“If the problem is something in your own character, who’s stopping you from setting your mind straight? And if it’s that you’re not doing something you think you should be, why not just do it?”
— Marcus Aurelius, Meditations (8.47)
Relief depicting an owl, represents the letter “m” in ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, detail of a carving on the walls of the central court. The Mortuary Temple of Hatshepsut, Deir el-Bahari, West Thebes.
To further unpack it: The sign to the right of the 1 consonant m-owl** is a tree which has the 3 consonantal value iAm, and to the left of the m-owl we have the 2 consonant heart symbol ‘ib’. So we have iAm, m, and ib. The iAm and m join together as the 1-consonant m is a phonetic complement (which means the m in the 3 consonant sign before needs to be read so here’s another to make you do it) to the word iAm (usually meaning to bind), and then we’re left with ib ‘heart’, which is a separate word to iAm, but does form part of the overall construction. So the meaning of the construction iAm-ib
is literally ‘bind to the heart’ or idiomised as ‘beloved’.
So the above image reads the word ‘beloved’
**in this relief we’re reading right to left - remember you read in to the animal/human faces so if they’re facing right you start right, if left you start left. It’s also a handy way to know if an inscription on a replica is fake or not, because those tend to have animals/humans facing every which way.
What’s really interesting about this is how someone’s worked hard to hack out the heart. I’m finding myself thinking whether whoever did this only had the time to hack out what is presumably the most significant word in this phrase (thus rending the whole phrase inert), or whether hacking out the heart turns the phrase into something else (”bound to nothingness/hatred/erasure”).
I mean, if you think about it, a person who fails the weighing of the heart has his or her heart fed to Ammit, and thus is literally uncreated. Was this person trying to uncreate Hapshesut?
Nah. This damage isn’t hacked out. If it was hacked you’d see much more uniform marks, which would cover the entirety of the sign so we could barely see it. Much like this:
The ib sign here shows only signs of historical and weather damage. The other signs present have similar damage. Remember that many temples that are standing now are the result of (unfortunately) rich western Europeans coming in the 1800s and wanted to restore (a la Belzoni at Abu Simbel) and efforts by the Egyptian government to restore temples to their former glory. Inscriptions like the one above more likely became damaged in rock slides, and when other parts of the temple collapsed on them.
Finally, damnatio memoriae only works in Egyptian culture on names and images, as you needed your name (as part of the 5 parts of a human being) and image (so if the body is destroyed your image can still go to the afterlife) to be preserved. Since iAm-ib is a compound phrase, erasing only the ‘ib’ would make no sense as it cannot be given another meaning beyond this without actually writing something else in. The Egyptians don’t work in physical metaphors when writing. Only 2% of people can read, so if they can’t add in the negative phrase no one is going to understand what happened here, and it’s a mortuary temple made to keep her Ka fed in the afterlife. Most people would never even enter this temple; only priests.
This is an example of damnatio memoriae actually from Deir el Bahri:
In it you can see her cartouches neatly erased, aside from gods names, and is what I would expect if similar damage had occurred to the heart in the original image.
A photograph of some liquidators from Chernobyl disaster on the roof of Reactor three taken by Igor Kostin. The white streaks at the bottom of the photo were due to the high levels of radiation emanating from below. 1986
Alfred-Maurice de Zayas, former secretary of the Human Rights Committee of the UN, recounts that, four weeks before the coup d’etat of Augusto Pinochet against the Chilean president, “there was precisely a blackout.” “Salvador Allende was in the middle of a speech when that happens, and evidently behind the blackout was sabotage,” he said.
The expert explains that the idea behind this type of acts is to cause “anxiety” and “confusion”, which in turn is combined with the sanctions of the North American country to generate “chaos” in Venezuela. “The United States, then, is causing this chaos. He wants to present himself as a good Samaritan,” stressed De Zayas.
