thatlittleegyptologist:

rudjedet:

egypt-museum:

Ancient Egyptian ‘head cone mystery’ solved by archaeologists

Ancient Egyptian art is filled with images of reverent revelers with pointy cones on their heads. Men and women are shown with head cones in artistic depictions on everything from papyrus scrolls to coffins, donning the pointed objects as they take part in royal feasts and divine rituals. Women who wear the cones are sometimes also portrayed in childbirth, an activity associated with certain gods.

But while the head cones were relatively common in Egyptian art for more than a thousand years, their purpose and existence has remained a mystery. No archaeologist had ever excavated one of the enigmatic objects, leading some scholars to think of Egyptian head cones as merely symbolic representations—the equivalent of the halos that appear on saints and angels in Christian iconography. 

Now it appears that an international team of archaeologists have indeed found the first physical evidence for the elusive head accessories, according to a new paper published in the journal Antiquity. Read more.

It wasn’t a mystery! It’s not fucking solved either!

Doesn’t anyone learn???

We’ve pretty much known they did this for decades. We’ve had strong, yet incomplete, evidence that they put them on their heads and melted them for decades. The only thing this find gives us is material evidence of the candles on the head of someone, which finally proves that yes they definitely did wear them on the head (there was debate as to whether it actually happened or whether it was just a thing that didn’t happen but was portrayed in tomb scenes) and what they were made of (we finally proved they were perfumed).

No one, I repeat, no one, has ever described candles on the head of a party goer as a “halo”. This is what you get when someone writes an article (not OP who is merely reporting the content of the article) doesn’t understand the difference between the sun disk seen behind the heads of certain deities in Egyptian religion, and a fucking perfumed candle worn at parties.