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Controversial Truths About Ancient Egypt Masterpost

• The pyramids were built by contemporary workers who received wages and were fed and taken care of during construction
  
• The Dendera “lightbulb” is a representation of the creation myth and has nothing to do with electricity
• We didn’t find “““copper wiring””” in the great pyramid either
• Hatshepsut wasn’t transgender
• The gods didn’t actually have animal heads
• Hieroglyphs aren’t mysteriously magical; they’re just a language (seriously we have shopping lists and work rosters and even ancient erotica)
• The ancient Egyptian ethnicity wasn’t homogeneous
• Noses (and ears, and arms) broke off statues and reliefs for a variety of reasons, none of which are “there is a widespread archaeological conspiracy to hide the Egyptian ethnicity”

• The carvings at Abydos aren’t modern machines but recarvings over old carvings. Sure they look like them but if you can read hieroglyphs and know that Ramesses II will even usurp the carvings of his own father just to be a little shit

• ‘No soot on the ceilings and walls of the Dendera temple!’ is actually because of extensive restoration works and not because Egyptians were in on shit like Baghdad “batteries”
  
• While the Egyptians were fine-ass astronomers they didn’t align any of their enormous and/or important buildings to modern star constellations, because constellations look very different now than they did ~5000 years ago 
• The pyramid is the simplest, sturdiest shape with which to build and many different cultures discovered this in their own time. There were never any weird fish humans/aliens involved

• The sphinx of Gizah is only an approximate 5000 years old; the 10,000 year/rain erosion nonsense is proven hokum
  
• Speaking of that particular sphinx, the Napoleonic expedition is not responsible for its missing nose
• Akhenaten was not a “heretic” by contemporary standards
• Ramses II appropriated a lot of his predecessors’ buildings/reliefs and isn’t really deserving of the epithet “the Great”
• The Battle of Kadesh ended in a stalemate (twice)

• While they had feline deities throughout their history, Egyptians didn’t actually worship cats themselves. This was a later Greek/Ptolemaeic addition
  
• It was not, in fact, practice to shave off eyebrows after cats died; Herodotus lied about that
• Herodotus lied about a lot of things and many misconceptions about ancient Egypt can be traced back to his Greek ass

I can’t believe I forgot my favourite Hill to Die On

• Seth was not the god of “evil”, and despite his chaos providing a foil to order, he wasn’t completely villified until very late in Egyptian history, when he became associated with despised foreign enemies

Hats off to the few of you who’re reblogging this with tags saying you’re going to check my claims later. You make me not entirely despair of this hellhole.

Here are some vetted Egyptological books/sources (that are by and large appropriate for a lay-audience) you can find most, if not all of the above:

• Lehner, M., The Complete Pyramids
  
• Wilkinson, R. H., The Complete Temples of Ancient Egypt
• Hornung, E., The One and the Many: Conceptions of God in Ancient Egypt
• Dunand, F. & Zivie-Coche, C., Gods and Men in Egypt
• Kemp, B., Ancient Egypt: Anatomy of a Civilization
• Bard, K., An Introduction to the Archaeology of Ancient Egypt
• Stevenson Smith, W., The Art and Architecture of Ancient Egypt
• Kitchen, K. A., The Life and Times of Ramesses II, King of Egypt
• Sweeney, D., Sex and Gender (in Ancient Egypt)
• McDowell, A. G., Village Life in Ancient Egypt:  Laundry Lists and Love Songs
• Te Velde, H., Seth, God of Confusion 

Guys do me a solid and reblog this version instead of continuously asking for sources on the other versions thanks

#i honestly didn’t know that about seth#like i knew he wasn’t the actual god of evil but i did think he was very much villified in egyptian mythos#i also don’t really understand the appearances of the gods either#i need to read a bit more on that.

The thing about Seth is that he is half of a whole. Not only in the sense of “without chaos there is no order”, but also in that the Egyptians liked to see joined in their king both the aspects of Horus (faithfullness, respect for parents) as well as Seth (strength, cunning). 

Hatshepsut describes herself as follows:

(…) as I wear the White Crown, as I appear in the Red Crown, as Horus and Seth have united for me their two halves, as I rule this land like the son of Isis (Horus), as I have become strong like the son of Nut (Seth). (After Sethe & Helck, 1906)

Turner (2016) likens Seth to a minister of foreign affairs rather than a foreigner himself. He served a purpose, even as he was worshipped by the Hyksos, the invading foreigners - foreigners who were eventually driven out. Only after Seth “failed” to aid in the driving out of further invading foreigners did he become villified.

As for the appearance of the gods: certain gods were portrayed with animal heads, but this does not mean that the Egyptians thought of their gods as being anthropomorphic with an animal head tacked on - it means that the gods had two (or more) distinct forms, and that they could appear as either. 

Hathor, for example, was portrayed as both a cow and a woman, as well as a woman with a cow’s head, or a ureaus snake, or a lioness, or the cow’s head (with feminine characteristics) seen on columns. There is a statue on the Louvre that shows four of these forms side by side:

The iconography of the gods is, as Hornung (1971/1982) puts it, “an attempt to indicate something of [their] complex nature.” So in our example Hathor can appear in many forms, indicating her many-faceted nature. She’s not simply a woman with a cow’s head; she can be in the woman and she can be in the cow.

The gods are portrayed this way to communicate the nature of the gods to the illiterate members of society (the great majority). No one really believed that Khepri was a guy with a dung beetle for a head. 

I love how people are reblogging this without a care for how transphobic it is to look back at a figure in history and declare that they could not possibly be transgender, despite all the evidence to suggest it as a possibility.

No one is trying to claim they know with absolute certainty that Hatshepsut was trans or even queer, it is impossible to know since we cannot ask her. But looking at the evidence, it is beyond anyone reasonable to deny that she is “queer” amongst her peers–other female rulers of Egypt.

“Regardless of how she might identify today, however, the reality remains that she was born female and chose to rule as a king - no female pharaoh before or after her ever felt the need to rule as a man to legitimize their claim.”

https://www.makingqueerhistory.com/articles/2017/8/31/hatshepsut

“Based on the records available to us, it’s simply not possible to know what was in the heart of a pharaoh who ruled over 3,000 years ago. Much like sexism made her the Lady Macbeth of Egypt in the 20th century, cisheterosexism could very well be preventing modern academics from understanding the full picture of who Hatshepsut was.”

Please go and read the full article and follow @makingqueerhistory

Although I’m pretty much done arguing about Hatshepsut, I want to once again point out that there’s absolutely no transphobic intent behind the statement in my original post, and frankly I’m getting sick of people suggesting this or outright accusing me (and anyone who reblogs this) of transphobia. 90% of Tumblr absolutely loves its kneejerk responses and it really shows. 

Unfortunately, “no female pharaoh [sic] before or after her ever felt the need to rule as a man to legitimize her claim” is an incorrect statement and does not reflect the reality of Hatshepsut’s rule or that of, say, a Sobekneferu or a Tawosret. 

Basically every female monarch of Dynastic Egypt had themselves referred to as the masculine ni-sw.t-bi.ty, the Middle Egyptian for “king”; not just Hatshepsut. The Egyptian language grammatically does not allow for that specific title of “king” to take feminine markers. They legitimately can’t do anything but refer to themselves with a masculine marker if they want to use that title (and they do, because they are king).

Additionally Hatshepsut, in the text “The Birth of Hatshepsut”, does refer to herself as “Her Majesty” - Hm=s in Middle Egyptian. The word Hm, “Majesty” can take feminine markers. The only times Hatshepsut uses masculine markers to refer to herself is when she grammatically cannot do anything else. Every other time she used the feminine markers. The same goes for the other queens.

Tawosret for example had a combination of male and female epithets, and both she and Sobekneferu had themselves, like Hatshepsut, portrayed with emblems of the king, such as the nemes-headcloth. Sobekneferu is listed as “king” (masc.) in at least one of the contemporary king lists. 

The statue of Tawosret with a combination of male and female epithets, where she refers to herself as ni-sw.t-bi.ty (king (masc.))and sA-ra (son of Ra)

Bust of Sobekneferu portraying her with the royal nemes-headcloth

Scene from Tawosret’s tomb in which she refers to herself with the title sA-ra, son of Ra

Titles of Tawosret: “King of Upper and Lower Egypt, Daughter of Ra, Beloved of Amun, Son of Ra, The Powerful one, Chosen of Mut”

All arguments for Hatshepsut being transgender hinge upon the fact that she sometimes used masculine markers to refer to herself, and that she allegedly had herself portrayed as a “male” where no other Egyptian female monarch did so. Those arguments just don’t stand up to scrutiny. She refers to herself with sometimes masculine markers; so do other queens. She has herself portrayed with the emblems of office; so did the other queens. These emblems of office such as the false beard are, as an aside, a marker of royalty and kingship, and not necessarily of masculinity. Hatshepsut’s statues (and, to keep to our examples, those of Tawosret and Sobekneferu) read as female as per the strict rules of Egyptian art:

Statue of Hatshepsut where she’s depicted with breasts and wearing a wrap dress, traditionally female markers in Egyptian art

Hatshepsut does not seem to be queer even among her peers - instead, she functioned exactly as was expected within contemporary social and cultural boundaries (apart from taking on a traditionally male office, but no one really took issue with it until long after her death - originally her damnatio memoriae was attributed to her successor Thutmose III, but there is no evidence to support this defacing of her monuments happened prior to Amenhotep III. Tawosret had the worse deal, as she likely was dethroned after a period of civil war and immediately scratched from the record by her successor Sethnakhte).

The bottom line of this discussion is that we cannot project modern gender constructs upon a culture that did not have those same gender constructs. While I fully believe that historical representation of LGBTQIA+ individuals is important, we have to do so within the cultural and historical framework of the society that individual belongs to, and not simply apply a modern Westerncentric term to a famous historical figure based on an incomplete understanding of the evidence. 

I’m saying we can’t claim Hatshepsut was transgender because there is no unequivocal evidence to give her a label with a purely modern definition. You’ll notice that I did not claim she was therefore cisgender, because this too is a gender construct inherent to modern Western society, and not to Pharaonic Egyptian society. 

Transgender people exist, and they are valid, and I would never deny nor have I ever denied any of them the right to express themselves the way they want to express themselves. There are individuals within the historial record which we might refer to as either losely or closely corresponding to what we now call “queer”, but Hatshepsut was not one of them, this based upon the evidence, and our understanding of Egyptian society and Hatshepsut’s person. If you’re interested in learning more about Egyptian individuals in a relationship with an individual of the same sex, check out (the tomb of) Niankhkhnum and Khnumhotep.