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