. It ruins the fantasy,
the fantasy or the fetishization that we have put into our minds of what
these coffins were meant to be, the fetishization that the Egyptians were obsessed with
death, and that they put all of their know how and extraordinary abilities into
burying their dead with such care and attention. And when somebody comes in and
says, yeah, but when times got tough, they went in and they
recycled all of this stuff and reuse it. All them. People are like,
no, they didn't, they would never do such a thing. And
I'm like, seriously, the world is ending. You don't have any income,
and you're not going to open up your basement and take out the gold
that great grandpa put there. Really give me a break. They're like,
well, great Grandpa's buried down there and he's holding the gold like clutched in
his dead body. I would never. I'm like, yeah, you would,
You totally would. You would bring somebody in, a specialist who would
be able to help you deal with dead great grandpa. Whatever you believed dead
great Grandpa could do to you. You would go in and you would take
that gold and you would make use of it. It's the most moral solution
in a time period of great upheaval. We're going to take a short commercial
break to allow our sponsors to identify them selves, and we will return shortly
with my guest today, doctor Karraconey, talking about her new book, Recycling
for Death. We'll be right back. My guest today is doctor Caracuney.
She is an egyptologist and a professor of archaeology at at the University of Los
Angeles in Southern California and her new book, Recycling for Death is really a
shocking look at the end of the dynastics and what they were doing with their
coffins and other funeral items. Funny how you described that, because you're talking
about the decline of the Egyptian Empire, and it's pretty ugly if they're doing
what you're talking about. And I can see why other Egyptologists are like,
we don't want to talk about that. We wish you wouldn't bring it up
in your book. It's true, and all these bodies are so carefully rewrapped.
We have the body of Ramses, the second SETI, the first amenhuts
of the third. That's crazy. The reason we have those bodies is because
the high priests of Amen went into their tombs before the robbers did, took
out all of the rich stuff, unwrapped their bodies, took all of the
jewels and gold and all of the precious stuff off of them, re wrapped
them, heard them, re ritually, oh serified them, put them in
redone coffins with their names on them, and kept them safe. They kept
them safe in a tomb on the side of the cliff of Dero Bahri,
so safe that it was intact until I think eighteen ninety eight. Wall.
Where did you find that passage in a script or a scroll or a papyrus,
there's none of You can't expect these things to be written down. You
have to, as an archaeologist, work with everything that's available. So you're
assuming that this priest did this. Well, the priest wrote down on the
lids of the coffins that I high priest and reocerifying this body. We rewrapped
Billy Bob, and he's gonna be here to the We are recoffining him,
We are reocerifying him. They say, they're oh, serifying him, right.
They don't say, oh, and while I did that, I took
all his stuff. You're not gonna say that. You're not gonna say that.
You're gonna be like I did the good thing and I kept him safe.
Right, Okay, now going back to type. Right now, I'm
still blown away. I think, Kara, this is something that really needs
to be broadcast, because I know if people knew. I mean, I
was just in Cairo and the display at the Cairo Museum is this mask.
And the Egyptians are so uptight that they scream at you for not moving along
and no photos now, and this is like an icon that they're just leading
on. Yeah, I mean, and why because it's made of solid gold,
we wouldn't care so and it's gorgeous, right if it weren't dropped at
gorgeous and if it weren't made of solid gold, they don't think we would
care so much, it really don't. I mean, then the bust of
Nefertiti is gorgeous. It's not made of solid gold. It's made a very
simple limestone, but it's treated very much in the same way in the Berlin
get it is and it is that fetishization, right, this piece has been
fetishized. Fetishized objects are the least studied in Egyptology. The more important they
are, the less ironically we know about them, because the less access you're
given, What am I going to do? Apply to work on the mask
of to not Gomen? And they're just going to be like, sure,
Kara, here, let's clear out all the tourists so we can open the
case so you can look at it. No one has given you permission,
Not even Zayiehl Watts will give you permission. There was a wonderful, wonderful
book just published by Christian Ekmann and Katie Broschat, two German scholars conservators,
and they were able to work on the mask for many days. And the
reason they were able to is because the mask was damaged about I think it
was like four or five years ago. I don't know how many years ago,
but they were trying to change a light bulb in the case and the
mask and then somebody grabbed it. I don't know the details. Again,
people don't write. Some of the jewels came off and they needed to be
glued on again or something. The beard, the beard came off. They're
not going to be like, dear Diary, I harmed the mask of Too
Gobbin today. You know, we broke it exactly. They glued the beard
back on with this epoxy and everyone could see. So the tourist the next
day and everyone coming in is like, what's that. The mask doesn't look
right? And then word started to spread that the mask had obviously been broken.
Whoever opened the case didn't you know there was damage, and so they
shut everything down huge like google this. Everyone can google this. It was
a crazy thing. And they took the mask off display. It's the only
time it's been off display. I think since it I don't know, you
would have to check, but for like decades, right, they bring it
off display. Christiane Ekunakattie shot work on this mask. They carefully, painstakingly
manually remove that epoxy with their little the little metal picks like you get the
dentist, right, and then they put it back on and they realized it
can be reattached with a little hook, that no epoxy was needed. You
didn't even need to do it. I think they did use something, but
they didn't need to. And they were able to photograph that mask, document
it extensively and inside and out, and they worked on that mask. So
now we have a situation in which an Egyptologist named Nicholas Reeves fees traces of
old texts in a cartouche and a longer cartouche than is there for two dot
comment documents the traces and says, I think this is a reuse name.
And look the name that I think it should be on caperat fits in it
perfectly. This is how it would work. Other Egyptologists look at it.
Are Egyptologists like MARKA. Bold Dieter Arnold. They're like, yeah, we
agree, you are correct. That name could fit into this Gold is easily
reused. And you can look if someone gave me access to twenty four care
At Gold and I had this pencil eraser, you know this, this pencil
eraser, and I rubbed on the text of the gold. They inscribed text
for like twenty minutes. I bet I could flatten that out to put a
new text in, because that's how soft twenty four Cara gold is. Right,
Yeah, it's a malleable thing, easily reused. Where Nick I think
pushes it too far is he says that the portrait the mask was also changed
when they reinscribed it for tud Doon Cong. The actual features of the face
mask, the of the Golden Mummy mask itself was taken out and reused,
and there is no evidence of that. And Katya and Christian and Katya prove
that right. They're like, this mask was a part of the mask originally.
There's no taking out and putting it back in. We don't see that.
What they don't talk about more extensively is the Egyptological historical portion of it,
the hieroglyphic portion of it, that is, taking out one text and
putting in another, and what traces of an old text. Look like they
don't talk about that because that's not their jam, that's not their specialization.
That's Nick Reeves, Jim, that's his specialization. So we have two people
with two different specializations talking about the same object with diametrically opposed opinions. One
saying no, it wasn't reused because the face mask wasn't taken out. That's
the conservators, and then one saying it was absolutely reused because I can see
this old trace of a name here that's Nick Reeves. Is there any guesstimate
as to who the unknown perhaps an unknown pharaoh of some kind. Oh?
Absolutely, the name of the pharaoh is unk heprew Ray. Oh my god,
so he actually, I mean it. You can't read it on the
two uncommon mask by no means there's only traces. When you reused, usually
do so quite completely. But the name of on Caperray would have fit in
this space very convincingly and would have indeed needed a longer cartouche. So it's
part of the king tut lineage is in early pharaoh of unknown king on Kepperray.
The only places that you see there's two places for on Caperrat. Now
we're going down a rabbit hole. That a deep one. And you guys
can google this stuff too, and also look for Reeve's article on the reuse
of that mask. He publishes it online freely so you can you can find
it. But in Nicholas re used tun on common funery mask reuse whatever,
you'll get it. But on caprew Ray is either the throne name of Nefertiti
as co king on Caparrat nefer Nefrewray or a Caperrat is the thrown name of
smenka Rey, the king who ruled after Tude on Common. Sorry, sorry,
right before you can't be after sorry right before to common and after the
death of Akanat. Did you say I'm misunderstood you? Did you say it
could have been his mother's funerally funeral mask? Never tity is probably not his
mother. Never tit, I argue in my book When Women Ruled the World,
is his grandmother? Because we were going on so many rabbit holes,
so how do we screw that one up? Okay? So common is that
his body showed that he's the product of incest. Yeah, because it is
where the deformities, Yes, my cleft palate and his club foot and the
genetics suggests that he's the product of incests. There is no information anywhere that
suggests that Nefertiti was his mother, nor that Nefertiti was Akanatan's sister. There
is a whole lot of information that proves that Akinnatin did elevate two of his
daughters to be great royal wife. And I argue that toun on Common was
the product of a father daughter sexual experience. So tun Common is the product
of incest, but not the incest of brothers sister, which is more common
perhaps. And yeah, so Nefrititi is not his mother, but Neverertiity was
co king, and I would say mostly Gyptologists agree with this, that she
was co king as an keeper rey neff for nephrew Autten and nick Reeves argues
that this funerary set, mummy mask, and maybe some of the coffins,
certainly the knopic chest and canopic coffinets, the little golden coffinets to hold the
organs, that those were made for on caprew Ray, that is, for
Nefertiti as cocaine. Nick Reeves also argues that men care on caprew Ray's men
care. I know these names are very difficult. Was Neffertiti as sole king
after the death of akanant there I would say mostly Egyptologists don't agree. I
do agree with him, but there's very little data for it. So I'm
not going to like stake my life on this is not this is the information
that's not going to see the light because you go to Cairo and if you
were to put a little new thought on the death mask of tut we don't
think it's really him. It's you know, it's going to just cause a
shit storm people know. So people don't want this to happen. Indeed,
when Nick Reeves theories came out, they held conferences about it, and Egyptologists
who were egypt not Egyptian, German, French, whoever, are there saying
that Nick Greaves is wrong because it serves people to say that he's wrong because
it allows them to maintain their access. Is American, Nick Greaves is British.
Oh okay, so he's in England, well okay, but it's still
it's still in a post colonial Egypt. Very problematic for somebody who's not Egyptian
to come along with grand theories that poke holes in the greatness of a regime.
It's a problem. It's a political problem, right, so you can
come along with amazing intellectual theories that people will be like, no, not
touching that today because it's not politically savory. It's not it's not useful for
people to touch. So it's the most interesting thing in the world for me
because you can you can go to that mass today. I was just there
and I saw the little traces of the old name. They are clear to
see, you mean, in a display case, you can see them with
the naked eye. They're right there. Oh, it's down below. It's
down below, right on the shoulder. So if oh, look he's facing
out, it's on his left shoulder. And if you look at the cartoush
on the left shoulder, you will see traces of another name. Google the
Nick Reefs article all those traces. He marks them out and very careful uh
images in his article infographics, et cetera. And and you'll be able to
see what it is I'm talking about. And how on capru ray fits in
there perfectly. How easy it is to just you know, I could take
my fit my thumb and rub it over that gold for a couple hours and
probably be able to come up with the same the same call recycling for dead,
and my guest has been recycling for death, for death exactly for death.
Excuse me, uh Kara. I want to conclude with and by the
way, for those of you listening, this book has the most beautiful photographs.
The back of the book has just and you took all of these photographs
my team and I. Yeah, they are amazing, clear one hundred and
eighty photographs. Yeah, and I have to say I applaud the publisher for
actually not going black and white on anything. No, whole book is colored.
Were originally black and white. Yeah. Yeah, it's also amazing.
So the only way to do it, well, I had to get a
subvention. Do you know what a subvention is? No, this is a
this is an academic book. Academic books don't make money, right, Yeah,
no, I know. This is a this is a research book.
It's not really made for the general public. And also, by the way,
it costs one hundred and fifty bucks. You want to get a guy,
I think is it one twenty five? But with that, yeah,
it'll be one fifty dollars. But I had to pay fifteen thousand dollars of
my own research funds. To make sure that that price stayed as low as
it is. Otherwise this book would be inaccessible for anybody. Yeah, that's
how academic publishing works. I love that your mouth is still open. You
may close it, no, because I was looking at Your assistant sent me
the digital version, which is what most people can get for forty bucks.
It's forty bucks, I don't remember, Yeah, but it's really really worth
it. What I wanted to finish with, Kara is and you spend a
great deal of time with this. The techniques that were used for reusing the
coffin, In other words, what did you find? Did they scratch off
the earlier work and then plaster it and then paint over That's what seems like.
But your early versions, the coffin that you saw at the British Museum,
that kind of sparked this whole thing. Yeah, looks like they just
covered it with plastic and the painted over it. So anything you can imagine
as possible here. It's the same with the wedding dress. Right. So
the wedding dress, like say, you're the exact sime, same size as
Mama when she was married at twenty one, right, and you fit into
it and you're like Mom like fits and there's no alterations necessary. You just
wear that dress. Say the dress is horribly ugly, and you're like,
I'll wear it, but I need to redo it completely. Then you're gonna
take it apart and have the seams to just redo it all and it'll look
like a different dress but made of the same material. So you can have
either side of that spectrum and everything in between. So essentially the easiest way
to reuse something if you really don't have any funding or ability to bring in
a priest, or you're not really even worried about the angry dead, you
just take out the body and you put a new body in, You do
your funeral, you're done. That's it. There are coffins that are of
a belonging to a woman of a certain period and there's a man of a
later period buried in the coffin, or a vice versa. Right, so
you are able to say that coffin was not made for that body inside.
That that's a reuse that they didn't modify. But they didn't modify the coffin
at all. That's the far end of the spectrum, right wow. Or
you take that coffin down to its wooden pieces. The other side of that
spectrum is like, I don't want anyone to know I've reused this. This
is a really great coffin, but I don't I can't let anyone know.
I'm gonna break it down into wood and I'm going to rebuild it. And
the only way I would know that you have re used that coffin is by
carbon dating it, which I have done and going, I got you that
wood is way too old for the coffin that you're in. You reuse that
wood? Was it coffin wood? I can look at some of the wooden
planks and make the argument that it was coffin wood that they reuse. Carbon
dating individuals that you're suspicious individual coffins me one hundred. It cost me what
like fifty each carbon date that you see Irvine because I'm UCLA, so I
am able to get well, he's got a discount. I can get a
disk out. But if you come in with like ten samples, good luck
to you. I mean it's gonna cost you thousands of dollars to test one
of these coffin. Sure, I gotta really want it. I gotta really
want to test that coffin. But so then like the one in the British
Museum, they they really wanted no one to know that they had reused it,
and so they but they didn't know how to reuse yet. Remember that
reuse isn't common except in times of crisis. That coffin in the British Museum
is mid twentieth dynasty, right when the coffin reuse is beginning, when the
crisis is beginning. And so they're like, okay, well we're going to
reuse this coffin. And they just take the coffin as decorated peace and put
new plaster on it and redecorate it. And because they varnished these pieces,
the plaster started to the new layer plaster started to pop off the old layer
plaster, which makes it so easy for me to see the reuse. I'm
like, oh, there's a whole decorated panel underneath this, and there's a
new decorated panel right on top of it. That's what they would do maybe
in the mid twentieth dynasty. By the time they got better at reuse,
they were chiseling the entire decorative surface off, so all plastered, painted,
varnished layers were removed and they would put a new plastered, painted varnish layer
over it. In such cases. There is a wonderful coffin in Florence that
I published a couple of times that has on it this twenty first Dynasty decoration.
And I'm crawling around this coffin with my flashlight looking for what I can
see, and I get to the back of the head and I go,
ha, guys, there is this tiny little spot of the old striped headdress
that does not match the new headdress, that is a centimeter lower in stratigraphic
depth than the new headdress that they missed. They had chiseled off all the
old decoration, but they did it fast. They didn't really care, and
they missed that little spot, And that little spot was there for me to
see and go, Okay, this piece was reused. They did take off
the old decoration to reuse it, but they didn't take it all off.
Isn't a nine chance that they would leave part of the previous because it's a
family heirloom, so exactly, go on, I know, yeah, they
would leave it so that there was a marker to know that this is being
reused and it's ceremonial ceremonially being repurposed, reused for this new person. Yeah,
so there are a couple of cases like this, not enough for me
to stake my life on it, but there is. But it's let me
give you the example. So there's a wonderful coffin set in the Metropolitan Museum
of Art in New York, used to be in Looks or was found in
thebes as was and it's belongs to a woman, and it belongs to a
woman whose name is Nauni. And if you look at the the set carefully,
you see that another name is there, the name of a woman named
Ta Bechnet. And and if you look at their at the papyrus scroll that
was found with this woman, Nauni, Ta Beechinet is Nauni's mother. And
so the coffin that Nauni is buried in was reused, and I can see
it. It's reused. It's probably reused two or three times. You can
you can see that number of reuses. But the name reused is obvious,
and they left it obvious, I would argue on purpose. They left it
obvious because Nauni when she died, when the family repurposed that coffin for her,
and almost certainly took Nauni's mother out of the coffin in a ritual fashion,
making sure she wasn't angry, making sure she was protected and divinized in
all of these things, kind of like the high Priest did for Ramses the
Second himself. They left her name on it when they reinscribed Naaluni's name.
I would argue that that was purposeful. I can't prove it. I can't.
I don't have a time machine to be like, excuse me, sir,
when you did this? Did you do so purposefully because you wanted my
daughter to stay together? What were you thinking? I will never know that.
I have to be sanguine with knowing that there are things that I will
never know. But the evidence suggests that this mother daughter pair were buried with
legal reuse, the mother first, the daughter second, and that for the
daughter they kept the name of the mother because you know, there's, for
example, there's Middle Kingdom coffin texts that are spells for how to find your
loved ones in the afterlife, Like this is something we're all gonna need,
right, We're all gonna die, You're gonna die, I'm gonna die.
What's the thing that people are most afraid of with death, losing everyone they
love, losing their society, losing their loved ones. That's the thing that
gets us right. What better thing than a spell to find your loved ones
in the afterlife. I can't think of anything that I would want more.
I'm taking one that coffin text with me, right, and this is a
way of providing that on the coffin. It's not a coffin text of the
Middle Kingdom. This is a New Kingdom coffin, but it's the same kind
of thing. It's that that mother daughter connection. And I can almost guarantee
that at some point daughter was interred in the tomb with mother's body right next
to her. She wasn't found that way by archaeologists, but she probably was
for some amount of time. And then it gives you the understanding that these
coffins were not meant to be owned permanently by the dead, but were rather
meant to be transformative devices so that the dead could become the osiris they were
meant to be, to become the sun god that they were meant to be,
and become that ah that activated an effective dead spirit. Then once that
had happened. You could take that coffin back from them. The work that
that coffin needed to do, the hard work had already been done. Is
it better to leave it with the dead forever? Of course? But if
you cannot do that, then you'll come up with other solutions. You gave
an example earlier of a crypt or tomb or something where there is the coffin
and next to it are the mummies. Yeah, is this something that's a
fairly regular occurrence with say administrators or I don't know. I don't know if
there's any pharaohs that have that situation, but I mean that would be a
real head scratcher. Without this data that you're presenting, you kind of fill
in the gap on a little bit of that. Well, it's tricky.
First, there's very few in tac tombs. There's very few tombs that have
their coffins remaining in place, nested as they were placed there at some point
in antiquity. Because looting, and I mean real looting is a regular thing.
People are always looking for a coffin to sell. Coffins are worth money
now there we use they're putting museums. People pay top dollar for them,
right, So people are looking for these things to sell, and so it's
a very rare thing for an archaeologist to find an in tac tomb. The
Theban tune one was found intact, so the archaeologists who published it say,
right, and found it. And yet twenty two bodies, only nine of
them in coffins. When I publish that my opinion on that tune the first
time, I said, oh, the poorer cousins are buried with the richer
cousins because they'll be able to participate in their fancier life. Because not everyone
got a coffin in inachi an egia, five percent or less got a coffin
set in a really really this is some really scarce materiality. There is not
much wood in Egypt, that much wood. This is a social separator.
This is a way for rich people to be like, I am rich.
You are not. This is my mansion, you're outside. This is my
gated area. These are my security guards. The coffin does that. It
provides a way for certain part of society to become a superhero of the dead,
if you like, and everyone else just gets to decay in the crown.
Pretty amazing. The last thing I want to ask you is, as
you observe and this wonderful book's been put together, are we seeing a traumatized
culture at the end of its life and this reusing cough because this seems so
out of context, out of place with all their ritual they're writing the Book
of the Dead, you know, it's like, oh, you know,
we remove your organs, we place them in jars, and we're going to
set it all up. It's going to beautifully organized. Now we want to
reuse your cough and get out. It's right to reuse the canopic chess,
maybe not the jars, but all of this. They're reusing everything. It's
kind of and the answer is yes. There is an anxiety that you can
note in the texts of the period. There is a desire to hide what
it is they're doing. And I can see that as I track the reuse
and I look at how it's done, that there's an interest in hiding most
of the reuse in any way that they can. There's there's a real worrying
consternation. So much so, and first thing I want to say is that
this is not Egypt's first trauma. This is a three thousand year old time
period. They had been through the first intermediate period after the collapse of the
Old Kingdom, the second intermediate period with the collapse of the Middle Kingdom.
Now we're dealing with the third intermediate peer with the collapse of the New Kingdom.
So this isn't the first time they have gone through something like this,
but it is the first time in living memory for the people who are going
through it, so it's a very meaningful and difficult time. The second thing
is that it makes people bury. Elite people who get to spend all of
this money on their coffins, they bury themselves differently from this time on.
So when this coffin reuse starts to peter off, it starts to subside.
The wealthy people of the twenty second Dynasty are like, Okay, I don't
trust anybody. I don't trust you, mister priest, I don't trust you.
My next generation is coming after me. I don't trust anybody. So
they have all of these crazy defensive rituals. I'll just give you one.
Instead of using wood for the innermost body container, they use something called cartonage,
which is like a papier mache that you mold around the body when it's
still wet, and they laced it up the back or they attached it in
some way. And cartonage is not something that you want to that you can
easily reuse. And to open that coffin you have to break it. It's
kind of like an old school piggybank that doesn't have the bottom opening, right.
You have to crack it open, you have to break it. Anybody
would know if you have opened up this carteonage to be absolutely And why would
they be worried about that? Well, because obviously their mummy has all kinds
of amulets on it. Their mummy is in the wrappings, has all kinds
of precious things, maybe gold, maybe, maybe silver, maybe other things.
They don't want anyone going in and taking that material. So they're like,
I want to make sure you, priests, whom I really don't trust
anymore, that you're doing it right. So do it in front of my
eyes. And they're like, okay, okay, we got it. And
they wrap them all up and do it in front of their eyes. They're
like, I'm not ready. I'm not done yet. They develop this new
this new cultural ritual embalming technique in which they pour this black viscous varnishy man
resin all over the dead body and over that cartonage. They seal it and
it's sticky and if anyone tries to touch it, they'll have black fingers,
and it's like they seal it. It's like show me, show me that
you're not going to get in there. Seal it. And so they actually
make the high priests or for priests, any priest who's a funerary priest,
seal the coffin in front of their eyes, because there is so little trust
in this, in this profession that is burying and taking all with you know,
I bury with the Lartian, I take with the left, and and
it's or this generational. You can't control what people are gonna do after you.
You can't control your own funeral. The dead do not bury themselves,
as the old adage goes, So you don't know what's gonna happen. So
you create a system in which people have to bury you in a certain way
that is more protected. And it's pretty crazy that the Egyptians were so traumatized
by all of this. They're like, Okay, we're not going to get
rid of the Conference of the Tombs and all this stuff. We love it.
It works for us. It helps us keep our highly place. But
we're not going to do it in the way that we've been doing it because
it's stupid. We're going to be clever about it. I think there's a
I think there's a lot of rebound, a lot of material that others are
going to pick up from this book. I mean, I hope so that's
what it's totally totally But I have to say this, Kara, you're an
anomalist, you really are. You find this stuff and you're like, wait
a minute, I got to more. I gotta know more. I gotta
know. I have to figure it out pages later. It's a book,
girl, and there's another volume to come and I'm working on and it's taken
so long. Ah, so you know, but this is to you know,
you write a popular book. I'm not saying that's easy. It's not
easy, but it doesn't I don't have to collect as much data. I'm
more standing on the shoulders of giants to write that book, right. And
I was reading it and you're referring, referring, referring to those who came
before you. Oh my god, this book now, but Facebook, I
had to collect the data myself. I had to go out to each museum.
I had to take those photos myself because nobody photographs a coffin the way
I need you to photograph a coffin. They're not going to open it up.
You open up the coffin, you see everything they don't want you to
see. I'm like, I got you now, Now I can tell that
this is a reuse piece. Do you just look at the outside and what's
pretty. That's why you're not going to see it. And that's why people
are so surprised. They're like, are you sure. I'm like, let's
open up your coffin together. Well, little bit it up and they're like,
oh my god, I see what you're saying. Oh yeah, but
it's yeah, it's data. You have to work with the data. Yeah.
The book is Recycling for Death. You can get a digital copy on
Amazon. I just saw it. It just came out a couple of weeks
ago, and I'm going through it again, Cliff. It's coming out in
August. Now. They gave you no I saw it on I saw it
at Amazon today. Isn't that a pre order? Oh? I thought it
was only the digital version was available. Maybe I'm wrong. That is possible.
That is completely possible. Okay, well they if they do change it,
is there any chance that you'll have a pre offer with a lower price.
I can't control what the publisher does. Oh, it's a publisher.
It's an academic publisher too. And yeah it's an American University in Cairo press.
And so I will I will do what they tell me to do.
But but if the Kingdom price, I think the kindle price is lower,
which is great. Yeah forty bucks, yeah for five hundred pages. Yeah.
I want to mention also that Kara has a podcast that she launched a
couple of years ago that's great. It's called Ancient Now and I was listening
to it and it's her dialogue and like we're doing right now with her co
is Amber a regular or she just show up once in a while? Amber
shows up. Amber is always there and sometimes on the podcast. So Amber
Amber is my my other half. And then my other co host is Jordan
Glazinski. So it's Amber Myer as well as and Jordan gz And it's great
because Caro just lets it rip. And I love that she's not she's I
mean, she's orthodox, she's an academic, but she's not old school in
many ways, and she's really bright and open and this book is a is
a good representative of where you're going. So Kara, it's been a pleasure
as always and continues success. And I mean, I started reading this book,
but I got to the back where all these photos were. That's a
book in its own. It's like a it's like a what what are they
called a coffee table book where you go make a big one and expand because
of the photos. I don't know what camera work you're using, but it's
very high quality, uh reflex camera. Thank you. We did our best.
I'm no photographer, so when I go in, I'm working on my
iPad and working with software that helps me keep the photo and the text together.
So I'm just taking iPad photos. But the you know, the photographers
that I bring with me, they really know what they're doing and are able
to get in there. And then I'll be looking, I'm like, get
that detail, get that detail. But sometimes we use one of my iPad
photos if it's a close up detail. Sometimes I get my work in there,
but mostly it's their better work than mine. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
And to be able to tell which ones have been reused and not.
You probably have a really trained eye now so that you can talk to your
students and go, okay, look for this and this and this. Yeah.
Yeah, you learn by doing, and now I can teach what I
have figured out, which I love doing. I think it's great and run
with it. And see, I want to just close by saying that you
have a number of of acquilades and references. And even Zahieh Wats is like,
good job. And he's not one for high praising. He's you know,
he has his own ego and whatever. But he actually said something nice,
which is good. I know I got I got a blurb from him
on the back of the book, which is really great. I was really
pleased. All right, hey, thanks again, let's not be strangers.
Have been more than a year. Let's get you back next time. Well,
yeah, because my next book, Clift, it's on Nefertiti. This
this is shocking, you know what she had to say. I mean,
I was just in Cairo a few weeks ago, back in May, and
I saw this king death mask and all his adornment, adornment, and now
I'm shocked. So you know, I'm going to I have some really good
photographs up close and personal of this death. I'm gonna put it up on
our Facebook Earth Ancients page, both pages, as well as some other items
that she mentioned, and also I will pull a few photographs from her book
so you can check them out again. Her books called Recycling for Death.
It's over five hundred pages. I had to say this too. When it
comes out, it's gonna be about one hundred and fifty bucks, so it's
more of an academic college text than it is for general reading. If you're
a researcher, you should probably look into it. But I got a digital
copy of it and it's a monster. I mean, the whole last third
of the book is all illustrations and photographs of these coffins. And she's got
some of the tout material in there too, and I don't think she highlights
where the previous owner's name is, but we'll get a sense of it and
I'll put them up. So I'm going to up, like I said,
probably ten to twenty images on Facebook to check out. But what a shocker,
What a complete shocker. King Tut's death mask with his world famous golden
death mask, is not him. It's modified it with somebody else's you know.
And the thing is, I really love having care on the show because
she just tells it like it is. As an ewtertologist, you do your
research and then you leave it for someone else to pick up. And I
believe that's also that goes for non orthodox docs, scientists like Chris dun and
Hancock and so forth. And we're gonna have Luke Cavan's on the show in
a few weeks. When you hear from someone who's a fresh graduate who's an
anthropologist, he acknowledges Hancock, he acknowledges these other non academic research investigation because
of their contributions. We need all of this data. You don't pooh pooh
it in the face of the possibilities, but can you believe that you know?
And she gave us an idea, Kara gives us an idea of what's
going on with these people's she's reading from whatever text. But they have to
and she admits this, and I love that she admits this. They have
to provide educated guesses, they have to have theories, they have to make
hypothesis on what is going through the minds of these people because obviously she's not
there, and she says this. You know, she's not going, well,
this is what we know. No, she says it right out.
These are educated guesses on what was going on with these pharaohs and this time
period. Now you know she's saying new kingdom, what nineteenth dynasty of the
twenty second I think it goes earlier than that. I think it goes way
earlier than that. So who knows. I mean, it's a it's a
shocker. And really I think, and you know what, it really remains
to see to be seen if this information will be released to the general public,
because it's devastating. It's devastating. I mean, these pharaohs are they're
scratching and calling scrawl, scratching and trying to exist in going and unwrapping.
Did you hear her talk about unwrapping mummies to extract the gold and the gems.
The other thing was that I had an image of this is what he's
saying. They're reusing the coffins, right, So they take the coffin out
of a noted pharaoh or an administrator, they remove the mummy, they put
it down on the ground, and they put a new mummy in and then
replaster and then put a new uh on it. Oh god, wow,
wow, really amazing. I love her on this program and I support Kara,
and she launched a new podcast. I think she I think it's interesting
that she named her podcast afterlife and because there's so much thought of death in
the whole Egyptian existence, you know. But I wonder if that made them
morbid. I wonder if it made them they kind of lost a perspective to
go in and to remove mummies from from coffins and the jewelry and the gold
and the death masks. I'm still just completely shocked at that whole thing.
So fun having her on the program. And again, I'll have a gallery
of these images from her book as well as King Touch death Mask on Facebook.
Hey, if you're enjoying Earth Ancients and Destiny, please consider becoming a
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Forward Slash Earth Ancients. Hey, we have two more tours before the end
of the year. If you are thinking of your vacation, come out and
join us in Turkey. That's August fourteenth through the twenty fourth. We all
meet in Istanbul. It's a fantastic tour. We're just we're updating the itinerary
and have just added karenhan Teppe. This is the site of these tall figures
that they've just discovered. One of them is I think it is about fourteen
feet tall. Is huge, and we'll have a chance to see all the
digs, the museums that's been added that's close by. We'll see Cappadocia,
Darren Kuru. It is a blast. It's going to be two weeks of
intense viewing. Our host is Mohammed Ambraheem and for more information go to earth
Ancients dot com forward slash Tours. Check it out. These tours are extremely
reasonable. They're about half the price that you'll see on a general tour with
the same itinerary. All right, and then the final tour of the year
is the Sacred Temples of Mexico. This is Maya Ville, my favorite place.
November eighth through the seventeenth of this year, twenty twenty four, we're
gonna climb pyramids and a lot of places. You can't go and climb anything,
but we've made special provisions for everyone to climb the Great Pyramid at Ushmol,
the ek Balam Pyramid, which is a long column. You had to
stop a couple of times as you're entering the top area. And then Mayapan,
which is really our training ground to learn how to walk on pyramids.
For the full itinerary and more information, go to earth Ancients dot com Forward
slash Tours and see the whole thing. It is a great tour. It's
one of my favorite places, and it's sacred, hollowed ground. His energy
energy bubbling everywhere in these places, So earth Ancients dot com forward slash Tours.
All right, that's it for this program. I want to think my
guest today, doctor Kara Cooney, coming to us from southern California. As
always the team of Gail tour, Mark Foster, and everyone who makes this
thing happen. Thank you, and you guys are rock all right, take
care of be well and we will talk to you next time.