Speaker 1: Oh hey, it's your camp counselor. It's only two years
Speaker 1: older than you, but seems just ancient ali Ward back
Speaker 1: with another episode of Ologies. This episode has been roughly
Speaker 1: eleven years in the making. Well, I guess five thousand
Speaker 1: years in the making. Now listen. If you're already into Egyptology,
Speaker 1: this episode offers kind of a different look at Egyptian
Speaker 1: history and its parallels to our culture. Now, if you
Speaker 1: have no knowledge of Egyptology at all, don't worry. We're
Speaker 1: going to talk about cats and tombs and hieroglyphs and
Speaker 1: ancient aliens. That's going to happen also, But first, a
Speaker 1: quick thanks to the patrons at patreon dot com slash
Speaker 1: Ologies who donate a dollar or more a month just
Speaker 1: to keep the podcast going. You're doing it this podcast,
Speaker 1: which this week was in the top ten science podcast
Speaker 1: on iTunes. Thank you as always for that. It's made
Speaker 1: totally independently. Patrons fund it so I can hire an
Speaker 1: editor and get these out on time every Tuesday. So
Speaker 1: thank you to everyone who supports a show. Also by
Speaker 1: putting ologiesmerch dot com items onto your body. The link
Speaker 1: is in the show notes. We have a bunch of
Speaker 1: fall collogies, new stuff up. That's just excellent. It's very
Speaker 1: scholastic looking. You can also support for zero dollars just
Speaker 1: by tweeting or gramming or telling a friend say, hey,
Speaker 1: listen to this if you want. You can rate and
Speaker 1: review and subscribe. That also helps you know. Award here
Speaker 1: reads all your reviews because I find them quite touching.
Speaker 1: And to prove it, I'm going to read one by
Speaker 1: JVC fifty five, who said, if you like learning things
Speaker 1: from people who are so genuinely excited that sometimes they
Speaker 1: have to swear, then this is the podcast for you.
Speaker 1: Five million stars. I heck and agree. Man. Okay, Egyptology,
Speaker 1: let's get into it. Obviously it is a study of Egypt.
Speaker 1: Come on, but where does the word Egypt come from?
Speaker 1: So it comes from a word meaning the temple of
Speaker 1: taw At Karnak. This is in Luxor, which is apparently
Speaker 1: not just a moderately priced theme hotel in Nevada. In fact,
Speaker 1: it's near a place called Memphis. Did you know there's
Speaker 1: a Memphis in Egypt. It's on the Nile River, and Memphis, Tennessee,
Speaker 1: is on the Mississippi River. That's why they named it that.
Speaker 1: Did you know that I did not know that. So
Speaker 1: I already went down like an hour long rabbit hole
Speaker 1: researching this episode, and we're still in the intro. So
Speaker 1: let's get onto it. So on to the ologist. So
Speaker 1: eleven years ago, I was watching some late night TV
Speaker 1: and I saw an egyptologist as a guest on Craig Ferguson,
Speaker 1: and I was like, what Egyptologists can be on late
Speaker 1: night talk shows, just chatting about tombs and monuments and
Speaker 1: female rulers alongside people like Cedric the entertainer, who was
Speaker 1: also on that episode promoting a slapstick film about a
Speaker 1: corpse in a hotel room. Anyway, I'm like, this egyptologist rules.
Speaker 1: And I started looking into her work, and whenever her
Speaker 1: name would come up in the news with a new
Speaker 1: book or a new show on Discovery, I would be like, yes, woman,
Speaker 1: get it. So cut to me starting ologies thinking, dude,
Speaker 1: what if I did Egyptology and I got to interview her?
Speaker 1: Would I die on the spot. There's only one way
Speaker 1: to find out. So I emailed her and we set
Speaker 1: a date. She was like sure, I drove an hour
Speaker 1: to our house. So excited, so nervous, I started setting
Speaker 1: up my mics and I realized with some horror that
Speaker 1: my zoom recorder was not in my equipment bag, and
Speaker 1: my face became very hot and red, and sitting in
Speaker 1: her kitchen table, I almost just died of sheer mortification, like, Mummy,
Speaker 1: me up, I'm done, But she was so understanding, and
Speaker 1: I slinked off to my car, just defeated by my
Speaker 1: own idiocy. We said another date. I showed up again,
Speaker 1: this time with a bottle of Japanese whiskey as an
Speaker 1: I'm sorry token. It was ten am, so we did
Speaker 1: not drink it while recording, but we were off to
Speaker 1: the races. I had my equipment. We did the interview,
Speaker 1: and I wish this episode was like six hours long
Speaker 1: because there are so many things I wanted to ask her.
Speaker 1: There's so much to know about ancient Egypt. But we
Speaker 1: focused a lot on her really astonishing work right about
Speaker 1: female kings and the sociology of ancient and modern patriarchies,
Speaker 1: and also her work as an expert in coffins and
Speaker 1: if there's a Mummy's Curse and dongs of antiquity, and
Speaker 1: if you don't have a favorite egyptologist, well, hot damn,
Speaker 1: you're about to. She's a professor of Egyptian Art and
Speaker 1: Architecture at UCLA, and she's been on archaeological digs, curated
Speaker 1: museum exhibits, traveled the world inspecting Egyptian coffins, has appeared
Speaker 1: on multiple Discovery Channel and History Channel archaeology shows. She
Speaker 1: wrote The Woman Who Would Be King Chepsuit's Rise to
Speaker 1: Power in Ancient Egypt and has another book duout November
Speaker 1: called When Women Rule the World Six Queens of Egypt.
Speaker 1: So straight out of the gate, we started talking about
Speaker 1: my forgetting equipment the first time, and the course of
Speaker 1: multitasking and coffins and her double identities, and she's just
Speaker 1: amazing and I'm so honored to dig in to this
Speaker 1: chat with Egyptologists. Doctor Cathlin aka Kara Cooney. I have
Speaker 1: a recorder this time. Very exciting.
Speaker 2: You realize when you're doing too many things, when when
Speaker 2: you forget stuff, like like when I showed up in
Speaker 2: Egypt without any flashlights at all to look at the coffins,
Speaker 2: and I realized and I had to go to the
Speaker 2: store and buy some things that i'd have a UV light.
Speaker 2: But I realized I was just doing too many things
Speaker 2: many things.
Speaker 1: Do you need a UV light to look at coffins.
Speaker 2: It's very helpful because the uv you can see you
Speaker 2: get an idea of whether the varnish is modern or ancient.
Speaker 2: Because in museums they've messed up these coffins so much
Speaker 2: by overpainting them, over varnishing them, restoring them, and so
Speaker 2: then you have to figure out first what's ancient and
Speaker 2: what's modern. And this happens more in European museums than
Speaker 2: in Egyptian museums. It happens more in Protestant places than
Speaker 2: in Catholic places.
Speaker 1: Really, why do you get it?
Speaker 2: Because there's this Protestant work ethic, and people feel they
Speaker 2: should be doing something, and so they miss up their
Speaker 2: own pieces. And the coffins north of the of the
Speaker 2: Protestant Catholic divide in Europe are more fake than they
Speaker 2: are real. And the amount of time it would take
Speaker 2: to take all of that new paint and new varnish
Speaker 2: off is pretty extensive, and nobody does it. And I
Speaker 2: saw one coffin in Leiden in the Netherlands, and I
Speaker 2: was standing with the curator and we took out the
Speaker 2: old publication and we realized the entire thing was repainted
Speaker 2: with new paint.
Speaker 1: They just well hands, Idle hands are the devil's work.
Speaker 2: I guess in places where you take more coffee breaks
Speaker 2: and where work is not as much of a driver
Speaker 2: of human identity, there the coffins are less messed up.
Speaker 1: Oh my god.
Speaker 2: So it's funny.
Speaker 1: No, that's just enough emphany waiting to happen.
Speaker 2: Do less, Yeah, do less, I'll do less. Don't mess
Speaker 2: with your objects. I don't need to.
Speaker 1: So I have a bazilion questions. Yeah, before I go
Speaker 1: for as fast as I can in addressing you. Kara Cooney,
Speaker 1: Kathleen Cooney or doctor Kathlyn Cooney.
Speaker 2: Yes, it's a problem on many levels. It's a problem
Speaker 2: that my mother started by naming me Kathlin, which is
Speaker 2: my grandmother's name on my father's Irish side, And yet
Speaker 2: she didn't like the name Kathy, so she nicknamed me
Speaker 2: Kara in advance, and Kara obviously fits my personality better.
Speaker 2: No one can pronounce Kathlin Kathleen Catherine, and I say no,
Speaker 2: it's Kathlin and they look at me like I'm crazy.
Speaker 2: And so that's my real name on every document that's official,
Speaker 2: and Kara appears nowhere that's official. So I use it
Speaker 2: to create kind of a double personality, where Kathleen M.
Speaker 2: Cooney is my academic name and Kara Cooney is my
Speaker 2: popular names. I don't put the doctor in front of
Speaker 2: my name because I'm also I think I have other
Speaker 2: things that give me that authority. I'm chair of my
Speaker 2: Department of neary Stern Language and Cultures at UCLA. I've
Speaker 2: been a professor there since two thousand and nine. I
Speaker 2: have about ten graduate students, many of whom have finished
Speaker 2: with their own PhDs, and call me doctor Moteur. So
Speaker 2: I'm cool with just Karacuney.
Speaker 1: And women empower is something that definitely you were an
Speaker 1: authority on, especially looking at it through the lens of Egyptology.
Speaker 1: So your forthcoming book, which was so exciting when women
Speaker 1: Rule the World Six Queens of Egypt coming out on
Speaker 1: election day? Was that an accident?
Speaker 2: It wasn't an accident for the editors in that geo.
Speaker 2: But I didn't tell them to do that. This is
Speaker 2: you know, these women, they keep following me and haunting
Speaker 2: me and lurking behind me and filling my footprints as
Speaker 2: I walk. Because I didn't want to be known as
Speaker 2: the chick lit nonfiction girl.
Speaker 1: Before she became an author and a UCLA professor. Kara
Speaker 1: got her BA in Humanities and German in Austin, Texas
Speaker 1: and her PhD in Egyptian Art and Archaeology at Johns
Speaker 1: Hopkins University. And she didn't intend to focus on female
Speaker 1: rulers for her literary career, but they kept coming up
Speaker 1: in the classes she was teaching, And she says, by
Speaker 1: writing the books, she's seen new patterns in history that
Speaker 1: she hadn't even seen in the classroom before. But before
Speaker 1: we get to that, let's start at a very very beginning.
Speaker 1: Let's go way back. Well, let's start at the beginning. Now,
Speaker 1: let's start about why you're an egyptologist. Okay, I know
Speaker 1: that this question comes up like daily for you, and
Speaker 1: the answer is always like, I don't know, kind of
Speaker 1: you saw some books when your kid, Your parents brought
Speaker 1: back some books from the London Museum, right.
Speaker 2: From the British Museum in London. Yes, And I remember
Speaker 2: when my mom brought those books home. She brought a
Speaker 2: book home on mummies, and she brought these Do you
Speaker 2: know the publisher Osborne, It's a wonderful publisher. They do
Speaker 2: children's books that have all kinds of drawings about daily life,
Speaker 2: or little detailed, you know, very detailed, tiny drawings of
Speaker 2: people tanning hides or washing clothes or what it's like
Speaker 2: to take a bath or whatever, in all little animated figures,
Speaker 2: and then little captions can to all of these pictures.
Speaker 1: I just looked up these books by the publisher us Born,
Speaker 1: and I can confirm that they are cute as hell.
Speaker 2: And I had one for Rome, one for the medieval world,
Speaker 2: medieval Europe, one for Egypt, and the last one I
Speaker 2: can't remember right now, but Egypt was the one that
Speaker 2: just struck me as the most interesting. It bit me
Speaker 2: and it never let go. And yes, you're right. This
Speaker 2: is the question that I'm asked the most out of
Speaker 2: any other why are you an Egyptologist? And I always
Speaker 2: give a too pronged answer. Number one, I have no
Speaker 2: freaking idea. It's the one question that an Egyptologist would
Speaker 2: never ask another egyptologist, or a specialist of ancient Rome
Speaker 2: would never ask another Romanist, because it's a ridiculously stupid
Speaker 2: thing to do. You have to spend eight years longer,
Speaker 2: eight to ten years longer in school than everybody else.
Speaker 2: You live a life of poverty in comparison to other
Speaker 2: people who have the same education level. It's not a
Speaker 2: clever thing to do. It is a calling. It's something
Speaker 2: you do because you love it or you just you
Speaker 2: have to solve these problems. So we don't ask each
Speaker 2: other that, but other people ask us that all the time.
Speaker 2: And so my answer is, I don't know why. It's
Speaker 2: something that is that I'm curious about myself. Why I
Speaker 2: see the world better through the lens of an ancient
Speaker 2: authoritarian regime than I do just by looking at my
Speaker 2: own world around me. But it's the truth. And then
Speaker 2: number two, the real answer to your question is I'm
Speaker 2: an upper middle class white chick, which means that while
Speaker 2: my brother was encouraged to become a lawyer, and he did,
Speaker 2: even though he would be a would have been a
Speaker 2: great academic, I was allowed to follow my heart as
Speaker 2: a woman. And there was still when I was growing
Speaker 2: up in the seventies and eighties, this idea that I
Speaker 2: was not necessarily meant to be the breadwinner in my family,
Speaker 2: and I was allowed to be more impractical imprudent, and
Speaker 2: I was allowed to do that.
Speaker 1: Just take note the following should be considered a tutorial
Speaker 1: by Karakuni on acknowledging privilege. She just nails it.
Speaker 2: So And of course the upper middle class part is
Speaker 2: pretty clear. I had the education level and access to
Speaker 2: these more difficult to acquire academic cultures spaces, and so
Speaker 2: it was something that I was able to move into
Speaker 2: quite easily that other people have a much harder time
Speaker 2: finding their way into. Or if you grow up African
Speaker 2: American in this country and you're constantly assaulted with white
Speaker 2: privilege all around you, if you have a chance to
Speaker 2: study the ancient world, you might do it through a
Speaker 2: different political lens, through a lens of afrocentrism, rather than
Speaker 2: the lens of the classical white world, or what is
Speaker 2: perceived is the classical white world. And most people who
Speaker 2: study ancient Egypt in the United States and in Britain
Speaker 2: and in Europe are white people. It's a very colonial science,
Speaker 2: and it's off putting for people of color.
Speaker 1: And do you come up against any resistance or friction
Speaker 1: with that, and and kind of how do you grapple
Speaker 1: with that.
Speaker 2: It's a very interesting subject to me, how the ancient
Speaker 2: world is politicized, claimed and used to bolster certain kinds
Speaker 2: of identities. It's something that we need to pay attention to.
Speaker 2: There are reasons that when the Lakhma exhibition for King
Speaker 2: Tut came out in two thousand and five and he
Speaker 2: was depicted as a white barbarer streisand and in the
Speaker 2: reconstruction that the some French team made and National Geographic
Speaker 2: put on their cover, there's a reason that we have
Speaker 2: people picketing out front of the museum saying King Tut
Speaker 2: is back and he's black, because there are claims about
Speaker 2: his racial and ethnic identity that are done in a
Speaker 2: way that is serving certain populations. And if we're not
Speaker 2: aware of that and why those things are happening, then
Speaker 2: we need to step back and think about it. So
Speaker 2: race and identity, these are things that I apply to
Speaker 2: my classes, and that Ancient Egypt is very helpful because
Speaker 2: it provides a means of talking about these things, but
Speaker 2: a thousand years removed.
Speaker 1: Kara also explained that even some well known Egyptian born
Speaker 1: Egyptologists have been known to whitewash ancient Egyptians because of
Speaker 1: just long entrenched colonialism and racism that identifies power with
Speaker 1: European colonists, and that misrepresentation of Egyptians is tragic, and
Speaker 1: she says, pretty frankly not accurate.
Speaker 2: As I always say, if any of the Egyptians that
Speaker 2: I know lived in Alabama in the fifties, they would
Speaker 2: have sat at the back of the bus or have
Speaker 2: reached a lot of or created a lot of problems
Speaker 2: for themselves.
Speaker 1: And how much of your work, your career as an Egyptologist,
Speaker 1: is spent in Egypt, and how much is spent in
Speaker 1: museums around the world and in classrooms here in la.
Speaker 2: Oh Most of it is here. So I have been
Speaker 2: to in Europe and the United States, probably twenty five
Speaker 2: different museums. It's a lot of museum work. You go in,
Speaker 2: you figure out what the curators, what your plan is
Speaker 2: it is. You go into storage, you open up thetrains
Speaker 2: if possible, you pull things out if possible. Vatrin is
Speaker 2: a case in the museum viewing space. So it's yeah,
Speaker 2: generally the word that Egyptologists use. It's a very old
Speaker 2: fashioned word.
Speaker 1: I thought it meant like a ceramic bucket, a guts
Speaker 1: or a mummy case.
Speaker 2: No, no, vitrine is essentially just a container. I think
Speaker 2: probably a good Latin word. We could look it up.
Speaker 1: Okay, So news to me, a vitrine is a glass
Speaker 1: display case. Did you know that, Like, if you tried
Speaker 1: to steal something from a museum, you would have to
Speaker 1: bust a vitrine. And also don't do that. Now the
Speaker 1: etymology for victrine is Latin means glass. It has nothing
Speaker 1: to do with a latrine. And then I was like,
Speaker 1: I wonder if there are vitreine latrines. So, with much hesitation,
Speaker 1: I googled glass toilets and happened upon a public bathroom
Speaker 1: in London, just in the middle of busy city foot
Speaker 1: traffic that's made of one way glass so no one
Speaker 1: can see but when you're inside you can still see
Speaker 1: out like everyone's just walking around as if the walls
Speaker 1: were clear. And it is a deeply anxiety provoking object.
Speaker 1: And it's also rightfully listed as one of the six
Speaker 1: most terrifying restrooms in the world by Cracked dot com. Okay,
Speaker 1: back to it before I ask Kara about Egyptian metriarchs.
Speaker 1: Let's get to coffins.
Speaker 2: But I'm not an Egyptologist who's doing dirt archaeology, who's
Speaker 2: opening up tombs, who's excavating in any way, and I
Speaker 2: wouldn't know how to do it even if I was
Speaker 2: given the opportunity. So leave that to the archaeologists.
Speaker 1: And would you say that a lot of your work
Speaker 1: deals with coffins with paperwork with I mean, when you
Speaker 1: are looking at artifacts, what's your bread and butter artifact? Wise?
Speaker 2: Oh, my bread and butter artifact is a coffin, which
Speaker 2: is weird, right? And I start my I have a
Speaker 2: public lecture that I've been doing around the country, a
Speaker 2: variety of them, but one is the you know why
Speaker 2: women don't rule the world and why they should? And
Speaker 2: I start with me looking at a coffin, and I
Speaker 2: say that I'm a coffin expert, and it always gets
Speaker 2: a laugh because it's the weirdest thing that you can
Speaker 2: possibly imagine to tell people. Oh, yeah, I'm an expert
Speaker 2: in coffins. You put any Egyptian coffin in front of me,
Speaker 2: and I'll know early eighteenth dynasty, late eighteenth dynasty, when
Speaker 2: in the nineteenth if it's twenty aeth or twenty first,
Speaker 2: and I can talk all about the details of these coffins.
Speaker 2: It's strange and weird, and you're thinking to yourself, why
Speaker 2: ever would someone devote their life to that? But if
Speaker 2: you what was less wedding you went to.
Speaker 1: Oh god, I feel like I go to like six
Speaker 1: a year, but I went to one like three weeks ago.
Speaker 2: And when the bride hits the aisle, you turn and
Speaker 2: you see her dress, and you can make snap judgments
Speaker 2: about everything about her socioeconomic level, her education level, her ethnicity,
Speaker 2: her religion, her political perspectives. You can make snap judgments
Speaker 2: about all kinds of things. Age. The age is staring
Speaker 2: you in the face. But maybe she's had really good
Speaker 2: classic surgery, and so you can make some other conclusions
Speaker 2: about age. Oh no la so yeah, yeah, a location, right,
Speaker 2: geographic regional identity. We could throw that in as well.
Speaker 2: Hawaiian wedding is going to be very different from a
Speaker 2: wedding at the Pierre and in New York. And this
Speaker 2: is how I view coffins. So the coffins for me
Speaker 2: are not oh, the land of the dead and some
Speaker 2: sort of ritual and all of this religion and the
Speaker 2: god Thoth and Anubis and mummification and all of that
Speaker 2: is interesting, but it's been done to death, and it's
Speaker 2: what Egyptologists have focused on the most. So I look
Speaker 2: at these coffins as social documents, as ways of understanding
Speaker 2: how the Egyptians themselves competed with the Joneses or the
Speaker 2: pawn Ebbs, or how they displayed their place in the
Speaker 2: world and maintained their social power thereby.
Speaker 1: So they didn't have BMW's or Suzuki Samurais or Bentley's
Speaker 1: back then. So it was like, that's cool, we'll just
Speaker 1: wait until you're dead and then we'll scrutinize your coffin, buddy.
Speaker 2: And so I lookt coffins to see if a person, well,
Speaker 2: let me put it this way, when you're hanging out
Speaker 2: with really rich people and they have conversations that go
Speaker 2: over your head because the details of what the really
Speaker 2: rich know about clothing or fabrics or real estate or
Speaker 2: hedge funds, it goes over my head and I have
Speaker 2: no idea what the hell they're talking about. Rich people
Speaker 2: are going to have a different cultural milieu, and you
Speaker 2: can see the same thing in a coffin. There are,
Speaker 2: amongst the very rich the very wealthy, there are details
Speaker 2: of separation that only the knowledgeable would have been able
Speaker 2: to pick apart, critique, comment upon, and everyone else would
Speaker 2: have been like ooh bluo ooh gold, ooh whatever. And
Speaker 2: I like to see who's having a conversation with whom
Speaker 2: and who are they displaying too. And I've applied this
Speaker 2: to mummies as well. There's a particular time period in
Speaker 2: ancient Egypt, the twenty first dynasty, when the elites of
Speaker 2: Egypt tricked out their mummies, like you cannot really stuffed
Speaker 2: underneath the facial tissue. They would separate the skin from
Speaker 2: the muscle, make incisions like we wouldn't, almost in the
Speaker 2: same places that we make plastic surgery incisions, and stuff.
Speaker 2: Their face is full of this fatty sawdust material to
Speaker 2: give them a lifelike sort of look. They put in
Speaker 2: glass eyes. They attached false hair, sometimes real humans, sometimes yarn.
Speaker 2: They would plaster the face and then paint it a
Speaker 2: nice skin color, giving it a kind of rouge. If
Speaker 2: it was a female, they put peppercorns in the nose
Speaker 2: so it wouldn't collapse. They even stuffed arms and chests
Speaker 2: when it got really, really extravagant. And I looked at
Speaker 2: this and I'm like, that's the strangest thing, because a
Speaker 2: mummy is meant to be hidden bound in these bandages
Speaker 2: and not meant to be seen by prying eyes, and
Speaker 2: yet they're pulling all of their wealth and putting it
Speaker 2: into their bodies and making their bodies into kind of
Speaker 2: standalone coffins. And I was able to conclude that we're
Speaker 2: talking about a society of very wealthy and exclusive people
Speaker 2: who are showing ten other people a dozen other people
Speaker 2: the bodies of their dead family members and are able
Speaker 2: to compete that way, keeping all of the unclean masses
Speaker 2: out of the conversation entirely. And it's a competition that
Speaker 2: didn't last very long. As soon as society changed a
Speaker 2: little bit, then this over the top mummification stopped, and
Speaker 2: people again started putting all of their wealth into the
Speaker 2: coffins that contained the corpse on the outside rather than
Speaker 2: the inside, which is a very human thing to do.
Speaker 2: It's not a normal human thing to buy an amazingly
Speaker 2: beautiful diamond ring and then never wear it, never show it.
Speaker 1: Or maybe it's like MTV's Cribs.
Speaker 2: I would compare it more to having a really nice
Speaker 2: bedroom that very few people are able to see, but
Speaker 2: it's a tricked out and amazing bedroom that you invite
Speaker 2: a few people to see, and then word of mouth
Speaker 2: spreads and people talk about it. Or there's some sort
Speaker 2: of feature done in a magazine, but it's many steps removed,
Speaker 2: and there's a way of getting prestige that way.
Speaker 1: This is where it.
Speaker 2: All goes down, folks, This is where the magic happens.
Speaker 2: So essentially, when gender is not involved, all of my
Speaker 2: work involves social competition. And I think that's very much
Speaker 2: because of the way I grew up in Houston, Texas
Speaker 2: in a very competitive environment. Big hair, oh, big hair,
Speaker 2: big cars, big everything, and I found it very tedious
Speaker 2: and annoying, and so I'm interested in how people do
Speaker 2: it and why they do it.
Speaker 1: Kara says that as a graduate student, she was reading
Speaker 1: about contracts and protocol of ancient artists, and her advisor,
Speaker 1: a very badass egyptologist named doctor Betsy Bryan, suggested.
Speaker 2: Well, why don't you look into coffins and look into
Speaker 2: this book by jak Jansen called and wait for it.
Speaker 2: This is crazy. This gives you an idea of how
Speaker 2: academics were commodity prices in the Ramsid period. Doesn't that
Speaker 2: sound like you want to kill yourself? And I went
Speaker 2: through commodity prices in the Ramsid Period, which is like
Speaker 2: a seven hundred page tome, and I found a section
Speaker 2: on coffins, and I never looked back, and I've been
Speaker 2: working on this stuff since Oh my god, nineteen ninety eight.
Speaker 1: Do you care about modern day American coffins or just Egyptian?
Speaker 1: Do you find yourself looking like when you go to funerals? Now?
Speaker 1: Are you like it's pretty good coffing?
Speaker 2: Well, luckily I haven't been going to as many funerals
Speaker 2: as I've been going to wedding. But funerals we don't
Speaker 2: usually think of them as display opportunities. We put our
Speaker 2: display in other places, and so the funeral here is
Speaker 2: not quite as interesting. But in our culture, I see
Speaker 2: us avoiding the conversation until the very last possible moment
Speaker 2: and keeping it very quiet. We don't like to talk
Speaker 2: about these things or show it off.
Speaker 1: For more about how Americans die, listen to the Fanatology
Speaker 1: episode with Cole and Perry. She's an expert on death
Speaker 1: and dying, and I promise it's shockingly uplifting. She's amazing. Okay,
Speaker 1: but onward, I do want to go back and just
Speaker 1: for like a primer on Egyptology. Where do you begin
Speaker 1: to understand it? Because number one, there's like fifty thousand
Speaker 1: dynasties is a dynasty, just a generation. Why do we
Speaker 1: call them dynasties?
Speaker 2: Oh my goodness. Well, first of all, let me go
Speaker 2: back to the first part of your question, which is
Speaker 2: what is Egyptology and essentially where it's a complicated thing
Speaker 2: because you're taking a place and then you're applying all
Speaker 2: of these different academic pursuits to it. So you can
Speaker 2: be an art historical egyptologist. You can be an archaeologist
Speaker 2: who's an egyptologist. You can be a philologist language specialist
Speaker 2: who is an egyptologist, you can be a historian. You
Speaker 2: can apply all of these different perspectives to this one place.
Speaker 2: And the reason that Egyptology separates itself out, which isn't
Speaker 2: necessarily good for it, if there's reasons, is that we
Speaker 2: have three thousand years the same culture, the same religion,
Speaker 2: the same governmental structure, almost in an unbroken line. Yes,
Speaker 2: with ups and downs of prosperity and then collapse, but
Speaker 2: the same rather inward looking, rather protected place that maintain
Speaker 2: it's cultural separateness even to this very day.
Speaker 1: And what is up with Egyptian dynasties, like what exactly
Speaker 1: are they?
Speaker 2: Let's break this down, so you start out with dynasty one,
Speaker 2: and then when that family changes you move on to
Speaker 2: dynasty two, in three and four and in succession right.
Speaker 2: Sometimes dynasties can rule concurrently with one another, so in
Speaker 2: time periods of great collapse and social problems, you can
Speaker 2: have dynasties like seven and eight, nine, and ten ruling
Speaker 2: concurrently with one another, and a great deal of overlap
Speaker 2: and a great deal of regional contestation, so that there
Speaker 2: would be dynasty seven in one place and eight in
Speaker 2: another place. But at the same time, some dynasties get
Speaker 2: more of our attention. As Egyptologists like I would say
Speaker 2: dynasties four, five, and six of the Old Kingdom when
Speaker 2: the pyramids were created at Giza.
Speaker 1: So side note, this era is known as Old Kingdom
Speaker 1: around four to five thousand years ago, also known as
Speaker 1: the Age of Pyramids because they built a lot of
Speaker 1: pyramids which served as tombs to kings. An important figure
Speaker 1: during this era was Imotep, credited as being a chief
Speaker 1: architect of the Step pyramids and also just a general cool,
Speaker 1: smart dude. Now, during the Old Kingdom, they built a
Speaker 1: bunch of stuff, and kings were thought to be godlike
Speaker 1: and they were buried in these huge well known tombs, and.
Speaker 2: Then the Middle Kingdom dynasties eleven and twelve, so known
Speaker 2: as a Golden Age. This Middle Kingdom was thirty five
Speaker 2: hundred to forty five hundred years ago, and it was
Speaker 2: known as a time of prosperity and stability, possibly due
Speaker 2: to high river waters which made the land more fertile.
Speaker 2: Now pharaohs were seen more as leaders of the people,
Speaker 2: and they were buried in secret tombs so the folks
Speaker 2: can come to steal their stuff. They're like, get bank
Speaker 2: grave robbers, get out of here. And then dynasties eighteen
Speaker 2: and nineteen.
Speaker 1: So three thousand to thirty five hundred years ago saw
Speaker 1: the New Kingdom or the Imperial Age. This was the
Speaker 1: peak of Egyptian power and military conquests. Now you got
Speaker 1: some famous ass pharaohs during this time like Chepsut, a
Speaker 1: lady king Akhnaton and his wife never tid kink tut.
Speaker 1: So that's the briefest of rundowns, because trust me, Egypt
Speaker 1: has more hot goss than a million Southern hair salons.
Speaker 1: But let's continue.
Speaker 2: These are the big dynasties that people like to focus
Speaker 2: all of their attention on because you're dealing with the
Speaker 2: centralized government. You get more production, you get grand temples
Speaker 2: being created, you get artwork of the finest quality, and
Speaker 2: you have more history being written down because people write
Speaker 2: down more history when they're winning rather than when they're losing.
Speaker 2: When you're dealing with civil war, it's not a time
Speaker 2: to sit down and write thoughtfully about what's going on.
Speaker 2: You're just trying to live, and so you have a
Speaker 2: dearth of documentation for those time periods. And more social media, yes, yes,
Speaker 2: and so social media. I mean when people are going
Speaker 2: through really hard times, they kind of disappear from Facebook.
Speaker 1: They're like, not going to post not about this breakup.
Speaker 2: You kind of disappear, and then when things are happy again,
Speaker 2: you the pictures show up. Right. I hadn't thought about
Speaker 2: it though. Way, that's nice. I do know what you mean.
Speaker 2: That's great. Okay, So we'll compare Egypt to Facebook, and
Speaker 2: I think that works pretty well. But it's so much
Speaker 2: to get a handle on. The Other problem with Egyptology
Speaker 2: is that because it is so protected geographically, it's less
Speaker 2: invadable and there's less competition going on even today, Like
Speaker 2: think of the Arab Spring and what happened in Libya
Speaker 2: and Syria versus what happened in Egypt. And Egypt people
Speaker 2: held hands and protected the Egyptian Museum in Cairo from
Speaker 2: being burned by Molotov cocktails flung in the revolution by
Speaker 2: whom we don't know, and people will discuss it forever.
Speaker 2: In Syria, you know, millions of people have had to leave.
Speaker 2: It will never be the same. The place is utterly destroyed.
Speaker 2: These are geographic realities, but this protected place means that
Speaker 2: more stuff will be preserved, have a preservation that you
Speaker 2: don't have in other places, which means for the Egyptologists
Speaker 2: you have an embarrassment of riches to commit to memory
Speaker 2: to figure out where these things are, where they might
Speaker 2: have come from. Millions of objects are swirling around in
Speaker 2: a given egyptologist's head and it can be quite overwhelming.
Speaker 2: And I haven't talked about the language. So to be
Speaker 2: an Egyptologist who knows anything about anything, you have to
Speaker 2: spend a year doing your Middle Egyptian grammar introduction and
Speaker 2: learning your signs and figuring out how to look words
Speaker 2: up in the goddamn dictionary, which takes forever. Then you
Speaker 2: have to figure out how to read heretic, which is
Speaker 2: the handwriting that the ancient Egyptians used is a shorthand
Speaker 2: for the hieroglyphic symbols.
Speaker 1: When you're start learning hieroglyphics, do you just have a
Speaker 1: bunch of flash cards?
Speaker 2: You do, Yes, we all make a bunch of flash cards,
Speaker 2: and you start out trying to figure out the signs,
Speaker 2: because these signs are these abstracted real things, and there's like, well, here,
Speaker 2: hold on just a second, all my microphone out and
Speaker 2: we'll get a book out, and you can see what.
Speaker 1: You start spring on the hieroglyphs, spraying pring on, the hieroglyphs,
Speaker 1: spraying pring on. Oh. So at this point, Kara shot
Speaker 1: up from the kitchen table and she rushed off to
Speaker 1: another room, and like she was about to bust out
Speaker 1: some old glamour shots or like a really great snack,
Speaker 1: she excitedly came back with this hard bound reference tome.
Speaker 1: She cracked it open and it was a compendium of
Speaker 1: these precise, perfect hieroglyphic diagrams with little English translation captions underneath.
Speaker 1: And these symbols just have a thrilling aesthetic, kind of
Speaker 1: like really elegant clip art of the ancient world meets
Speaker 1: hipster stick and poke tattoo flash but obviously cooler.
Speaker 2: But when you start learning how to find signs, oh.
Speaker 1: My god, so many bogies.
Speaker 2: They're organized according to So let's start at the beginning, right,
Speaker 2: because people like to put themselves first. So the human
Speaker 2: goes first. And look at all the different signs you
Speaker 2: have for the humans doing different things. You have a
Speaker 2: human who's getting hit with a stick, a human who's
Speaker 2: hitting somebody with a stick, a human who's got his
Speaker 2: arms up in praise.
Speaker 1: Honestly, these are just like emojis.
Speaker 2: It's crazy, it's true. So then we go to the
Speaker 2: parts of the person. You'll have the hand. A phallis
Speaker 2: a phallus emitting liquid.
Speaker 1: I just look down and saw fallas liquid issuing from it.
Speaker 2: And there's so many penises in Egyptian language and iconography
Speaker 2: and art, and they're always erect.
Speaker 1: It's crazy. Dick a palooza here, Yeah, it's true.
Speaker 2: And then you get to the animals, and then God
Speaker 2: help you, you get to the birds. Now, when you're
Speaker 2: first starting out, these birds all look the same. I
Speaker 2: don't know anything about birds, flying bird, nestling bird.
Speaker 1: So how long crocodiles, how long do you study all
Speaker 1: these symbols.
Speaker 2: These symbols to commit to memory. Still, that's why this
Speaker 2: sign list exists. You're never going to be able to
Speaker 2: commit everything to memory. Not all of this stuff is
Speaker 2: going to be in your head at any one time.
Speaker 2: I do know people who have this stuff in their head.
Speaker 2: I am not one of them.
Speaker 1: Was there any point in learning all of this that
Speaker 1: You're like, you know what, I'm just going to work
Speaker 1: in insurance?
Speaker 2: There were nights and I would spend twelve hours on
Speaker 2: my Middle Egyptian homework, and I remember them. I remember
Speaker 2: having a hard time looking things up. I remember how
Speaker 2: time consuming it was for me, and I remember some
Speaker 2: days I would I would give up a little bit,
Speaker 2: but the interest in my bigger questions always continue to
Speaker 2: draw me. So even though the language is something I
Speaker 2: can do and I can't teach, it's not what drew
Speaker 2: me into Egyptology. What drew me into Egyptology was all
Speaker 2: of the statues and the beautiful things, and the way
Speaker 2: the kings are displayed, and the way people show themselves
Speaker 2: that the art history of it, that's really what pulled
Speaker 2: me in. And now it's the social history that keeps
Speaker 2: me there.
Speaker 1: And getting to your book coming out, which I'm very excited.
Speaker 1: I know that there are six women who rule the world,
Speaker 1: six queens of Egypt. Yes, Now, female rulers were called kings.
Speaker 1: Queens were just the wife. That's like saying the first lady.
Speaker 1: Isn't the same as saying the president. Yes, can you
Speaker 1: give me like a quick bio of each of the
Speaker 1: six if you had to be like, let's say this
Speaker 1: were a cast of the real world, and you had
Speaker 1: to be like, this is the troublemaker, this is the
Speaker 1: one who's always making sure everyone drinks up of water.
Speaker 2: I think I can do that. Let's see. So just
Speaker 2: the title of the book, where we have six queens
Speaker 2: of ancient Egypt when women ruled the world, and I
Speaker 2: kept thinking, should it be female kings? No, because the
Speaker 2: first one was just a queen. So they were all
Speaker 2: queens at one point, and some of them were able
Speaker 2: to catapult into this position of female king. And you're right,
Speaker 2: the distinction is very clear. A queen an ancient Egyptian
Speaker 2: language is just the vessel of the king, a helper,
Speaker 2: a womb, if you like. But a king for a
Speaker 2: male or a female that's the leader of state. And
Speaker 2: so the Egyptians when that woman became leader of state,
Speaker 2: they gave her the word and moniker a king. That
Speaker 2: was what she deserved.
Speaker 1: Okay, all right, buckle up, you're about to get a
Speaker 1: quick tour of six very remarkable figures in ancient Egypt.
Speaker 1: They're stories. Oh these stories. They're more dramatic and triumphant
Speaker 1: and tragic than like any you true Hollywood story, like
Speaker 1: deaths and usurping and gluing beards on lady faces and
Speaker 1: sibling romance. Just get ready, there's cobras, there's stabbing. Oh okay,
Speaker 1: so cares about to spill some tea, and by tea
Speaker 1: I mean red sarcophagus juice.
Speaker 2: All right, let's go now. The first is Mayor Nath
Speaker 2: of dynasty Ie, and she maintains her queenship. She never
Speaker 2: becomes king, but she's buried like a king amongst kings,
Speaker 2: with forty sacrificial victims around her, men and women who
Speaker 2: were murdered or encourage to commit suicide, we don't know,
Speaker 2: to accompany her and to death. Oh, forty is nothing.
Speaker 2: Her husband before her had hundreds upon hundreds, and her
Speaker 2: son after her had hundreds as well.
Speaker 1: Oh my god.
Speaker 2: So so it's a very interesting part of the book.
Speaker 2: It starts out with a bloody bang. If you like,
Speaker 2: killing their wives, brothers, sons, husbands right in front of
Speaker 2: their eyes is probably one of the most powerful things
Speaker 2: that you can do. And that keying, that mourning that
Speaker 2: would have been created in those moments is very powerful indeed.
Speaker 2: And Mayor Naith was in charge of deciding who was
Speaker 2: sacrificed for her dead husband. She's the one that's holding
Speaker 2: the bag, so to speak, that has the reins of
Speaker 2: power in her hand when her husband dies and her
Speaker 2: son is too young to rule, so she rules on
Speaker 2: his behalf as a queen regent if you like. But
Speaker 2: then when she dies and she's placing the ground, she's
Speaker 2: buried in this line of kings, just like all the rest.
Speaker 1: In the immortal words of Sean Carters to.
Speaker 2: God, what's the show off? So she flies below the
Speaker 2: radar and yet wields power that is uh that packs
Speaker 2: a visceral punch. The next woman for whom we act
Speaker 2: have evidence is named nephru Sobek of Dynasty twelve, and
Speaker 2: she rules because there's no one else left. She's the
Speaker 2: last gasp of her dynasty. Her father was a great
Speaker 2: king aminem hit the third, and he seems to have
Speaker 2: borne a son, aminem Hit the fourth, whom Nephrusobek married,
Speaker 2: probably her brother or half brother, and it may have
Speaker 2: been incess that made it so that there is nobody
Speaker 2: left to rule. It's a good exclusionary tactic of keeping
Speaker 2: everybody out a rule, but it's not a very good
Speaker 2: tactic for keeping a very healthy genetic line. So there's
Speaker 2: a good way to end a dynasty. To come back
Speaker 2: to that dynastic question.
Speaker 1: Just bone your brother, yeah, seriously, and line, this is
Speaker 1: the end of the train. This train will terminate here.
Speaker 1: All change.
Speaker 2: Please ensure that you take all your personal belongings with you.
Speaker 2: And there was nobody left to rule but her, and
Speaker 2: that was how they ended it. And then we get
Speaker 2: to Dynasty eighteen, which is when we have For in
Speaker 2: Dynasty eighteen, we have two female kings and the first one.
Speaker 1: Ooh, sheps It. Okay, so this is a name that
Speaker 1: we should all know, but we don't. She disappeared from
Speaker 1: records after her death. Now she started to rule on
Speaker 1: behalf of her nephew, who couldn't rule because he was
Speaker 1: very busy being two. Auntie, take care of this for
Speaker 1: a bit. She's like, I got you.
Speaker 2: And she ended up being crowned as king alongside this
Speaker 2: boy whom she could never eliminate, and there was this
Speaker 2: co kingship that stretched on until her death, even though
Speaker 2: he was a bibit. Well, she took the kingship when
Speaker 2: he was maybe nine years old, okay, and then maybe
Speaker 2: because he was nine years old, she realized she'd better
Speaker 2: do it now. You know, she was able to rule
Speaker 2: with impunity without him interfering, because what's an eight year
Speaker 2: old going to do? I have an eight year old.
Speaker 2: He's starting to get difficult.
Speaker 1: I mean, I don't have kids, but I don't even
Speaker 1: know if like nine year olds can make their own macaroni.
Speaker 2: No, she is the female king who did everything right,
Speaker 2: who was the most traditional, who ended up even showing
Speaker 2: herself in depictions as a man right, not necessarily because
Speaker 2: she wanted to, but because it was what it was expected.
Speaker 2: And of course she's ruling next to this young and
Speaker 2: vibrant young man. She has to compete with him in
Speaker 2: a sense. And she's the one whose name we don't remember, right,
Speaker 2: She's the one whose name we can't pronounce. She's the
Speaker 2: one who hasn't made it into our cultural memory. Who's
Speaker 2: in our cultural memory Women who were thrown out of
Speaker 2: the window and eaten by dogs, like Jezebel or Samira
Speaker 2: miss who slept with a different man every night in
Speaker 2: Assyria and had him murdered according to the texts or Cleopatra,
Speaker 2: who of course used her sexual wiles to get to
Speaker 2: Julius Caesar ann mark Antony and ended up having to
Speaker 2: commit suicide according to the text. So one of my
Speaker 2: points in the book is that we remember the failures,
Speaker 2: the cautionary tales, and trust me, historians make it very
Speaker 2: clear that we should remember them so that we don't
Speaker 2: go down that dark path again.
Speaker 1: Okay, back to hot Shepsy and it's okay if you
Speaker 1: don't know how to say this yet, I'm pretty sure
Speaker 1: everyone's like hot shep what.
Speaker 2: But the woman who did it all right, who ruled
Speaker 2: when Egypt was most prosperous, who put Egypt with its
Speaker 2: best foot forward and left Egypt better than she found it,
Speaker 2: hot Shepsuit, we don't really remember her, so she's the
Speaker 2: one that needs to be resuscitated. And it reminds me
Speaker 2: how for us women in the workplace, when you do
Speaker 2: something really well, then it's easy to take credit for it.
Speaker 2: It's a very abstract thing. It's a very fungible thing,
Speaker 2: whereas if you do something really badly, everyone's going to
Speaker 2: remember you having messed that up, and nobody's going to
Speaker 2: want to take credit for it. So success, as many
Speaker 2: women listening to this will know, is pretty dangerous. You
Speaker 2: have to do success, but you have to do it
Speaker 2: by putting your own spin on it if you want
Speaker 2: to keep it.
Speaker 1: Now, along those lines, it was hot Shepsut who just
Speaker 1: went for it, like gender bending fashion ideals by wearing
Speaker 1: a short wig and the head dresses of kings and
Speaker 1: a crown of rams horns, sometimes even depicted bare chested
Speaker 1: and with a false beard, making like pants suit feminism
Speaker 1: seem very tame by comparison. So she might be the
Speaker 1: icon we all needed but never knew about. And I'll
Speaker 1: admit that as I drove to Karas, I was repeating
Speaker 1: hutcheps It's name like some sort of ancient incantation, so
Speaker 1: I wouldn't say it wrong, and I had done some
Speaker 1: research so I wouldn't sound like a total ignoramus. I
Speaker 1: already forgot half my equipment, so like the deck was
Speaker 1: already stacked against me. I had to compensate. And now
Speaker 1: her nephew pretty much had her erased from memory once
Speaker 1: she died, right.
Speaker 2: He did, but he waited a good twenty something years
Speaker 2: before he did it. And it was when he put
Speaker 2: his son on the throne and claimed which son he
Speaker 2: was going to have is king after him, he decided
Speaker 2: he needed to remove her. He knew that he wouldn't
Speaker 2: have been king at all if it weren't for her,
Speaker 2: that somebody else would have ruled as king, somebody else
Speaker 2: would have moved him aside. But she protected him and
Speaker 2: then he goes and erases her twenty years in. Uh,
Speaker 2: it's problematic, but that's what patriarchies do. They have to
Speaker 2: create this perfected and uncontested line, and a woman is
Speaker 2: messy and difficult. They had to get rid of her, depressed.
Speaker 2: And then next is Nefertiti. And I hope you notice
Speaker 2: a trend that all of these women are here protecting men.
Speaker 2: If a three year old comes to the throne, what's
Speaker 2: going to happen. Some strong warlord's going to come in
Speaker 2: murder the kid, hold the bloody knife and go look
Speaker 2: at I killed him, And then he gets to be
Speaker 2: a king. In Egypt with divine kingship, it's a different issue.
Speaker 2: You can't do that. It's a god that's standing in
Speaker 2: front of you, so you invite a woman to come
Speaker 2: in and rule on his behalf. New for Titi's a
Speaker 2: little different. She's ruling as a co king alongside her
Speaker 2: husband Akanatan, who's created this really weird and wacky new
Speaker 2: religion of Autanism, worshiping this one solar divinity in the sky,
Speaker 2: changing Egyptian's temples, means of worship, funding the temples, really
Speaker 2: pushing Egypt into great upheaval. And during that time, he decides,
Speaker 2: for whatever reason, that the only person he can trust
Speaker 2: is his wife, his greatest, his highest placed wife. He
Speaker 2: had many wives. We can be sure that every king
Speaker 2: had a harem full of water. And Nefertiti's story is
Speaker 2: the one that's really been being uncovered now because when
Speaker 2: you think of Nefertiti, what do you think of Oh?
Speaker 1: I think of that bust, that like very tall hat,
Speaker 1: high cheek bones. Yeah. I think of her as being
Speaker 1: like this regal sort of figure.
Speaker 2: The paragon of beauty, this this beautiful thing. We don't
Speaker 2: think of her as as being a powerbroker, as being
Speaker 2: somebody who puts Egypt back to rights again, and that's
Speaker 2: really her story that she needs to be resuscitated for
Speaker 2: moving Egypt back in the direction of the old religious
Speaker 2: ways and kind of a truth and reconciliation king.
Speaker 1: Also side note, Nefertiti had six daughters, and everyone's like, ah, congratulations,
Speaker 1: that sucks no sons. So her husband was like, we'll shoot, okay,
Speaker 1: I'll just also marry my sister and together they had
Speaker 1: a boy baby named King Tut in common King Tut,
Speaker 1: as he is often called, maybe a little too casually,
Speaker 1: I'm not sure. Took the throne at nine, ruled for
Speaker 1: ten years until his untimely death around the age of nineteen.
Speaker 1: Now experts suspect it was an infected leg fracture that
Speaker 1: took him down, but he also had like several strains
Speaker 1: of malaria. His mummy is the oldest known case of
Speaker 1: malaria on record, which is like, pretty cool, it's another
Speaker 1: little feather in his cap. Now he's said to have
Speaker 1: had a bit of a youthful temper, but he married.
Speaker 1: He had two children who did not survive infancy, perhaps
Speaker 1: because his wife was also his half sister. Just normal
Speaker 1: political stuff, so speaking, of male versus female rulers.
Speaker 2: Which brings up the question of do females rule differently
Speaker 2: than men in Egypt today? Anytime? Do they when?
Speaker 1: Well?
Speaker 2: I mean, if you're Sarah Huckabee Sanders and you're working
Speaker 2: on behalf of the patriarchy.
Speaker 1: Look, everybody wants to make this an attack on a
Speaker 1: woman in a quality What about the constant attacks that
Speaker 1: he receives or.
Speaker 2: The rest of the answer is no. But if you're
Speaker 2: a woman who has a different perspective not to protect
Speaker 2: a patriarch, then I think the answer is yes, and
Speaker 2: you might be more interested in cutting deals, in thinking
Speaker 2: with nuance, in making decisions that please more rather than
Speaker 2: one faction. I think that question needs still to be answered,
Speaker 2: and we haven't allowed it to be answered because we
Speaker 2: don't let women into power. That's a different question.
Speaker 1: Did I mention that her new book comes out on
Speaker 1: November sixth, which is also voting day for the midterms
Speaker 1: in the US, just saying just circle that day, make
Speaker 1: a plan for it. A lot of good things happening.
Speaker 2: Our next queen to become king is a woman named
Speaker 2: Taal Watratt of Dynasty nineteen, and she's really a badass.
Speaker 2: Because she comes in as a queen to a king
Speaker 2: who dies precipitously, and then acts as regent for a
Speaker 2: boy who's too young to rule, who's not her own son,
Speaker 2: and then when he dies, she rules as old king
Speaker 2: on her own, just for a couple of years.
Speaker 1: Okay, so this queen's husband dies, she also helps out
Speaker 1: a baby king he dies, maybe by her own hand,
Speaker 1: and then she becomes king, and then she dies somewhat mysteriously.
Speaker 1: So if you've ever been nervous about, like getting a
Speaker 1: promotion at work or asking for a raise, just go
Speaker 1: for it. Nothing can beat the workplace anxiety of ancient
Speaker 1: bloodline monarchies.
Speaker 2: Am I right? She's involved in a civil war as
Speaker 2: a prime operator on her own like no other woman,
Speaker 2: and it seems she was punished for it. It's always
Speaker 2: very vague, but it seems that if she's the one
Speaker 2: that was murdered, it makes sense that she's the one
Speaker 2: that's not acting on behalf of a patriarch. And we
Speaker 2: get a bit of a cautionary tale of what it
Speaker 2: means to be the woman who's ambitious for her own self.
Speaker 2: It's not a good place to be. She'll be punished
Speaker 2: for it, and then, of course the last one is
Speaker 2: the most well known, and that would be Cleopatra of
Speaker 2: the Ptolemaic dynasty. She's also punished for what she does,
Speaker 2: but Cleopatra is more Cannie than Tahuastra, and that she
Speaker 2: knows she can never rule alone. She rolled first alongside
Speaker 2: her father, Tallmy the twelfth, and then she rolled alongside
Speaker 2: two brother husbands in succession, tall Me the thirteenth and
Speaker 2: tall Me the fourteenth. Tall Me the thirteenth died in
Speaker 2: battle against her. Oh tell me, the fourteenth was poisoned
Speaker 2: by her. And then she had Ptolemy the fifteenth, who
Speaker 2: is Caesarean, whom she bore after a great romance with
Speaker 2: Julius Caesar. And she's not shy about saying that this
Speaker 2: is Caesar's son and her heir. And she realizes that
Speaker 2: if she's going to keep her son on the throne
Speaker 2: or keep herself on the throne, that in the absence
Speaker 2: of any patriarchs around her, and she's done with all
Speaker 2: of those men who are trying to murder her anyway.
Speaker 2: She's going to move on to the most powerful men
Speaker 2: in the world, and those are the Roman warlords. And
Speaker 2: she picks well, she picks Julius Caesar, who's a growing
Speaker 2: in his authoritarian power too quickly, too much, and his
Speaker 2: links to Egypt is probably one of the many reasons
Speaker 2: that he was killed on the steps of the Senate
Speaker 2: in the IDEs of March two.
Speaker 1: Oh true.
Speaker 2: And then she moves on to mark Antony. But he's
Speaker 2: perhaps not as strategic a choice, because if he hadn't
Speaker 2: made some of those boneheaded decisions in the Battle of Actium,
Speaker 2: perhaps we would talk about Cleopatra and mark Antony in
Speaker 2: a different way.
Speaker 1: Mark Antony quick primer around thirty to forty years BCE,
Speaker 1: before the Common Era, which is a more factually accurate
Speaker 1: and less religious way to say BC or before Christ.
Speaker 1: So mark Antony was a buddy of the assassinated Julius Caesar.
Speaker 1: Mark Antony, not to be confused with Jlo's ex husband.
Speaker 1: Mark Anthony was part of a Roman triumvirent with Octavian.
Speaker 1: Now Octavian was an adopted son of Caesar. Now everyone
Speaker 1: in this power triangle, they had started getting bitchy and
Speaker 1: power hungry with each other. So Antony was like, you
Speaker 1: know what, I'm gonna marry Octavian's sister just to smooth
Speaker 1: things over. But then he cheated on her and had
Speaker 1: three kids with Cleopatra, who already had a kid with
Speaker 1: the dead Caesar. Things started getting a little stormy. Octavian
Speaker 1: ended up going to war with Antony and Cleopatra in Egypt,
Speaker 1: and he creamed them in this naval battle at Actium.
Speaker 1: Things get even wilder after that. Man, if you like
Speaker 1: soap operas, you'll love wikipedia. But before we go there,
Speaker 1: what was Cleopatra's deal in life?
Speaker 2: But she came the closest out of any of these
Speaker 2: women into setting up her own dynasty from her own womb,
Speaker 2: which is an extraordinary thing to do, because if you
Speaker 2: think about divine kingship and why it works so well,
Speaker 2: it's because you have one man who can produce theoretically
Speaker 2: three hundred and sixty five babies outside of himself in
Speaker 2: a given year without any hormonal problems, without any danger
Speaker 2: of dying in childbirth.
Speaker 1: See higherglyph from earlier.
Speaker 2: Pallas a Palace admitting liquid it's a very practical thing
Speaker 2: to give birth outside of your body. Yeah, yeah, a
Speaker 2: woman and I have done this, and it's not an
Speaker 2: easy thing though. The childbirth is no fun. It's no
Speaker 2: fun and I did it naturally, so I can actually
Speaker 2: talk about what it might have been for an ancient person.
Speaker 1: Oh God, it was.
Speaker 2: Okay, that's a different it's a different interview. And so
Speaker 2: Cleopatra she produces one child with Julius Caesar, and then
Speaker 2: three children with Mark Antony. She has twins with him
Speaker 2: and survives that ord deal. It's amazing, not ivf and
Speaker 2: she sets each one up to be a king or
Speaker 2: queen of one of the parts of her growing empire
Speaker 2: in the East. If they hadn't lost in the Battle
Speaker 2: of Actium, they would have been a competing dynasty to
Speaker 2: the Roman war lords who are trying to take over
Speaker 2: the world. But in the end, Cleopatra does not leave
Speaker 2: Egypt better than she finds it. She loses Egypt, becomes
Speaker 2: nothing more than a province of the Roman Empire, and
Speaker 2: loses much of its well well, Egypt is never going
Speaker 2: to be under native control again after Cleopatra until nineteen fifty.
Speaker 1: Now a bit of a Romeo and Juliette situation there
Speaker 1: where she faked her suicide to devastate Morgantine and that
Speaker 1: he killed himself, and then she killed herself, maybe with
Speaker 1: a needle, maybe with a snake.
Speaker 2: What happened? No one knows what happened, and the only
Speaker 2: people that are telling us what happened are the Romans.
Speaker 2: What better way, i argue in the book, than for
Speaker 2: Octavian to claim that Cleopatra had committed suicide, abandoning Egypt,
Speaker 2: abandoning her children, locking herself up in her tomb, trying
Speaker 2: to destroy all of her treasure so that he couldn't
Speaker 2: have them. She's obsessed with her own fame and glory.
Speaker 2: She's selfish to the end. She tries out poisons on
Speaker 2: slaves so that she can see which one is less painful.
Speaker 2: According to the texts, there's all kinds of rumors being
Speaker 2: created around Cleopatra's death. The only one who knows how
Speaker 2: Cleopatra died is Cleopatra, and she can't talk anymore. I
Speaker 2: think Cleopatra was murdered. I have no way of proving this.
Speaker 2: I'll never know how she did it, but a story
Speaker 2: is certainly woven to make her look self serving, manipulative,
Speaker 2: and mentally unstable. And what do we use today to
Speaker 2: keep women out of power but the idea that they
Speaker 2: are hormonally unstable, that they're not somebody that we can
Speaker 2: have in charge of our army and our military men,
Speaker 2: that we can't have them in combat situations. They're hormones.
Speaker 2: Their emotionality, I think, is what will always be used
Speaker 2: to take women out of the halls of power, rather
Speaker 2: than seeing that emotionality as the reason they should be there.
Speaker 1: And also just discounting the emotionality of men in power.
Speaker 1: I mean, it's all one needs to do is open
Speaker 1: Twitter to see that on full display.
Speaker 2: Well, in my public lectures with you, were talking about
Speaker 2: emojis with a series of emojis, and it's a panel
Speaker 2: that shows a man's day, and it shows these faces
Speaker 2: and it starts out with this happy face and then
Speaker 2: this bland half smile, and then it's sleeping, and then
Speaker 2: it says a woman's day. And you can imagine the
Speaker 2: emojis start out with a happy face and then she's mad,
Speaker 2: and then she's crying, and then she's happy again, and
Speaker 2: it just goes up and down and all around, and
Speaker 2: it's just this emotionality beyond anything, and it's exhausting. And
Speaker 2: I just put that slide up there and everyone, you know,
Speaker 2: they feel embarrassed that they're laughing. They feel embarrassed that
Speaker 2: there's truth in that slide that women do, according to scientists,
Speaker 2: have more connection with not only their own emotions, but
Speaker 2: other people's emotions. They're better at reading emotions on people's faces.
Speaker 2: They're better at connecting with people and negotiating and figuring
Speaker 2: out how somebody's feeling and what they might need to
Speaker 2: do at a given moment. But these abilities are turned
Speaker 2: against them as something that is alive ability. But as
Speaker 2: I point out in my lecture, I say, it's the
Speaker 2: man's lack of connection to his emotionality, to what he's feeling,
Speaker 2: and his lack of ability to try out emotions without
Speaker 2: going all the way to the end that makes men
Speaker 2: throttle and rape and commit mass suicide with their children
Speaker 2: and their wife, and press the red button and create
Speaker 2: wars and do all of these things that women, with
Speaker 2: their emotional connections and with their ability to try things out,
Speaker 2: talk it through what might that be like? These are
Speaker 2: reasons why I think women need to be in power,
Speaker 2: particularly at this day and age, when we're really looking
Speaker 2: down the edge of a precipice of social and civilized collapse.
Speaker 1: So men, non men, everyone just feel your feelings. It's
Speaker 1: healthy to feel your feelings and identify them so that
Speaker 1: you can address them also, of those queens and lady kings,
Speaker 1: I do have a opinions on who's a Miranda, who's
Speaker 1: a Carrie, who's a Samantha, But listen, I feel like
Speaker 1: it's somewhat insulting, But also I think that you should
Speaker 1: think of that on your own and then you can
Speaker 1: just tweet me with your opinions. Anyway, with Kara's book
Speaker 1: coming out on election Day, the discussion kind of drifted
Speaker 1: toward how the fall of ancient civilizations is mirrored in
Speaker 1: modern politics. Shirley Bassey's like, it's all just a little
Speaker 1: bit of history. You study kind of autocratic rule, how
Speaker 1: do you how do you liken that to what we
Speaker 1: are experiencing now? And is there any hope at all?
Speaker 2: You know, it's an interesting thing. I didn't realize that
Speaker 2: I was studying an authoritarian regime until after I'd gotten
Speaker 2: my PhD. And I remember standing with my graduate students
Speaker 2: in front of Abu symbol and these massive statues of
Speaker 2: Ramses the second going oh my god. Of course it's
Speaker 2: like Stalin and it's the silly thing, and I'm almost
Speaker 2: embarrassed to a but I dare say that most people
Speaker 2: who are attracted to Egypt and go to King Tut
Speaker 2: exhibitions don't think that they're lauding an authoritarian regime that
Speaker 2: understood how to package power so that it's safe and
Speaker 2: like puppies and rainbows and not. They packaged it so
Speaker 2: that they weren't showing the bloodshed. They packaged it to
Speaker 2: show the divine protection. And we're drawn to that. We
Speaker 2: want somebody to take care of us. We want our
Speaker 2: divine father to come in and say it's gonna be okay.
Speaker 2: You don't have to worry about anything. This is very
Speaker 2: alluring and seductive for us. And so it's it's an
Speaker 2: interesting thing now to have this twenty years of experience
Speaker 2: with this particular authoritarian regime and see my own country
Speaker 2: go down the same path of authoritarianism and do it
Speaker 2: in a way so that people don't even know it's happening,
Speaker 2: to package it, to package that authoritarianism so that it
Speaker 2: seems like it's decisive. It's keeping you safe, it's keeping
Speaker 2: the immage grants out, it's keeping the woman in her place.
Speaker 2: They may not say it directly, but it's still the Father,
Speaker 2: and very much with Evangelical Christianity, thrown into this or
Speaker 2: is Zionist judaism the divine Father coming in to protect
Speaker 2: us and keep us safe, and the ideology behind what
Speaker 2: is happening today in the United States is so cleverly
Speaker 2: done and so on a par with what the ancient
Speaker 2: Egyptians did when they presented themselves that it's scary. No,
Speaker 2: we don't see Donald Trump's statues in you know, giant
Speaker 2: granite relief, nor should we expect it, because we're too
Speaker 2: clever for that. But we have figured out to create
Speaker 2: the state TV in a privatized context.
Speaker 1: And we do have golden towers in the major cities
Speaker 1: bearing the name, so I mean it's not.
Speaker 2: That far off. We do, and we do have the
Speaker 2: same now here. This is going to seem a little provocative,
Speaker 2: and I talk about this in the book. But Donald
Speaker 2: Trump also understands that his wife on par with him
Speaker 2: as a peer in turn, well not in terms of age,
Speaker 2: but in terms of hierarchy. She has to keep within
Speaker 2: her place, she has to keep quiet, she has to
Speaker 2: worry about clothes, She's supposed to just worry about those
Speaker 2: womanly domestic things, whereas he allows his daughter to go
Speaker 2: out there and be much more of a power broker,
Speaker 2: and the way he talks about his daughter sexualizes his daughter,
Speaker 2: and Howard Stern interviews is very much akin to the
Speaker 2: ancient Egyptian king marrying his daughters and elevating them to
Speaker 2: great royal wife, and Ivanka Trump does play the role
Speaker 2: of the great royal wife in the ancient Egyptian authoritarian regime.
Speaker 2: That way of viewing things, So the parallels to ancient
Speaker 2: Egyptian authoritarianism and what we see in the modern day
Speaker 2: are pretty damn striking. This idea of us versus them, exclusionary,
Speaker 2: xenophobic sorts of tropes, it's all there.
Speaker 1: Do we have time for a few raps? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: a few quick rabbit wire But before we take questions
Speaker 1: from you, our beloved listeners, we're going to take a
Speaker 1: quick break for sponsors of the show. Sponsors. Why sponsors?
Speaker 1: You know what they do? They help us give money
Speaker 1: to different charities every week. So if you want to
Speaker 1: know where Ologies gives our money, you can go to
Speaker 1: Aliward dot com and look for the tab Ologies gives back.
Speaker 1: There's like one hundred and fifty different charities that we've
Speaker 1: given to already, with more every single week. So if
Speaker 1: you need a place to go, donate a little bit
Speaker 1: of money but you're not sure where to go. Those
Speaker 1: are all picked biologists who work in those fields, and
Speaker 1: this ad break allows us to give a ton of
Speaker 1: money to them. So thanks for listening and thank sponsors. Okay,
Speaker 1: your questions. I got this question a lot. Emily Jackson,
Speaker 1: Ariel belk Iolanthe, and Maria Spenceeri all asked cats CANi.
Speaker 1: Why did ancient Egyptians worship cats? Well, wouldn't you worship
Speaker 1: a cat? I don't know. I like dogs.
Speaker 2: I mean, I don't like either. I was a vegetarian
Speaker 2: for twenty years and i'm not anymore. So I'm not
Speaker 2: an animal hater, but I'm definitely not an animal lover.
Speaker 2: Some people just aren't animal people, and I'm one of them.
Speaker 2: The animals connect me and I go, what do you want?
Speaker 2: What's going on?
Speaker 1: Well, okay, hear me out. I looked it up and
Speaker 1: sixty percent of Egyptian land is desert. Like maybe, I
Speaker 1: guess it's kind of like a big sandbox.
Speaker 2: Yes, a cat can be this sweet, calm thing, and
Speaker 2: then when she's pissed off, that cat can destroy you.
Speaker 2: Even a house cat could destroy your face. If she
Speaker 2: wanted to, they could kill me.
Speaker 1: Yes, And the Egyptians identify with that.
Speaker 2: Oh my god, they loved that. So the thing about
Speaker 2: the cat, they thought of the cat mainly as a
Speaker 2: female entity. That's where they really put their attention. And
Speaker 2: they put their attention into this idea that the female
Speaker 2: cat can be this cuddly sweet thing, or she will
Speaker 2: destroy this vehicle of keeping the patriarch safe, this vehicle
Speaker 2: of making sure that the rebels will not come towards
Speaker 2: the king. In many ways, the cat is Sarah Huckabee
Speaker 2: Santas like the cat cult. She's the one that make
Speaker 2: sure that the barriers are put up to keep the
Speaker 2: king at the center safe and to keep the mahat,
Speaker 2: to keep the truth and justice of the authoritarian regime.
Speaker 1: Never gonna Well, she does have cat eyeliner took.
Speaker 2: Yeah, she kind of doest she kind of does.
Speaker 1: And then she uses that ash to create a perfect
Speaker 1: smoky eye. A bunch of people ask me this, and
Speaker 1: I don't even know how you're going to answer this,
Speaker 1: but simple question, how are the pyramids built? Do we?
Speaker 2: Oh no, we don't know. And that's really cool that
Speaker 2: we don't, that we don't know and that.
Speaker 1: Was it ancient aliens.
Speaker 2: It was not ancient aliens. But that's what the Egyptian
Speaker 2: Kings want you to believe. So what better thing than
Speaker 2: for you to stand in front of those pyramids? Have
Speaker 2: you ever done it? Have you been to Keese? You
Speaker 2: stand there and you look up and you just go,
Speaker 2: Holy God, how is this possible? And boom, they've got you.
Speaker 2: It's propaganda that never stops giving. Because you look at
Speaker 2: it and you think that other worldly powers built those pyramids,
Speaker 2: then they're are other worldly powers did build those pyramids,
Speaker 2: and it's called the Egyptian Kings. When people think that
Speaker 2: ancient aliens built them, or just aliens, you're buying into
Speaker 2: the propaganda of the authoritarian regime, hook line and sinker.
Speaker 2: So please don't do it. Okay, just because we don't
Speaker 2: know how it was done doesn't mean that doesn't mean
Speaker 2: that you didn't have one hundred thousand poor schmucks dragging
Speaker 2: and pushing stones. I mean, really, draft labor of your
Speaker 2: own people is the best explanation the details of how
Speaker 2: Until we take that thing apart, we're not going to
Speaker 2: really know.
Speaker 1: I hear that's going to be difficult.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's going to be difficult to take one of
Speaker 2: the eight Wonders of the world apart the only last
Speaker 2: standing one. It's going to be a really big renovation
Speaker 2: job for seven. There's seven Wonders and people at the eighth. Sorry,
Speaker 2: that was embarrassing.
Speaker 1: No, I didn't even I couldn't even fact check you
Speaker 1: because I didn't.
Speaker 2: Know seven wonders yet. I felt like a.
Speaker 1: Real bozo that I couldn't remember all seven. And then
Speaker 1: I looked them up and there are you ready. Colossus
Speaker 1: of Rhodes, Great Pyramid of Giza, Hanging Gardens of Babylon,
Speaker 1: Lighthouse of Alexandria, Mausoleum at Hallacarnassis, Statue of Olympia, Temple
Speaker 1: of Artemis at Aphesis. Confession, y'all, I hadn't heard of
Speaker 1: five of those, had you? Okay, let me know how
Speaker 1: many you'd heard of. Because it's possible that the tourism
Speaker 1: boards or the Seven Wonders PR team is just snoozing
Speaker 1: on the job. Like, come on, get an Instagram account,
Speaker 1: tag things Wonders full. A little brand awareness for the
Speaker 1: Seven Wonders could go a long way. Jessica tubisingh Asks,
Speaker 1: do you have any belief in King Tut's curse or
Speaker 1: any other pharaoh's curse. Come on, get real with me.
Speaker 1: Curses yeah, your name.
Speaker 2: No, I don't believe in curses, but I believe in
Speaker 2: a lot more than you would think. I mean, I
Speaker 2: may be an academic who's interested in science and data
Speaker 2: driven arguments, and I am. But you know, as I said,
Speaker 2: I don't know why I'm interested in ancient Egypt. I
Speaker 2: don't have any good explanation for that.
Speaker 1: I was gonna ask if ever, you thought maybe you
Speaker 1: were just being inhabited by an Egyptian ghost. Who knows.
Speaker 2: I have no understanding of what happens to me after
Speaker 2: I die. If I was someplace before, these things are
Speaker 2: interest to me. But wait, what was the question again, Oh,
Speaker 2: King Tut's curse. Yeah, there were lots of ways to
Speaker 2: die in the twenties before antibiotics came around, and uh
Speaker 2: so I wouldn't And Carnarvan was already of frail health,
Speaker 2: and that's why he went to Egypt in the first place.
Speaker 2: So if that's the way you're going to prove your curse,
Speaker 2: it's not going to work.
Speaker 1: So four months after his presence at the opening of
Speaker 1: King Tut's tomb, one, Lord Cardivon got a mosquito bite
Speaker 1: which he cuts shaving. Then he died. Nothing pure l
Speaker 1: couldn't have stopped.
Speaker 2: Maybe, yeah, because it was that nicked infection on his
Speaker 2: cheek from shaving, right, so they say, And we don't
Speaker 2: even know how and why he died. Blood infection possibly,
Speaker 2: but there was probably other stuff going on with that
Speaker 2: poor guy. And the stress of finding that too, oh
Speaker 2: my god. So maybe just the stress of a big discovery,
Speaker 2: maybe I could do it. I've seen Egyptologists who have
Speaker 2: found amazing discoveries and it can be very very hard
Speaker 2: on the on the body, psyche and soul. Really, all
Speaker 2: of that attention, all of the competition. I'll just put
Speaker 2: it down to that. It's the media destroyed cannar. You
Speaker 2: don't need a curse when you have the interest of
Speaker 2: all of the people around you, So.
Speaker 1: You don't need a curse. But in case you want
Speaker 1: more background on this, many tombs of the Pharaohs were
Speaker 1: discovered in the Valley of the Kings on the west
Speaker 1: bank of the Nile, across from modern Luxor now. Many
Speaker 1: Egyptian tombs in general bore clear warnings like one which
Speaker 1: read very straightforwardly quote cursuld be those who disturb the
Speaker 1: rest of a pharaoh. They that shall break the seal
Speaker 1: of this tomb shall meet death by a disease that
Speaker 1: no doctor can diagnose. Like what okay, duly noted, I'm
Speaker 1: out of here. But in nineteen twenty two, Egyptologist Howard
Speaker 1: Carter was hired by George Herbert, the fifth Earl of
Speaker 1: Carnivon Ka Lord Carnavon, to do some digging, like does
Speaker 1: it get any more hello? Then we are here to
Speaker 1: pillage your treasures. It looked like a bust. They weren't
Speaker 1: finding anything. Then a water boy tripped on a stone
Speaker 1: and revealed a hidden flight of steps leading to a chamber.
Speaker 1: A few weeks later, Lord Carnivan arrived in Egypt and
Speaker 1: going through these tunnels by candlelight, he's like backseat excavating
Speaker 1: over Carter's shoulder, and he asks, can you see anything?
Speaker 1: And Carter sticks a candle through a small hole into
Speaker 1: an undiscovered chamber glimmering with golden burial objects and just says, yes,
Speaker 1: wonderful things and King Tut's tomb was discovered. Roughly fifty
Speaker 1: four hundred items were found in the tomb, including a
Speaker 1: solid gold coffin, face mask, thrones, archery, bows, trumpets, a chalice, food, wine, sandals,
Speaker 1: fresh linen underwear, and a dagger with an iron blade
Speaker 1: made possibly from a meteorite. It's like a very intense
Speaker 1: and becursed episode of Storage Wars. Now remember four months later,
Speaker 1: Lord Carnavon died of to borrow from Egyptian tomb warnings,
Speaker 1: death by a disease that no doctor can diagnose. Let's
Speaker 1: look like a little on the nose ghost kings. But
Speaker 1: I see why? What about that sarcophagus found this summer
Speaker 1: in Alexandria and filled with three skeletons and a bunch
Speaker 1: of magic red liquid. Well I did a dive on
Speaker 1: Kara's Facebook to see if she had any thoughts on
Speaker 1: the batter, and in response to the question should we
Speaker 1: drink it, she just commented, um no, and there were
Speaker 1: eight ms in her arm. Does she think it's cursed? No,
Speaker 1: they think it's sewer water. When asked by MPR, she
Speaker 1: said sewage is enough of a curse really, so onward? Uh.
Speaker 1: Danielle dank can Bring asks what's the strangest thing you've seen?
Speaker 1: Honor in a coffin? So many dicks are there dicks
Speaker 1: on coffins.
Speaker 2: There are, but in there are dicks. As you say,
Speaker 2: Egyptologists like to say fouli. You'll see fallises, erect fallicies
Speaker 2: all over the place, and you will see divinities standing
Speaker 2: there with their erect foul us all out and lovely.
Speaker 2: And you might see some masturbatory images because the beginning
Speaker 2: of the world and is from a masturbatory moment, and
Speaker 2: Osiris remakes himself after his death by masturbating himself, jacking
Speaker 2: himself off to new life. So you actually see dix
Speaker 2: all over coffins. So that's but she asked about inside
Speaker 2: a coffin, you might see an erect fallus figure depicted
Speaker 2: on the inside of a coffin. And two donk Aamen
Speaker 2: was buried, mummified with an erect fallus. What yeah, yes,
Speaker 2: buried and with a mummified fallas in the erect position.
Speaker 2: He's the only one known to have had that treatment
Speaker 2: from the examination of the other mummies. But and you
Speaker 2: wonder how they did that. You know, they stand the
Speaker 2: thing up and let it dry, and it's a tiny
Speaker 2: little fallus because you know, it's just it's all dried,
Speaker 2: and it reminds me of George Costanzas. I felt I
Speaker 2: was in the pool. You mean strike it, Yes, And
Speaker 2: apparently the penis was knocked off of the mummy. Google it,
Speaker 2: you guys, it's it's fun. Then they had to find it.
Speaker 2: And I don't think they've reattached it that he's just
Speaker 2: in there with the body.
Speaker 1: Oh no, just like a baby carrot.
Speaker 2: Dry it. A baby carrot would work. Yeah, And if
Speaker 2: you want, you can go to the Griffith Institute at
Speaker 2: Oxford has put all of the Harry Burton photos up
Speaker 2: live for you to see. It's called anatomy of an excavation.
Speaker 2: So put in Griffith instod anatomy of an excavation too, doncommon,
Speaker 2: and you will be able to find You could probably
Speaker 2: even do a tech search hello for penis and you
Speaker 2: might be able to find it.
Speaker 1: So I did I look this up? And I mean, listen,
Speaker 1: have you ever made beef tricky? Because it loses a
Speaker 1: lot of volume. Dehydration is a real bitch. But I
Speaker 1: did read that whoever embalmed him may have positioned him
Speaker 1: in such an alert way as a little FB you
Speaker 1: to his dad, who was a pharaoh who was more
Speaker 1: religious and I guess conservative and I think that that
Speaker 1: is both hilarious and very cool, but lamentably, the member
Speaker 1: in question went missing in nineteen sixty eight for almost
Speaker 1: forty years until someone found it in two thousand and
Speaker 1: six in the sand next to his body. It's buried
Speaker 1: like a cat turd. It's painful to even think about
Speaker 1: that level of disruption. I would like to extend my
Speaker 1: sincere cosmic apologies to King Tutan common that this happened
Speaker 1: just on behalf of all living humans and creatures left
Speaker 1: on Earth, Like curses are put there for a reason,
Speaker 1: and I get it, this was not okay, But Kara
Speaker 1: shares her own experience in this realm. So coffin's the
Speaker 1: craziest thing you've ever seen on it And.
Speaker 2: I've ever seen inside of a coffin, I guess would
Speaker 2: be a dead body. And you know, that's pretty amazing,
Speaker 2: especially when they're one of those stuffed twenty versus dynasty varieties.
Speaker 2: Those are pretty intense.
Speaker 1: Are they still wrapped with makeup on underneath?
Speaker 2: They're supposed to be wrapped, but most of the bodies
Speaker 2: that I've seen have been unwrapped by people wanting to
Speaker 2: see what those mommies look like. Usually at a time
Speaker 2: period when they didn't do it very care and they
Speaker 2: were just cutting through the bandages. So most of them
Speaker 2: are just displayed vulnerably exposed and should we wrap them again?
Speaker 2: I don't know. When I see a body in a coffin,
Speaker 2: I always say hello, and I say, I'm only here
Speaker 2: to look at your stuff. I won't disturb you for
Speaker 2: very long. And I'm so sorry to disturb you. But
Speaker 2: how are you today? And just trying to just in
Speaker 2: my head have a little conversation with the dead person
Speaker 2: right there. And yeah, it doesn't happen as often as
Speaker 2: you would think, even though I'm a coffin expert. Most
Speaker 2: of the bodies have been removed from the coffins, just sad.
Speaker 2: I wish they were all kept together. But when a
Speaker 2: piece goes into an art museum, they say we are
Speaker 2: an art museum and this is not art, and they
Speaker 2: send the body off to some anthropological museum where it
Speaker 2: is usually disappears or something bad happens. It's very sad.
Speaker 2: That's why the twenty first Dynasty individuals did that, why
Speaker 2: they tricked out their bodies so much, though, because coffin reuse.
Speaker 2: Because I didn't tell you That's the other thing I
Speaker 2: do with coffins is I look particularly for how these
Speaker 2: coffins were reused at this time period of economic crisis,
Speaker 2: how often they were reused, And they were reused so
Speaker 2: often that these twenty first dynasty individuals made sure that
Speaker 2: their bodies could work as a transformational device, as a
Speaker 2: kind of coffin without being in the coffin, because they
Speaker 2: knew that they probably were going to have their coffins
Speaker 2: taken from them because they were taking their ancestors coffins
Speaker 2: and reusing them.
Speaker 1: Huh ah, that's crazy. Yeah, I'm sure that you can
Speaker 1: probably look for signs of varnish, and.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you can see multiple layers, kind of like an
Speaker 2: archaeological excavation where you're looking for stratigraphy.
Speaker 1: I looked it up. That just means looking at multiple
Speaker 1: layers of an artifact.
Speaker 2: I can sometimes see multiple decorative layers on a given coffin.
Speaker 2: By the time the twenty first ygnacy came to a close,
Speaker 2: they were really good at reusing these coffins without people
Speaker 2: noticing and taking off all the old previous decoration. But
Speaker 2: there's still clues here and there that are that are
Speaker 2: useful for me.
Speaker 1: You're going to need a flashlight them.
Speaker 2: I know. Yeah, because I'm heading back to Egypt this September.
Speaker 2: You are got for three weeks and in Yeah, Chiro
Speaker 2: Museum is the gift that keeps giving wonderful things in there.
Speaker 1: And now, what do you hate about your job? What sucks?
Speaker 2: Email?
Speaker 1: It went off like six times?
Speaker 2: I know, And I don't have the notifications going on
Speaker 2: because they would just every day I get, you know,
Speaker 2: good hundred emails. And I'm chair of the department and
Speaker 2: I have to deal with you know, grading problems or
Speaker 2: disruptive students or you know, lectures who have problems. But yeah,
Speaker 2: the service of the job can be a little overwhelming
Speaker 2: and daunting, and I just try to keep up with
Speaker 2: that as I can. And that's why summer is my favorite.
Speaker 2: I get to read and think and write, and I
Speaker 2: don't get to do that that much during the year.
Speaker 2: But I'm using September instead of reading more to go
Speaker 2: out into the field and collect more data on coffins,
Speaker 2: which is great. And I'm looking at coffins that are
Speaker 2: so fugly, as I like to say that, that everyone's
Speaker 2: ignored them, and I'm really excited to look at these pieces.
Speaker 2: There are coffins that when the High Priesthood of Amen
Speaker 2: and Dynasties twenty and twenty one went through the Valley
Speaker 2: of the Kings and used it as their own personal
Speaker 2: bank fault and took all of the golden and silver
Speaker 2: and precious objects out of the tombs of Ramses the second,
Speaker 2: Amen Ho It's up the third, Ramsey's the third, all
Speaker 2: of those kings and recycled them for their own use,
Speaker 2: to fund their own regime. They took those king's bodies out,
Speaker 2: stripped them of all of their valuables, rewrap them, and
Speaker 2: then put them in these fugly coffins, reused ugly, ugly coffins.
Speaker 2: And I'm very excited to look at these pieces, because
Speaker 2: it's rare when ugliness enters a museum. But because Ramsey's
Speaker 2: the third is buried in one of these fugly coffins,
Speaker 2: He's that coffin has kept in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo,
Speaker 2: So I get to.
Speaker 1: How ugly are they are? Theyly crocs? Are They just
Speaker 1: like one big croc with them?
Speaker 2: Well, you know, the faces are a little off. They're
Speaker 2: not made for kings, They're made for other people and
Speaker 2: their surfaces, if they were nice, pieces are often chiseled
Speaker 2: down because they were covered with gold. So a lot
Speaker 2: of that ugliness is because of theft. So their faces
Speaker 2: have been marred. But a couple of them are in
Speaker 2: coffins that were not made by very good coffin makers,
Speaker 2: and they just look a little they're just a little off.
Speaker 2: Like imagine that, you know, when you're looking at your
Speaker 2: Facebook or your social media and someone makes a cake
Speaker 2: and they go nailed it. It's like some of those
Speaker 2: coffins are like this. Their faces are just off and weird,
Speaker 2: and you know they didn't have the best coffin maker
Speaker 2: for some of these, and it's interesting that they're going
Speaker 2: to be like, eh, we have the most royal and
Speaker 2: divine rameses the third we have this coffin. So yeah,
Speaker 2: whatever put them in there. There's some ugly art out
Speaker 2: there in the world.
Speaker 1: Well that's just delightful though.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: So her son's babysitter was due home any minute. Also,
Speaker 1: thank you so much, Kara for making time for this.
Speaker 1: So we wrapped it up with one last question. Now,
Speaker 1: what is your favorite thing about Egyptology or your job,
Speaker 1: like the thing that just gives you butterflies that you're like,
Speaker 1: I love this so much.
Speaker 2: Oh that's hard, but I think I know how to
Speaker 2: answer that I do. It's my great It's a sword
Speaker 2: that cuts both ways. It's my greatest weakness as well
Speaker 2: as my greatest strength, and that would be my ability
Speaker 2: to communicate to people who don't do Egyptology, and my
Speaker 2: interest in talking to normal people who don't devote their
Speaker 2: lives to these thirty dynasties with all of their intricacies
Speaker 2: and all of their language and material complexities. And I
Speaker 2: like telling a story, I like connecting with an audience,
Speaker 2: and I like making the ancient world come alive again.
Speaker 2: And when I say that's my greatest weakness, it's because
Speaker 2: academics they like to make sure you're moving the field forward,
Speaker 2: and so I have to constantly ask myself, am I
Speaker 2: moving the field forward by doing this kind of work?
Speaker 2: And so thus I have Kathlin Mcony and Krakuni, and
Speaker 2: I have to negotiate both sides of my egyptological being,
Speaker 2: if you will, to try to move the field forward
Speaker 2: with my coffin's work social history work, and then to
Speaker 2: also communicate with the public and tell people why the
Speaker 2: ancient world is relevant at all. So whether that gender
Speaker 2: studies work my book When Women Ruled the World or
Speaker 2: the woman who would be king move the field forward
Speaker 2: or not might be debatable. Yeah, the humanities are not
Speaker 2: building factories, and the humanities are perhaps not employing hundreds
Speaker 2: of thousands of factory workers, but they're helping us to
Speaker 2: understand where we've come from, where we are, where we're going,
Speaker 2: and it is as relevant as anything I can possibly imagine.
Speaker 1: And where can people gently stock you? Where can they
Speaker 1: find you?
Speaker 2: Oh? You can stalk me in so many places. I
Speaker 2: have a Facebook page, which is still my biggest, but
Speaker 2: there it's my favorite medium because I can post articles
Speaker 2: and get more academic with what I'm saying. And you'll
Speaker 2: find me on Facebook under Karacuni Egyptologist. You'll find that
Speaker 2: I am an anthropologist at heart, and I'm interested in
Speaker 2: all kinds of stuff, and I just post things that
Speaker 2: are of interest to me. And then I have an
Speaker 2: Instagram page Karakuney, and I don't post on that quite
Speaker 2: as much, but I do is more personal too, so
Speaker 2: if you're interested in my private life, you could go there.
Speaker 2: I hate LinkedIn, Oh god, I hate it. I get
Speaker 2: messages if you ever try to write me on LinkedIn,
Speaker 2: forget it. I don't look at it. I've forgot my
Speaker 2: password on purpose. I don't want to know anything that
Speaker 2: happens on LinkedIn.
Speaker 1: No one will ping you there. Okay, good circle back
Speaker 1: as they do, good good, And the book comes out
Speaker 1: on November six.
Speaker 2: It does. It's going to be an interesting November for everybody.
Speaker 2: What are you going to be doing on November six? Oh?
Speaker 2: I'll be watching the polls like everybody else. I don't
Speaker 2: know how much TV I can handle. I haven't been
Speaker 2: able to watch too much TV lately. I like to
Speaker 2: consume my end of the world apocalyptic narrative through print
Speaker 2: rather than picture and babysitters. Here here's my Women in Power.
Speaker 1: So you can pick up her twenty fourteen book, The
Speaker 1: Woman Who Would Be King, or pre order her new one,
Speaker 1: When Women Rule the World Six Queens of Egypt, which
Speaker 1: is out very soon. You can also find her show
Speaker 1: Out of Egypt or The Secrets of History's Lost Queen
Speaker 1: on Discovery channel heads Up I Believe that is available
Speaker 1: on Amazon and Netflix. She's also a recurring expert on
Speaker 1: the History channels Digging for Truth, so find her shows
Speaker 1: streaming just in general, enjoy her presence on planet Earth.
Speaker 1: To find more of ologies, We're at ologies on Twitter
Speaker 1: and Instagram. I'm Ali Ward with one L on both,
Speaker 1: and there's a Facebook Ologies podcast group. You have to
Speaker 1: answer a few secret questions to be admitted into our
Speaker 1: underground chamber. Thank you Aaron Talbert and Hannahlippo for admining.
Speaker 1: You can become a patron and submit questions and see
Speaker 1: what ologies are coming up at patreon dot com slash
Speaker 1: Ologies for merch. Head toologies merch dot com. You can
Speaker 1: pick up some of the brand new fall stuff in
Speaker 1: mustards and maroons and collegiate crested shirts and such. They're
Speaker 1: so delightful. Thank you Bonnie Dutch and Shannon Feltis for
Speaker 1: designing and handling merch. And thank you to all four
Speaker 1: sister uncles for the wonderful time in Portland this past
Speaker 1: weekend at the first ever Campologies meet up group, which
Speaker 1: was just a treasure trove of nice, curious people looking
Speaker 1: at bees and trees. Thank you melotologist Mandy Shaw and
Speaker 1: dendrologist Casey Klapp for coming out and hanging out and
Speaker 1: teaching us so many good things. Thank you to Stevenray
Speaker 1: Morris himself very much a cat person who makes each
Speaker 1: episode so much better. Check out his kitty themed podcast,
Speaker 1: The Percast. If you don't believe me, dude knows his cats.
Speaker 1: It's an exceptional podcast. Nick Thorburn wrote the theme song.
Speaker 1: And now if you stick around at the very end
Speaker 1: of the show, you know I tell you a secret.
Speaker 1: This one is super, super embarrassing, but that's the nature
Speaker 1: of getting you to listen through the credits. Okay, So
Speaker 1: the first time I went to record with Kara and
Speaker 1: my Zoom wasn't in my little vintage recording purse. I
Speaker 1: was mortified, Like I was like, how could this happen?
Speaker 1: How did I leave the house without this? So we rescheduled.
Speaker 1: I left defeated. I smothered my sorrows with a pastry
Speaker 1: at a cafe and I went to get my wallet
Speaker 1: out of my backpack and I found my Zoom recorder
Speaker 1: in there. So I had it with me the whole time.
Speaker 1: It was just in the backpack and not in the
Speaker 1: vintage equipment bag where it should have been. I could
Speaker 1: have recorded this the first time. I didn't actually leave
Speaker 1: it at home. It was right there, So that's even
Speaker 1: more mortifying, I think than just plain forgetting it, thinking
Speaker 1: you forgot it, but really it was next to you
Speaker 1: the whole time, in a different bag. So, Kara, I'm
Speaker 1: so sorry. I hope that you stopped listening at the credits.
Speaker 1: Anyone else. If you're out there beating yourself up for
Speaker 1: making a mistake, just know happens to all of us.
Speaker 1: Even world renowned egyptologists arrived without flashlights. Let's all forgive
Speaker 1: ourselves onward upward, all right, keep asking smart people stupid questions.
Speaker 1: I swear they love it. I think they love it.
Speaker 1: I'm pretty sure they're okay with it. I think they
Speaker 1: love it, okay, hacadermatology, homiology, ryptozoology, lithology, new nuology, meteorology, statology, ethnology,
Speaker 1: and seriology, elidology. Tell me, baby girl, because I need
Speaker 1: to na